Are we really on the very cusp of an imminent rapture that will end the Age of Grace and herald a period of tribulation that will wipe out most of humanity, or have we twisted and tortured the signs before us to tell us what we want them to say? Perhaps we need to take a step back and re-evaluate these signs. At such times as these I find that a mug of strong coffee and a huge cinnamon roll are most helpful to clean the mind of worldly distractions.
Just like the proverbial tree hidden in a forest, there are so many warning signs of the end of the age around us that it is increasingly difficult to actually see the road, itself. Are we really at the end of the Age of Grace? What does the Bible say?
The truth of the matter is that the Bible doesn’t actually define in so many words when the “end times” or “last days” actually begin. However, every reference in both the old and new testaments that refer to the last days is predicated on the assumption that Israel goes from being a people scattered across the entire planet to a mighty nation (See Ezekiel 37:21-22). In fact, God said that He would make Israel a nation in a single day, and He fulfilled this promise on May 14, 1948 at 4 PM in the afternoon when David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, stood up in Independence Hall in Tel Aviv and formally announced the formation of the Nation of Israel. We also know from Matthew 24 that the events of these last days, from the re-birth of Israel as a nation until the Battle of Armageddon and the start of the Millennial Reign of Christ, will occur within a single generation.
Although we have been told by our Lord that no man knows the day or the hour, we have also been told repeatedly that we can not only know the season, but we are commanded to know the season and to diligently watch for His return because our Lord is returning as unexpectedly as a thief in the night (I really hate using that analogy to describe our Lord and Savior). Jesus bitterly scolded the Pharisees for being able to predict the weather based on the clouds in the evening sky while being totally incompetent with prophecy that predicted the season they were in. Our Lord made it quite clear that we are expected to know and interpret prophecy and to be watching for His return.
I believe that we are not only in the season of the Lord’s return, but that we are at the very end of that season.
The Bible tells us that in the last days there will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. We are certainly witnessing a myriad of both rare and spectacular signs in the heaven. The real beauty of these signs is that they are available to mankind all over the world regardless of the language each person may speak. Even more unique is how these signs speaks volumes to the person who looks up in belief, while they are little more than pretty lights in the sky to the spiritually ignorant and those unbelievers who lay claim to the mental superiority of the scientific mind while closing those same minds to the facts which surround them that do not support their feeble hypothesis.
To those who refuse to believe, no amount of proof is sufficient. To those who believe, no proof is necessary.
The signs of nature that tell us we are in the last days are even more plentiful than the signs in the heavens. Floods and droughts of Biblical proportion have certainly increased in both frequency and intensity. From watching the evening news and the local newspaper it would seem that anyone not floating away in one of these extremes must certainly be perishing in the other extreme. Natural disaster damages for 2011 were five times higher than the average for the past ten years and were double 2010’s total of $130 billion. Earthquake activity has increased dramatically in both frequency and intensity while dormant volcanoes all over our planet are coming back to life. The “vapors and columns of smoke” which the Bible predicts will occur in the end times are closing large chunks of airspace to commercial aircraft while raining ashes on surrounding towns and villages. The Japanese earthquake in 2011 was the costliest natural disaster in all of recorded history. Japan hit the apocalyptic trifecta with an 8.9 magnitude earthquake that moved the entire planet several inches off its rotational axis, a tsunami where a 30 foot high wall of water traveled as much as 3 miles inland, and a triple nuclear meltdown with still untold and horribly foreboding consequences.
Major wildfires are becoming far more common in the United States, Australia, and the former Soviet Union as well as many other nations in our world. Hurricanes have not only increased in frequency and intensity but are also occurring in places never seen before in our world. The number of record low temperatures set in the United States last year is only rivaled by the number of record high temperatures.
My mocking friends are constantly accusing me of falling over the apocalyptic edge every time a natural disaster occurs. They are also wrong. I realize that nature has been full of tragedies ever since the beginning and that there will be tragedies right up until the end. It is not the fact that these tragedies occur that is so unique, it is the frequency and intensity at which they are occurring now that is prophetically significant. We have become so numb from witnessing natural disasters that we scarcely noticed the greatest loss of life from nature when, starting in June 2011, 13 million people were affected in the worst drought in decades to strike eastern Africa. The death toll from this horrible famine ran into the tens of thousands and included 30,000 children.
In addition to the routine natural disasters that are taking place, strange sounds are being heard in many places all around the world. These sounds first gained attention on August 11, 2011, in Kiev, Ukraine. They are often described as a humming, rumbling, scraping, or pulsating that almost sounds like a low-pitched trumpet at times, and are also described as eerie and haunting. Other descriptions range from bizarre, to creepy, to industrial, to mechanical. From listening to the various recordings, I am reminded of a huge piece of metal scraping along as it is being moved, like an enormous steel door with rusty hinges opening or closing. In every reported case it is impossible to tell what direction the sound is coming from. They are omni-directional with no single traced source of origin, while leaving the impression of coming from directly overhead or from directly under the earth. Lately these sounds have changed to very loud explosions and crashes that occur in a region for a few days and then fall silent.
