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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on October 15, 1978 When ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors . . . But of that day and hour knoweth no man . . . but my Father only. Matthew 24:33, 36 Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. 1st Thessalonians 4:17 IN THE MIDST OF ALL THE BURDENS associated with building a work for God and living in devotion to Him in an alien world, every so often we have to come to grips with the benchmark, the reality that God is in control. When He says He will do something, He will do it. We are to purify ourselves by a blessed hope and we are to think on the hope that is ours. Likewise, the people we read about in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi may not have been aware that they were also a part of a much larger happening. When we look at the background of those who came to rebuild the walls and the temple at Jerusalem, we can see that God was weaving a fabric with many strands. A multitude of prophecies given by God brought His people back to Jerusalem. Isaiah named Cyrus before he was born and prophesied that he would be the king who would send the people back again to Jerusalem. Jeremiah prophesied of the bondage and its time limit of 70 years. Through Daniel, Nahum, Zephaniah and other prophets, God was weaving the pattern. Now imagine that you are making that journey from Babylon to Jerusalem. Whether you are eating the dust of the man walking in front of you, or wading through a river, you have one thing in view: you are going back to Jerusalem to build an altar and a temple, and to restore God’s way of doing things. But there was a much larger pattern involved: Jerusalem was to be a significant place in God’s plan for the world. When you read in Ezra 2 and in Nehemiah 7 the lists of those who returned, you might wonder why a little town like Bethlehem would be included in the restoration when so many other towns were involved. But there were Scriptures concerning the role that Bethlehem would play in the birth of a Savior, prophecies that predated the rebuilding work by a long time. As we rebuild God’s work and as we pay the price in agony and sacrifice to keep a foothold that the church has obtained, it is easy to lose sight of the larger pattern. “In the midst of fighting alligators,” as someone has said very eloquently, “it is easy to forget we are draining a swamp.” There are larger happenings going on, and we are a part of those happenings. So in the midst of our daily struggles, I do not want us to lose sight of that blessed hope: the glorious appearing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. From Jesus’ day until now, many people who specialize in prophetic teaching about His second coming have made the mistake of trying to set a date when the Lord would return. Augustine, one of the giants of the church, almost made that mistake. Some people imagine that they have an exact formula to determine the date of Jesus’ second coming. There are people who have put on white robes and gathered on hilltops to get ready to go somewhere. And so far, each one of those groups has been left waiting. If the Lord came, He came and went without anybody knowing about it, because those who went out to meet Him were still there after the supposed date had passed. Three of the Gospels zero in on end-time teachingsof Jesus. You can take much of the detail and reduce it down to two things that He said. First, Jesus said that nobody knows the hour; not even Jesus could give the time. God retains some options for Himself, as He did with Methuselah. God told Enoch, “Name your child Methuselah,” which means, “When he dies, the end will come.” So you could conclude that the older Methuselah got, the closer the end was. But no man knew the hour, and Methuselah lived longer than any man on this earth. The New Testament lets us know that God was long-suffering, prolonging the time before the flood. Since Jesus said that nobody knows when His second coming will occur, I don’t need any other text or any cross-reference; that is enough for me. The second thing that Jesus let us know about His second coming is that, like watching Methuselah getting older, even though we don’t know the hour, we can know when it is “even at the doors.” Jesus was talking primarily to a people He knew would reject Him. He was speaking of a day that would come when the church would be gone, and the people who would still be on this earth would come to their senses under much tribulation. They would be brought even to the brink of the end, and would be able to follow the signs all the way. In Matthew 16, Jesus says, “You can read the weather, and you know that when the wind shifts to the south, a certain kind of weather is going to follow. So if you can read the weather, you ought to be able to read the signs of My coming.” Then in Matthew 24, Jesus began to catalogue those signs. He said that a certain event is going to happen, and then another event is going to happen, and then another. He put them in a sequence. He said, “A certain event will happen, but the time is not yet; and then another event will happen, but the time is not yet.” So you can figure out that when a certain event happens, at least that one is behind you, but the time is not yet. But as we have said, He did indicate you can know when it is even at the doors. Many people who look at the second coming of Jesus and study the signs of the times in the Bible make the mistake of thinking that it is all one event. But the second coming is not a single event. Throughout the Bible, from early prophecies through the New Testament, there are numerous references to “the Day of the Lord.” Many prophecies in the Bible unfold over a period of time. You first get a little capsule or a seed. Sometimes there is a double fulfillment, so that a type is laid down of the manner in which