Pete Garcia
You know what the funny thing about Bible Prophecy is? It’s that irrespective of our doctrinal positions and eschatological ‘leanings’, the reality is that it’s coming to pass regardless of what we think or believe. Nations are aligning just as they were foretold, regardless of what Rick Warren or Hank “the Bible Answer Man” Hanegraaff teaches. Collectively, we have become a people bent only on wickedness, with our hearts filled with violence…just like the Bible said we would, in the Last Days.
But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. 2 Tim. 3:1-5 NKJV
Now hold on Pete the skeptic says….the world has always been wicked. According to you, God even flooded the earth in back in Noah’s day because of it. God even rained down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah during Lot’s day. God allowed Israel to be conquered twice. We’ve had wars, rumors of wars, pandemics, earthquakes, poverty, starvation, famines, murders, etc. et al since the beginning…and you are saying NOW we are in the last days?
No, what I am saying, is that we are in the last moments, of the last days. And I can prove it.
Normalcy Bias
While it is true, we have had all the above mentioned happening since time began, Christ (who we believe to be God in the flesh) stated;
Then He said to the disciples, “The days will come when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, ‘Look here!’ or ‘Look there!’ Do not go after them or follow them. For as the lightning that flashes out of one part under heaven shines to the other part under heaven, so also the Son of Man will be in His day. (22-24)
Speaking toward the time when the Son of Man (Christ Himself) would return, Jesus states that there will be a time when men would look back, wishing, they could be where they (the disciples) were…that is, walking and talking with Jesus. That denotes the passage of time. But He told them, you will not see it…but many false messiahs will come claiming to be the Son of Man Jesus warned, but when He does return, you will know it.
But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built; but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. Luke 17:25-30
Christ then reiterates their immediate future, by stating that this generation (i.e…their generation in context with the subject at hand) would reject Him (they did), and Christ would be crucified as prophesied by the OT Prophets. Then, in no specified amount of time, Christ stated that the world would move on. People would go about their lives as if nothing happened. What this introduces is, as in the days of Noah and Lot, a form of normalcy bias.
Life today, will be like life tomorrow. Life tomorrow will be like life 10 years from tomorrow. This satanic doctrine is known as the ‘normalcy bias’, and it promotes the idea that nothing changes and the way the world is, is the way the world will always be.
Here is the rub; more change has happened in our generation, than all the previous put together.
Our world, in just the past hundred years, has gone from the speed of a horse, past the speed of sound. From the Wright Brothers to NASA. From the musket rifle to the M-4 semi-automatic rifle with laser scopes. From Phrenology to Neurology. From arithmetic to Quantum Physics. We went from Copernicus’s telescope to CERN. Two World Wars involving hundreds of nations. Two consortia of nations attempting global unification; the League of Nations and now the United Nations. We went from a divided and fractious and highly nationalized Europe to the European Union. To a world without Israel, to one with her back as a nation after 1,946 years. More advancements in technology, communications, medicine, military industrialization, travel, geo-political development, commerce, educations, and information have been made in our day, (in our generation), than in all of recorded history combined.
How anyone can still buy into the normalcy bias, is beyond me.
Tower of Babel Moment
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Gen. 11:5-6
Information and technological advancements are doubling around every 24 months. We as a race are dangerously close to cracking the code on mixing humans with other species. (See Gen. 6:1-5) We are dangerously close to cracking the code on Super Artificial Intelligence. We are dangerously close to figuring out how to re-introduce the expansion and extension of human life beyond man’s 70-80 years. (See Psalm 90:10) We don’t know exactly what happened at the Tower of Babel, other than what the text tells us, but whatever it was, it wasn’t simply because they were building a tower. For one, God’s not afraid of sky scrapers. They were dangerously close to opening something that mankind shouldn’t mess with, and God physically put a halt to their work by scattering them around the world and confusing their languages.
Mystery of Lawlessness
Today, the world has become a haunt and a host for the rulers of darkness of this age and spiritual hosts of wickedness. (Eph. 6:11-12) The lie that Satan is ruling in hell is just that, a lie. That’s the last place Satan wants to spend his time at. He is roaming to and fro, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8) He is walking up and down over the face of the earth. (Job 1:7, 2:2) He has thrones established, (Rev. 2:13) and is actively and aggressively pushing his agenda so that he in some kind of vain and ridiculously insane way, might thwart God’s plan of redemption.
