Serious Misjudgment For The Modern Church To Disregard What God Has To Say About The Future

It Is A Serious Misjudgment For The Modern Church To Disregard What God Has To Say About The Future

Dan Price 

The study of “last things” (eschatology) seems to have fallen out of favor in many corners of the modern church. With a dismissive reference to no one knowing the day or hour of Christ’s return, many Christians assume that studying eschatology is not something most churches, or even individual Christians, really need to take seriously. I repeatedly hear students in my classes claim that Scripture is too unclear on the details or timing of the Rapture, or whether Christians will go through the Tribulation, or the nature of the Millennial Kingdom, to make studying these things worth their time. Is studying eschatology largely irrelevant to our walk with God?

I’ve also had many conversations with pastors and elders who argue that preaching in detail on eschatology is way too divisive for the pulpit. Usually one of the reasons given for avoiding preaching on eschatology is that people hold too tightly to their opinions on the topic and won’t listen or change. Of course, the answer to that concern is to teach us how to disagree and still love one another. But the other prominent reason many churches avoid eschatology is because studying prophecy can make Christians appear a little nuts to unbelievers—it’s too divisive in that it can make us unpalatable to unbelievers who visit our services, and they’ll reject us and the gospel. I mean, I understand not wanting our ministries to be lumped in with the crazy excesses of preachers who’ve abused the doctrine of eschatology, but is that really what makes us unpalatable to unbelievers? We appear crazy to the world first and foremost because of the gospel of Jesus (John 15:18–21). Believing that there are prophecies still to be fulfilled is not really the central divisive issue, and it should in no way motivate choices in relation to our preaching calendars. Is it really true that modern churches can’t grow spiritually or numerically if they take the teaching of eschatology seriously?

Scripture’s answer to these questions is a resounding “no!” The study of eschatology and what God has revealed about future events leading up to Christ’s return (and beyond) was not a tertiary issue to Paul, any of the Old Testament prophets, or Jesus. In fact, I would argue that we need the regular, serious study of eschatology in our lives and churches even more than ever. As the world hurtles toward increasingly uncertain days, Christians can be convinced that God is not silent on our concern about the future or how it impacts our walk with Him today. 

Here are the top three reasons I believe we need the study of eschatology more today than ever.

1. Eschatology helps us know God better

When the texts of the Bible were written, over a quarter of them were prophetic according to some scholars.1 Stop and consider that for a second. More than one fourth of what God wanted to communicate to humans was a message about their future. More than that, God held prophecy and prophets in extremely high regard, with rules for recognizing who really speaks for Him and how to treat prophecy in general. This is true in both the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the New Testament. 

Pick up a Bible and you’re holding repeated messages from God to you about the future. True, there is more than just prophecy in the Bible, but the whole storyline of Scripture is the unfolding of God’s plans for how He’s going to use His redemption of the whole universe, humans included, to one day bring Himself the glory He deserves. God talks about His future plans a lot

What are we to make of this? Why does God speak of the future so much? I would argue that the study of His prophetic messages helps us to glimpse hints of the true magnitude of our God. He is doing more and better things than we often imagine. His plan is more multifaceted than we are capable of understanding, and knowing that He’s working to redeem much more than just us self-centered humans is truly instructive. All the threads of history, past, present, and future (including you and me!), are just one small corner of the magnificent tapestry of the self-revelation which God is weaving. And it should drive us to worship Him better. God doesn’t only talk about the future because of how badly we need to know the future. He also talks about it because of how badly we need to know Him!

2. Eschatology motivates spiritual growth

To every generation that God has revealed something about their future, prophecy has been given alongside warnings, exhortation, and encouragement for spiritual growth. Frequently in the OT, prophecies about the future would include a call for reformation, or a return to God. Throughout the NT we see authors point to future events as motivation for holy living today. 

