Aug 4, 2008
The Master Plan Gets A Big Boost
The other day, I was updating the mirror sites for Rapture Ready and happened to notice that several of our hosts have dramatically increased their bandwidth for each account. The typical limit increased from 2 to 15 terabytes.
In the 20 years I have been working on Rapture Ready, I have always followed a plan for the site's progress. One blueprint has been my focus from day one. It is so important that I call it the "master plan," and I even created two articles on the site related to it. The "master plan" is this: Getting Rapture Ready on a server net that is so powerful it allows an unlimited number of people to access the siteʼs data.
The pre-tribulation rapture will be a media event without equal. I am convinced it will be 100 times more stunning than 9/11 or Pearl Harbor . It will be so shocking that tens of millions of people will turning to the internet for information. Because Rapture Ready is so closely tied to this subject, a large portion of this traffic will come our way.
The problem is that right now, a billion people at once cannot access the site. The current bandwidth of RR can only handle about 60 million visitors. The good news is that the capacity of the average server continues to grow at an exponential rate. The day may soon come when bandwidth concerns become a non-issue.
The information age is so common to us, we have lost sight of its importance in spreading the Gospel message. Before the days of printing presses, Bibles were so precious, people in the Middle Ages were willing to suffer a horrible death rather than reveal the location of a Bible. Today, you can find a pile of cheap Bibles made in China at the 99 Cent store.
It would have taken some poor scribe nearly a year to hand write a Bible. The internet now allows me to download the full text of the Holy Bible almost instantaneously. If the entire web were turned over to the task of sending out data files of the Bible, it could be transmitted 5 trillion times a second.
When I started my little internet ministry, it was far beyond the technology of that day to even think that RR could reach a large audience. For the first seven years, there was no website for people to visit. I was limited to posting my updates in the old Newsgroups networks. In 1995, when I set up my first web account, my bandwidth limit was a meager 100 megabytes per month. Today, our total capacity is around 100 terabytes, which is a growth rate of a million times.
Here are three examples to give you a better perspective of this type of increase: The distance between New York and London is a million times the length of a rowboat; the Statue of Liberty is a million times taller than the width of a human hair; and an Olympic-sized swimming pool holds a million times more water than a 24-ounce drinking bottle.
Even with years of explosive web growth behind us, internet traffic is still growing at 50 percent per year, and there is no sign we will hit any barriers. The San Francisco Chronicle calculates that by 2010, only 20 typical homes will generate as much network traffic as the entire Internet produced in 1995.
The trend toward video files will be a huge benefit to RR. As people begin to post DVD-quality video files, there will be a great demand for more bandwidth. Because RR is a text-based site, its bandwidth needs will remain relativity unchanged.
The vast majority of prophecy sites fail to comprehend the witnessing opportunity that will come with the rapture. Most of them are fixated on the signs, and will become strangely outdated when the big event takes place.
Rapture Ready has an endless number of articles for people to find. We have so much material that one reader noted the tribulation would have to be extended in order for tribulation saints to read it all.
I am always looking for people to mirror the content of the site. If any of you folks have your own web hosting account, it would be very easy to mirror RR. These stripped-down versions of the mother site are only 300 megs in size, and they put zero demand on a server. If you are interested in mirroring RR, please contact me at todd1@raptureready.com
-- Todd
A Sodom Vacation
News pundits tried their best to make the murderous rampage against the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church of Knoxville, Tenn., by Jim D. Adkisson, not an attack on a house of worship, but a hate crime against gays. Time and time again as the story became more known throughout the nation, the talking heads were wondering if the investigation wouldn’t find that the killer was in fact engaging in a hate crime because the church openly embraced practicing, unrepentant homosexuals, welcoming them as members.
The crime, for a time, seemed to be cast not simply as a murder of a woman and the injury of others, but as one more serious in the pundits’ almost unanimous view: the crime of bigotry against those who are gay. The journalistic mantra seemed, to me at least, to be aimed at attempting to raise a groundswell of opinion against those who believe God’s Word condemns homosexuality.