This author believes, that as we draw closer to the end, we are witnessing a ‘thinning’ of the veil between the natural and supernatural, as God readies His plan to set aside the restraining power of God the Holy Spirit through the Rapture of the Church. (2 Thess. 2:7-9)
We have seen a rapid increase in the interest into the occult and supernatural over the last 115 years. What began with the fringe few (Order of the Golden Dawn, Theosophical Society. etc.), now has morphed into huge billion dollar industries primarily in entertainment (movies, books, television), but also in religious movements (Jedi Church, Scientology, Satanism, Wicca, Paganism), and to a lesser (but growing) political movements, claiming religious equality with major religions.
Departing the Faith
“And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write,
‘These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked— Revelation 3:14-17
Apostasy in and from the Christian faith has been ever-present since even during the Apostle’s days (2 Peter 2-3, Jude, 2 Tim. 3, etc.) back in the 1st century. We have seen apostate movements in every century since the time of Christ. While the presence of apostasy isn’t a sure-fire sign of the last days, the embracement of apostasy by Evangelical Christianity is.
Yet today, we have bonafide Evangelical Christians embracing apostate teachers and movements in an effort to promote ecumenism within all the supposed Christian denominations, regardless of doctrinal fallacies and heretical teachings. There is even a growing push to accept those who are clearly not Christian, into Christianity by merging them together such as;
Chrislam which merges Christianity and Islam
Emergent Church, which merges Eastern Mysticism with Christianity.
Hebrew Roots, which merges Judaism into Christianity
And these efforts are being swept aside as if irrelevant to the greater calling of religious unity.
There is a growing movement within Evangelical Christianity that delays, denies, or dismisses the importance of Biblical prophecy and the purpose it serves as a warning of what is coming upon the earth. Most hearers, particularly in the West, ignore the prophetic message and buy into the normalcy bias that things will stay the way they are now, forever.
Like frogs in a pot of increasingly hot water, people don’t realize the dire situation they’re really in until it’s too late. But some do turn and realize their own precarious positions in light of what is just ahead, and turn to the saving faith of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it warrants us continuing our message to them because of the few who do turn toward Christ. While others that do know, or should know better, refuse to teach and preach that there is coming soon a day of reckoning, in which God will pour out upon this earth, judgment in the form of divine wrath.
Conclusion
The coming day of wrath is actually a week of years, known as Daniel’s 70th Week. (Dan. 9:24-27) We know that this was not already fulfilled by some event in the past because it will be so terrible, that if God doesn’t stop it Himself, no flesh would survive. When speaking this, Jesus was looking forward into time, and He stated it will be the very worst time in human history, trumping everything, even the great Noahic Flood. (Gen. 6, Matt. 24:21-22) According to Jeremiah 30:7-11, Daniel’s 70th Week will serve two purposes, they are;
To punish and correct a rebellious nation of Israel.
To make an end of the nations of the world and bring an end to man’s rule on the earth.
It begins with Christ’s removal of His Church (1 Thess. 4:13-18, 1 Cor. 15:51-56), and proceeds as Christ triggers by opening, a series of judgments on the earth. It will conclude with His coming at Armageddon as He singularly destroys all the armies of the earth in one swift, terrible moment while simultaneously casting the Antichrist and the False Prophet straight into the Lake of Fire. (Rev. 19:11-21)
The world, for the most part, sees Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary’s Cross as a failure and defeat. But as everyone will soon find out, that Christ is the Stone cut without human hands, that will destroy all the kingdoms of the world all at once (Dan. 2:44-45). And then Christ’s kingdom will fill the earth and He will rule and reign on the same planet He had been previously rejected, accused, beaten, and crucified in.
Christ must physically rule in the same place He was seemingly defeated in, and it is why this writer adamantly rejects the notion that Christ can only rule and reign in the unseen, spiritual realm as many of the major Eschatological positions claim. (Amillennialism, Preterism, Post-Millennialism) If Christ doesn’t physically rule on the throne of David as was foretold by the Angel Gabriel (Luke 1:32-33), then Scripture has lied since David’s throne is not in Heaven, but on the earthly city of Jerusalem, Israel.
But we know Scripture has not lied, but will in fact, be fulfilled at the culmination of time when Christ reenters human history to establish what the Father has already given Him from eternity past. (Psalm 2, Isaiah 2; 11, Zech. 12; 14) While the Church that Christ Himself is building (Matt. 16:20) will not be on the earth when God’s judgments are being carried out, we will see and know because we will be with Christ when it happens. (Zech. 14:5, Jude 1:14, Rev. 19:14) His coming kingdom will absolutely come.
Then the seventh angel sounded: And there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” Revelation 11:15
Even So, Maranatha!