Eternal life resides in Jesus and in Him alone. No one else! This is true now and will also be the case after Jesus removes His true church from the earth.
In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
What do people need the most? The answer remains the same as it’s always been: A clear understanding of the Gospel. By this I mean that people need Jesus, not the one that so many today create in their mind but but the One revealed on the pages of Scripture.
The church is the body of Christ with Jesus as its Head; it does not operate as a kingdom in this present world. And it’s most certainly not the restored kingdom of Israel.
The Lord never intended for His church to behave like a kingdom with an aristocracy that rules over it. We function on earth as Jesus’ body with each member possessing spiritual gifts that support the whole.
As deception, government corruption, violence, and lawlessness increase daily in our world, it becomes increasingly difficult to hang on to our hope in Jesus’ imminent appearing.
How do we keep our focus on the Rapture during these perilous times? Is there any hope for those of us weary of waiting for His return?
The prophetic signs of our day resemble a storm warning. The dark threatening clouds on our horizon point to nearness of the time when the four horses of Revelation 6:1-8 will burst out of their stalls and gallop across the earth.
For us as believers, the black clouds on the horizon signal the nearness of Jesus’ appearing; we will be in heaven with Jesus when He opens the seals.
The Rapture and the Second Coming are different events; they cannot happen at the same time.
In the previous post in this series, we established the Rapture as a biblical event; we have a firm scriptural basis for the series of closely related events that constitute our “blessed hope” (Titus 2:11-14).
Why do so many believers today remain blind to the numerous signs that we live in the last days?
I believe a key reason for this lies with pastors and teachers today who in large numbers today embrace amillennialism, a belief system that denies biblical prophecies related to Jesus’ thousand-year rule and the restoration of a kingdom for Israel. As a result, they regard the miraculous emergence of Israel as a nation as mere coincidence without any prophetic significance.
You may wonder why I am again writing in defense of the pretribulation Rapture, the belief that Jesus will come for His church before the start of the seven-year tribulation. I am doing so because we live in a time when many inside and outside the church ridicule our hope in Jesus’ imminent appearing.
How do we answer those who mock the hope we hold so dear?
In this two-part series, I will answer twelve questions that confirm our belief that the New Testament indeed teaches a pretribulation Rapture.
When the disciples asked Jesus about the signs of the end of the age, Jesus began His answer with these words, “See that no one leads you astray” (Matt. 24:4). Jesus’ first warning about the last days concerned those who would seek to deceive His followers by leading them away from the truth. Does this not describe the world in which we all live?
So what’s the big deal in regarding apostasia in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 as a physical departure rather than spiritual apostasy? It adds considerable support for belief in a pretribulation rapture, one that occurs before this period of God’s wrath upon the earth.
It confirms that Jesus must come for His church before the world knows the identity of the antichrist, which we know occurs at the beginning of tribulation, if not before.
Just as the rapture infused hope into the boy of my past, it does so for believers today amid the lawlessness and rampant violence on our streets. It matters now more than ever before!
One has to consciously block out the many prophetic signs of the coming tribulation in order to deny that we live in the last days of human history. It’s simply not sensible to dismiss the words of the book of Revelation as history or allegory at a time when we see its prophecies coming to life before our eyes.
What is happening to our great nation? What do the riots signify? Why do we see such violence on our streets with innocent people attacked and in many instances killed? Why the tremendous increase in violence?
What if all that we are seeing points what the Bible tells us will be a world government during the time of the tribulation?
Much of what we are seeing in 2020 represents a concerted effort by elite globalists to prepare people in the United States and world to accept the authority of the coming New World Order (NWO). Although President Trump remains solidly against the submission of the United States to it, the radical left has succeeded in convincing many Americans of its necessity.
I remember a scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation television series where Data is in his room watching water come to a boil in a flask. When someone walks in and asks what he is doing he explains that the old adage, “A watched pot never boils,” is just not true. As proof, he says that he has watched water come to a boil 23 times in a row without fail.
For those of us awaiting the imminent return of Jesus, there are days when we are tempted to wonder if a “watched for” Jesus never appears to take us home.
Waiting is difficult! Whether we’re waiting for cold symptoms to subside, a job offer, or a storm in our life to end, it’s never fun waiting (to say the least).
It’s also not easy waiting for Jesus to take us home to heaven as He promised in John 14:2-3. Yet I know so many of you, like me, have been waiting decades for His appearing.
The world is abuzz with the news that President Trump ordered a deadly and successful strike on Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military general who was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of American soldiers in the past couple decades.
As many in the world breathe a sigh of relief at the death of this tyrant, they also wonder what’s next for our world. Could there be a devastating world war, much worse than anything that has previously happened?