Let me state up front that Christians are not supposed to condemn anyone. We are, however, if we truly follow what the Bible teaches, expected to agree totally with the God of heaven in His condemnation of sin. We, likewise, are to hold fast against any sin which overtly and adversely affects the moral values of the society and culture in which we conduct our lives, raise our children, etc. When morally degrading activity is thrust into our public lives, and we are forced to experience that activity’s cesspool-like goings-on--right in front of our and our children’s eyes--we must speak up. We must object to and oppose that sinful activity.
There are numerous scriptural condemnations of homosexuality. They have been put forward so many times that I see no need to list them all. One such edict by the Living God against homosexuality is the following: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood [shall
be] upon them” (Lev. 20:13).
For those who might think that this condemnation applied only to the time of the Mosaic Law, I remind that the Scriptures teach that God does not change. He continues to view homosexuality as an “abominable” sin. The sin of homosexuality is indeed an abomination. We cannot ignore that it is a growing part of our national and world societies.
There is no vacation, it seems, from its morality-infecting invasiveness.
With the permission of my friend and colleague from Ireland, Patrick, I present below his recent experience. His troubling “holiday,” as they call vacations in Europe, drives home the point that like in Lot’s day of vexation with the homosexuality of Sodom, there is no holiday from the debased activities of this fallen world.
“Myself and Catherine just returned from five days in northern Spain, where my nephew married a Spanish girl. We stayed in Madrid last Saturday night on our way back to Dublin. Madrid was hosting a huge Gay Pride day when we arrived Saturday evening.
Unfortunately, our hotel was right on the main street of Madrid. There were thousands of men women and children lining the Gran Via leading to a huge park, which was packed full. Bus load after bus load of homosexual men and lesbians waved and cheered amid loud music and the crowds that lined the streets waved back.
Men kissing men, women kissing women--and all [were] cheered on by the on-lookers. Transvestites [were] parading boldly down the streets having their pictures taken with couples and their children. Many of the transvestites had red horns on their heads.
One man was painted in rainbow colours all over his body. He walked slowly and deliberately down the center of the street as folks jumped in front of him to take his photo. We saw him from behind and he was naked.
At 11:30 at night, Catherine and I walked up the main street amid the blaring of loud music. The street was filthy dirty, with people drinking and eating, and discarding their litter on the paths. Some people were urinating against the walls in side streets.
As we got to the top of the street, there were several hundred people gathered in a big circle. They were banging drums and jumping up and down with their hands in the air shouting, all in unison.
The drums and shouting and jumping went faster and faster until it reached a crescendo and exploded with a huge shout of delight and clapping by the mob.
It looked and sounded like something from Dante's inferno but felt like a scene directly from Sodom and Gomorrah. Truly, this was a nightmarish atmosphere and a sure indication that we are indeed in a time similar to the days of Noah. There was a similar parade of gays going on in London and other cities at the same time.
The days are getting shorter and the cracks are appearing all over the globe. If there was ever a call to reach out to the unsaved before the Lord comes to take out His Church, it is now. "Lift up your heads. Your redemption is drawing near…”
Still, the Lord also continues to love the sinner, no matter the sin, and we who name the name of Christ are to love them, too. We cannot truly love our Lord if we hate those He loved so much that He came to die on the cross at Calvary so that they who will believe on Him and turn from their sin can be saved. We are nonetheless to stand against evil that would bring humanity down to the base, cesspool level to which Satan and his minions want to bring God’s creation called man. The only remedy that is left when mankind reaches such a level is God’s wrath and judgment. Our nation and world are swiftly approaching the proverbial bottom of the barrel. As Patrick writes, when we see the end coming, we are to look up, and lift up our heads, for our redemption draws near (Luke 21:28).
--Terry
