Imagine if you could choose where, when, and under what circumstances you were born. If you’re perfectly fine with how things worked out for you, that’s great, I’m not trying to make you unhappy with your upbringing. But think of the possibilities. Many people would probably choose to be born to rich parents, or maybe to royalty, or if nothing else, in a nicer climate or better location than where you started out.
Of course, we have no way of choosing where or when we’ll be born, our ancestral lineage, or the circumstances of our birth. It’s something we all accept as being beyond our control. That’s what makes it so hard-hitting when we look at Old Testament scriptures to see “before-it-happens” predictions of where and how the Messiah would be born. There are a number of Bible verses describing the coming Christ’s future birth:
Isaiah 7:14 – Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Genesis 49:10 – The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.
Micah 5:2 – But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.
Isaiah 11:1 – There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
Now aside from the virgin birth part of it, I can see how a skeptic might say “well, okay, but if you make enough predictions, you’re bound to get something right.” You know what? I agree with that. Here’s the thing, though. The verses listed so far only pertain to Christ’s birth. When you add in predictions about the Messiah’s demeanor, about His riding on a foal, that He never suffers a broken bone, the nature of His death, etc., you start really narrowing the possibilities down in a way that excludes random chance. While it might be possible to fulfill a few of them by chance, things start to get mind-blowing when someone comes along and fulfills all of them.
I heard somewhere that the odds of anyone fulfilling all the prophecies related to the Christ were fewer than one in 80 billion. I think we get desensitized from movies about how astronomically unlikely it is to overcome such odds. The computer virus gets beaten. Han Solo successfully navigates the asteroid field. Tom Cruise saves the day. Let’s bring this a little closer to real life. The odds of winning the MegaMillions lottery earlier this week were a little better than 1 in 303 million. If those odds remained the same from drawing to drawing, you’d hit the MegaMillions jackpot over 260 times before reaching the same level of likelihood as a single individual fulfilling all those messianic prophecies.
Even if you don’t believe in God, you’ve got to admit there’s something a little unusual about that. The inference is that Jesus Christ is the predicted Messiah. If that’s true, it has massive implications for you and for everyone you hold dear. Why don’t you take a closer look into it?
Lately there’s been a beautiful stretch of weather where I live, but it’s not always this nice in August. The current low-humidity 70s and 80s are very nice, but once upon a time I worked in the field of residential construction, and I’ve had to deal with some nasty weather conditions.
I don’t even remember this dude’s real name, but everybody called him “Lumpy.” (The origin of the name, I think, had to do with some poorly mixed spackle or grout.) One hot August day Lumpy and I were working in Jersey somewhere, and it was time to call it a day. We jumped in the company truck and got on Interstate 80 to drive back to Pennsylvania. Everything went fine for awhile, but we ended up running into a wall of red brake lights on the highway.
I stopped the truck and we just sat for a bit, waiting for the jam to start breaking loose. Only it didn’t. We just sat there, waiting. The truck idled so long the fuel gauge began dipping. Brake lights turned off as people put their cars in park and killed their engines. Eventually people got out of their vehicles and walked around.
Not knowing how long we’d be there, we shut off our engine, too. The cold air from the A/C stopped blowing, and rather than bake in a hot vehicle, we opened the windows and got hit with hot, humid air. As we sat there sweating, we saw people get out of their cars and go sit in the shade of the trees, either talking on their flip phones or Blackberries, lighting (or bumming) cigarettes, or wandering into the treeline to find an impromptu restroom. People rolled down their windows and began talking with complete strangers. Lumpy wasn’t the most talkative guy, so we just sat there, listening to the radio and waiting for something to happen. What else could we do? We were powerless to get ourselves out of the situation.
I don’t know how people sensed movement, but at some point they started getting back in their cars. The brake lights turned on again as they cranked engines and put cars into gear. I can’t think of many times I was more relieved to see a traffic jam start to move again. I was psyched to hit 30 mph. I have no idea what snarled traffic so badly, but we made it back without further incident.
Sometimes you find yourself in a period of waiting, where all you can do is watch beyond-your-control circumstances play out. They are agonizing at times, often emotionally draining. This example is much more lighthearted than what a lot of other people have to deal with, but it illustrates the concept that sometimes God just wants you to wait. Maybe it’s to teach you to rest in Him, maybe it’s to force you to deal with something you’ve been avoiding. It could be a time where something’s being prepared for later. I know it’s hard. Sometimes it’s really hard. This is one time I can’t provide much insight, as God’s purpose in making you wait could be tied to any number of reasons. Spend time in the Word and in prayer, listen with everything you’ve got to what the Lord may be saying to you, and look for ways to make the most of this unusual season. I don’t know when it will be over, but seasons don’t last forever.
Let’s build a little off the last post, which went through some reasons to take the Bible seriously. This one gets tricky to visualize though, so I’m going to use movies to tackle a tough biblical subject.
It seems like lately Hollywood ran out of original ideas, so they started rolling out sequels to decades-old movies. Some of them are fun and work well (Top Gun, Creed), others not so much (Indiana Jones), and a whole bunch I haven’t seen so I don’t know (Beverly Hills Cop, Blade Runner, Tron, Mad Max, Bill and Ted, Coming to America, etc.). One such franchise is “The Matrix” series.
