My daily emails and conversations usually include a statement similar to: “With everything going on, we must be very near the end.”
This usually means that this generation of anti-God rebels alive on the planet must be about to get their comeuppance; God must be fed up much like He was with the likes of the inhabitants at the lower end of the Dead Sea during the days of Lot.
It was a time of evil, debauchery, and violence, as we read in Genesis 19. Jesus gave condemning words by saying that the time He returns (that is, when He is next revealed to an unsuspecting world) will be just like it was in Lot’s day in Sodom and during Noah’s day. (Lot’s day in Sodom was a microcosm of what the entire world was like during Noah’s day.)
In both instances—Noah’s day and Lot’s day—God found mankind so repulsive in the way they were acting that He had to destroy all but the very few He found to be righteous. The biblical account says the destruction in both cases was complete. To the believer in biblical truth, that is proven to be the case as we look around.
The antediluvian world is no more. There’s not a trace of it, except perhaps in geographical sites, etc. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah can’t be found, either. We do have proof that they existed and were destroyed, however, as we will look at a bit further on.
First, it’s interesting to consider that Noah’s day and Lot’s day bore similar characteristics. We will, in this case, look basically at only one similarity: violence was rampant. Jesus said, by inference, that the time He is next revealed will be in a period of extreme violence.
This is because Genesis chapter 6 said that violence filled the whole earth during the time just before the Flood that destroyed all but Noah and his family. It must have indeed been a murderous time, one when everyone did what was right in their own eyes, with little or no attention paid to God’s prescription for living.
So we are looking at “proof” for the lawlessness—the violence that stems from throwing off God’s Law and instead doing what is right in our own, sinful eyes. Is there any evidence that this generation is coursing toward violence of such significant levels? Are we in the time like Noah’s day and Lot’s day that Jesus was talking about in the Olivet Discourse? (Matthew 24:36–42 and Luke 17:26–30). Are we at the very end of God’s holy patience, as were those earlier generations?
The following excerpt of an article may give us a clue.
Our violent, blood-soaked culture has produced a violent, blood-soaked reality in our streets. The final numbers for 2020 have finally been released by the FBI, and they are stunning.
Prior to last year, the largest one-year increase in the murder rate in the United States was 12.7 percent, and that came all the way back in 1968. Needless to say, many of you that are reading this article were not even alive in 1968. Well, we didn’t just break the old record last year. We more than doubled it. According to the FBI’s annual report on crime, the nationwide murder rate was up about 29 percent in 2020…
The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, according to data gathered by the FBI for its annual report on crime.
The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29%. The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7% increase in 1968. (“The Largest One-Year Increase in Murder in the History of the United States,” by Michael Snyder, Prophecy News Watch, 9/24/21)
In our book, LAWLESS: End-Times War Against the Spirit of Antichrist, a number of authors delineated the exponential increase in every sort of anti-God activity. Just since the recent release of that book, we witness even greater increase in violence in every direction as we look across the prophetic horizon. Thus, we must conclude that the answer to the consistent comments in the emails and the conversations have proof to back up the near-consensus. We are living at the very end of this Church Age (Age of Grace).
Proof that God is dealing with absolute evil from which people refuse to repent now confronts the eyes of mankind, if we will believe what we see.
Archaeologists have unearthed physical proof of what points to the destruction of Tell el-Hammam in the Jordan valley, the region of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, and what they found was really wild. They found evidence of an incredible explosion that occurred in the skies above ancient Sodom, an explosion so intense that buildings down below were destroyed and things were literally vaporized…
FROM THE JERUSALEM POST: Tell el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley might have inspired the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, according to a new study that has spanned 15 years. In the study, published in the journal Nature on Monday, archaeologists researched the remains of Tell el-Hammam in an attempt to discover what destroyed the ancient city during the Middle Bronze Age. During the period, there were roughly 50,000 people living in the area of the Jordan Valley in three cities: Tell el-Hammam, Jericho, and Tell Nimrin, with Tell el-Hammam the biggest of the three, implying that until its destruction, it would have been the political center of the area. Radiocarbon dating dates the destruction to within 50 years of 1650 BCE.
Examination of the remains revealed evidence of a destructive event that involved high temperatures, such as pottery pieces that were melted and boiled on the exterior, but normal on the inside. The buildings of Tell el-Hammam were made of mud bricks, some five stories tall. In the upper part of the city, the destructive force demolished the buildings to the height of their foundations in the walls, and little mud-brick remained. Of the palace that was in this part of the city, the first-floor walls and the upper stories are missing, and most of the mud-brick was pulverized. (“Archaeologists Discover Physical Proof for Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” Jerusalem Post and NTEB, 9/23/21)
It is more evident by the hour that we are in a time similar to those in which the Lord said “enough is enough.” Judgment is coming. But for those who believe in Jesus Christ for redemption from sin and rebelliousness, the moment of God’s next catastrophic intervention into man’s history will be a glorious one, not one to dread. Christ’s shout from above, “Come up here!” will instantaneously take all believers into His magnificent presence.
Here is how to make sure your eternal soul is prepared to leave this wrath-bound planet when the Lord calls.
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:9–10).