Good News is Good News; Bad News is Good News; Very Bad News is Great News

I continue to see an amazing performance in the U.S. stock market. I’ve become absolutely convinced that the stock market’s ability to defy long-standing financial rules on the negative side is related to the rapture.

We are living in a strange world where the most dire news possible can be made to be a positive event for the financial markets. If it was announced that a large asteroid was headed for earth, the stock market would rally.

We recently had the credit rating agency Fitch downgrade the U.S. credit rating. Fitch cut the U.S. debt by one notch, from AAA to AA+, partly in response to how the federal government handled the debt crisis two months ago. That move mirrored a similar downgrade by S&P in 2011, also following a debt ceiling standoff in Congress.

I was surprised that Fitch was brave enough to cut the government’s debt rating. When S&P downgraded the U.S., the stock market went into a mini-crash, and gold shot to a new high. S&P found itself under scrutiny from a large portion of the national government. Since the firm had given a AAA rating to corporate bonds that crashed during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Washington expects S&P to continue the lie with all federal debt.

Fitch likely made the decision to downgrade because it perceived that few people cared and reality would eventually set in. If the federal bond market goes into a meltdown, Fitch can claim the one-point lowering of our nation’s rating was somehow a warning of the coming calamity. A true measure of our debt risk would have bonds rated as junk.

There used to be a class of people who were called debt watchdogs. They would write books that warned how our spending was going to cause the death of the dollar. I have many of them in my book collection.

When the national debt reached $1 trillion on September 2, 1981, the debt Watchdogs started barking like crazy. They would be amazed to learn that the U.S. debt would reach $33 trillion in 2023. Today, our interest payment alone is projected to soon be $1 trillion. The dollar is not only still alive, but it remains the world’s reserve currency.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a report that said the U.S. budget deficit will widen by $5 billion every single day for the next decade. It will soon rise by $7 billion, $10 billion, and $12 billion. The CBO has always been too low in its numbers because it doesn’t understand how debt compounds.

The U.S. Treasury Department recently shamed the CBO by announcing plans to borrow an “eye-popping” $1.85 trillion over the next six months, which is 40 to 50 percent higher than the Treasury’s last spending forecast made just two months ago. Years ago, this would be the type of news that would cost a party control of Congress and the Whitehouse. There are probably more people in America that can sing the Mexican national anthem than quote dollar figures for the current federal debt.

We have a huge banking crisis that has already created a dollar value loss that is greater than the banking crash of the Great Recession. By jacking up rates at the fastest pace in history, government bonds have become dangerous to own. U.S. banks would have a loss of $200 billion if they were forced to sell their U.S. bond holdings.

It is amazing that more banks have not collapsed from simple mismanagement. The bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank shows it was more concerned about diversity and transgender rights than it was about watching the bottom line.

Right now, foreign holdings of U.S. debt were approximately $7.5 trillion, accounting for around 28% of the total U.S. debt. When the monthly trade figures came out, the data used to be something that could move the Dow Jones up or down. The trade deficit has become so meaningless, most financial news outlets don’t even report the numbers.

Reports that show the two largest holders of our debt starting to sell their bonds have had no impact on awareness. The Fed can print up all the money required to patch a hole in a U.S. financial market. It can do nothing for a trade partner that says they don’t want dollars for products we sell you.

There is a growing list of financial milestones that, once reached in the past, have nearly always resulted in a stock market crash. Some strange magic is working to prevent these triggers from being set off. Because Jesus said he would come back at a time of peace and safety seems to be the only explanation for why we have the most resilient economy in our nation’s history.

“For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:3).

–Todd

Rapture Verdict Overturned

A friend with whom I was on the phone said, “There are a lot of people coming against the preTrib Rapture.”

I asked him to name names, and he said, “Guys like Joel Richardson and Walid Shoebat.”

These and many others, my friend said, are saying things like those of us who believe in and teach a preTrib Rapture are heretics. And some are saying worse –like we who teach such things are leading people to hell with our false teaching.

I, of course –as reported in these commentaries—have heard those invectives and worse against those of us who believe in and teach the preTrib Rapture of the Church. However, I’ve met both Joel Richardson and Walid Shoebat. But Mr. Richardson never came across as a man who would make such strong condemnation. And Mr. Shoebat, an admitted former Mideast terrorist, now a Christian, I haven’t heard much about since our meeting at a prophecy conference some years ago. He was passionate, to be sure, and I knew he didn’t believe there will be a preTrib Rapture, but I never heard from him any such diatribe accusing us of being heretics as my friend said he and others were declaring.