The Matrix came out in 1999, followed by two sequels, both in 2003. Then, much later, a final (I hope) Matrix movie came out in 2021. Three different timeframes, all part of the same story. We’re going to use this scenario to help frame our discussion of Daniel’s prophecy of the 70 weeks, which I believe to be one of the most interesting prophecies in the Old Testament.
I have to give a little disclaimer here. There are a few different possibilities as far as the way things can be interpreted, so I’m going to present the way that makes the most sense to me. Things don’t jive perfectly the way I’m going to explain it, but they’re close enough that it makes you say “yeah, there’s something to this.” Just know I could easily be wrong about some of the details, but I encourage you to look into it for yourself and see what people much smarter than me on the subject have to say.
In Daniel 9, verses 20-27, Daniel receives one of the most interesting, but difficult to understand prophecies of the Bible. Daniel, a very godly man, is given the future timeline for some of the world’s most historic events.
Before jumping in, it’s important to have a little context. When you and I think of a “week,” we think of a seven-day period of time. They certainly used this term back in Bible times (God created the universe, earth, and humanity in a week in Genesis, and only a few verses after our text, Daniel mourned for a period of three weeks in Daniel 10:2-3). That’s not the only way the word “week” is used, though. The week you and I think of is a week of days. In this prophecy, a week refers to a period of seven years. Thus, the prophecy of 70 weeks totals a period of 7 x 70, or 490 years.
Here’s the Matrix tie-in. Remember how the movies didn’t all come out in the same year, but were kind of close together in the beginning, then had a big gap between the middle installment and the last one? That’s similar to what happens here. There are 490 years involved, but they’re not all consecutive. Daniel 9:25-27 breaks it down, though not in the most intuitive way. The 70 weeks is going to be broken down into three chunks: seven weeks, 62 weeks, and one week (49 years, 434 years, and seven years, respectively). The first two chunks run back-to-back, and the third one is off floating around by itself. What events are these chunks marking? The answer lies in those same few verses. “From the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there shall be seven weeks and sixty two weeks; the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublesome times.” –Dan 9:25
This was written before Christ arrived on the scene. If we look back at history, we can figure out when that command was given and work our way forward. We know from the last post Judah was carried off to Babylon. That city changed hands, falling to the Medo-Persian Empire while Daniel lived there. When Daniel wrote down the prophecy of the 70 weeks (probably sometime between 536 and 530 B.C.), he was serving in the same city while Jerusalem lay in ruins. In the year 457 B.C. the Persian king Artaxerxes gave the Israelite priest Ezra permission to re-inhabit Jerusalem (Ezra 7:6-10). This starts the clock ticking on the first seven weeks from Dan. 9:25. I can’t point to a specific event, but 49 years later, Jerusalem once again had Israelites living in it (including a rebuilt wall and gates courtesy of Nehemiah’s leadership) and Malachi, the final Old Testament prophet, had spoken the last word from the Lord before the Messiah’s arrival. The world then entered a 400+ year period of silence from the Lord (the Intertestamental Period between the Old and New Testaments).
If we do some math here, 49 years plus 434 years comes out to be 483 years. If you add 483 years to that initial “re-occupy Jerusalem” green light in 457 B.C., you’re very close to the year 30 A.D. That’s the year Christ entered Jerusalem riding on donkey, one week before His crucifixion. (If you want to be more precise on the math, 27 A.D. is closer to the mark, which is when Christ began His earthly ministry.)
Okay, good, so Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy is holding up so far, but we’re still short one week/seven year period. Everything we’ve covered so far is retrospective; the prophecy’s math makes sense based on the events that have already taken place. Now we shift gears and look to the future. We’re looking at that final movie sequel, the one that was separated from the earlier installments by a much larger period of time. Daniel 9:26-27 gives some more insight into things. This period refers to the rule of the Antichrist near the end of time, and takes place immediately following the rapture of Christians (when the Lord pulls His followers out of the world to spare them from the horrors about to take place).
That last week, also known in Revelation as the Great Tribulation, can be split in half. Following the confusion and fear accompanying the disappearance of a large fraction of the world’s population in the Rapture, a smooth-talking politician is going to burst onto the world stage, he’s going to calm the panic and broker a peace deal between Israel and its enemies, and everything’s going to feel like it’s fantastic for the first three and a half years. The Bible also refers to these halves of the final week as 42 months or “a time, times, and half a time” (one plus two plus one half). Then, at the mid-point of the seven years, he breaks the treaty, bans Jewish sacrifice, and demands that he be the only one anyone worships (Dan. 9:27, 2 Thess 2:4). It doesn’t give a timeline for when that final week commences, but when the Rapture happens, the Antichrist arrives on the scene, if not before.
There’s a great deal more to what happens during this time in the book of Revelation (chapters 6 to 18), but I recommend using a study Bible with a good deal of notes to help explain it. I believe the point of including this prophecy is to say “look, only God could predict these things with this much specificity, and if the first couple components of the 70 week prophecy have come true, the last part is probably worth taking a look at.”
Finally, let’s suppose you’re not a Christian, but you’re intrigued by what you’re seeing here and in the Bible verses I referenced. Either the Bible is true…or it isn’t. If it’s true, that means the whole thing is true. In light of that, don’t you think it might be a good idea to look around at what else the Bible says? Specifically, I’m referring to humanity’s inadequacy to meet God’s standard and our corresponding reliance on Christ’s perfection and sacrifice on our behalf.
