June 25, 2007
July to September Fund Drive
The year is half over, and that means it is fund drive time again. With the passing of every quarter, I like to focus on our
recent accomplishments and our plans for the future.
I'm very thankful to the folks who have helped me retool the message board. The operating of a forum is a huge pain in the neck. It only amounts to 2 percent of the site's traffic, but produces close to 100 percent of the problems. When I upload an
article on the main site, I rarely ever see it generate an angry complaint from someone. All the negativity is normally
applied to the whole site.
The moderators deserve a special praise for all the gripes they have to endure to make the board a safe place for Christians
to fellowship. When we get to heaven, if the Lord doesn't already have a special crown for moderators, I'm going to suggest
that one be created.
The RR News posters continue to do a great job. Because you would expect me to be biased, I was pleased to hear what the folks at Woodmont Church in Florence, Alabama had to say about our RR News division. They said the News links have become a vital part of their prophecy class. Two members of the group told me they were amazed at the team's ability to find stories that the mainstream liberal media refuses to publish.
I spend a good portion of my time trying to figure out how to get our articles ranked higher in search engines. With over
500 million word phrases now linked to some search inquiries, it's very hard to stand out from the crowd. By staying
focused on a single key topic, we've managed to get hundreds of pages ranked in the top five search results. Our large
volume of web content has also given us a broad reach. The word "rapture" is strongly tied to RR, but it now only represents
5 percent of our total search traffic.
Each month, the site is visited by people who found RR in 40,000 search results. If we tried to generate the same amount of traffic from advertising, it would cost us $30,000 per month. People don't normally click on ads when they do searches. The best strategy is to create content that people want to find in the first place.
The general public likes pages that offer a quick synopsis of a single subject. One of our biggest mistakes was not having a page that describes common prophecy terms to people who are unfamiliar with Bible prophecy. In an effort to plug that hole, we are now working on a page called the ABC's of Prophecy.
This idea for "ABC's" came from the success of Wikipedia. Many of the key words related to prophecy are covered by this online encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia is a secular website, its listings for prophecy include the views from every
religion on the planet. We're hoping to give Wikipedia some competition from a page that has a purely Christian viewpoint.
I wish to encourage any of you folks to help out with this project. We still have several terms that have not been defined, and any terms that are now listed still have room for improvement. There is no need to reinvent the wheel with these terms. To help us fatten up the "ABC's of Prophecy," all you need to do is find material that is already on the web.
After years of focusing on having a bank of mirror sites to carry the load after the rapture, our plans are shifting towards
having RaptureReady.com on several servers. Up until now, I just assumed the mother site would crash, and people would end up going to the mirror sites. Now that servers have reached the point that they can handle tens of millions of people, it has become possible for a series of linked servers to survive the massive deluge the rapture would trigger.
I strongly believe world events are getting so active that every Christian needs to be doing everything he or she can to promote the Kingdom of God. When I was finishing up last week’s article, a news flash came across the wires about rockets being fired into Israel. I immediately thought, "Oh no, I spent all day writing this article and it now invalidated." Luckily, the missile launch was a rogue event.
All indications point to the possibility of major conflict in the not-too-distant future. The shortness of time is a good thing for believers who are waiting for the rapture. It's a negative for folks who are trying to reach lost souls. I stay busy because I know our opportunity to work will come to a sudden end at the rapture.
If you’re thinking about financially supporting RR, don’t wait until you hear tanks rumbling in the Middle East. By that time
we may be watching events unfold from a higher vantage point.
One of the simplest ways to contribute to Rapture Ready is through a regular donation. PayPal subscribers and people who have
their banks send funds to our PO box have become a vital part of our ministry. If you're interested in signing up, you can
find the link on the Donation Depot page. Donations can also be sent to our PO box at:
Rapture Ready Min.
PO Box 185
Boys Town, NE 68010
-- Todd
True Objectives Regarding the Jewish Question
President Bush, speaking this past week, said that a small faction within Hamas had as its political objective the removal of Israel as a nation. Implicit within his declaration was the thought that: 1) only a small portion of those who are within Islam want Israel removed, i.e., want to deny that state’s right to exist; 2) that the Palestinian Fatah, favored by America but driven out of power by Hamas, wants peaceful co-existence with Israel while Hamas wants Israel removed; 3) there are only “political” objectives any of the Palestinians aspire to attain within the Mid-East problems.
