Does anyone recall those compelling cartoon doomsayers toting a huge sign reading THE END IS NEAR? Here he comes – a grey-robed character with a rope for a belt and floppy sandals – black beard flowing in the breeze like the mad hieromonk he is – wild-eyed and terrified of expression proclaiming a dire ending to (I suppose) everything. I love that guy.
And, the fellow’s overdrawn figure and message aside, his presence and personal warnings are as relevant as your next moment. The timing of Christ’s promised return is surely quite close. Indeed, my subjective feeling is that you may have experienced the same message roiling around in your head rumbling in your gut in the quiet of the night or while watching the evening news. It’s a palpable sensation of rightness and destiny that won’t be denied without a conscious effort to shake it off. Few deny we live in an apocalyptic-style world of dangers filled with stupefying uncertainty and outright fear.
The divine fist is raised, ready to sound a loud knuckle-knock on eternity’s door demanding attention. If such a prophecy has merit and logic, we as all aware persons are concocting an emotion of dread and excitement – a heady mixed drink of anticipation and wonder. Sometimes we even mumble the mantra of Armageddon: “What is the world coming to?” No other event of any description can compare to its powerful implications. A look around will show our fellow humans in their normal mode of frenzy to keep appointments, to get ahead or stay there, find pleasure, and accumulate as many trophies as possible. If they think at all about and ending, it’s the closing bell on Wall Street.
Yes, yes, I hear you. The answer to the running-scared monk as he rushes by is the predictable sly reply: the planet has always exhibited that kind of behavior and belief and nearly every religious person who has ever lived has looked for the end in his own generation. The years flow past and the world hasn’t ended yet. Those statements are true enough. Our globe has always known war, disaster, pandemic, fear, rebellion, uncertainty, immorality, violence, and every hubris ever named. A sense of the end has never left us through the ages but few there are who ponder it.
However, there are two caveats that the doubters invariably fail to recognize. First, there have never been more people on the earth than are here now. And never before has the frequency and intensity of troubles been so acute. That pair of circumstances adds a strong flavor of concentration of energy and consternation of woe more evident than ever before. When action events and density of population collide it can only spell pandemonium. Activities and populations are moving too fast for us to keep pace. It feels like the world is “speeding up” and becoming more complex, leaving us continually asking, “What just happened?”
So, who or what prompts us to scrutinize end time events today more than ever? And how can such a bold prediction be substantiated? Unless we can answer convincingly, we are merely adding one more soft or wrong-headed prophecy to a surplus of them already out there.
Evidence for the source of the soon-coming Christ evolves from two bases – one from Scripture and the other from the undisputed expert on the issue, the Holy Spirit himself. But not everyone will accept the testimony, even if it springs from God alone. If you number among them, there are no other proofs that will satisfy. The Second Coming doctrine is neither science nor logic – it derives from faith alone. People trust the Spirit or they do not. Try to remember, please, that faith is knowledge as much as it is belief for those who hold conviction in it. Sometimes science and facts won’t help with a given problem because science is often wrong and facts are not what we thought they were. We can clutch faith wrapped in hope though there is no evidence of it. But secularism can, and does, sting us with disappointment all too regularly. The inevitably of the Second Coming can be illustrated no other way. The Word of God and the Voice of God are true to the extreme or both faith and prophecy are false to the core.
The writer of Hebrews says (Heb. 6:16-18) that God gave an oath that His promises are guaranteed and, since there is nothing greater to swear by, He swore by Himself with two unalterable standards: Jesus Christ as high priest of the Jews in the line of Levi and Jesus Christ as the priest of the higher authority of Melchizadek for the Gentiles. Who would imagine God needed to testify to His own integrity? The concept is astounding. What God chose to affirm was His assurance that prophecy will not fail, a certainty anchored in pledged certainty. I know of no other confidence more solid than that one.
