God's Word to the Wise

This old man is weary of the evangelical obsession with “End Times.” It is a competition between different interpretations with each group poised to say, “I told you so.” Those who read the tea leaves of contemporary society, (Signs of the times) are warning that recent signs/events reveal we are now living in the time they call “the beginning of the end”. We are told the rapture will take place soon. They fail to understand that mankind has been living in the beginning of the end time for more than 2000 years. (Luke chapter 17 and 2 Peter Chapter 3)

In (Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32), Jesus states that no one, not even the angels or the Son (himself), knows the day or hour of the end, only the Father. These passages emphasize that the exact timing of the end times is a divine secret known only to God the Father, and encourages believers to live in readiness rather than trying to predict the future. There won’t be signs hinting at its soon approach as in the time before the destruction of Jerusalem. In fact it will occur as in the days of Noah where everyday living was happening. That Day, The Day of the Lord, will be a routinely typical day.

Scripture says that the return of Jesus, The Day of the Lord, will be an event that is inescapable and all of humanity will witness it. It is going to be a divinely noisy event. (1 Thessalonians 4:16) “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God.” What is described here is not a secret rapture! The Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians in (1 Thessalonians 4:16) that when Jesus returns, “the dead in Christ will rise first.” Their bodies will be resurrected and reunited with their spirits, after which the living believers will then be given new resurrected bodies, “In the twinkling of an eye” and will also be taken up to be with the Lord. These three events will take place one after the other. In Luke 17 when it says “two will be in one bed and one will be taken and the other left.” it is describing what happens when the believer is taken before the unbeliever. The one left isn’t “Left behind.”

Immediately after the resurrection of all believers the “Left ones” will be taken up before the Great White Throne of judgement They rejected God’s forgiveness of their sin through Christ, and so their names are not written in the Book of Life. Their judgment will be based on God’s perfect justice; they will receive the punished for sin, their sin.

My dear fellow saints, stop wasting your brief time in this present sin infested world trying to know every detail of how this place is to be obliterated, and live as Peter under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit told us to live. (2 Peter 3:14-18) “Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these things, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and till the day of eternity. Amen.”