The study of the End Times is fascinating, but for all its razzle dazzle, it’s not nearly as important as the central message of Christ dying for our sins and extending the invitation for us to join Him for eternal communion with God after we pass from this life. As I said toward the beginning of this post, it’s something I encourage you to investigate for yourself.
You might be a skeptic who’s not really into the whole “Christian” thing, or maybe you’ve been a Christian for awhile but haven’t spent much time exploring the Bible for yourself. If you’re in any type of situation where you’re thinking about checking out the Bible, trying to figure out where to start reading it can be a challenge.
I’m not going to tell you where to start, but in this post I’ll help you understand a little more about how the Bible’s laid out and some of the things that make it so compelling. Bear with me for some of the stuff you may already know, and then we’ll get to the interesting stuff.
Let’s start with the basics. The Bible is a huge book, and it wasn’t all written by the same author. We (Christians) believe God separately inspired multiple people to write down what we now know as the books of the Bible, and those various writings collectively form the Word of God without contradicting the doctrinal points of any of the other authors. Those authors’ lives spanned multiple centuries. Moses recorded the first few books of the Bible, but at least one book (Job) was probably written before Moses even came on the scene.
The Bible is broken into the Old Testament (the books written before the birth of Christ) and the New Testament (written after Christ’s birth). The Old Testament is made up of 39 books, and the New Testament has 27. The Old Testament (from Creation and the start of humanity until about 400ish years before Christ’s birth) spans a much larger time than the New Testament (from Christ’s birth to about 95 years after His birth, with a look forward to the end of time).
Many people who aren’t familiar with the Bible don’t realize just how spectacularly the whole thing ties together. Remember…there are many authors of the Bible, spanning over a thousand years. Sometimes it’s hard to get two people in the same room to write similar papers that don’t somehow contradict each other. There are many verses from earlier parts of the Bible that forecast what will happen later in the Bible. Skeptics figure since the Bible is so old and has been around for so long, its ability to accurately predict these things is easy to fake. This is where it gets interesting. It’s not a monolith; it’s 66 different books, all written at different times. While some of their dates of writing are known pretty well, we have to ballpark others. Some of the predicted events pertain to forthcoming “religious” things (like where the Messiah would be born, what tribe He’d be from, how He would die, etc.) and others were focused on more secular events on the world stage (like the rise and fall of different empires).
The Bible spans so much time, parts of the Old Testament actually predict events that come to fruition later in the Old Testament. For example, the Kingdom of Israel split into two separate entities: Israel and Judah. When they both stopped depending on the Lord and started worshiping other gods, the Lord gave them lots of warnings through the prophets He sent. Eventually He had enough. In Hosea 9:3 and 11:5 He warned Israelites Assyria would carry them into captivity if they didn’t repent. They didn’t repent and Assyria conquered them. In Jeremiah 25:8-14 God gave a similar warning to Judah: Babylon will conquer you and take you into captivity if you don’t repent! Guess what? Judah didn’t repent and found itself carried off to Babylon. Recordings of those captivities are elsewhere in the Old Testament, but these geopolitical events are also verifiable outside of scripture, and these two prophets of the Lord accurately predicted them before they occurred.
One really tricky part to understand, especially for the people living when these books were written, is that the Bible often refers to two future things at once, one in the not-too-distant future and the other waaaaaay down the road. Jeremiah chapters 30, 31, and 33, for example, talk about the restoration of Judah and Israel. Context helps determine whether it’s talking about restoration from its human captors (near-term) or restoration from its sin-tainted past (at the end of this world). Similarly, Isaiah chapter 13 talks about the importance of the city of Babylon both before it became a major player on the world stage and then again when referring to the distant future, “the Day of the Lord” when Babylon represents humanity’s final uprising against God.
Likewise, there are plenty of prophecies (predictions) about the Messiah. Almost all of them were about things outside a normal man’s control. Even if Jesus were an exceptional con man, he’d still have to be the luckiest dude in the world to fulfill all the messianic prophecies he did (have a look at the verses listed in the graphic below). What nobody really expected was that the Messiah would come to Earth twice. Nobody really anticipated Him showing up for awhile as a poor and humble average Joe, then visibly stepping off the world stage for almost 2,000 years (and counting) before coming back in full power and majesty. While the Bible does say the Messiah will be a mighty conqueror, it evidently referred to the second time He’d be coming. Everyone figured it would all happen at once. That’s part of the reason some of the most devout religious figures of the day scoffed at Christ. They expected a mighty warrior king to free them from Roman oppression, and when lowly Jesus didn’t meet their expectations, they wrote Him off, no matter how much sense He made scripturally, regardless of the miracles He performed, and irrespective of all the other prophecies He checked the box for.
In a future post I’ll take a look at a prophecy from the book of Daniel that involves some timelines offering further proof of the Lordship of Jesus. Part of the reason the Bible records these prophecies is to help its readers understand that there’s something supernatural at work here. How could something predict the future with such great accuracy unless someone with knowledge beyond time was involved? If you’re a truth-seeker, chew on that for awhile.
