In many respects, the life of Christ depicted in the Gospels echos the history of the people Israel. Once of the aspects strongly identifying the person of God the Son with Israel is that in his very youth he is taken to escape disaster from Israel into Egypt, echoing the escape of Joseph’s family into Egypt to escape the famine in Israel. Later on other Pharaohs appear who do not know Joseph, and it culminates in the Pharaoh at the time of Moses, who oppresses the Hebrews and is forced in the end to let them go home. In the same way regime change – in the case of Jesus’ life the removal of Herod – enables Christ’s family to return to Israel from Egypt.
In the Bible, Zechariah 14.2 to be precise, you will read a prophecy of all nations gathering against Israel to fight. This verse has remained in every copy of the Bible ever printed, even through the hundreds of years when there was no Israel and atheists would have used it as another one of their “proof texts” against the veracity of scripture. The most savage enemies of the state of Israel are the Islamic States, with a notable exception in Egypt. The regime change now occasioned against Hosni Mubarrak, whatever his faults may be, is this a symbol that the final battle is now coming? The most influential Arab state that had been keeping peace with Israel is now in turmoil, and some other states, like Iran, are claiming that the unrest has an Islamic revolutionary character and are calling on Egypt to wipe Israel out. So now all the surrounding nations would be hostile, and a situation emerges where the prophesy of Zechariah 14.2, which many people believe to be an end times prophesy.
What does Jesus Christ say about this time in Matthew 24?
1And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.
2And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
3And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?
4And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.
5For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.
6And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
7For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8All these are the beginning of sorrows.
9Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.
10And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.
11And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
12And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
13But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
14And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
15When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)
16Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:
17Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house:
18Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.
19And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!
20But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day:
21For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
22And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.
23Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
24For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
25Behold, I have told you before.
Some say that what was done in AD 70 was being referred to here, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire, but that was a mere rehearsal, since Jerusalem is and Egypt is and even the Roman Empire still exists in a certain form. It has a Muslim at the head of it, now, but it still is. The role of the Pope in the days when the Roman Church was Antichrist is now in the leader of the United States being the seat of power of the Nation States run by Masons on behalf of the devil, so we do indeed have the Black Pope that Nostradamus spoke of, only the geography has changed. We didn’t need one in old Rome, he sits in the Senate anyway.
How near is the end now? Nearer than when I first believed. I don’t know the hour, the day or the year, but I would be unsurprised to see the end of days in my lifetime.
And I say Maranatha. Yes indeed. Maranatha’s what I say. Come Emmanuel and sort this mess out which we cannot do, and establish Thy righteous rule in a regenerated universe.
Related Articles
- ‘Terrorists’ Attack Egypt-Israel Gas Pipeline (news.sky.com)
- “‘Israel has all but given up on Obama'” and related posts (friday-lunch-club.blogspot.com)
- “EGYPT: Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu watching unrest with ‘vigilance and worry'” and related posts (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
- Netanyahu: Due to turmoil, Israel must get stronger (reuters.com)
- Natural gas supply to Israel cut off after blast at Egyptian terminal – Washington Post (news.google.com)
Whilst I find this take on the current unrest in Egypt erudite and logical, I only wish I could believe it. There are many scholars and philosophers who will have there own explanations for what is happening. I would not, nor could “argue” philosophically with such erudition and scholarliness. However, my own belief (and it can only be a belief. Like all people, I could be mistaken) on these matters is not in line with any organised religion, of which I have a profound distrust. Unfortunately for me my belief has no comfort or reward to offer either. Nor do I go along with the atheist viewpoint, which often stems from as much fervent anger about “those who are not like us” as some religions do.
We are beset today with too much “Science” which has replaced God. I would only say that science by no means has all of the desperately-needed answers. In many cases it is the cause of the problems for which solutions are sought.
The universe, we are told, is a cold, impersonal,neutral entity. O.K. but it still gave rise to this beautiful (despite the determined onslaught of humanity) globe we live on.
I think it is highly likely, therefore, that there is a creative force within (if that’s the word) the universe. I don’t believe it necessarily follows that the Creator should have any further interest in its creation on a personal and moment-to moment basis.
