Pack Your Bags
September 19th, 2016Hope for an Early Flight
I guess it’s weird to post two blog entries a few minutes apart, but I felt like I had something else to say.
One of the Youtube people I watch is convinced that Christians will be here during the Tribulation. I felt I should add my two cents. I do not believe Christians who are walking by faith will be here.
I will give you my reasons.
God loves to foreshadow what he does. He works in repetitive patterns, so people who have understanding given by the Holy Spirit will understand the way the universe works, and so they will not be taken by surprise. In the past, he has foreshadowed the Rapture and Tribulation, and he has indicated an intention to remove Christians from the earth before things get really bad.
Example 1: the flood.
The world became corrupted before the flood. Angels reproduced with women and gave rise to beings which were superior to human beings. They were bigger and stronger. They were presumably smarter and more talented. They polluted the earth with angel worship, and they probably received worship, themselves. They polluted our DNA and our morals.
People got so filthy, they wrote marriage contracts between human beings and animals. It sounds a lot like what’s happening today. We are already seeing incestuous marriages between parents and children. It has happened at least once; look it up.
God decided to purify the earth, just as he will purify it during the Tribulation. He drowned everyone except for eight people, and seven of those eight only survived because they were close to Noah.
They were removed from the earth, in a boat that floated above the waves. They were not drowned. They were preserved so they could repopulate the planet and restore the worship of God.
Did they suffer at the hands of the people who later drowned? Surely they must have. There had to be persecution. The world was disgusting. People hated God, and here was Noah, honoring God by building a boat in the desert, on a planet where it had never rained. If the wicked didn’t insult and abuse Noah and his family, it would be a major deviation from the general pattern of life on earth.
Surely, the good were mistreated, but they were not here when the real misery started. They were here while halfbreeds and angels were inflicting suffering, but they weren’t here when suffering started pouring down from God.
Another example: Sodom and Gomorrah.
Lot lived near Sodom, which was near Gomorrah. The people in these cities were cruel and sexually perverted. They were heavily into homosexuality, and not the gentle kind. God agreed to spare the cities if five decent people could be found, but those people could not be found. God sent angels to Lot, and the gay men of Sodom tried to rape them.
That bit about five people is important. If God would spare Sodom and Gomorrah for five people, why would he rain fire on the entire earth while millions of Spirit-led Christians still lived there?
God told Lot to get his family out before the destruction began. He didn’t burn the cities until Lot was safely on his way to a new home.
Third example: the parting of the Red Sea.
God told the Hebrews to flee Egypt. He led them to the edge of the Red Sea, and the Egyptian army chased them, intending to kill them. God opened the water, waited for the Hebrews to cross (with dry shoes), and then he closed the water on the Egyptians. He didn’t close the water on everyone and pick a few Hebrews out of it.
The pattern is very clear, and it would be out of character for God to deviate from it during the Tribulation.
The Tribulation can’t come while Christians are here in large numbers, because we pray all the time. We are the salt of the earth; our presence preserves it. God isn’t going to pour fire on the earth while millions of us are praying for him to have mercy on us and our neighbors. We have to be removed first; we would be a hindrance.
Does this mean everything is rosy for Christians? Sadly, no.
The Tribulation will be a time when God himself torments humanity. It will be worse than anything that has ever happened. But it won’t be the only suffering that will take place before Jesus comes. The ungodly will rain misery on Christians before the Tribulation begins. It’s already here. Gays are destroying Christian careers and businesses. We are absorbing huge numbers of illegal immigrants who will eventually vote for candidates belonging to the party that fights God the most. The strongholds of God are breaking down, and we are not protected the way we used to be.
It’s going to get worse. Many of us will be killed, tortured, imprisoned, robbed, and raped. But we will not be here when the real agony starts.
The things that will happen before the Tribulation will be bad enough. The weaker you are as a Christian, the worse it will be for you.
God refused to flood the world until Methuselah was safe with him. He refused to burn Sodom until Lot was safe. There is a limit to what he will do to people while his children are among them.
The good news: you may not be here when God burns the world. The bad news: you may be here to be tortured and killed. And it appears that bad things are going to happen to Israel; God will have to step in to prevent complete destruction.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. Don’t find yourself watching porn and doing lines of coke when the world really turns against you. A lot of Christians are storing food and guns. Great, but you should put prayer and repentance first. Your primary fortress is you.