God’s first prophecy is found in Genesis2:17 and the last is in Revelation 22:20. In total, between the two, there are some 1000 prophecies in the Bible of which about one-half have been fulfilled. All the Bible books discuss the New Age in some form except Song of Solomon, Ruth, 2 John, and Philemon. Esther has very little. That’s 28% or more of the entire Bible; Revelation is 98% prophecy. Of 333 prophecies concerning Christ, only 109 were satisfied at his First Coming, leaving 224 for the Second to reach fulfillment.
We’re saying, then, that if you believe the Bible and trust Jesus, you can also believe his return to earth and accept it as fact. What neither Scripture nor Jesus tells us, however, is when it will happen. We can know the season but not the day. Here is the most carefully guarded secret of the universe. Even Jesus said he did not know the hour or day of this own return, at least in his incarnate first advent. If anyone tells you he or she has figured it out (it happens too often) run as fast as you can and seek shelter. You have met a false prophet who seeks to make you as disobedient as he is because Jesus told us explicitly not to set exact dates.
Even so, Jesus does not want us to be ignorant of the discernable signs the Father has set out for us to study. We are admonished to pay close attention to what is happening around us – looking for indicators that the time is drawing near. He expects us to educate ourselves in the Word and draw reasonable conclusions. We can see a fig tree blooming, he says, and be fairly certain harvest time is coming. We can read the Olivet Discourse (much of Matthew 24 and all of 25, Mark 13, and Luke21) and pick up on numerous warnings and signals. We call those verses “the Little Apocalypse” for a reason.
The early Christians obeyed the Lord’s injunction to be alert and expectant. How else could they have approached the question? Every era is expected to anticipate the Second Coming as if it could happen in their own day. Jesus said he was coming “soon.” I don’t know when “soon” is but I suspect it’s shorter than “far distant.” The term is relative and the only modifier for the word is that “soon” is closer to us than it was hundreds of years ago. As time moves on, the signs of the ages become clearer and eschatological knowledge expands exponentially. Revelations are progressive. To that end, our generation is the most responsible before any other and the most accountable. Considering what has transpired in history and what we are experiencing now, I’m declaring that we are likely the final generation. If I’m wrong, I’ll simply shrug and look to the following day. There has to come a point in time when evil will have grown so pervasive where it must be dealt with by divine operation lest we perish in our own audacity and drown in our own violence.
We can’t speak for God as to when enough is enough. What we can do, however, is examine the evidence and make informed judgments. By doing exactly what Jesus admonished us to do – to observe the times and pay attention – we can make a good assessment of the days left for us on earth. When the last soul is born to the kingdom in repentance and salvation, and when the world can stomach no more sin, the end will come. It will conclude, not because we are clever enough to predict it, but because God will not tolerate the ruination of His creation nor allow His servants to suffer more than we can bear. Already, more people have died for their faith in the last century than all other centuries combined.
What proof can we offer? Although it seems obvious to do so, let’s glace at a few indicators that the world is nigh full up of insufferable turmoil:
Geo-political Events
Wars and rumors of war (culminating in Armageddon)
Unceasing Mideast turmoil
Unstable political climate worldwide
Disunity among nations and within nations
Rampant worldwide economic fluctuation
Foreign policy failure
Increased national traitors
Increasing and uncaring power-based government oppression and bureaucracy
Terrorism
Military recklessness and intimidation
Irreconcilable political partisanship
Corruption in business and government
Treaty breaking
Population displacement and movement
Phenomenal technological advance
Universal banking and communication
Further polarization of wealth and poverty
International atmosphere of fear and despair
Fanatical search for thrills and sensual pleasure
Ethnic hatred and punishment
Natural Upheavals
Signs in the heavens (see Matthew 24:29-30; Acts 1:11)
Increased UFO activity
Natural disasters (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, drought, wildfires, erratic weather patterns
Increased pandemics, famine, crop failures, disease, pestilence
Decrease of animal populations
Erratic weather patterns
Religio-spirituality Signs
False teaching