For now, though, where does that leave us? The prophecies that still haven’t been fulfilled give us an idea of what to expect. We’re still looking ahead to when the prophecies of the second coming come true. Internet searches for bible verses connected to “End Times” or “eschatology” should return verses from Revelation, Daniel, 1 Thessalonians, and many more. There’s lots of your own research to do here. The more you research, the more you’ll see how it all ties together.
The answer, of course, is baby giraffes. Let’s talk a little bit about Evolution.
Before we get into that, though, I’d like you to think about a traditional mousetrap. It’s a simple machine that’s been mass produced and has sold millions of units. Yet what would happen if any of the mousetrap’s components was removed? Take away the trigger, the holding bar, the spring, or anything else, and what happens? Removing any single component means the trap isn’t catching any mice.
Instead of a mousetrap, think of a complex biological machine, say, the human eye. Evolution says that simple, one-celled organisms changed over many generations and long periods of time to become highly complex living systems. If this is true, there had to be a series of pretty spectacular leaps forward to move from a single-celled organism to an organ that can sense light, then again to today’s human eye. It just doesn’t make sense. What was the immediate predecessor to the current version? What can you take away from the human eye and have it be almost as capable as the version we know today?
The theory of evolution has a problem. Animals that need to evolve fall into one of two categories: they either fail to evolve quickly enough (and thus fail to pass along genes that will enable future generations to acquire new characteristics), or they undergo massive mutational changes during a single generation (which seems very unlikely). Let’s use the giraffe as an example.
Let’s assume for a moment that Evolution is true. Imagine what giraffes looked like before they had long necks. It was more like a funky moose. For this conversation we’ll call it a stubby giraffe. Evolution claims that as food got scarce for individual stubby giraffes, they were forced to look for sustenance in areas beyond their normal reach. Let’s look at a few possibilities for what happened next.
Possibility number one: starving stubby giraffes did not consume enough calories to carry and give birth to baby stubby giraffes, so they died without birthing any healthy calves. – Unsuccessful evolution.
American, North Korean, and South Korean (left, center, right) soldiers
Possibility number two: the bodies of stubby giraffes, in the span of a single lifetime, while suffering from malnutrition, activated biological mechanisms which altered their own established DNA blueprints and triggered explosive leg and neck growth (while malnourished), enabling its survival. Malnourished bodies, however, experience stunted growth, not accelerated growth. North Korea’s people are starving and its children don’t get enough food to eat during their bodies’ crucial stages of physical development. As a result, many North Korean adults have a much smaller stature than their counterparts in other countries who had sufficient nutritional support during those stages of physical development. – Implausible.
Possibility number three: stubby giraffes did not experience rapid alterations, but they did experience incremental amounts of extraordinary growth (growth beyond what its DNA stipulated) with each passing generation. As these “hybrid giraffes” gained the ability to reach food they hadn’t been able to access before, they consumed all the food stubby giraffes could reach, and the stubby giraffes died out. But the same problem remains: if hybrid giraffes weren’t getting enough to eat and were forced to either evolve or die, how did their starving bodies find it within themselves to boldly step outside the bounds of their DNA and add inches or feet of bones, muscle, and corresponding tissue and blood vessels? On the other hand, if they were getting enough to eat, why did they need to evolve any further, and why haven’t they shrunk since then? After all, in terms of calories and energy, extra muscle mass is expensive. – Implausible.
There’s no logical scenario where this kind of evolution happens. Logically, people would have to buy into possibility number four: the giraffes you see today are similar (both in appearance and genetically) to the first giraffes that walked the planet. Hundreds or thousands of giraffe generations all followed the same DNA blueprint, passed that blueprint along to the next generation, which passed it to the next, and so on. Whoever designed these things established the originals along with a pretty solid process of reproducing themselves.
Did you know that a giraffe’s neck is strong enough to support the weight of a human climbing on it? Also, I got banned from the zoo today.
Here’s an example that will make you think. What if I, as a human, suddenly needed to evolve quickly enough to be able to hold my breath for 10 minutes? With practice I can increase my breath-holding capacity to over two minutes, but if I’m thrust into a situation where I need to hold my breath for 10 minutes, I’m not going to make it. That’s a Pass/Fail test, and it’s not looking good for me. What if we take a more incremental approach to this problem, though?
The Bajau people of Southeast Asia have long relied on their skills at free-diving for their livelihood and for food. They spend an extreme amount of time repeatedly holding their breath and diving below the surface to obtain food and pearls on the seafloor. This lifestyle has led to enlarged spleens among the Bajau. (The spleen plays a role in the oxygenation level of blood, among other things.) This adaptation enables divers to stay underwater longer. Here’s the interesting part though. Even non-divers among the Bajau people have enlarged spleens. This finding suggests conditioning the body has an impact on DNA, but it also means this adaptation was not the result of an “evolve or die” scenario, because death was not imminent before it occurred. Is it possible that evolution is taking place here?
I can’t find it online, but when I was in high school I was taught something I think called “Color Theory.” It helped explain the wide disparity in physical characteristics of people across the globe. I’ll run through a few examples. The Massai people of Kenya and Tanzania in eastern Africa have one of the tallest average heights in the world, at around 6 feet, 3 inches. They have tight curly hair and very dark brown (or even black) eyes. Spending many generations primarily as herders of livestock, they’ve traditionally spent long hours in the hot equatorial sun. Their height enabled them to see predators sneaking through the grass to attack members of their herd, and their dark skin, dark eyes, and tightly curled hair provided various forms of protection from the intense sun.
