January 13 2018
END TIMES
When bluster and lies find a ready acceptance in the nation, then total collapse is at hand.
I found the above line in my INCOHERENT UTTERANCES file where I store odd thoughts that strike me as different. I believe these sayings are called APHORISMS.
Yes, bluster and lies rule the world today, and yes, total collapse is imminent, in spite of some claiming that we never had it so good, which is true for perhaps 5% of the world population, but not for the 95% of the 7.5 billion of us mortals.
I count myself among the privileged 1%: debt-free, considerable assets, 20 offspring spread over three generations: all doing well. Considering all our blessings, including our faith in Jesus Christ and in his forthcoming return, very few people in the world are as well off as my wife and I are, which makes us part of a tiny, tiny fraction of One Percent.
It’s so true, we live secure and need not worry about the future. That does not mean that there are no worries. I know that Jesus tells us (Matthew 6: 34), “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Well, I believe that tomorrow has come: time to worry.
Look at Matthew 24, that infamous chapter telling us about THE END TIMES.
7 Nation will rise against nation.
(happening now).
8 All these are the beginning of birth pains.
(Birth pains occur when a new order is about to come. That is now.)
9 Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.
(Christians suffer everywhere.)
10 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other.
(That is now).
11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.
(Look at the Rapture fraud, the Oprah phenomenon and the Prosperity Gospel).
12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold,
13 but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.
14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
(There’s where the Internet comes in; more about that later).
15 So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation’, spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand.
(Only now we can understand this when in the Holy Place – God’s very own creation – we observe the pollution, the die-off, Climate Change, dying seas, Arctic Melting, 80% of insects gone, vital to all ecosystems).
21 For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now–and never to be equaled again.
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(We are beginning to see this happening. And it will all start with a gigantic earthquake: see below.)
By the way this chapter – Matthew 24 – also contains an correction for the RAPTURE lie. Verse 39 clearly indicates that THE SINNERS are taken away and – just as Noah – God’s people are LEFT BEHIND.
END TIMES IN THE NEWS
This week’s title I found in the January 6 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. Its front page had only a few words: END TIMES followed by: Fire; Earthquakes; Rising Seas; Storms; Mass Extension; Doom: a perfect painting of the verse 21 just quoted.
This January 6 issue discusses books related to the growing incidence of natural and human-made disasters, mimicking almost word for word what is found in Matthew 24, where we also find a vivid depiction of The End Times, mentioning of wars, famines, and earthquakes, especially earthquakes.
A very strange prophecy.
And then, out of the blue there suddenly appears the prophecy:
“The Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Verse 14 above).
That is so unusual. Why? Because no church, no religion, no organized movement anywhere preaches this Gospel of the Kingdom. So what’s happening? How can this Bible text come true?
I believe the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom has nothing to do with the Bible. After all, the church has lost the Biblical vision of the Kingdom, which you may know, involves the restoration of God’s pristine creation.
No, the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom is totally a negative proclamation, refers to the global destruction by human hands.
When the FLOOD came, with Noah, then too The Gospel of the Kingdom was preached in a negative way, but then God promised never to do that sort of thing again: now WE are the agents of destruction! WE bring on the world-wide preaching of The Gospel of the Kingdom, by US humans destroying the Kingdom of Men.
And Matthew 24 is not the only place in the Bible that foretells tremendous global disasters. Revelation 6 tells this too. There, in that mysterious book of REVELATION, the ultimate future is revealed.
Revelation is all about opening up what is hidden. In Chapter 6 the Sixth seal is opened, introducing the immense cosmic disasters the entire world is about to undergo. It relates how an enormous earthquake takes place, the SUN darkened as if a balaclava had been slipped over it, while the MOON turns blood red, and the stars fall to the earth (verse 12). Utterly frightening! Every mountain and island is affected. Billions die and cities are totally in ruins.
Revelation 6: 12 is not the only place relating this event: throughout the Bible we find mention of this. Amos: “the whole land will rise like the river it will be stirred up and then sink.” Ezekiel 38: 19, “In my zeal and fiery wrath I declare that at that time there will be a great earthquake in the land of Israel”, and Joel 2: 10 too, “Before them the earth quakes.”
No wonder: we, by burning fossil fuels, have thrown the earth out of kilter: trillions of tons of ice on both poles have melted and thrown the precarious balance of the earth out of whack.