the ultimate fulfillment will come. A partial fulfillment is worked out in history to give a little dramatic portrayal of the way the complete fulfillment will come at a later time. As a seed becomes a tree, you can follow the fulfillment of prophecies throughout God’s book. Genesis 3:15 gives the whole redemption plan: the seed of the woman will bruise the head of the serpent, and in doing so, the serpent will bruise the heel of the seed of the woman. In the unfolding of God’s redemptive plan, every encounter between God’s Son and the devil, and between the children of God and the devil, is that warfare represented by the serpent striking the heel of the man, and the serpent inevitably losing as his head is bruised. The devil might raise his head for a while, but it will ultimately be knocked down. So if you are only looking in the short time scale, you might say that prophecy is not being fulfilled, because it is obvious that the old serpent has his head held high and nobody is bruising it. But if you stretch out your view of the whole prophetic plan, you will see that the devil ultimately gets his head bruised as the inevitable unfolding of God’s prophecy moves on. At Calvary, it comes into sharp focus: the seed of the woman is bruised on Calvary and the head of the serpent is knocked flat! I once heard a preacher very dramatically portray all the demons in hell jumping around with glee, and Satan having himself a party because he finally got Jesus on the cross. Nonsense! That is what the devil tried to prevent; he did not want Jesus to go to Calvary. Satan held the power of death over man. As David took the very sword of Goliath and cut off his head, Satan knew that Jesus would seize at Calvary the keys of death, hell and the grave, and conquer him in the very act of being bruised on the cross. All of that was encapsulated in Genesis 3:15 in one sentence, and the whole prophetic plan unfolds it. As you unravel the prophetic plan, you will come to that phrase, “the Day of the Lord.” You all know the story of the blind men who encountered an elephant. One of them felt his trunk, another felt his legs, and they all had a different view of the elephant. As God’s prophecy unfolds, most prophecy preachers are like blind men feeling an elephant. They find only a little part of it and come up with their own view. I have read books that said that Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin or Roosevelt, or just about everybody you can think of, would be the Antichrist. How many so-called Antichrists have you seen buried during your lifetime? The Day of the Lord encompasses His coming to this earth in manifest substance of being, in all respects God Himself. The Day of the Lord began to be fulfilled when God was led forth from behind a curtain, and the Word that was with God and was of the same essence as God tented in human flesh, and suddenly the substance of God was unveiled and moved onto the stage of history. But the prophecy students of Jesus’ day spent more time reading the apocryphal book of Enoch and the canonized book of Daniel than they did studying Isaiah 53. Isaiah depicts the Messiah as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He had no comeliness that we should look upon Him and behold Him as a thing of beauty. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. I can imagine someone reading Isaiah and saying, “That will never draw a crowd; let’s not preach on that one. Give us the book of Daniel, with its images of great kingdoms. Give us the apocryphal book of Enoch. There the Son of man comes in a blazing light on a cloud to execute judgment, and all we chosen people of God will be rulers over the hated Romans. That kind of preacher will fill a stadium!” That was the kind of Messiah they looked for, not the suffering servant Messiah. So they hunted and pecked in the Scriptures and picked the part of it they liked, but the Day of the Lord includes that first coming. Even though they did not pay enough attention to Isaiah’s picture of the suffering servant Messiah, it seems that God keeps pointing them to it. The Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered in the Qumran Caves on the northwest side of the Dead Sea. One of the best-preserved scrolls in that archaeological find was a complete scroll of Isaiah. Some people used to say that Isaiah’s prophecies are merely a history written after the events that they purport to foretell. But carbon half-life dating has disproved that notion. Isaiah was a prophet, and his scroll predates many of the events it describes. Archaeologists have dug below the Wailing Wall, uncovering the foundations of the old temple built by Solomon. They uncovered a stone with some writing on it. What do you think the writings were? Isaiah! I can just see God saying, “You missed it the first time and I will not let you miss it this time.” The Day of the Lord includes Jesus’ first coming as the suffering servant Messiah, who must remove the barrier of our sin, ransom a lost people and buy up all the transgressions, past, present and future. He came to pay all debts on the estate and break “the wall of partition,” as Ephesians 2 says, that God might again build a temple of living stones, not made with hands. After that, He will come back again to take His people home, when He comes as King of kings and Lord of lords. But the people in Jesus’ day missed it entirely. People today are making the same mistake about the second coming. They hunt and peck here and there, coming up with a phrase here and a phrase there, then they make doctrine. But the second coming is comprised of many events. Some Bible scholars have applied the word “rapture” to describe one phase of Jesus’ second coming. We read in 1st Thessalonians 4:17, “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up . . . to meet the Lord in the air,” to be with our Savior who is coming back for us. The word “rapture” does not appear