For we know that the whole creation moans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. (Romans 8:22 NASB)
A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth; for the Lord hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; he will give them that are wicked to the sword, saith the LORD (Jeremiah 25:31 KJV)
From God’s perspective Israel is the center of the world. To be even more precise, Jerusalem is the place which God considers as the center around which mankind revolves (Ezekiel 5:5). If we want to know how close the world is to blowing up we need only look at how short the fuse has become that is burning in the Middle East. The dogs of war are definitely growling and are ready to pounce. All 22 Islamic dominated nations comprising 99.4 percent of the land area in this region are armed to the teeth and ready to go to war at a moments notice. Tiny little Israel, with only 0.6 percent of the land in the Middle East and only 2 percent of its population, along with God, are determined to defend the right of the Jewish people to exist.
All of the traditional signs of the last days have not only been in place for many months now, but they also continue to intensify with each passing day. One would expect the rapture of the Church at any moment based upon these signs alone and yet there is something more – much more – that has the world on edge. It is a pervasive feeling that something really big is about to happen. This feeling is exceptionally difficult to define. Christians hopefully look for the return of the Messiah. Many in the New Age Movement look for the Age of Pisces to end on the winter solstice on December 21, 2012, and for the Age of Aquarius to begin as the earth’s equatorial plane aligns exactly with the center of our galaxy. Buddhists look for the return of Maitreya sometime in the very near future. Mayans predict and end of an epoch on December 21, 2012, and a new epoch to begin. The Aztec look for the return of the flying serpent, Quetzalcoatl, sometime around the end of 2012. Aztecs also predict the possible end of time, as we know it, and possibly the end of the world. The I-Ching independently predicts the end to occur on the winter solstice this year. Meanwhile, the Zohar, which is a collection of books in the mystical Jewish Kabbalah from 13th century Spain, talks about the appearance of the Messiah at about this same general time. According to these texts, all of the kings of the world will come together in Rome, which will then be destroyed by God. This closely parallels the prophecy of Saint Malachi, the Bishop of Armagh, who was summoned to Rome in 1139 AD by Pope Innocent II and while there had a vision in which God revealed the 112 future popes, including the last pope, who will come to power and witness the destruction of Rome. Muslims look for the return of the Mahdi, or Twelfth Imam at about this time, while teenagers around the world look for the return of the twelfth season of American Idol.
The entire world is on edge because its inhabitants from every nation and culture feel something. Something that is almost impossible to identify or define. The Book of Revelation tells us that in the last days Satan will be thrown to the earth and will be frantic because he will know that his time is very short. I am not certain that this has occurred yet, but I do sense very strongly that evil in the world has intensified with a supernatural hatred that is shocking. In the past week I have read several accounts of cannibalism, including an article about a naked man who was shot and killed by police when he refused to stop eating the face of another man. During this same week I read articles about a mother who gouged the eyes out of her young son in a satanic ritual, and reported accounts of doctors in India feeding aborted human fetuses to dogs. These are but a few examples of the incomprehensible hatred by a supernatural evil that is only now beginning to manifest itself in our modern world. The love of many in this world has certainly grown cold.
Another aspect that has increased to a fever pitch is the supernaturally rabid fanaticism by those determined to annihilate all traces of Christianity. Not only do we see these forces at work in the Middle East, but in many African nations as well, where Christians are literally being hunted down and killed. These same forces are at work right here in the United States using and twisting our own laws to forcibly rip every reference to the Christian God, no matter how small or insignificant, from the fabric of our nation.
The entire world is also on edge because of an incredible worldwide political power vacuum. The Arab Spring revolt has created deadly riots in dozens of nations and yet there is neither a leader nor a clearly defined goal. The same is true for the Occupy Wall Street movement that has taken place across our nation and has spilled beyond our borders into Europe. An incredible vacuum exists for a worldwide leader and yet no leader has come forth. We also know that nature abhors a vacuum. Paul Henri Spaak, the post WWII premier of Belgium and Secretary General of the United Nations from 1957 – 1961 said on January 1, 1993:
We do not want another committee. We have too many already. What we want is a man of sufficient stature to hold the allegiance of all people, and to lift us out of the economic morass in which we are sinking. Send us such a man, be he God or the devil, and we will receive him.
Every nation is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with America on the brink of economic implosion, having borrowed one-fourth of all of the money in the world and unable to pay it back. All over the globe central banks are feverishly printing money in an attempt to “paper over” this crisis, but this is not going to work. The entire world economic system is a house of cards in which each bankrupt nation props up the economy of other bankrupt nations using imaginary electronic money that does not actually exist. Charles Ponzi would be proud if he were alive today. But a house of cards cannot stand forever, and when it falls (and it will collapse) the economic foundation of the entire world will fall with it. What I am sensing about all of this is that the world economic situation should never have become as critical as it is now, and it should never have been able to sustain itself for this long. We are well past the logical time when it should have collapsed. What kind of supernatural forces have brought us this far and what kind of supernatural forces will provide us with a leader who will have all of the answers to get us out of this morass?