It seems likely to me that any “end time” will come about through man’s inherent aggression and greed and will be just that. The end of mankind as the dominant force on this globe. Whether the globe will recover from the devastation is another question.
It’s a sad fact that despite the thousands of years of religion and philosophy, as a species we still find co-operation, caring and non-violence so elusive. Would that this were not so. There is hopeful note though. There seems to be no reason why certain people should be so caring, compassionate and empathetic; yet thankfully, they are.
Why is this ? Also the “by design” argument for there being a God is very tempting.
I sincerely wish I could believe otherwise but what I do believe is that whenever the end comes (during my lifetime or thousands of years from now) it will be frightening, painful will destroy all life forms and have no regard for beliefs of any kind.
Let’s all try and care for one another regardless of viewpoint, whilst we are here.
Best wishes.
DD
I don’t have an organised religion either, quite the contrary. Any organisation that wants to come between me and Christ will not get any truck from me. He said “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them” and the Popes and clerics can say what they like about that.
I believe that you can know God and I also believe that if you wish to believe you simply can take control of yourself and believe what you choose to believe. If you say ‘I cannot believe what I choose, I must believe what proves itself to me’ then sorry , but that isn’t actually belief in the faith sense. Faith is about the accepting of things which are not proven facts and the hoping for things which are not the things that we see, but of which we hear and read in revelation.
Science is all very well, and has given us a lot, and there is a place for the cold logic that it offers, but that place is not the area of meaning of our lives and souls. When science interferes here, it goes ultravires, and the proponents of science as a religion substitute themselves show that they have a faith that this form of reasoning can give us the answers. In this they show a faith, as there is know way that they can know for sure that what seems to be rational thought will lead us to the right answers about the big questions. Science in fact has many unanswered questions, and I am not just using a God-of-the-gaps argument there, as if scientists were correct in contemptuously dismissing our observations of science’s unanswered questions as “GOTG” argumentation, then I’d at least hope to see that the gaps, such as they are, in science’s knowledge should be getting smaller and not bigger.
Since we have been able to look at the atom and the various particles in it at a subatomic level and get into the realms of quantum mechanics the gaps in what science can confidently answer have grown exponentially. Niels Bohr said “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory hasn’t understood a word of it” and Richard Feynman said “It’s safe to say that nobody on earth understands quantum mechanics”. When we look at these observations from science as to how the world works, then all of a sudden such ideas as God being one and three all at the same time don’t seem so impossible after all.
It all adds up to the fact that we know and understand very very little by means of science. We have just scraped the surface of what can be known, and as to higher purpose about why we are here and what we are supposed to do science has no more to offer us than any religion.
The religion of Christ, and the centrality of Christ in both Creation and in redemption, and that this redemption should be a redemption offered to us on the base of faith as we really have nothing else to give, seems to me to be the only way in which I can understand the world that I am faced with. I understand all the arguments of people like Dawkins, I’ve read all his books and analysed all his clever rhetoric, and enjoyed his fine command of English and his fund of knowledge about the natural world, but still remain utterly unmoved by his arguments. I sympathise with his fury at people who use religion as a way to manipulate others or make money, I would just add that he has a bit of a blind spot about rationalists making money out of their ideas too. It’s not like his books are free, whereas all my writings have always been free to everyone and all my video too.
When the end comes, as far as this life is concerned, you can only die once. Whether you die in a fight with a police officer by being overtazed, or whether you die of a heart attack or a car accident, you can only die once.
You can die to protect other people, which is a Christian way to die, you can die to make others die, which is a Muslim way to die. You can die fearing the moment of death, or you can die facing it optimistically. Either way, you get to die just the once, just like you got to be born the once and after it happens you don’t remember if it was a painful or even a pleasant experience. So it is with the death of this body.
After death, according to Christ’s promise, those who serve Him and believe on Him for their salvation will be where He is. This is a different physical universe and the way into it is by resurrection of the body. The resurrected body is different to this body as it can fly, walk through walls, but still eat a little. The face of a resurrected person is not immediately recognisable to people who knew that person in their mortal life, as they have been perfected. Even Christ who was perfect even in the mortal body but aged for his years by living in this world such as it is, was not recognised immediately until his disciples got a good look at Him.