in our Bibles, but the Greek word that we associate with the word “rapture” occurs in Acts 8:39 to describe Philip being “caught away.” Philip was here, then he wasn’t, and suddenly he appears in another place. He was “raptured.” That word is then taken to describe this phase of the second coming when the saints who are alive are caught away to meet Jesus in the air. In other passages, particularly in Zechariah 14, Jesus comes and touches this earth. His feet touch the Mount of Olives, it cleaves in half and a great valley appears in the middle. So we know that there will be an appearing, a catching away and a touching. Those events could all happen in quick succession: some could be caught up to meet Jesus in the air while He is coming down, and then He touches the earth. But other passages show that there is a gap in time between the catching away and the touching. There is in God’s book an appearing that is a prelude to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. You have to be there to partake of this meal; that is a logical deduction. Whom does the Lamb marry? The church! We are the bride of Christ. A feast is prepared, and Jesus will come to take the bride to be at that feast. In Revelation 19, that feast has already occurred when John describes seeing “the One sitting on a white horse and behind Him were the saints on white horses, arrayed in white, and they come to execute judgment and to tread the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.” Revelation 19 also describes the “supper of the great God,” where an angel standing in the sun cried for all the fowls of the earth to fly and to feed upon the flesh of the beasts and the kings of the earth that have been slain by the sword going out of the mouth of Him that sat upon the horse. We see that there is a sequence of events. There is a prelude to a Marriage Supper, and after they have eaten, there is a coming to tread the winepress of wrath, which in turn is a prelude to the feast of the great God where the flesh of those slain in the great Battle of Armageddon is eaten by the birds of the air. Some passages show that before Jesus comes to do battle, there will be an outpouring of wrath: six angles will pour out plagues and terrible happenings upon the earth, like those that were embryonically portrayed when the children of Israel came forth out of Egypt. Yet other passages say that we are not appointed unto wrath. We are not appointed unto wrath, yet wrath is outpoured. So the church must be taken away before that wrath can be outpoured. The church will not undergo the “great tribulation” spoken of in the book of Revelation. No one will dispute that the saints all over this earth are going through tribulation. The martyrs down through the centuries might ask those living in comfort today, “What do you mean, we are not to have tribulation?” There is tribulation in this world from those who are in this world, which Jesus spoke of in John 16 when He said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation.” But that is not the “great tribulation” where those angels empty their vials and the wrath of God is poured out on this earth, the great and horrible tribulation before He comes to set everything right. John makes it clear in 1st John 4 that the “spirit of antichrist” was at work in the land as early as in his day, but it comes to focus on that one “man of sin” that Paul speaks of in 2nd Thessalonians 2. If you take the Bible to mean what it says, a terrible future for this earth is laid down. Sin will get worse, and the last expression of sin will be the worst kind of sin. The sins of this world will consummate in a world figure called Antichrist, who will rule this earth and who will acquire power by first substituting himself for God. An earthly government will join with a false church that will work miracles, and the very elect will be deceived. Then that man of sin will reveal himself and set himself up to be god and world ruler, and no man will buy or sell without his number in their hand or their forehead. But 2nd Thessalonians 2 says that the man of sin cannot be revealed until something happens first. We read that, “he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.” The words letteth and let in Old English mean “to restrain.” Literally, Paul said, “He who restraineth will restrain, until he be taken out of the way.” So someone is restraining the man of sin, and that someone must be removed first. That either speaks of the Holy Spirit residing in the church, or the church itself. In either case, the church must be gone before that man of sin can be revealed. When you take all of those scriptural passages and put them together, we see that there is an appearing, a touching down, a removal from wrath, and a treading of the winepress of wrath. There is a taking away of the church, who is the bride of Christ, in order to participate in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The church must be removed before Antichrist can be revealed, because the church is the restraining force against his full revealing. Then Antichrist is revealed, who must rule for a period of time, after which he is destroyed. After the Marriage Supper, God’s people will return with their Lord at the Battle of Armageddon. That battle becomes a feast where the flesh of those who opposed God is fed upon by the carrion fowls of this world. Common sense tells us that the church has already gone up before Antichrist is ruling and the plagues and tribulations are poured out on this earth. What is the significance of these events? Nowhere in God’s book do the signs point to the indefinite time of the catching away of the church. Every sign of Jesus’ second coming points to the final end when He must come to execute final judgment. Between here and that coming described in Revelation 19, between here and that final end to which the signs point, there must be the removal from wrath, there