False prophets
False messiahs
Antichrist types
Apostasy
Religious persecution
Strong satanic delusions and false miracles
Increased immorality and personal sin
Gospel preached to all nations (but not necessarily to repentance or acceptance)
Multiplication of scoffers and mockers
Persecution and ridicule of the righteous (socially and politically)
Acceptance of sectarian or all-inclusive religions
Sorcery, New Age, and occult practices common
Increased militant blasphemy
Stagnant formalism and dead ritualism in worship
Timidity and relativism preaching and practice
Lack of spiritual discernment
Rise of demonology
Societal-cultural Signs
Degradation of personal and societal mores
Pervasive selfishness and conceit
Covetousness and materialism rampant
Pride (arrogance) commonplace
Disobedience in home and to national law
Ingratitude and complaining
“Without natural affection” (child and elderly abuse, rape, incest, bestiality, pornography, homosexuality, sexual perversion, sadism)
Lack of emotional control (road rage, perpetual anger, “acting out,” disrespect for marriage and family values, erratic or non-existent marriage relationships, domestic violence, promiscuity)
Prevalence of human trafficking and prostitution
Dishonoring of truth and truth-telling
Character assassination
Lack of restraint in immoral and illegal behavior
Increased racial and personal hatred
Unchecked violence (rioting, looting, armed robbery, home invasion, theft, prison unrest, rape, assault, arson, brutality, murder, domestic terror, sadistic crime)
Consistent fraud
Frequent suicide
Decline of the humanitarian spirit
Ingratitude and complaining
Demand for public entitlements
Soaring high-mindedness attitude
Capital-labor disputes
Breakdown of law and order
Judicial partiality
Bribery and bias
Uncontrolled drug and alcohol abuse
Lack of consideration for others and for basic manners and human rights
Humanism (the love of self alone)
Materialism (the love of possessions and wealth)
Hedonism (the love of sensual pleasure)
All this, the Bible calls “perilous times,” the “multiplication of sorrows,” and an “unholy society.” The key to awareness that distinguishes what we have normally experience as opposed to the prevalence in society today is the culmination of the events and the intensity of their expression. I challenge you to find a single abomination above that is new and I further challenge you to deny each is increasing and becoming more fierce. Human restraint loosens its grip day by day.
Here are our enemies. Civilization is in a mess larger than history itself. Place no faith in the traditional remedies. Secularism will not help because it cannot operate without religion’s help. Science is not a panacea. There’s no room for God in the scientific method and the discipline has been wrong more times than right.
Don’t depend on education. Learning does follow teaching but the process is flawed at its core. Some high school graduates can’t read beyond the sixth-grade level. Liberal ideas of the extreme left are the only subjects allowed in many institutions. Does Critical Race Theory give you warm feelings?
Banking and commerce are splintering and unstable. Too much of it goes in only one direction – away from you and me. More is swallowed by fraud and inflation. Government can be downright dangerous when it should be protective of its citizens. Losing power from the people to the legislators is a recipe for hardship. For many politicians, power, prestige, and profit are priorities. Big government is not your friend; the Constitution is.
The arts and entertainment represent fantasy. Hollywood is an exclusive club and a never-closing theme park. Beware of reason and philosophy if you find any. Earning them is difficult and the results are often unrealistic and almost always atheistic. To find Truth, don’t depend on the mainstream media. For most of the outlets, a fact is but a possibility that spins easily and must be adjusted to fit a preconceived narrative.
Business has one goal and (hint) it isn’t philanthropy, ethics, or good customer service. The judiciary gains its integrity from good laws and good judges. But who makes the laws, who interprets them, and who enforces them? Bad laws can be passed as quickly as good ones; district attorneys can opt to not enforce any rule; judges can be blatantly biased.
Religion can be fickle and are subject to the same corruption as any other institution. It’s not easy to confront error and risk being called a dirty name or cut off from society. Preaching wants to extol the easy way and ignore the hard truths, especially eschatological considerations. Choose carefully where and how you will worship. The Church of God will never ultimately fail is a promise from Jesus, but we tend to ignore our own strength as collected believers.