First Thessalonians 5 is an excellent example of this when Paul tells the Christians in Thessalonica that they don’t really need a lot more instruction about the future coming “Day of the Lord.” Rather, he says their knowledge of the future should motivate them to live as “sons of light,” sober and alert, marked by their growing faith, expanding love, and steadfast hope of avoiding God’s judgment. Knowing what is to come should motivate our walk with God now!

Those who seriously study eschatology can testify to this. For example, many students in my classes which study the pretribulational Rapture and the Tribulation period are struck by the knowledge that they don’t need to live in fear of experiencing the horrific events of Revelation 6—19. It’s liberating to know that the grace which covers our sin also ensures that we will not be “collateral damage” when God rises up in judgment on the nations in the Tribulation period! But on the flip side, recognizing that the window of opportunity to testify to the grace of Jesus and accomplish anything for Him will one day close, leads to a sober, focused Christian life as we work “while it is still day.” Every study of God’s revelation of the future should inspire us to reflect on how we can, with the work of the Spirit, better live in light of what we now know. The modern church would do well to heed the Bible’s call to holy living today because of what’s to come tomorrow.

3. Eschatology reinforces our hope

When we study eschatology we get into the nitty gritty of how God is going to bring light out of the darkness we see and experience. The twists and turns of our lives, the evil and brokenness of the world around us (and as it increases in the future), the injustices that surround us daily are all part of what is going to make God’s future redemption of all things that much more incredible. And our experiences of that brokenness here and now are tinted by that future hope!

I love how 1 Peter 1 describes the day when Jesus comes back. Peter tells us that our living hope, Jesus, will one day be revealed, justifying all our trust in Him for the whole world. Peter says that we can rejoice knowing that this day, this justification of our hope, is really coming. Even though our days are dark now, and we’re grieved by “various trials,” in comparison to what is coming, our experience of the pain in this life is short, a “little while.” In other words, knowing more about our ultimate hope, the glorious return of Messiah Jesus, the day He will be marveled at by all who believe (2 Thessalonians 1:10), reshapes our perspective of our difficult lives now. It gives hope! Not just hope that we will spend eternity with Him, but hope that He really is going to return and reorder all elements of the cosmic order to align with His good and perfect purposes. He will one day satisfy the groanings of all creation awaiting the day of God’s redemption (Romans 8). King Jesus really will set right all injustice, pain, and darkness. And the brokenness that the universe has experienced will only give us more reason to marvel at Him.

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Conclusion

Only the study of what God has told us about that coming day, and the events around and contributing to it, can reinforce our hope in such a powerful way. We need to study what He’s told us is to come. It’s heartbreaking to think that God gave us these beautiful depictions of our hope revealed and we might simply ignore them, for fear that they might make us unpopular, or because they seem too divisive. Eschatology has the potential to infuse a powerful dose of hope and strength into your walk with God here and now. So dig into the prophets with me. And rejoice in the culmination of the gospel message. It can only help you, Christian. Let’s not miss out on the benefits of what He’s revealed to us.

Global Food Prices Will Soar and Acute Hunger Will Spike Thanks to a Shocking Confluence of Disastrous Events

Global Food Prices Will Soar and Acute Hunger Will Spike Thanks to a Shocking Confluence of Disastrous Events

Michael Snyder

Experts are warning that a historic global food crisis has begun. Food prices have already been rising for years, and now they are about to go significantly higher. The number of impoverished people in the world suffering from acute hunger was already at an all-time record high coming into this year, and it is being projected that 49 million more impoverished people will be added to that total in 2026.

We are facing a Super El Niño, a painful global fertilizer shortage and a very alarming cyclosporiasis outbreak all at the same time. We really are in unprecedented territory, and the months ahead are certainly going to be quite chaotic.

If you doubt this, just consider the chaos that we just witnessed in Ceuta.

Approximately 60,000 migrants from Morocco suddenly came storming in, and most people have no idea why it happened.

The primary reason why those migrants are so desperate is because they are hungry.