must be the meeting in the air and there must be the Marriage Super of the Lamb. There must be the removal of the restraining force, there must be the unveiling of Antichrist and there must be the outpouring of the tribulation. Then the final end comes, the consummation of the Day of the Lord. John says, speaking of Christ’s coming, “He hath on his vesture and on is thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.” In Revelation 20, he says, “I saw an angel come down from heaven . . . having a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit.” That fulfills the stomping on the serpent’s head that was prophesied in Genesis 3. Know that the signs do not give security for predicting the time when the church goes to its bridal supper. When Jesus says, “When these signs occur, ye can know it is even at the door,” He is not talking about the catching away. In fact, He is talking to a people most of whom will not be caught away because they and their descendants will not accept Him. They are that olive tree, the old trunk which will have the wild olive branch grafted on to it, as described in Romans 9 through 11. But after having worshiped the false christ, they will finally recognize the true Messiah when He comes, and they pay with their lives in many cases. Then they will know that the end that He spoke of in the synoptic Gospels is at the door. When we say, “The time is not yet,” we cannot be secure that the catching away will not happen soon; we only know that the final event is not here yet. Therefore, if we can say, “the end is at the doors,” how much closer is His appearing? Hebrews 9 says, “unto them that look for him shall he appear.” The apostles taught that we should purify ourselves for this hope and live every moment expecting the breaking in the clouds and the catching away, because they knew that somewhere between here and there, we will go up to meet Him. Well, if there is a catalogue of events yet to be accomplished between the catching away and the end, that is God’s problem. He has to make all those events happen within a shorter period of time. It is like someone who gives you driving directions and says, “When you see that sign, you’ve gone too far. The exit will be before you get there.” Now, when you see these things coming to pass, know that the end is at the door; but if you are there at the end, you have missed it! When you get so close you can see the end, quit looking at the end. Start looking up, “for your redemption draweth nigh.” If the end is at the doors, how much closer the appearing? The tragedy of Christianity throughout 1,900 years is that saints in prosperity seldom look for His appearing. To those in tribulation and persecution and suffering, He offers the only extraction from their misery, so they stay alert on the subject. But God’s word still says, “unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time.” All of that was introduction. I have preached for years on the second coming, and have always said, “Saints, don’t make the mistake of saying, ‘Because this has not happened, I can relax a little; Jesus won’t come tonight.’” No, all you can say is because this has not happened, Antichrist is not yet revealed, the Marriage Super of the Lamb has not yet occurred, and the final end is not behind us, but is yet to come. Those must happen before that final end can come. We are going to be gone, having met Him in the air. We are going to that feast. We are going to be with Him. Then Antichrist will be revealed. The spirit of Antichrist is already at work, and before the end can come he must first substitute himself as a man of peace who comes with the answer to man’s problems. A false church will work miracles. That is why the last days are preparation for the end. The perceptual frames of people will be so changed that they will expect miracles, and the stage will be set for even the very elect to be deceived. Twenty years ago, skepticism and rationalism reigned. Now people are more prone to believe in miracles than before. People will suddenly believe that their problems are solved, and then Antichrist will reveal his true self when power is in his hands, and he will set himself up as ruler. Then must come great tribulation; and then comes the King of kings. All of that has to happen. But between here and there, there is a happening that I don’t want to miss: in the twinkling of an eye, we will be caught up to meet Him in the air. He will not have touched down yet. He touches down when He comes to tread the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. There are three signs of the end that tell us that the rapture is at momentary expectancy. First, Israel had to be restored. I will not recount the entire history of that event at length, but when World War I was being fought, nobody dreamed that the people of Israel would ever have a homeland in Palestine. There are passages in Ezekiel 6 where God pronounced a curse upon the land and said that His people would be scattered, not just eastward as they had been carried many times in the past, but to all four corners of the globe, and persecution would become synonymous with their name. You can chart the history of the fulfillment of that prophecy in the great persecutions in Russia and on to the present time. That problem was in existence in 1914. My history professors called it “an accident of history” that Lord Balfour and Lord Rothschild had the position they had with the British War Office during World War I and, through the influence of Chaim Weizmann, brought forth the Balfour Declaration that opened up Israel for the first time. That is all well-known history. As the people poured into Israel, various means were tried to control the influx. You can plot five successive waves as the people poured in. God’s word had said that, though His people would be scattered, there would come a time when He would reach out His hand and He would “say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.” Isaiah would lift his eyes and say, “Who hath heard such a thing? . . . shall a nation be born at once?” and would cry out, “Who are these that fly . . . as the doves to their windows?” In Operation Magic Carpet, tens of thousands of Jews were flown from Yemen to Israel in great “flying boxcars.” Ezekiel prophesied that the land would begin to blossom again. Each time I have gone to Israel and am confronted with the reforestation there, I go back to Ezekiel and reread the prophecies. In 1948, President Truman moved on the scene and recognized the nation of Israel. President Truman made that gutsy decision in spite of what many people had advised about international relationships. From that day until now, each president has wrestled with the problem of how to maintain peace with the Arab world, meet our need for oil and deal with the problems in that area of the world, and at the same time maintain their support for the Israeli nation. My Bible says that President Truman didn’t have a choice; neither did Lord Balfour. God’s time schedule said that this nation must be restored, and regardless of your political feelings, and regardless of the humanitarian considerations, God on His throne is the Boss. In Ezekiel 34, God speaks through that Old Testament prophet saying, “Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out… of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land,” and will feed them therein. That had to happen, and it did. The second of three signs to occur is the shift we have seen in the world balance of power. It had to become three-pronged. Until sometime after World War II, few students of world history believed that the Far East would become a major fulcrum in the world balance of power. Only in our day have we seen that happen. The Bible shows us that scene in a prophecy of events that will occur after Israel is restored. We read in Ezekiel 38, “Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth . . . Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land.” Ezekiel says that northern countries are going to look down on Israel, the land that is restored out of many countries and the people who were brought back to dwell in safety in their own land. Those northern countries will suddenly arise and be like a cloud over that land, to come and take a spoil. Western nations are named in that passage. “Gomer, and all his bands” means that Germany has to be a part of the northern confederacy. “Togarmah of the north quarters” refers to Turkey. Ezekiel’s prophecy goes on to name western Mediterranean countries “and the young lions thereof,” their offspring. The United States could also be one of the young lions sprung forth from those western Mediterranean countries named in Ezekiel. We do not read about this ascendancy of the Far East and the north in the book of Daniel. The prophecies that are given in minute detail in the book of Daniel do not provide a history of the entire world. In the image depicted in Daniel 2, Nebuchadnezzar’s great kingdom is seen, and out of it will come the kingdoms of the Medo-Persians, on through to the Grecian and the Roman Empires, represented by the legs of iron and the feet of iron and clay. Only those kingdoms that grow westward out of Nebuchadnezzar’s empire are pictured in that image. It has nothing to do with the great kingdoms and dynasties of the Far East. It is in Ezekiel we see that after Israel is restored, there will be an offensive action by a northern group. Does it include Russia? No one knows what countries will be part of the northern regions spoken of in Ezekiel. God and Magog, Meschech and Tubal are geographic identities in God’s book; they locate an area. If these are the last days, Russia as a nation now occupies that region. If these are not the last days, it will be whichever country occupies that area at that time. But whoever is in power in that area now occupied by Russia will look down on Israel and will be aggressive. Western Mediterranean nations and their offspring will look eastward and will ask the defensive question: “Art thou come to take a spoil?” and they will react defensively to the northern aggression. We read in Revelation 16 that long after we are gone, an angel will pour out his vial on the River Euphrates. We are told that this happens to dry up the river so that the way might be provided for the kings of the east. If you march across that river and head straight west, you are going to come through that gap through which prior aggressors came, spilling out into the great plain called Megiddo. You find in God’s book, painted loosely because God will not tie Himself to those who would predict dates, that the last conflagration will focus in that area where Israel is today. We read in Ezekiel that a king of the south will move up, and the whole focus of the prophecy will be concentrated in that geographic region. I do not know when it will happen. I will not name which nations are involved, because these end-time prophecies speak of general geographic regions. But God’s word made it clear that the final balance of power will be three-pronged and there will be three forces that spill into that Megiddo area. Only in our day have we seen the world take that shape as we get closer to the end. When will all that happen? I do not know, but the church will be gone. We who were caught away will be coming back to see them after they get there, and we will watch our Lord trample on them and the birds eat them. I believe that the church is the restraining force that will be taken from this earth, and not the Holy Spirit. We read in Revelation 11 that the Holy Spirit will be here in the presence of the two prophets who suddenly appear in the streets of Jerusalem in the last days and begin to prophesy and work miracles, and although they are hated, no man can touch them. Many have speculated who these final two witnesses