We have been consuming far more than we replenish or recycle. Fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce as water tables drop, rivers dry up, and pollution contaminates much of what remains. China has put a stranglehold on the rare-earth elements so necessary for the electronic technology we have become so dependent upon. The nations of the world that seem to hate Christianity and the western concept of freedom the most are the same ones that control the oil. And finally, the world’s food supply is rapidly shrinking as it comes under attack from every imaginable source and direction. One does not have to be a prophet to see that something really, really big is going to happen in the world really, really soon.
I am convinced that the entire world is on edge because we have really disobeyed and offended God and, no matter how much we try to justify our actions or how much we deny the very existence of a God, we are way overdue to be punished. In Genesis, Chapter 6, we are told that genetic makeup of humanity was corrupted when “the sons of God” interbred with the daughters of men, creating giants. God was so angry that He destroyed all of mankind, except for the eight occupants of Noah’s ark. Today we are using our technology to combine human, animal, and plant DNA in ways that have the potential to produce creatures even more hideous and grotesque than in Noah’s time. Could God be any less angry with humanity today as He was in the days of Noah?
Regardless of what may, or may not, be politically correct we know that God despises homosexuality and He destroyed both Sodom and Gomorrah because of this particular sin. In the past few months I have witnessed a new fanatical determination by the homosexual community to force their agenda on the rest of our society and to recognized as a special, privileged class. I have also noted an increased use of the term “homophobia” to imply that it is the normal person who is the one who has the mental disease or defect. Lastly, I have noticed how the homosexual agenda has become increasingly anti-Christian, as if to beg (or even dare) God to strike them. God is not mocked, and it is incredibly dangerous to do so
Beginning around the middle of December 2010 there has been a very sharp spike in animal deaths in the United States and around the world. The mainstream media rarely reports these events but they are covered by the independent prophetic news sites, and the number of individual events since the middle of December 2010 is, quite literally, in the hundreds. Science has not been able to provide definitive answers while the proposed causes they have suggested range from the absurd to laughingly ridiculous. The only thing our scientists are certain of is that the cause cannot possibly be supernatural.
Listen to the word of the LORD, O sons of Israel, for the LORD has a case against the land, because there is no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge of God in the land. There is swearing, deception, murder, stealing and adultery. They employ violence so that bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and everyone who lives in it languishes along with the beasts of the fields and the birds of the sky. And also the fish of the sea disappear. (Hosea 4:1-4)
I will completely remove all things from the face of the earth declares the LORD. I will remove man and beast; I will remove the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea. (Zephaniah 1:2-36)
People are on edge today because they know that a lot of bad things are happening that have consequences which reach every corner of our world, and the officials that we trust to keep us informed cannot be trusted. For example, every bluefin tuna tested along the California cost in May, 2012, had levels of radioactivity from the cesium 134 and cesium 137 that was released from the crippled nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, 5,500 miles away across the Pacific that were 10 times the level before the accident. Scientists stress that the levels of radioactivity are “perfectly safe to eat,” according to their report, yet the truth of the matter is that radioactivity ingested in food is cumulative over time. There is no safe level of radiation in food. Period.
Unidentified flying objects have been around since the most ancient of times, yet they did not figure prominently in government conspiracies until the middle of 1947, when a UFO crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. This was less than a year before Israel became a nation and initiated the time we now refer to as the end times, or last days. I am absolutely convinced that UFO’s will play a major role during the 7 year long period of worldwide tribulation that is about to begin, and I can only speculate as to what that major role will be. UFO activity has definitely increased in recent days and weeks, which has increased my feeling that something big is about to happen.
There is one last sign that has put me on edge and is building my expectations that something really big and really prophetic is about to take place. There are many prophets in the world today. Some are true prophets of the Lord while others are prophetic wanna-be’s. Trying to determine which is which can sometimes be obvious and sometimes quite tricky. However, one thing that I have noticed is that all of today’s prophets routinely use the words imminent, soon, very soon, very very very soon, and at the door in all of their messages lately. In fact, there is an ever increasing tone of urgency which I did not notice before, but has become blaringly obvious now.
Something really big really is about to happen, and happen very soon. The really, really big thing that is about to happen is the rapture of the Church followed by a period of tribulation that will be so incredibly horrible that the world has never seen anything like it in the past. The Age of Grace is about to abruptly end and the free gift of eternal salvation that so many have taken for granted for so long will end just as abruptly. Most of the earth’s population will die. I feel privileged to be alive at this moment in time so that I can witness such an historic moment. Everything is in place. All that remains now is for the Lord to set it all in motion. Are you ready for what is about to happen?
Carl Worline