For years I’ve had Jesus’ prophecy of Luke 17:28–30 at the center of the message I believe our Lord wants delivered at this late hour of the Church Age:
Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed. (Luke 17:28–30)
Well, that message hasn’t changed. It still resonates as the one prophecy I believe is most directly meant for this sin-darkening planet that’s on the cusp of receiving God’s wrath because of humankind’s rebellion against Him.
Jesus said when He next intervenes into the evil affairs of earth’s inhabitants, the “righteous” will be removed. In the “days of Lot” in Jesus’ prophecy, it was Lot and his family who were removed because Lot was considered the only one in Sodom who was righteous. In the case of Christ’s next intervention, He indicated that another righteous entity will be removed to safety. This, of course, will be all who believe in Jesus for salvation–collectively called the Church.
I always preface what I say about that moment of Rapture with Jesus’ statement that, at the time, people of earth will, as in Sodom of Lot’s day, be buying, selling, planting, building, and marrying—in other words, going about business as usual.
Even with all the evil going on now–and it’s probably worse than it was in ancient Sodom and Gomorrah—it is still business as usual, as I view it. Despite the evil–the wars and rumors of war, the deception, the ethnic upheaval all over the planet—there isn’t yet catastrophic disruption of life on earth.
So, in this sense, our time is exactly like Jesus predicted in Luke 17:28–30.
As we know, the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. And the destruction apparently came immediately following Lot’s removal. The cities were decimated; for millennia, scientists and archaeologists thought the Bible’s account of the destruction to be myth. But in most previous decades, there is evidence that indeed these cities were destroyed, and even sulfur residue of the region at the south end of the Dead Sea proves that something devastatingly powerful blasted the area. Pottery shards and other evidence that humans once inhabited the region are still being extracted from beneath the earth’s surface there.
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