No, the church has long compromised the Gospel: it will not preach THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM. This time the SERMONS on that topic will come from secular channels: books, as the New York Times did this past week, magazines, film and TV, and the Internet, of course.
Take the Guardian this past week, “We know what happens when the world ends. Well, we’ve seen it on TV. The Walking Dead shows how our most primal forms emerge as survival eclipses existence. Societal collapse ignites our desire for normality, à la The Stand. Vultures swoop down, aiming to refashion what’s left in their own image, as we see on Under the Dome. And, like The Leftovers’ Kevin and Nora, we ask why we were spared, and whether or not that makes us the lucky ones. But, in all of these series, that “extinction-level event” came as a surprise, a thief in the night. What if we saw it coming? Would we be any more prepared? Would we be any better off? These are just some of the questions posed by Hard Sun, a “pre-apocalyptic” series co-produced by BBC One and Hulu.”
Some even tie it to a time frame: “The earth’s forthcoming devastation”, says David Bowie, English Song writer, “happens in five years.” He said that before he died last year.
Sam Carana, of Arctic News, claims that when the Arctic Methane melts (and it is starting) the world’s temperature will increase by 10 degrees C. by 2026 and everything will burn to a crisp, as 2 Peter 3: 10 also tells us.
Already people are dying off in droves, thanks again to Fossil Fuels. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 36 percent of all deaths from Lung Cancer and 34 percent of all strokes are blamed on Air Pollution. Add to this the increasing incidence of forests fires as the world warms, and the air we breathe will kill ever more of us.
The Gospel of the Kingdom tells us that you can’t fool around with God’s Primary Word, his creation.
More bad news: back to Revelation 6 and this time INFLATION.
With arable land disappearing, and water either too little or too much, prepare for INFLATION, and Revelation 6 predicts this.
Here is the relevant passage in my own words:
Immediately after the second horse, right after the breaking of the third seal, the rider of the black horse arrives. His intentions are understandable. The rider carries in his hands a scale, and while he proceeds, there is a voice that says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.”
Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. Money loses its value and the costs of the normal daily needs become higher and higher. A quart of wheat was about what one person needed to stay alive, which meant that a laborer by working could only earn enough to keep himself from starving, but not his family. Were he to use barley, instead of wheat, the situation would be more manageable, but even then it would be impossible to maintain a family. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days, my source tells me.
Of course this is bound to happen with the “Abomination” of which Daniel speaks and Jesus quotes in Matthew 24.
Food depends on two items: good soil and plenty of water. Both will become in short supply while expectations rise in tandem with a rapid population growth.
More secular prophecy:
“The Earth’s biodiversity is under attack. We would need to travel back over 65 million years to find rates of species loss as high as we are witnessing today.” (James Dyke, The Ecosystem Canaries, Which Act as Warning Signs of Collapse, The Guardian, Aug. 19, 2016). Biodiversity increases resilience: more species means each individual species is better able to withstand impacts.
Think of decreasing biodiversity as popping out rivets from an aircraft. A few missing rivets here or there will not cause too much harm. But continuing to remove them threatens a collapse in ecosystem functioning. Forests give way to desert. Coral reefs bleach and then die.
It’s already happening! Imagine flying in an aircraft while watching the rivets pop, one by one.
That’s what we are doing with PLANET EARTH. Today decline is signaled by any number of drivers such as (1) changing climate, (2) declining environmental productivity, (3) disease, (4) warfare, (5) the TRUMP regime and (6) combinations thereof.
COMPUTER COLLAPSE.
This past week the news has focused on our computer-driven world: we have built the digital world too rapidly. It was constructed layer upon layer, and many of the early layers were never meant to guard so many valuable things: our personal correspondence, our finances, involving the very infrastructure of our lives.
But design shortcuts and other techniques for optimization — in particular, sacrificing security for speed or memory space — may have made sense when computers played a relatively small role in our lives. But those early layers are now emerging as enormous liabilities. The vulnerabilities announced last week have been around for decades, perhaps lurking unnoticed by anyone or perhaps long exploited.
This means that the computer on which also my blog relies, will someday crash beyond repair, just as our economic empire will tumble to disappear into the nothingness which it already represents.
Then Revelation 18: 11 will become reality, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their merchandize anymore.”
We have created a phantom world: The Human Kingdom will melt away without a trace.
“But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.”
(2 Peter 3: 13)
“In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety.” Hosea 2: 18.
THAT’LL BE THE DAY!!