might be. Some theologians say it is Enoch and Elijah, because neither of them had a natural death. They base their theory on the passage in Hebrews 9 where it says, “It is appointed unto men once to die.” They say that since Enoch and Elijah went up without dying, they have to come back so they can die. I don’t know what will happen to those of us who are raptured; I hope we don’t have to come back again and die! Though I cannot prove it, I believe that the two witnesses are Moses and Elijah, because they are witnesses to a people who would not accept their Messiah. Two witnesses saw Jesus at His Transfiguration, and we are told who they were: Moses and Elijah. Two witnesses were standing in shining garments to witness the Resurrection when the women came and saw the empty tomb, but we are not told who they were. Two were witnessing the Ascension and cried out, “Why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner.” There were two each time because the number two signifies the “adequate witness.” Since we know it was Moses and Elijah who were there on the Mount of Transfiguration, I believe that Moses and Elijah are these last two unnamed witnesses. That is why I think God was so tough on those two. Just think of it for a moment: the last two witnesses on this earth, and God’s whole case rests with them. What if the people could break them down and they would apostatize and declare that their witness was not true? God has a couple of men who were put together like iron and steel, Elijah and Moses, who worked the kinds of miracles these two final witnesses will work: fire from heaven and water turned to blood. These two men have been trained by God, and God has them ready for their final declaration. The third sign is the explosion of technological advancements that have developed in recent decades. Revelation 11 says that the two witnesses will be slain and their dead bodies will lie in the streets of Jerusalem for three and a half days and the world will view them lying there. That could not have happened until there were communications satellites. We are that much closer to the end. Revelation 13 says that during the Great Tribulation you cannot buy or sell unless you have a number in the hand or in the forehead. When some people refused to take social security numbers because they said it was “the mark of the beast,” they were called fanatics. We all know we are now moving toward the numbered, moneyless society. We are right in the midst of that struggle. There is no way that Antichrist could have come to power until the computer was invented. But today, for the first time since the prophecies of Revelation were declared, we have the computerized ability for the whole world to be date-assembled, data-organized, and data-controlled. That is why it is part of our theological mission to resist. Someone has said that there are only two institutions left in America today that have any freedom: the press and the church, and we are seeing the clutches of government move into each of those areas. Nobody would have believed 20 years ago that a Supreme Court would make a decision allowing unannounced entry by police into a press organization. Nobody would have believed that an attorney general would unabashedly say he has the supervisory rights over all the temporalities of a church. Only with computers could Revelation 13 be fulfilled. Social security numbering began to condition us for it. Now people are conceiving plans where one number is used for everything. Since everybody has a social security number, why not link that number to your health insurance policy, life insurance policy, address and postal zip code? Just add your social security number, and it is all precisely related to you. All that had to happen before the end could come. We are to occupy till He comes, and we are to restrain that force until we are taken out of the way. If we are to die in the process, then we are in a position similar to those saints who made Jerusalem and Bethlehem ready for the first coming of our Lord. They set the stage. Malachi under Nehemiah would close the book in the Old Testament, and the next book would open in the New Testament with the Lord of Glory moving into a tent of human flesh, in those very cities restored under Ezra and Nehemiah. We may be making ready a better and more glorious family up there. You might say, “Do you really believe that?’ I sure do! We may not be here tomorrow. The end is even at the door; how much closer the appearing! You say, “Well, if I don’t make that appearing, have I got a chance?” That is between you and God. All I am going to say is that if you miss the catching away, you are not in the bride of Christ. God’s Son only marries one church. He is not a bigamist. If you miss the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, and you still are expecting to be received into His kingdom, you have to rely on some shaky ground, by rather esoteric theology, if you have any other chance. God’s people should quit trying to figure out, “What’s my second chance?” if it’s there at all, and start ensuring they are caught up with the first crowd. And if God is able to make the whole world follow His stream of events like this, He is going to take care of His church, including me, you and yours. Say with me, “We made it through this year, either here, or up there!” I want us to know that we are part of a much larger happening as we fight Antichrist and fulfill our mission. Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott | December, 2019 Wingspread | November, 2019 Wingspread | October, 2019 Wingspread | September, 2019 Wingspread | August, 2019 Wingspread | July, 2019 Wingspread | June, 2019 Wingspread | May, 2019 Wingspread | April, 2019 Wingspread | March, 2019 Wingspread | February, 2019 Wingspread | January, 2019 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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