In Asia, the Gobi Desert straddles Mongolia and China, two of the world’s oldest and most storied cultures. The desert played a significant role in the type of genetic characteristics that manifested themselves in people that lived in the area. Being over six feet tall and having curly hair is no picnic during and after a sandstorm. The people in the region were generally much shorter, had straight, coarse hair, and had eye shapes and structures suited to providing protection for their vision. All of these characteristics made it easier to cope with the realities of living in regions with large volumes of sand blowing around.
Finally, the people of Scandinavia in northern Europe have their own unique characteristics. Living at high latitudes means the sun’s rays are not nearly as intense as other areas of the world. Weaker solar rays warrant fewer protections from the sun, so those traditionally living in this region are normally fair-skinned, have thinner (or more fine) hair, and have light-colored eyes. This makes them well suited for geography where, for months out of the year, the sun’s max intensity approximates dawn/twilight.
I share this with you to illustrate the following point. These four examples (Bajau divers, Massai, those around the Gobi Desert, and Scandinavians) all have unique adaptations for their native geography, but none of them are on their way to starting a new species. They are all unquestionably human, and they are all undoubtedly going to stay that way. They in no way represent a departure from the human race.
We are all human because God made us all in His image. We all descended from sinners and are sinners ourselves. Accordingly, we all have need of the same Savior, and that is Jesus Christ. If you’re one of His, there are plenty of other people out there who are waiting for you to share Christ with them, even if they don’t look like you. Take up the challenge to spread the good news with them.
The world is generally out of control right now. We’ve got wars in Ukraine and Israel, mass looting in cities, economic uncertainty in lots of countries, the breakdown of law and order, dissolution of America’s southern border, and general unrest all over the place. It’s natural to wonder if we’re in the period the Bible refers to as the Tribulation.
Well, the short answer is that unless a ton of people have already up and vanished without a trace, the answer is “no.” If you’re not one to do a lot of Bible reading, or even to connect certain parts of the Bible, it’s easy to jumble together a lot of the events related to the natural end of time (the part where God decides He’s had enough and shows up in a big way).
There are two major cataclysmic events at the end that will stop people in their tracks. The first is the Rapture. This is where Christ comes back from Heaven to pull His people (the Church) out of the world. This is a removal of the faithful, sparing them from the turmoil that’s about to take place. If some major fraction of humanity has up and vanished and that fraction doesn’t include you…no matter what sort of explanation is provided (I’m guessing aliens and UFOs), take a closer look at who’s disappeared. There’s sure to be a lot of confusion initially, but when the dust starts to settle and a clearer picture emerges, you’ll see that they’re all Christians. I’d guess that this linkage will try to be hidden, so you may have to go looking for evidence to connect the dots on your own. Yes, there will be church-going people, even clergy members, that did not disappear, and they’ll be hit with a hard truth: they did not have a saving relationship with Christ as Lord of their lives. People of other religions, along with other people of fine morals, good people, will also remain. The Christians’ disappearance will hasten the downward spiral of humanity. The churchgoers are the ones slowing humanity’s decay right now (October 2023), but once they’re gone, it’s a whole new chapter in the progression of unspeakable evil. It’s as though God says “I’ve been telling you for millennia how to live, and you rejected me this whole time. You know what? Fine. Have it your way. See how that goes for you.” The good news here is that there’s still time to embrace Christ.
The second event is Christ’s Second Coming. Moments after the Rapture all the Christians will have disappeared, but by the time of the Second Coming, seven years after the Rapture, more people will have become Christians. They’ll still have to endure some very difficult circumstances, but they’ll have the hope of Christ. For everyone else still on the planet, they’ll face a reckoning. At this point everybody starts to realize the jig is up, that there’s no getting out of this one, and that they should have paid more attention to what they heard earlier about Christ forgiving sins. Now it’s too late to change their minds.
There’s no question that these two events are easy to get blended together, but here’s a list put together by the late Dr. Norman Geisler to help separate them out. They give the reader a better picture of some of history’s final events. I have to warn you that some of these are a little tricky and don’t say much at first glance, but a study bible helps see beyond the face value, the deeper meaning, of the verse in question.
If the rapture hasn’t happened yet, study these verses and the ones near them so you can better understand what’s happening as events unfold. If the rapture already took place and you’re still around to read this, it’s even more important to get your hands on a bible (preferably a study bible that has additional notes and context on what the verses mean). If you believe the entire bible, you believe that Satan and his fallen angels exist. Well, they can read it too, and they know what’s coming. In my mind, I believe that’s why UFO activity has been ramping up in the past few years. These fallen angels are setting the stage to have a plausible explanation for the mass disappearance of a significant percentage of humanity. “They were abducted! They had to have been abducted, there’s simply no other explanation!” It’ll be quite the coincidence that a lot of those abducted people loved Jesus. Once that common thread gets out, don’t be surprised if you also hear things like “see what happens to people that follow Jesus? Let’s round up all the bibles and other commentaries about it and destroy them before this happens again!”
Anyway, we’re not in the Tribulation yet, but it increasingly seems like it’s not too far away. Think of this as an opportunity to focus your studies of God’s word on what’s coming.