So I did some research to see, in particular, what Joel Richardson (not his real name for his own reasons, I’ve heard) was saying.

I could find no written documents of significance by Joel on the subject, so I listened to his in-depth back-and-forth discussion with a woman podcast host as they dealt specifically with Joel’s opposition to the preTrib Rapture of the Church.

I found myself in total disagreement with all of his reasons that the preTrib view is unbiblical. I found them so weak as to wonder why anyone should even worry about his view making inroads against the Truth regarding the timing of the Rapture.

I did agree with him on one thing, though. The preTrib view is diminishing amongst believers –those of the Church who belong to Jesus. But it is not, in my view, Richardson’s and others providing anti-preTrib Rapture teaching that is causing the diminishment, but rather a part of the end times falling away from the faith in general that is caused in part by the lack of Biblical prophetic Truth being preached and taught in churches.

That said, however, I, upon meeting him, found Joel Richardson to be a gentleman and a gentle man, as Paul Harvey used to say about those he found to be so. And upon listening closely to him and the lady who was of the same anti-preTrib Rapture mindset, I heard the same gentleness in his presentation.

As a matter of fact, he lamented that some within the preTrib prophecy preacher camp had called him a heretic and much worse. Someone who hosted, or partly hosted, a 7,000-attendee prophecy conference had said these things about him.

Mr. Richardson said when he confronted the Christian Brother, the conference host admitted he was wrong but just “needed a scapegoat” to make his point while speaking at the gathering.

I don’t know of any prophecy conference of that size, nor what the man meant by “scapegoat” in this case, but I believe Joel Richardson to be a Brother in Christ in every respect and one who tells the Truth as he understands Truth. (It’s just that, after listening to him and the host of the podcast, neither he nor she understands Truth in the matter of when Christ will Call the Church to Himself.)

Another anti-preTrib Rapture Bible prophecy proponent I find to be otherwise quite accurate on the way things are trending toward the 7 years Tribulation is Michael Snyder. He is excellent at gathering information and reporting news of developments in the Ephesians 6:12 minions’ attempts to bring in Antichrist’s regime of control.

He wrote a book with the title The Rapture Verdict, in which he attempted to tear apart evidence from God’s Word for the preTrib Rapture. His verdict, of course, was that he had managed to prove there will be no preTrib Rapture.

Neither Mr. Richardson nor Mr. Snyder denies there will be a Rapture. But they lump Israel and the Church in the same lump, so to speak. Both Israel and believers that comprise the Church will go through the Tribulation, is their verdict. Mr. Richardson, at least –I can’t remember the position of Mr. Snyder– denies that God deals with man in dispensations. They both put forth that the Rapture will take place within the Tribulation, as I understand. Their belief is based upon the “last Trump of Revelation” to a large extent.

Mr. Richardson, as I heard him in the interview with the lady –and she agreed wholeheartedly— said that the best we preTrib Rapturists could come up with was Revelation 3:10. He admitted that it did seem to indicate that the believer will escape God’s Wrath. But he said that the scripture didn’t mean that we will not go through the time of Wrath –the 7 years of Tribulation— but that we will be kept “through” that time that will be, according to the Lord Jesus, the worst of all human history.

To me, Mr. Snyder’s and Mr. Richardson’s Rapture Verdict is overthrown –is overturned—in one simple word in this Promise from our God.

Here is the Promise.

“Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth” (Rev 3: 10).

As I understand, Joel Richardson believes that the word “wrath” means in the eternal sense, not in the sense of the physical, i.e., we won’t suffer the eternal Wrath reserved for the lost but must be here for the physical punishment phase.

But even more confusing is that he said, if I heard him correctly, that this scripture says we will be kept “through” this period of horror during which God Judges and makes war on unbelievers and on Satan and his angelic hordes – a thing I find to make little sense, as millions of new believers will die during that era.

But one word totally overturns the Rapture Verdict of the anti-preTrib argument, in my view. That term is the simple little word “from.”

It is the Greek word “ek.” The word means “out of.” – not “through.” We will be kept “out of” that hour that will come upon the whole world of rebels to try them in God’s Judicial Court Room called the Tribulation.

Of course, there is a body of evidence overwhelmingly extensive that could be brought into play that proves the preTrib Rapture is Truth. And that evidence has been presented over and over, beginning with the great Apostle Paul’s words, from which he said for us to take comfort. And there is no comfort that can come from knowing you are going through the worst time of all human history. Here are those words of comfort.

“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (1 Thes 4: 16-18).

–Terry