A nightmarish drought that never seems to end in Morocco “nearly halved its cereal harvests and erased 720,000 agricultural jobs”…

And this week, the pressure reached Europe’s own border. In two days, close to 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, more than 50 people dying in the attempt, and within hours France had tightened its border with Spain and Italy had suspended Schengen. No single cause explains a border crisis, and this one has geopolitics stacked through it. But the ground it grew from is well documented: seven years of drought, Morocco’s worst in four decades, nearly halved its cereal harvests and erased 720,000 agricultural jobs, pushing rural families toward the cities, the coast, and beyond, an out-migration the World Bank’s climate report on Morocco predicted in almost exactly these terms. Climate pressure does not stay in the elsewhere column. This week it swam around a border fence.

In Europe, the “hottest June ever recorded” did an immense amount of crop damage…

June 2026 was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. France logged its hottest nationally averaged day on record; Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic set all-time highs. It was the third major heatwave since late May, arriving while crops were most vulnerable.

The damage forced an almost unheard-of response from the grain trade itself. COCERAL, the association of Europe’s cereal traders, published an extraordinary, out-of-cycle forecast, cutting expected EU and UK grain production to 286.6 million tonnes, roughly 9 million below its own June estimate. The total is also 23.4 million tonnes below last year, though that larger year-on-year gap cannot all be blamed on the June heat.

Those numbers are really bad, but in my opinion they are way too optimistic.

The situation is particularly dire in the UK.

Wales and England just experienced their “driest July in at least 190 years”, and as a result harvest season is going to be a total disaster…

It comes as Wales and England reel from their driest July in at least 190 years, forcing all the former and half the latter into drought

Total output for barley, oats, and oilseed rape – key ingredients used in bread, beer, breakfast cereals, and livestock feed – is projected to drop to just 19.5 million tonnes this year.

That would undercut the previous low of 19.8m tonnes in 2020, making it the poorest yield since detailed record-keeping began in 1984.

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Globalism Must Be Vanquished

Globalism Must Be Vanquishe

J.B. Shurk 

Some politically charged words become part of our common vocabulary almost overnight.  “Globalism” is a timely example.  Ten or fifteen years ago, calling someone a “globalist” didn’t have much effect.  Today, it is well understood as a pejorative that highlights someone’s allegiance to international institutions over those created within a nation state.

Although the term has been used in various academic circles for more than a century, it didn’t become part of our common political parlance until anti-Establishment conservatives in the United States and Europe found it a useful taxonomic description of their ideological opponents.  In hindsight, it is surprising how long the word “globalism” remained dormant and hidden away in the context of political speech and debate.

During the Cold War, however, the world was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States, between communism and freedom, between closed economies and open markets.  To the extent that nationalism and globalism were distinguished from each other, academics and political leaders did so under the umbrella of the Cold War contest between East and West to gobble up as many nation states as possible.  Both sides embraced a “domino theory” of geopolitics in which partisans fought for global domination, one nation at a time.

There was, however, an intentional, albeit rarely described, linguistic shift from the 1950s forward.  In newspapers and scholarly essays of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, “nationalism” and “patriotism” were largely used interchangeably.  Following WWII, “nationalism” increasingly acquired a negative connotation until eventually becoming a proxy word for “fascism” or “Nazism.”  In our current age, prominent political and academic leaders speak of “nationalism” as if it were a virulent form of racism, imperialism, and authoritarianism rolled into one malevolent philosophy.  In contrast, until rather recently, “patriotism” retained a positive meaning, even though its Greek roots describe a person’s connection to “fellow countrymen” and the “fatherland.” 

After WWII, there was a concerted effort among political and intellectual leaders in the West to use the destruction from two catastrophic global wars as a profound moral argument for charting a new course for humanity.  Framing the carnage of those wars as the natural result of unbridled “nationalism,” architects of the post-war world put their faith in international institutions.  