The resurrection body is a total upgrade and features all the things that you may have experienced in your dreams in this life, such as being able to breathe underwater, to travel long distances in short times, to fly, to speak to people far away without the need of technology. These things are doubtlessly part of our coming experience in the new heavens and the new earth.
Such is the resurrection body for those who are believers in Jesus Christ. However, it is written that there is a resurrection of the just and the unjust. These are separate resurrections and there are separate characteristics of the body received by either type, the believer and the non believer. A person who has rejected Christ cannot expect to be a part of the resurrection body which He produced by his human life and death and living again. So what sort of body the people who are outside Christ receive and where it goes remain to be seen. We are talking about people who heard about God and salvation and who chose to reject it based on some excuse, some lie of the devil they listened to, when all the time there was really no good reason why they should not have got on their knees to Jesus Christ and cried for Him to place the knowledge of Himself in their hearts and to melt their hearts for Him.
These are the resurrected bodies of people who spent their lives running away from the calls on their conscience by God, refusing to take knowledge of Him, not wanting to peruse his revelations or gain any understanding of the Creator-Redeemer. They heard of Christ but dismissed him as an irrelevence, using the shortcomings of their fellow men who had believed in Christ as a reason to blame and reject the Perfect One, the Son. Now God established a system whereby everyone who believes can have everlasting life very fitly catered for in the eternity that exists outside of the quantum parameters which constitute the walls of this universe, but that was based on coming by faith.
Those who chose not to come by faith cannot find another way because it was not possible to do both systems. This system based on slavation because of imputed righteousness (that of Christ) acquired by faith works precisely because the system based on salvation acquired by works failed, except in the case of God Himself who came and passed through it, so that He had a proven righteousness under the law to be imputed to those who would believe. But salvation was always really by faith, as we see in the lives of Abraham (“Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness”) and in the time of Moses, where people were healed because they looked on the brazen serpent.
Once a person is dead and knows sentience again only at his or her resurrection and finds himself in a non-righteous body, ie in the resurrection of the unjust and not of the just, then the last chance to believe, that is to make a quantum leap of faith, is gone. When you wake up in a damned resurrection body, by then you cannot “believe” because, alas, you already know that what you were supposed to believe when it seemed hard to believe, was in fact true. Once you see something, you cannot believe it. People say “seeing is believing” but this proverb is an example of how the devil perverts language. Seeing is knowing, and not believing. Believing what you hear or read when it conflicts with what your eyes see, that is believing. That’s why it says in Scripture “faith comes by hearing, and hearing from the Word of God” and also “we walk by faith and not by sight”.
I have good news in that you can only die once from this mortal life, although there is talk of a “second death” for the damned and there are various thoughts of people on what the experience is after that. I pray none of my readers will ever need to experience it, and in fact it is freely available to believe in Christ and cast your cares of salvation before him, to acknowledge your inadequacy to be accpetable to God other than in the mercy of Christ.
Some people labour the point of repentance until it becomes a work itself, rather than something flowing naturally from faith. If you ask God to give you a fit repentance as we are so far gone we don’t even know how to repent properly, then I believe that is a prayer God will answer for the believer, and give that believer a right and sincere repentance. And even if the carnal body rebels against that repentance a thousand times, or even a thousand times a day, that repentance is there and you reaffirn it every time you pray. Coming before Christ we acknowledge our utter need of Him, our belief that He has already accepted us and made complete provision for us out of His inestimable power and love, and we ask that love to Him might be ignited in our hearts and that in some small ways we may begin here on eath to reflect Him and to do such things that show the faith which pleases Him, even though the works themselves be flawed and riddled with imperfections.
That is really all you need. You don’t need a Church, you just need one or two others to join with to experience a presence of Christ in worship, the simpler the better. You need to pray and to read the Bible. You probably don’t need someone to give you all their version of what it all means, better to read it for yourself and talk to God about it.
And if you really want to be a Christian, then that would be the way to go about it. If I can say any more to help, then by all means let me know.