I’m not saying all the institutions above are evil but only stating they can be and often are. Taken together, we have a “perfect storm” brewing and it will be beyond human capacity to avoid the damage.
Is there anything we can do to save ourselves? Is there help available out there somewhere? Do we have allies?
The answer is YES.
First, let us expect aid from the individual Christian. At the base, warfare against the world’s evil starts with one Christian woman or man: You. Hopefully, others will unite (I’m with you so now you can claim we are at least two). Then, more believers will join until we become a virtual army. At least, that is our hoped-for objective.
Further inventory of helpers available finds expression in Ephesians 6:14-17. Paul must have been looking at his Roman prison guards when he wrote this epistle and listed the items of their uniforms. We are to take on the belt of truth, a breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, shoes of the gospel, and the sword of the Spirit. Should we call this equipment tools or weapons?
Each item is useful like tools but they hold the power of weaponry as well. Wait, now… Every article is symbolic and spiritual – not solid and physical. The parts of the uniform are certainly real and tangible but Paul obviously does not mean for us to dress up in Roman fatigues and march on Washington, D.C. They represent a different style of combat. Any one of them is useful for offense or defense and can protect us or enable us to attack our real enemies like military issue can serve the soldier. They are wielded with character and spiritual discipline, though, and not the physical strength and skill of a warrior.
How else are we to fight spiritual entities in high places unless our armament is spiritual as well. The real enemy isn’t those opposers listed earlier; they are, in fact, neutral of moral content and any one of them could be used and enjoyed as a divine blessing. And sometimes they are when rightly directed. But each can easily become oppressive because Satan controls them. Further, their effects will prove even more deadly in the Tribulation era before the Lord’s appearance when Antichrist and False Prophet are running rampant as a godless trinity of subjugation.
We must never forget that Truth is powerful and will invariably defeat any lie. It has staying authority whereas falsehood fades with time and usage. Somehow, Truth bubbles up through lies, either soon or eventually. Deceits have a limited shelf life.
The breastplate (the largest piece of armor) protects the heart where the seat of power resides in Love. From here our souls can pump out courage, confidence, and a will to win. We can find assurance of our future victory and a willingness to sacrifice to get us there. The largest and best-equipped army will never win a war if the motivation and morale are not present.
Faith is called a shield because it can resist and protect the wearer from the strikes aimed against us. We can’t stop every blow but we can weaken it, deflect it, or make it impotent. Then we can survive what is thrown against us. Simply being assured that God is on our side and being in full awareness of Who the final victor will be is enough to keep us in the game until the end.
The helmet of salvation covers the head where our brains are. Good sense can make good plans, develop good strategies, outwit any opponent, and promote practical solutions. We can do that because we’re saved and privy to the grand councils of the Holy Spirit. I’m confident he is far more intelligent than a dumb demon. There seems to be a shortage of common sense in our world today so it’s easy for us to drum up supernatural wisdom for the task before us.
Shoes belong on the feet and the feet compel us to move. It’s how we move around and get stuff done. Action propels us to positions where we are needed. Each time we recruit a soul to God’s kingdom, voice a word of encouragement, take a stand against oppression, or offer alternative methods to problem-solving we strike a blow for freedom.
Finally, we get a sword that allows us to go on the offensive. Passivity has no place among our ranks. Our authority lies in the Holy Spirit within us and the Church and not using the big guns for big battles is both foolish and pointless. By the way, lest you think faith action is merely passive and limited to the mystical realm, let me relate that I vote in elections, I physically and verbally protest when rightness is insulted, and I’m licensed to carry concealed. Don’t mess with me or those I love if you threaten face-to-face.
Now to logistics. Armies have to be supplied. Where are our provisions?
Fear not, we have friends in high places. Our personal salvation enlists us in our numbers and without that total commitment to Christ we have no place in spiritual warfare except as another victim. Only Christians can serve and be identified as fighting on the Lord’s side.