Lord, if this blog is still around after the Rapture has occurred, I pray for those reading this. They’re dealing with mass fear, confusion, and many types of hardship that are turning or will turn their lives upside down. I pray that this post will help point them to You and the truth, that they would embrace You as Lord. As they approach the end of history, may You be glorified, God. I pray these things in Your name, Amen.
I used to work for a small residential construction company. During my time there we built a variety of houses or did renovations, built decks, or completed smaller jobs. Depending on how many projects we had going and what time of year it was, we had a minimal number of guys or a whole bunch of guys working.
While we built one house in particular, most of the time we only had three workers on the crew. I was the youngest and least experienced, so I ended up being the mule…the guy lugging materials everywhere while the other two assembled them and really made the house come together. I carried lumber to the cutting table, while the other guys cut boards to size and put together headers for windows and doors. I handed plywood up to the guys working on the second floor. When the windows showed up, I took them to the right locations so the other guys could install them. When the boxes of siding arrived, I carried their contents where they needed to go. The joke was that I eventually lifted the whole house by myself.
That’s just the rough assembly. Then come the finer points and finishing touches. Holes for wires and pipes still need to be drilled. After the drywall gets hung, it needs to be taped and spackled, then primed and painted. Upon adding trim around windows and doors, it needs to be caulked and painted, too. After you lay and grout tile, you need to wipe it clean. As the house nears completion, appliances need to be installed.
Think about everything that goes into finishing a new house. There are all kinds of materials that get used in the completion of a home. Deliveries to construction sites normally occur in stages; you don’t deliver the dishwasher before the roof is put on, for example. The foundation gets poured, the lumber arrives, then the roofing materials, then the siding. Windows and doors go in. While that stuff is going on, the plumbing and electrical work takes place. Drywall gets hung and finished. While there’s sometimes some flexibility, the overall process has to be scheduled and coordinated so that one area is not interfering with another. (It’s best to install the wires and pipes before hanging drywall, for example.)
Instead of being delivered in stages, imagine if someone delivered all of the materials that would be used to build the house all at once and just set them down somewhere on the property. Given enough time, would those materials eventually assemble themselves into the finished product? For that to happen, things would have to naturally evolve from a state of chaos to a complex state of order.
A lot of scientists, scholars, and others are convinced that this is how we got our planet. Given enough time, if all the atoms and mass were present, they say, it’s obvious that it would shape itself into this world that can sustain life.
There’s a problem with that.
There’s a scientific principle called “Entropy” which states that the universe naturally progresses toward disorder, rather than order. Conditions will generally evolve from more complex conditions to less complex conditions. That is, orderly conditions in an environment will generally devolve into less orderly arrangements. What happens if you stop mowing your perfectly landscaped lawn for five years? Does it become more neat and tidy or more unkempt? Does your vehicle run better if you perform no maintenance on it, or does it require some upkeep?
This is why it’s tough to accept the part of Evolution that mandates rapid change within a single generation of organisms. The theory requires that a given species evolves to overcome some life-threatening obstacle. I’m all for being optimistic and the power of positive thinking and all that, but in must-evolve situations, it’s very simple: if you don’t quickly increase the specialization of a given species, it’s not going to survive. At-risk species that don’t evolve quickly enough to overcome an obstacle don’t survive to pass along modified genes. If they pass along unmodified genes in the same at-risk environment, the new generation has the same problem as the last one.
One of the often-overlooked problems when people are trying to shoot down Creationism is the starting point for life. Sure, things evolve over time, but if evolution is correct and humans and apes came from a common ancestor, which came from a simpler species, which came from single-celled organisms, there’s still a major problem. Somewhere along the line, life sprung from non-life. What did that look like? Where did life originally come from? Such a feat has never been observed to happen in a lab, so what are we missing? I cannot accept the premise that going from “molecules to man” is something that just happened without some kind of intelligent design. (For those that say Earth’s first microbes or bacteria arrived here on asteroids, the same question still applies: how did life start?)
This poses a major problem for those that oppose intelligent design theories. If you hang your entire theory on the notion that life began through some event that is completely unsupported from an empirical perspective, does that not take an amount of faith that is equal to subscribing to some version of the theory of intelligent design? Even if life didn’t originate here on Earth, it came from somewhere. If that life originated after the big bang, how could that possibly have happened? It could only have happened if something gave life to it.
Something to think about. New houses don’t just show up on their own. Beautiful biodiverse habitable planets don’t, either.
I had to do one of my first research reports in 5th grade. I don’t think I’ve spent a whole lot of time checking into the state of Indiana before or since.
I wrote up a report on the state’s population size, its different regions, its climate, likely some stuff on its economy, and probably a few other things. My handwriting was nice and neat (for a change), and I assembled my papers and supporting graphics into one of those folders with the little brass things you stick through the holes in the paper to keep it secure in the folder.
On the day we were supposed to turn it in, I was pretty happy with my well-researched work of academic prowess. I had placed it carefully in my Trapper Keeper and brought it to class without even bending the edges.
As I looked around the class, I was horrified to realize that I had done nothing at all for the cover! While some kids had color photos, printouts, or elaborate drawings on the front of their state reports, all I had was a plain blue folder.