The United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union all emerged immediately after WWII but so did a thousand new international bodies constructed to do everything from standardizing industrial production in factories around the world to regulating the movement of people and goods across borders.  “Internationalism” was sold as an antidote to war and therefore became almost synonymous with “peace.”  The dichotomy between “nationalism” and “internationalism” was much easier to advance publicly than a contrast between patriotic love of country and an unpatriotic hatred for one’s countrymen.  The United Nations decided that patriots could be internationalists.  Nobody asked out loud whether internationalists could be patriots.

This paradigm has remained attractive for its simplicity but never made much sense.

or starters, German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese imperialism (in which an absolute monarch was worshipped as a deity) were not inherently dangerous because their proponents organized power through national governments.  They were dangerous because they were totalitarian in nature and compelled citizens to sacrifice themselves completely in the interest of the State.  Had the Germans, Italians, and Japanese strongly believed in limiting government power and maximizing personal freedom, respect for individual rights would have kept expansive authoritarianism in check.

It is illogical to assume that international forms of government are somehow more humanitarian or philanthropic than national forms, just as it is illogical to assume that national forms of government are more just and capable of representing citizens than local municipal governments.  

  One might ask what the difference is between the Green Party in Germany demanding total civilian obedience to “global warming” mandates and a group of international ambassadors demanding the same thing through the Paris Climate Accords.  Are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change somehow less

totalitarian because international bureaucrats are regulating the behavior of both Germans and non-Germans alike?

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The hunting down of Jews for sport

The hunting down of Jews for sport

Cookie Schwaeber-Issan

It’s the second time in just a matter of weeks that reports are coming in of attempts to locate Israeli tourists visiting abroad, making their whereabouts known to the general public. The first incident happened in Italy.

According to a Jerusalem Post article, in late July, local Italians were being urged to fill out forms, available on Google, to report the presence of Israeli citizens staying in hotels and other accommodations. Finding this very disturbing, the president of the Jewish Community of Milan responded by saying, “I think we’re going back to the 1930s to hunting Jews.

”The second incident occurred in Amsterdam, when “flyers were distributed, featuring names and locations of Jewish IDF soldiers visiting the city, ahead of the Pride Amsterdam event, slated to take place between July 25 and August 8.”

Written on the flyers was, “Protect your community, watch out for war criminals during WorldPride.” The names of Israelis were mapped out throughout different locations in the city, with photos attached to facilitate recognition.

Although both the WorldPride event organizers, as well as the City of Amsterdam, categorically stated that they were not responsible for the dissemination of the flyers, their distribution took place, during the celebration, with the official WorldPride logo.

It turns out that the anonymous form, circulated in Italy, along with the messaging to hotels, vacation rentals and businesses, warning to be on the lookout for Israeli tourists, was also the work of an outside group. 

What is clear is that malicious antisemitic groups have infiltrated venues with their hateful propaganda, designed to intimidate both the visiting Jewish tourists and also those who host them.

The troubling practice definitely conjures up horrific memories of the same toxic atmosphere that began to spread throughout much of Europe in the days leading up to the Holocaust.

In the case of Amsterdam, recipients of the flyers, who wanted to learn more, were directed to go to the HRF website (Hind Rajab Foundation) – an advocacy group, pushing for the prosecution of IDF soldiers, who they claim have committed genocide. 

These two incidents are especially maddening, because they involve an insidious deception which takes advantage of already organized scheduled events, where large audiences will gather.  

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The Mark of the Beast: Is CBDC the Fulfillment?

The Mark of the Beast: Is CBDC the Fulfillment?

Video

Are CBDCs linked to the mark of the beast? Examine the connection between digital currency and biblical prophecy. This presentation analyzes the rise of central bank digital currencies and their potential implications within the context of biblical prophecy. It is designed for those questioning how modern financial systems might intersect with prophetic warnings found in scripture. We look at how the shift toward a cashless society aligns with interpretations of the mark of the beast. By reviewing the mechanics of a digital currency, we can better understand why many view these technological advancements as significant markers of the end times. The analysis focuses on the transition from decentralized systems to state-controlled digital finance, grounding these observations in historical and theological discussions. Viewers will gain clarity on why these changes to the global financial system require careful observation.