Hope this is helpful.
September 19th, 2016 at 12:53 PM
As always, very helpful.
September 20th, 2016 at 2:17 AM
Yes, it is!
September 20th, 2016 at 7:02 PM
Noah built the ark for 500 years. Ample opportunity for the world to see Noah’s work and to reverse course.
It wasn’t just the desecration of intimacy, but the Hebrew word “hamas”, a form of violence with property, microtheft, whereby mobs converged and everyone in the mob stole less than the minimum prosecutable quantity. It was democratic economic redistribution to the extreme, far worse than a violation of the 10th Commandment, which is among the few commandments concerning emotion. There is no commandment to love parents, but there is a commandment not to envy the property of a neighbor.
The Tower of Babel was the only unified anti-G-d movement, yet only resulted in scattering. Human unity counts for something.
Abraham appealed to G-d to save Sodom and Gomorrah, finally getting whittled down to a minimum of 10 righteous people to save the cities, but that minimum didn’t exist.
Elijah lost his mission because he gave up on backsliders, unlike Moses who threatened G-d to save a slavery-mentality Children of Israel.
No Biblical examples of leaders not being focused on trying to save as many as possible in order to remain pure for some future salvation.
The reason Jonah resisted going to Nineveh was that he didn’t want the Jews to look bad by contrast if the city repented.
Tshuvah, repentance, is available to all. And the reason it deflects punishment is that the person who comes out the other end of true repentance no longer exist. The person has effectively “burned it out of himself”.
Bad things will happen to Israel, worse things for the rest of the world, especially among those who afflicted Israel physically and spiritually.
But the messianic vision until 2000 years ago was to result in a messianic peaceful era of 1000 years on earth where there would be no need to preach and nobody would have the desire to sin. After that 1000 years is another purely spiritual era.
Unless there is something which stated that the “nations beating swords into ploughshares” prophecy (among so many others, like a return to prophecy among the Jews, a restored Temple, a restored Davidic dynasty) was a Divine deception, it would seem to be a cruelty to skip the good stuff.
Who’d have thought 80 years ago, prior to the death camps as the world was silent or compliant, that there’d be a resurrected Jewish nation, prospering, thriving, and… flawed as all humans are? There are more Jews studying scripture now than ever. The secularists are increasingly marginalized and Israel is heading toward two milestones: a majority of Sabbath-observers and a majority of Jews among Jews in the world… and additional messianic issues will begin to “kick in”.
Those who engaged in behavior that severed the pattern of Jewish continuous generations engaged in physical or spiritual violence, despite what they thought they intended. If a behavior resulted in Jews assimilating so that they would have no mitzvah-observant descendants, the end was the same.
There are more chapters to come.
September 21st, 2016 at 10:48 AM
Thanks for the correction RE ten righteous people instead of five. I write these things intending to fact-check, but I often forget what I wanted to check.
September 21st, 2016 at 1:26 PM
For lack of a better way to put it, I guess that is why (to normal people like me) it seems like the world is going crazy.
September 27th, 2016 at 6:45 PM
I have seen this theory of yours before about the beginning of Gen. 3, that angels bred with men (well, the daughters of men). I thought they were supposed to be pure spirit and, fallen or not, ineligible for this.
Most commentators think the ‘sons of God’ thing refers to a branch of Adam’s progeny who remained close to God. But they take up with ‘the daughters of men’, those who have fallen away, the resulting progeny being ‘giants'(in reputation) and ‘men of renown’, legendary, but wicked.
Who are some scholars you can recommend who support your idea? You have a very knowledgeable -as far as I am any judge- Jewish poster here, what do the rabbis say about this?
Where do you find the human-animal contract?
September 27th, 2016 at 9:13 PM
You have picked up another fact-checking error. I usually say, “It is BELIEVED that marriage contracts were written for humans and animals.” It’s a belief of some Jewish scholars.
As for the angels having sex with women, have you read Enoch?
September 27th, 2016 at 9:15 PM
I should add that you will waste a ton of time reading what scholars have written. Some of what the really old scholarly traditions say is fact, but a lot of religious scholarship is guesswork from people who didn’t really hear from God.
You have to read scriptures with the help of the Holy Spirit. He pulls them together and makes sense of them.
I have virtually no respect for traditional Christian scholarship. It’s just deluded intellectuals of varying ability, exchanging wild guesses.