In a panic, I racked my brain about what to do. There was no possible way to do anything substantial before turning it in. That kid over there had cut out pictures of famous landmarks from their state and used a glue stick to fix them on the cover. Kids were already starting to hand their reports in!
The best I could do was to haphazardly draw a picture freehand. I whipped the report open to a picture of the state’s shape and committed the proportions and south border to memory, then started drawing on the front. The drawing was a little off center, but I topped it off with a star roughly where the capital city was. Then I threw the state name in big letters under it and put my name under that. The cover design wasn’t very good, but it was the best I could do in such a short time. I knew I’d get no points at all for the cover if I didn’t do anything, so what did I have to lose?
I don’t remember how I did on the report, but I remember that I got three out of 10 points for the cover portion. Not my best work, but three was better than zero.
If you’re not really ready to jump into this “Jesus thing” with both feet, ask yourself: “what do I have to lose?” Most people are tentative about having to give up some part of their lifestyle or quit something they’ve grown to like. This isn’t like a gym membership where you feel you have to get in shape before you walk through the doors for the first time. Come as you are. Let’s say you grow deeply committed and change your whole lifestyle and then it turns out there’s nothing waiting for us after death. In that case you won’t even possess a consciousness to realize what you’ve given up. If, on the other hand, Christ actually is who He says He is, you will have gained immeasurably more than what you had before. Sounds like very little risk for an immense payoff.
When I was a young teenager, members of our youth group took a two-hour trip to go visit a family of friends that had moved away from our church.
We did lots of stuff while reconnecting. We hung out at their house, we went to a local mall, and we ran all over the church grounds playing different games. As energetic young teenagers, we needed an outlet for some of our energy.
It must have been a cold-weather trip, because the sun went down pretty early. One of the games we played was a round of capture the flag. We could go anywhere on the church grounds, as long as it wasn’t inside a building. The playing area included a paved parking lot, the main church building, and a couple of out buildings on the property, along with all the green space in between. We set up the boundaries and used two plain white knee-length socks as flags.
Normally the way these games work is that the playing field is divided into two zones, one for each team. Each team hides the flag somewhere in their zone, and you have to venture into the opposing team’s zone to search for the flag. If an opponent tags you while you’re in their zone, you go to jail in a small section within their zone. You can be set free if someone else from your team makes it to the jail to tags you. You win the game if you find the opposing team’s flag and carry it back to your zone without being tagged. Both teams are playing offense and defense at the same time.
On that particular evening visibility was bad. Since it was dark, starting to get foggy, and there was lousy weather moving in, we split into two easily discernible teams: boys vs. girls. I don’t remember numbers, but there were a lot more girls than there were boys. Between an odd layout of the church grounds and not having enough guys on our team to simultaneously do a good job defending and go looking for the opposing team’s flag, we decided that in order to have any chance of winning, we’d have to come up with an amazing spot to hide our flag so we didn’t have to dedicate anybody to protecting it. As it turns out, we came up with what I believe to be a pretty risky and bold idea for a bunch of middle-schoolers.
When both teams were ready, we started the game. It moved slowly for a long time. Even if our team tagged opponents and brought them to our jail, we didn’t have enough guys to really protect the jail and still play in other areas, so it wasn’t too hard for the other team to set their jailed teammates free.
I remember our team’s strategy was so incoherent and we were spread so thin that at one point in the game I was running from one part of our zone to another and I stumbled across a member of the other team that nobody even realized had made it into our zone. She was picking through the bushes, looking for our flag. They had figured out that if they were patient enough, they could wander in and out of our zone and all they had to do was move quietly and we probably wouldn’t even know they were there.
This went on for probably 45 minutes. I don’t think any of our guys were able to find their flag, and the other team was getting frustrated because they felt they had searched everywhere in our zone and still couldn’t find our flag. All of us were cold and wet, and our team was about to get accused of cheating, so we collectively decided to call it a draw.
Understandably, the other team wanted to see with their own eyes where our flag had been hidden. We brought them over to the area, and some from the opposing team were shocked to learn they had run past it multiple times during the game and hadn’t even considered that it could be so near. We had placed our flag, an ordinary white sock, lying in plain sight on one of the white lines outlining parking spaces in the church’s parking lot.
Humans are born with the idea that there’s something beyond this life…that there’s more to this existence than what we can see. God’s the one that put that feeling there…He built it into us. People can’t look up at the stars or at the intricacy of the human body and not start asking big questions.
The devil, knowing he cannot stop this instinctive wondering, has concocted and fostered numerous counterfeit religious ideas and worldviews with which to distract humanity. The objective truth seeker has many options aside from Christianity they must examine, and the enemy’s hope is that the seeker will tire of the search and declare something besides the following of Christ as “close enough,” that the seeker will conclude that each worldview is as meaningless as every other one, or get them established and entrenched in an inaccurate worldview like works-based salvation. Yet all that time, the answer is not hiding. It’s sitting right there in plain sight, waiting for the seeker to look closer at it.
If you’re seeking truth, take a look at Jesus Christ and what the Bible (only the Old and New Testaments…no “mandatory” additional books) has to say about Him. Humanity was initially created perfect and had fellowship with God, but then made mistakes and became imperfect, thereby falling out of that fellowship. Jesus Christ, God incarnate, lived a perfect (sinless) life, and extends to us the offer of the only bridge back to that sweet fellowship with the Lord.
