Dubious Signs of the End Times Get my Hopes up

I checked out Drudge today, after a long fight with a messed-up garage door, and I saw a headline about three signs that the end of days was near.

I’m a sucker, so I looked. The link took me to The Daily Mirror. You can stop reading here, if you like. The phrase “Daily Mirror” is a good clue that I was disappointed.

Here are the three signs:

1. Cattle breeders are getting very close to creating a red heifer that is without blemish.

2. Fish are supposedly appearing in the Dead Sea.

3. A snake crawled out of the Western Wall.

Let’s see.

In Ezekiel 47, God said that water would flow from under the temple in Jerusalem. He said fishermen would cast their nets at En Gedi, which is a strange spring close to the shore of the Dead Sea.

I don’t know a whole lot about Ezekiel. His prophecies make up the most confusing book in the Bible. I can’t say whether the fish/Dead Sea prophecies are supposed to come before or after the return of Jesus, but I do know this: we haven’t seen them yet. Supposedly, underground springs are creating freshwater sinkholes by the Dead Sea, and somehow, fish have appeared there, but we haven’t seen a river flowing from under the temple, and the Dead Sea is not exactly popular with fishermen.

As for the snake crawling out of the Western Wall, it probably happens all the time. The prophecy about the snake isn’t Biblical. It comes from the Zohar, which is a book of Jewish mysticism. Mystics are basically witches, so I can’t take their prophecies seriously.

That leaves the red heifer. Funny thing; I have been going through a book by a man named Redheffer. It’s the differential equations text I used in college. Ants ate my first copy, so I bought another one, and I’m really enjoying it. You can actually take this book and learn how to do differential equations, without a lot of confusion because of bad writing and so on.

I looked up the red heifer, because I didn’t remember the significance. In Numbers, red heifers were used in sacrifices. Prophecy says the temple will be rebuilt (again), and it also says sacrifices will resume. So much for leftists who think Jesus is a vegan.

Here’s the part I have issues with: Jewish sages claim there haven’t been any suitable red heifers since the last temple was destroyed. They say “without blemish” is an extreme spec. If a heifer has two hairs that aren’t red, it’s ineligible.

I don’t buy it. Not without some kind of confirmation. How many hairs does a cow have? A human being’s scalp hairs number in the hundreds of thousands, so what about a cow’s entire body? Maybe twenty million hairs? How many are nearly microscopic? I doubt the ancient Jews were able to determine that a heifer had no non-red hairs. The Talmud wasn’t reduced to writing until after the temple was destroyed, and it’s not reliable anyway, so I don’t have much faith in the red heifer claims.

God does whatever he wants, however, and maybe the stories are true. I would love to be proven wrong. The closer I think we are to the end of this miserable age, the happier I will be.

The signs of the times remind me of what motorcycle riders call a decreasing-radius turn. A circle’s radius stays the same as you travel along the curve. A spiral tightens, so the radius shortens. Partial spirals are common on our roads. Many exit ramps have decreasing-radius turns.

If you’re on a motorcycle, this is a problem, because centrifugal (a misnomer, but I don’t care) force equals mass times the square of velocity over the radius. When the radius decreases, the force trying to shove you over the high side and into a guard rail increases fast, and it can get pretty hairy. You go into a turn thinking your speed is fine, and suddenly you have to brake like crazy and pray you don’t run out of pavement.

We’ve been putting along, getting by with washing machine Christianity for a long time, but suddenly, persecution is ramping up, and signs of the end are all around us. The end of free will is in plain sight because of a near-divergence in the graph of technological power versus time. Suddenly, we face scary challenges, and washing machine Christianity isn’t enough to protect us. We’re going to have to get very serious, very fast.

What is washing machine Christianity? It means treating yourself like a pair of white underwear you only wash once a week. You sin all week, and then you go to church and pray and worship to get the stains out. Then you go home and begin soiling yourself and stinking all over again. This is how most Christians do things. It won’t protect you in an age of extreme demonic activity and open persecution.

I have always expected persecution and signs of the end to increase, but I didn’t expect the rate at which they increase to increase. We’re not just speeding toward the end; we’re accelerating toward it. Leftists are a good barometer. They get crazier with every passing week. They are almost completely deranged now. It makes me wonder how much time we have left.

