In the Bible, it is recorded in Luke Chapter 9, Verse 51, the moment that the Lord Jesus began His final trip to Jerusalem. Various terms are used to describe the moment, depending on which Bible translation you may prefer. Some examples are:

• He steadfastly* set his face (ASV; ERV; KJV; NKJV)
• Jesus resolutely set out (NLT; BSB)

*Some versions use stedfastly.

The Lord knew what awaited Him in Jerusalem, and yet He was determined to go. These descriptions imply that this was a reality that He had to face up to, and it could not be delayed or avoided. The time that our Lord knew was coming had arrived. He then fulfilled His mission.

As followers of Christ, we have been blessed with the entirety of God’s Word for several centuries, certainly in all our natural lifetimes. While we can argue/debate over the efficacy of various versions, it is now, in this writer’s opinion, a distraction. We all know what distractions can be used to accomplish, and we are all intimately familiar with them in everyday activities. We should also be cognizant of how much the evil one likes to employ them.

There appear to be two (in very general terms and as it relates to this discussion) types of Christians. There are those who read and take to heart the book of Revelation and those who avoid it. This book makes a startling statement as to how important it is to both read it and also to take it to heart (hear it and believe it).

Since this final book of God’s Word deals with the fullness of the revelation of Jesus Christ in all His Glory, as the Lion of Judah, and the termination of God’s plan for human history, we should pay due attention. Peter made this clear in 2 Peter 1:19-21 as well as the very opening chapter in Revelation.

King James Bible (Rev 1:3)

“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”

By no means should the reader conclude in any way that I am implying that those who avoid this book are not saved. I know several brothers and sisters who are quite solid and devoted believers, but they avoid prophecy and any mention of eschatology and are quite unwilling to discuss it. I find that sad as fulfilled prophesy is the signature of God, and the myriad prophesies that have already been fulfilled offer proof that God is the trustworthy, sovereign God He claims to be.

It is also a large part of the cornerstone of Christianity; “For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10).

I believe that it is no longer possible to ignore or avoid the realities of the prophesies that God’s Word has provided to us over the centuries and throughout the entire span of Biblically recorded history.

Although there is a large amount of prophetic revelation all throughout God’s Word, for the sake of brevity I will mention only four examples. I believe these are more than sufficient to make my point.

The first two are current and ongoing. They are part of our everyday existence and rapidly gaining momentum. It could be argued that these conditions outlined by the Lord Jesus and the apostle Paul have “always” been around, and indeed that is true. What cannot be argued is they have now become institutionalized, constant. As we who served in the military would word it, they are now “ops normal.”

• Matthew 24:3-14
• 2 Timothy 3:1-13

We now come to the other two of the four examples, which have not yet begun. They have not yet begun because each has a specific starting point that is easily definable but has not yet occurred.

• Daniel 9:20-27(the Seventy Weeks)
• The book of Revelation (beginning with chapter 4: v1) to the end.

Before continuing, let me point out that (outside of the supernatural enabling of God) until the recent technological advances had been attained, many of the descriptions of events in the Book of Revelation would not be possible. These include (but are not restricted to) the ability of antichrist to control all buying and selling as well as the entire world to see the return of the Lord Jesus as the Lion of Judah at the climax of the seventieth week of Daniel (or Armageddon).

Now I will come to the crux of this article.

We do not know how difficult it is going to get for the true Christ-worshiping, Bible-believing church, the Bride of Christ, between the present time and the moment we realize the reality of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18 prior to the commencement of the seventieth week of Daniel and the command at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Revelation to “come up here”:

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.”

But this we know of a certainty: these things will happen, and every indication, from the technological advances enabling the prophesies to be reality, shows this world has become “as in the days of Noah” (Luke 17:26-30) where sin is rampant and lawlessness is the rule of every day.

Given these proofs that are before our eyes, it now has become necessary for the body of Christ to “steadfastly set our faces” and truly follow the example set by our Lord. It will not be easy.

Those of our beloved brothers and sisters who have avoided the more difficult verses and books should now set their faces to understanding them in order to have the strength and conviction to stand. I suspect things are going to get much more difficult, and we will all need to be cognizant of what we may need to endure prior to the Rapture and the solid proof of God’s promises to give us that strength.

Most important is our charge to be a witness to unbelieving people and an example for other believers and to convey the message of the salvation of God on His terms and what He requires of every person.

And what are His terms according to His Word?

• Genuine repentance
• Confession of sins
• Belief that Jesus Christ paid your death sentence for you on the cross
• To acknowledge that you are unable to pay that debt
• To believe that Jesus is the Way, the only Way, that God has established by which humans may be saved from the consequences of their sin and rebellion.

I pray that we will concentrate on setting our faces to deliver the Gospel with patience, kindness, and most importantly, love, and leave the final results to our Beloved Holy Spirit.

I also pray that, in spite of the difficulties of everyday events and the seemingly unrestricted blitzkrieg of evil, we will all praise God and sing Hallelujah as we witness Him bring about and fulfill His promises!

