It seems sometimes that Americans, particularly Christian Americans, are anesthetized to things going on around them.
Things like the attempted takeover by the dark spiritual forces behind Marxism and worse don’t seem to register on Christian Americans’ worry meters—at least not to the degree it registers on my own meter of concern.
Some will say Christians are confident that God is always in complete control, so they just don’t worry about these things. But the truth is that most American Christians are complacent; they’re not interested in thinking about the evil around us.
Even what’s going on in the Middle East, the war with Iran, and the threat closing the Strait of Hormuz presents doesn’t seem to heighten the level of worry that World War III or, at the very least, portentous economic crisis is in view.
And the Church–all who are in God’s family—for the most part doesn’t seem to have an idea of what Israel being at the center of all this worrisome news means. There is no concern about how it all relates to Bible prophecy among those who should be most aware of and alert to the fact that the world is teetering on the edge of a time Jesus called the worst that would ever be.
Yet this is another sign of where we are on God’s prophetic timeline, in my view as we look out across that horizon of “things to come,” as Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost titled his great volume on Bible prophecy.
As I’ve written many times, I believe Jesus described exactly the condition of humanity as it will be when He next catastrophically intervenes into the affairs of fallen humankind. The Lord’s “days of Lot” prophecy (Luke 17:28–30) says it will be business as usual, like it was when Lot and his family were removed from Sodom by the angels.
The Lord indicated that business and life in general itself were ongoing, even doing well, at that time, while the subsurface society and culture in that twin-cities area were as wicked as when God intervened previously in the “days of Noah” (Luke 17:26–27).
This is what we who “watch,” as commanded by our Lord (Mark 13: 37 and Luke 21: 28), should expect the world around us to look like at the twinkling-of-an-eye moment when He will again intervene as He did in those earlier times.
One of my frustrations continues to be that the Christians who say we who hold to the clearly taught, pre-Trib view of Rapture are wrong and that we’re leading believers astray. These writers, preachers, teachers, and others most often imply, or even say outright, that all the troubles we see around us means the following: Either the world—including all believers in Jesus Christ—is about to enter the Tribulation, or we’ve already entered it. Some believe we’re already engaged in World War III.
These aren’t looking for Jesus Christ to rescue believers before the Tribulation as Paul taught; they’re looking for chaos, calamity, and—to be frank—the Antichrist rather than for the True Christ.
The following article presents the view that the world is on the brink of Tribulation but offers no hope of Heaven’s rescue for the Christian.
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