God tends to get us all worked up and then delay things much longer than we expect, so I don’t know whether our end is as close as it seems to be. My feel for the thing is that it would be hard for us to go another 10 years before the rapture, so maybe that means we have 50 years left. Ugh. That would mean no rapture for me. It would be a life sentence in a place where most people hate me and do their best to make me suffer.

I would love to see the end come soon. Things are bad right now. I don’t want to be here for several more decades if the current state of things is as good as it will ever be. I don’t want to be here when America turns into Cuba or Iran (or California).

The decreasing-radius turn is pretty tight already. I’m quite satisfied with the problems we have right now. I don’t want to see our miserable future.

That’s selfish, though. There are people here to be reached, and they’re important. They’re the only reason we’re not raptured as soon as we receive salvation.

The other day I was standing in my driveway with a friend, and I heard a strange rumbling. It was sort of like thunder, but it was continuous. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Instantly, I thought of the dream God gave me about the rapture.

In the dream, I was sitting in my grandparents’ house with my late mother. She was wearing work clothes; it was a sight I never saw while she was alive. I heard a horn that sounded like it came from outer space several thousand miles away; maybe far above the earth over the Pacific. I knew everyone on earth could hear it. As it blew, my mother and I started to float as though water were lifting us up, and we passed through the ceiling of the house. Then I woke up.

I can’t help thinking of that dream every time I hear a sound that reminds me of the horn. For a second, I wonder if it’s time. I hope. Then it dawns on me: no joy. I don’t get to leave yet.

I don’t know what’s going on. My dreams get stranger and stranger. The other day, I dreamed a deranged man threatened me with a gun, and while I stood before him and tried to talk to him, he shot me between the eyes, and I died. I didn’t go to heaven. I continued life somewhere else in America. It was disappointing. If I die, the last…second-to-last…place I want to be when I wake up is here on earth.

I’ve read a lot of books about World War Two over the last couple of years. Marines at the front lived in mental oppression, because they eventually came to understand that they were nearly certain to be wounded or killed even if they did their best to stay safe. When people they knew were seriously, but not mortally, injured, they congratulated them because they knew they were going home, and things would not get any worse for them. I’ve started to think of illnesses that way. If you get a tumor, it’s not a tragedy. It’s a ticket home. It’s like a million-dollar war wound.

If I found out I had a fatal disease, would I fast and pray and to my best do get a healing, or would I load up on painkillers and opt for palliative care in order to sneak off the planet early? Sometimes I wonder. Trying to weasel out seems dishonorable.

People aren’t always afraid to die. My mother didn’t want cancer treatment. She just wanted to rest, take painkillers, and go. She let doctors cut her up to make her husband happy.

I lose respect for people when I find out they’re terrified of death and determined to stay here as long as possible. It’s a childish attitude that reeks of panic. You’re going to fall apart no matter what you do. Your quality of life is going to be pretty bad eventually. How much suffering are you willing to put up with in order to avoid growing up and moving on to something better?

I want to make God happy and accomplish something for him while I’m here. On the other hand, do I really want to be an 80-year-old man in a gutted future America ruled by looters and punks? That’s the kind of place people risk their lives to leave so they can move here. To get the same experience today, I would have to move to the South Bronx and have “MAGA” tattooed on my face.

One of the reasons I wanted to leave Miami is that I did not want my dad to grow disabled and die there. Miami is a horrible place for able people. For the helpless, it must be a nightmare. I didn’t want him to end up in a home surrounded by old people who only spoke Spanish and staffers who were not Christians. I didn’t want him to be cared for by voodoo practitioners. Now I realize: I have to get old somewhere, too, and I’m already on the threshold. Do I want to grow old and feeble on the earth of the Antichrist’s inauguration revelers, in the America of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren?

EEEEEEWWWWW.

Everyone has heard of the familiar curse: “May you live in interesting times.” That’s bad, but it looks like I’m going to be old in interesting times. Even worse!

Maybe it’s not worse. Maybe it’s a blessing. I could be young in interesting times. I could be facing a 90-year stretch on earth right now.

The earth is cursed. I know it, and I shouldn’t get worked up about it. Jesus suffered, and he said we would suffer, too. I’ll just grit my teeth and try to stay close to God.