Another problem with the president’s clarity of vision in these matters is that he sees the Fatah organization, along with its “duly elected” president Mahmoud Abbas, as greatly preferred by the Palestinian people. Bush’s assessment is wrong from the outset. The Palestinian people overwhelmingly voted for Hamas to rule, not Fatah. Fatah assumed its ascendancy through geopolitical manipulations, not through the majority votes of the populous. All of Mr. Bush’s dissection of Israel's immediate Arab neighbors' intentions and objectives is, it’s sad to have to say, fatally flawed. His conclusions are fatally flawed because any chance of establishing peace in the region, based upon such thinking, is destined to, ultimately, go the way of the dodo bird. There is only one peace formula that will ever produce peace in the region (and, for that matter, peace on a worldwide basis). The international community's, the UN's, and America’s peace formulas are destined for extinction.
Let’s examine each of my allegations about our president’s nearsightedness regarding the nucleus problem within the issues of Mid-East war and peace.
1) Only a small portion of those who are within Islam want Israel removed, i.e., want to deny that state’s right to exist.
Time and time again, throughout the modern era (the 20th and 21st centuries), the leaders of the Arab nations have expressed their hatred for the modern Jewish state. We could go into detail, extracting hundreds of statements from the most prominent leaders of Israel's Arab and Persian enemies over those many decades. But, there isn’t space here to contain even a modicum of representative condemnation by those past and present leaders of Israel's right to exist. So, we will just look--again, cursorily--at the brief troubled history of the nation born at midnight, May 14, 1948.
While Ben Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, was giving the address signifying the nation’s rebirth after nearly 2,000 years, the Arab peoples attacked viciously to prevent Israel's emergence among the nation states of Planet Earth. Gamul Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, rallied the Arab nations in 1956, and attacked with full fury. Nasser again was at the point of having Israel's Arab neighbors incited to attack in 1967 when Israel struck Nasser’s coalition preemptively. Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat led a massive Arab coalition in an all-out assault on Israel in the infamous 1973 Yom Kippur War. In every case, the declared intention was to push Israel into the Mediterranean –to completely remove all vestiges of the “illegitimate” state, and every Jew from the land the Arab leadership viewed as having been given to them by none other than “Allah.” The Arab leaders –through the terrorist organizations they harbor, haven’t changed their deadly objective.
2) That the Palestinian Fatah favored by America, but driven out of power by Hamas, want peaceful co-existence with Israel while Hamas wants Israel removed. Mr. Bush is deluded if he thinks only a tiny portion of Israel’s Arab and Persian neighbors deny the state’s right to exist. And those neighbors’ common belief, based upon their claims that Allah gave the land to them, brings us to another of the president’s errors in judgment. It is befuddling how anyone can look at the absolute glee that Palestinian Arabs and others of the Islamic faith around the world displayed when the World Trade Towers collapsed, and their displays of joyous celebration upon every spectacular act of terrorism when the Middle East strikes the west, and not understand that the majority, not a small minority, hates Israel and those who support Israel.
3) There are only “political” objectives any of the Palestinians aspire to attain within the Mid-East problems. Mr. President, you seem willfully blind to the reality of the Mid-East dilemma. The common objective of the Fatah, the Hamas, and all other terrorist organizations of Mid-East extraction is the death of Israel and all Jews. Consider how there is never a concerted condemnation by the Islamic “clerics,” no matter how bloody and senseless the deadly attacks. That’s because the book that governs all of Islam teaches murder as a fundamental methodology in bringing all infidels either to their knees in conversion or to their graves in refusal to totally agree with Islam. In other words, Mr. President –all diplomats and leaders of the western sphere—the Islamic terrorists of the world, who almost completely hold all of Islam within their fundamentalist, Koranic grip of bloody religious despotism, have as their number one aspiration not political objectives, but an objective that is satanic at its core. It is a religious fervor that drives those who want the Jew erased from the face of the earth.
Abraham’s descendents through Isaac and Jacob were, are, and will forever be God’s chosen people. The Jews are not a perfect people. Far from it. They are back in the land God gave them in unbelief. They have paid and continue to pay the price for that unbelief. But, they are His chosen people forever. (Read, for example, Psalms 89: 27-37, to get God’s perspective on His dealings with the Jew.)
The Islamic threat is wrapped up in the objective of the father of lies –Lucifer, Satan, that old serpent. The Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, came to earth to be the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. He paid the price for sin on the cross at Calvary.
Satan wants to destroy the Jew--thus, the genocide of the first centuries A.D. and beyond to Hitler’s murder of 6 million of God’s chosen. Satan, if he could prevent God’s promises to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob from being fulfilled, could prove the Lord a liar. That will never happen. You and I –and the Jews—have God’s Word on it. However, Bible prophecy tells us that before the promises are fulfilled, the whole world will pay increasingly deadly prices for holding onto the lies about Islam’s objectives, rather than God’s truth.
--Terry