Pro Salvator Vigilans

To contact me: canoeman96@gmail.com

 

 

Will You Marry Me? :: By David Cogburn

How many Christians know that God has actually proposed to us, and we as the church accepted His proposal? I will deal with this in a following article that I will entitle The Purpose of the Rapture and Why it is Impossible Not to Occur.

This article will deal with what is the MOST near and dear thing to God’s heart – INTIMACY. God is a triune God, a Holy Trinity of one God comprised of three personalities – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A good earthly example is water, which can be a solid, liquid or gas but is still water. The number one essence of God is relationship because God Himself IS a Relationship comprised of three in one.

Relationship is what brings God His MOST pleasure, and what makes the STRONGEST relationships is intimacy. BUT there is a huge difference between relationships and “intimate” relationships as you will see. God likes relationships so much that He decided to create more of them when He created His angels to have a personal relationship with Him and with each other. He created each one perfect and sinless, though with a free will. God is eternal, and every sentient being God creates is also eternal. He loves His angels, and they love Him back.

The unthinkable happened when Lucifer, God’s highest created angel, used his free will and decided he wanted to be like God and be worshiped. He committed the first sin in the Bible, the sin of pride – taking his eyes off God and focusing them onto himself. This resulted in not only his eternal fall from grace but also one-third of God’s angels falling from grace due to Lucifer’s influence over them.

This obviously saddened God even though God, knowing all things, knew this would occur. It appears God may have gone through a thinking process such as this: I have created all of my angels and am giving them my best by them living in My presence here in heaven, and still, one-third of them have rejected Me. And now it appears God asks Himself a rhetorical question: What if I create a new kind of sentient being in My image – human beings – though I know they will disobey Me and sin from the very beginning, and this sin will cause them to have to live outside of my Presence. I will be invisible to them, and they will not be receiving the best I have to offer but will have to take care of themselves.

Why would God want to do this? This is 100 percent the opposite of what God did with His angels. The answer is “intimacy,” as you will see. God’s type of intimacy is the “closest” two people can be in a personal relationship. It is so personal and so close that God reserves this type of intimacy for marriage. God refers to this as a “two become one” relationship when He created marriage for human beings. This is far more than sexual but is a “bonding” that two people have where they live LIFE “TOGETHER” vs living life individually. It is a closeness that, done God’s way, is far greater than any closeness they will have with any other relationships, including their own children.

Father God’s own intimacy in His triune relationship has caused Him to want a two-become-one “intimate” relationship for His Son, Jesus, with the lost, unsaved sin-filled human race. The most amazing thing about this is what God would have to do to bring this about.

Eternity is God’s domain, and God, being eternal, had to make sure that lost human beings would not be born inside “eternity” because what happens in eternity stays in eternity. This caused God to have to create the universe, which creates TIME. He had to make sure we were only lost inside TIME in order to have “time” to come to know Him through Jesus and be saved before we enter into eternity.

Our sin has corrupted not only us but all of nature and all of the universe. God “directly” created Adam from the dirt and then created Eve from Adam; both were created good and sinless. Love produces obedience, and God told Adam and Eve He would live with them, and He would take care of everything as long as they obeyed Him and did not eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden. He said that on the day they did so, they would surely die. When they finally did eat of that forbidden fruit, it caused their future physical death and God having to leave them to fend for themselves.

Because of Adam’s sin, every human being born from that point forward who has a human father would be born with a sin nature. Only Jesus was “born” without a sin nature because He did not have a human father but was conceived by God the Holy Spirit.

Anything or anyone God creates, He creates for His “pleasure.” So far, it looks like there is no pleasure for Him with the human race. The main problem for the human race is that God is Holy, Perfect and without sin, and THAT is His “standard.” But our sin separates us from God and aligns us with Satan (formerly known as Lucifer before he and his fallen angels fell from God’s grace in heaven) as God’s enemy.

Because there is nothing we can do to undo our sin nature and be like God, we simply “assume” that to be saved and get to spend eternity with God in heaven that we have to do good works and deeds. In other words, we have to save “ourselves” by trying to please God by doing more good deeds than bad deeds. We underestimate the Holiness of God and overestimate the goodness of man. This is like dropping a man in the middle of the ocean where he underestimates the size of the ocean and overestimates his swimming ability. The answer is death in both cases.

But the truth is God DID create us for His pleasure. Knowing that it is impossible for mankind to get rid of all of their sins, He knew He would have to intervene and do it for us.

Love is the driving force behind intimacy. God says the greatest act of love is when someone lays down their life to save another. So God created the law of atonement where He would allow sinless blood to be shed to pay the price for the sins of another. He decided there would come a time when He, through His Son Jesus, would become a human being and come to earth to live a perfect, sinless life and then die a horrible death on a cross to fulfill the law of atonement for the human race.

He committed the greatest act of love there is by dying and shedding His innocent, sinless blood to pay for the sins of mankind. He did this for one MAIN reason – so that all lost human beings can NOW have a two-become-one “intimate” relationship with Himself through His Son Jesus Christ.