Family can help. Our loved ones are hopefully loyal and share our values. Groups are out there ready to assist if we can hook up. Association and coordination with others of like mind make our strength grow over and over. The military calls the concept “combined arms” with help from the oceans, air, and ground forces. We have to be more effective and fight better with reliable backup.
The Church? Ah, yes, the church. She is our ally, and a good one, when she is willing to get into the mix full bore. It is the very foundation God ordained to carry the gospel to a pagan and needy world in the first place and He even declared her to be indestructible. Hell, itself, will not prevail over it and God will rescue His own before we are crushed. But alas, some of the churches (note the small “c”) go off-track, become timid, or creep along cowardly under the radar. Words and actions from pew and pulpit are worthless if they emanate from unworthy or lazy members. If your church is one of the hesitant, it may be time to get fussy or get out.
Finally, we have the Holy Spirit of God who controls all our potency and destiny. He is the necessary restrainer of evil in our environment (2 Th. 2:1-7) and keeps us in the fight. He it is who holds back the black crush of evil lest it destroy everything. He’s the reason we cannot lose at the last.
But Spirit-filled believers are still suffering servants who can be hurt, ridiculed, assaulted, and antagonized. We are quick to be labeled xenophobes, racists, intolerant, ignorant, and just about any other degrading name ever invented. But the day will come when we are to live in perpetual glory and the godless will be you-know-where.
Now to the core question which was the intent of this essay at the start: Will the USA survive and why is our country not mentioned in the Bible. Or is it? Surely, the most powerful world leader bears some chance to be named in Scripture, especially eschatological history. But, unless our land is disguised too deeply to be recognized, America is not named in the Bible.
Why not?
There are a number of possible reasons why the US is not to be found in Bible prophecy. It is possible that we won’t be here. Because of a nuclear attack, a deadly pandemic, or some other national major event we could be wiped out. There are some 27,000 nuclear weapons on the planet and the chance of a rogue nation or terrorist group in control of some of them is certainly possible. Covid -19 almost brought us to our knees once and something similar but worse could happen again.
Perhaps we will simply decline as a world power. We’ve already endured, and prospered, for over 230 years. Every nation’s days are numbered. Most likely, the decay will come from the inside pushed along by a Marxist-Socialist agenda, exposure to Critical Race Theory teaching, a WOKE mentality, cancel culture insanity, manifest financial disarray and national debt, lawlessness, internal rebellion, or some other malady of our own making. We will simply implode. And it could happen quickly.
The third possibility, and I think the most likely, is that the Christian population worldwide will be suddenly raptured – snatched away to Christ at his command. Possibly my prayers, and those of millions, will be answered and a Third Great Awakening will ignite nationwide. If that happens, I’ll be happier than a puppy with two tails. We do know a sweeping crusade of evangelism will identify the Tribulation era when thousands are named saints of heaven in the midst of unbelievable persecution before Christ’s Coming. But such an outbreak before then would be a reason to rejoice.
Some polls today claim that half of all Americans, from a total of about 333 million of us, claim to be Christian. I doubt there are that many “born again” believers but even if part of that number can make a huge difference. Suppose all were lifted off the planet in the twinkling of an eye, as Scripture says we will be. Even if fifty million are evacuated, can you imagine the devastation to industry, business, the military, government, agriculture, education, services, retail markets, transportation, the financial institutions, the medical community, and society at large? I doubt the left-behind population could survive. What do you think?
When it happens, Antichrist will have free reign with America limping along behind him or futilely floundering to oppose him. The rapture of the Church is the very next prophetic event along the timeline of history. It needs no signs to perceive it, no actions to precede it, and no precedence to slow it or rush it. It will happen with or without a nationwide revival because God and no other controls the trigger.
When the last soul possible is gained for the kingdom of God, when the last ounce of wickedness is squeezed from our behavior, when the eternal red line is crossed by an uncaring people, the end will come and Tribulation will fall upon the remnant.
Meanwhile, it’s our unrelieved job to stay alert, keep faith alive, combat unrighteousness, oppose oppression, thwart corruption, and live in expectant hope. We’d best get on with it.
Maranatha.
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