It’s that simple. You don’t have to perform rituals. You don’t have to give a certain amount of money to the church or perform a certain number of hours of community service. All you have to do is embrace Jesus Christ as your Savior, acknowledging Him as your only means of escaping the judgment of your imperfections. As you walk that new path, you’ll desire to change your character to become more like His, and as a result of that, you’ll want to perform good works.
It’s right there, hiding in plain sight. I implore you, take a closer look. You might just find the thing that you’ve been looking for all along: the answer to your deep restlessness.
Let’s enter the imaginarium for a few moments here. Suppose that you were around to witness God’s drawing board when He was designing the universe.
To put some scale to the level of God’s creativity here, imagine just for a moment that you were going to write a short story about landing on an inhabited alien planet where no human has ever set foot. What would that planet look like? What kind of life would be there, and what governs the way they live their lives? Don’t be shy or hold back, be as creative as you possibly can.
You’d probably imagine things you’ve already seen or heard from movies, TV shows, or books. Taking something you’re already sort of familiar with, then tweaking it…we can call that one degree of separation. Now think about God creating this planet. He made it out of absolutely nothing, and He did it without anything to borrow inspiration from or to model after. That’s at least two degrees of separation, and it’s something we as humans have a hard time wrapping our minds around.
Back to God’s workshop. Some people might envision sketches of antelopes, clay models of whales, and a scale model of a sparrow in a wind tunnel. While that would all be pretty cool to watch unfold, I’m more fascinated with the way He, once again, from nothing, laid out the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology.
We’re so set on the constancy of what we know as physical laws that the idea sounds absurd, but God could just as easily established different rules and had them work out fine and still be in harmony with all the other naturally occurring laws He set in place. Imagine if instead of what we’re used to, the following things hold true:
Materials with greater densities float above those with lesser densities. Water boils at 50 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level. The speed of light is the same speed as the speed of sound. There are bugs that combine grains of sand to form volcanic rock. Zebras give birth to aardvarks. Visible light is not the only visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Space is hot, not cold. The sky is yellow, not blue. The earth spins not west to east, but south to north, and it takes 33 hours instead of 24 to make a complete rotation.
According to what we know and understand, any single one of these things simply cannot happen. If He wanted to, God could have made all of these “absurd rules” work together simultaneously, and have it make sense. He could have made them the physical and scientific laws we abide by, but He didn’t. The laws we observe and rely on are the ones He gave us, and they provide context for our understanding of the universe.
I’ve studied physics, chemistry, and biology to some degree, and it can be especially frustrating to get the math wrong and not be able to figure out where you went wrong. It’s very helpful, however, in getting some insight into just how creative God is; imagine being so creative that you come up with physical laws that work in harmony with all other physical laws and living things on the planet, and you nail it on the first shot. You even get the nuances and exceptions right! Just one example: there are three basic forms of matter…gas, liquid, and solid. Ordinarily as a molecule moves from solid to liquid to gas, it takes up increasing amounts of volume. On the flip side of that coin, a cloud of gas takes up less room as a liquid, and even less room as a solid. You’re fitting the same amount of mass into smaller amounts of volume, so it becomes more and more dense. Here’s the kicker – water doesn’t behave that way, and continued life on Earth depends on that fact. Water actually expands as it moves from liquid to solid form. (Ever freeze a full container of water? I hope you weren’t too attached to it.) This single concept changes everything, and getting it wrong meant we’d have a really hard time surviving. If water behaved like most other forms of matter, ice would form at the surface and then settle to the bottom, making room for more ice to form at the surface and subsequently settle. Eventually the whole body of water would freeze solid, (probably) killing anything living in it.
Or what about the fact that Earth’s core is a big glob of slowly spinning molten iron? This gigantic dynamo produces a magnetic field that extends beyond our planet and protects us by diverting the crippling charged particles that the sun is constantly emitting. If this magnetic field didn’t exist, the sun’s particles would relentlessly strip Earth of its atmosphere, creating two major problems for us. First, there would be nothing left to breathe. Second, the reduction in atmospheric pressure would cause all liquid water to boil off and escape into space, even at low temperatures. Our planet would become a lifeless dry rock with no significant atmosphere (like Mars), but because God set things up so that the science would work together to maintain a habitable environment, we’re still able to walk around without wearing pressure suits.
It’s mind-blowing! The logic and creativity is without parallel. Yes, God is a God of love, of compassion, of power, of emotion, of so many “touchy-feely” things, but He’s also the God of logic, of order, of completeness, of “yeah, I considered all of those things when I set the universe in motion.” In the military I heard about the importance of weighing the “second- and third-order effects” of an event. God considers the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh order effects of an event, and then some.
That’s the God we serve. He’s not some aloof buffoon sitting on a cloud somewhere, eating grapes and throwing lightning bolts. He’s alive and well, and He’s actively involved in what happens every day in the life of His creation’s masterpiece: you. The next time that you feel your life is nothing more than an accident or that nobody even knows you’re there, remember that the God of all things had you in mind when He created this world, and when He went to the cross. The creator of the world decided He would rather die than live without you. He sees you, you matter to Him, and He has a plan for your life.
Oh God, the more we learn about science, the more it points to you. Some students of science will go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging the evidence of a designer, but thank you so much for revealing yourself through it! May You be glorified through it!