This occurs when we recognize God through His creation and through His holy word in the Bible, and we desire beyond all things to be with God and actually be able to even “have” an intimate relationship with Him. This happens when we repent of our sins and ask Jesus to come into our lives, be our Lord and Savior, and help us please Him throughout the rest of our lives. When we do this, we receive God the Holy Spirit IN us, and this is when we become connected to God and are two-become-one with Him.

Jesus said in John 14 that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me; I am in you, and you are in Me. Everything with God is about “relationship.” Everything else there is pales in comparison to relationships not only with ourselves but especially the greatest relationship there is when we are intimately two-become-one connected to God.

The good news is when we become born again, we are two-become-one with God NOW and forever. We receive God’s Holy Spirit in us as a NEW God nature in us to combat against our own sin nature, which unfortunately never goes away as long as we live in a human body. The bad news for us “now” is we still have a sin nature alongside our new God nature, and we are not living in God’s presence yet. The world that is anti-God would say it’s impossible to have any kind of “relationship” with someone or something invisible, but that’s because they don’t know God.

By being born again Christians, He supernaturally helps us to “understand” the “things” of God. Only God knows the things of God, and one of the biggest ways He helps us is by supernaturally helping us to “understand” His word in the Bible like never before.

The world and liberal theologians who do not believe the Bible is the inspired, infallible, inerrant word of God believe that way because they do not have the Holy Spirit in them to understand even what new beginning born-again Christians believe about the Bible.

A good example is myself. I was 34 when I came to know the Lord after reading Hal Lindsay’s book written in 1969 entitled The Late Great Planet Earth. I never went to church growing up, but I did know that Jesus died for our sins, and all we had to do was believe that, and I did. I believed it and said, Thank you, Jesus; see you in heaven. I had no clue that we had to have a personal relationship with Him until Hal Lindsay’s book. I did not even know there was prophecy in the Bible, and when I found that out, that was proof positive to me that everything in the Bible is true about Jesus, heaven and hell.

I did not want to go to hell, so like Hal said, I repented and asked Jesus to be my Lord and Savior. I had even taken a New Testament course in college because I heard it was an easy “A,” and I needed an “A” for my grade average. I read the New Testament completely through, and it meant nothing to me really. Just another book. But after I was born again and started reading the Bible, the truth in it started jumping off the page at me. I was blown away by what God was showing us in His word, and it’s been a growing relationship ever since. The point is that it took God’s Holy Spirit in me to begin to “fully understand” the Bible, which the world thinks is foolish.

Also, in our relationship with God, He speaks to us in a way we can understand through His word, through circumstances, through other Christians, through books, and many, many different ways. He gives us guidance, helping us to know what He wants us to do in terms of pleasing Him while we journey through life on earth. Most of that involves loving and serving others, which pleases God and earns us eternal rewards that we won’t fully understand until we enter eternity when we die. But God does not want any to perish but that all would come to know Him through repentance (2 Peter 3:9). And that is why Jesus gave us our great commission to share the good news of the gospel to the whole world.

As we all know, the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. Jesus has gone back to heaven to prepare a place for us, and we are waiting now for Him to return and bring us back to His place where we can have our marriage and wedding feast. We will then be Jesus’ wife (Rev 21:9). God tells us in Hosea 2:16-19 that “In that day you will call Me HUSBAND instead of Master and you will be my WIFE FOREVER.” Can it be any clearer than that?

How many born-again Christians do you really think actually think of our relationship with God in “this way”? Our two-become-one relationship with GOD is the CLOSEST relationship God has ever created since it is with Himself through His Son. We will go through eternity being even closer and bonded to God than we are now due to no more sin nature, and we will be in His presence.

I personally believe that, through the Holy Spirit in eternity, each one of us will have access to Jesus and will not have to wait hundreds of so-called years in eternity to spend time with Him when billions of us will want to be with Him and spend time with Him. God does not have a relationship with billions. He has only a one-on-one relationship with each of us, and obviously, we will have to wait until eternity to understand how truly incredible that will be.

Angels do not have an intimate relationship with God in the sense of a two-become-one relationship. They are not married to Jesus. And since Jesus is now our fiance, we should be treating Him even better than a normal fiance where we think about them all the time, “talk” to them all the time, tell our friends about our fiance, do everything we can to spend time with them, etc. We don’t know what all of this means yet, but we can know one thing for sure: it will be far more incredible than anything we can imagine now.

This is WHY God created the human race. It is a huge deal to God when sinful people who can only know God by faith in His creation and His word come to know Him, fall in love with Jesus, and desire an intimate personal relationship with Him because He saved us from our sins. It’s such a big deal that it makes God “want” to have an intimate two-become-one relationship with us now and forever. Nothing can be more exciting than that for all those who become part of His bride by being born again.

We at Raptureready.com are among a very TINY percentage of believers who are “actively” watching for the soon return of Jesus for us His bride. There are many videos on YouTube that show scriptural evidence that His coming could be a matter of weeks or months vs years. But as we know, only God knows the exact day and time. The best we can do now is keep watching, praying, and saying each day – Maranatha; come quickly, Lord Jesus.

David Cogburn

dcogburn789@gmail.com