“Well Done!”

Many prophetically attuned believers–such as those who take notice of this column and of posts on terryjamesprophecyline.com, as well as of other Christ-centered, Bible prophecy platforms—pay attention to the nearness of Christ’s call to the Church. Vast billions of people on Earth, however, go down that broad way of this brief life without a thought of their swiftly approaching destiny.

Sadly, we know that most Christians–even though they might be born-again believers—pay no attention to the lateness of the hour as the end of the Age of Grace draws near. Much of this disregard (even though the Bible consists of more than 27 percent prophecy) is the fault of the people in the pews who genuinely call Jesus Christ their Lord–because they have little interest in personal Bible study. But at least an equal share of blame for not paying attention to the prophetic signs of the times must be placed with the pastors whose flocks receive little or no teaching about biblical prophecy—for which the stage is being set in every direction we look.

American Christians are caught up in not paying attention to the prophetic signals that burst in lightning- strike-like fashion from each news cycle in reports from this nation and around the world. While these believers see the wars and rumors of wars, the economic strains and stresses that portend economic collapse and threaten to fracture their family well-being, or the absolute evil being perpetrated in the adulteration of a culture that murders millions of babies in the womb and subjects the youngest children to the most heinous sexual perversions imaginable, they only shake their heads and wonder aloud something like, “What’s the world coming to?”

If they would just get into their Bibles—and if their pastors would get into God’s prophetic Word—the Holy Spirit would open their spiritual eyes to what this world is coming to.

And what this world is heading toward—is soon coming to—is God’s judgment and wrath.

And I’m of the conviction–and believe that you are, also—that God’s judgment and wrath can’t be too far distant. This is obvious to the Christian who’s familiar with God’s warning and alert to the flashing signals that can’t be missed. It is imperative that we make our fellow believers aware they should be paying attention. We must hold up God’s prophetic Word to pastors in Bible-believing churches and remind them that they’re responsible for teaching and preaching Bible prophecy. They must do so today, without delay, because time is fleeting in this Church Age (Age of Grace).

We have in the book of Hebrews an exhortation I believe transcends merely urging believers to gather in physical meeting places–church sanctuaries, et cetera. Of course, this is indeed an important part of the exhortation. But I believe that, just as importantly, it means we are to come together as Christ’s Body in understanding the times, especially as we see the time of Tribulation approaching:

“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).

The words “the day approaching” in this passage is warning of the day when Christ will call the Church into the clouds of Glory, and the time of Daniel’s seventieth week—the Tribulation era—will begin.

We must come together and speak of coming judgment as a Church Body, especially as we see the stage being set for prophetic fulfillment.

We must, therefore, make sure our brothers and sisters are on the same page. Of course, we know from the apathy and because of the many different views of Bible prophecy that this cannot and will not be achieved in total, but we must do what we can to try to make it happen.

I am very thankful that those who come to read our articles here have been so supportive of our efforts. And you know who you are who have been so faithful and supportive of our Pakistani mission. My little Prophecy Power book has been used in a mighty way as the Pakistani minister has distributed it in that dark land and used it to shed the Gospel’s light about coming judgment on sin, and, more importantly, to give the wonderful message of God’s grace through His Son’s sacrifice on the cross at Calvary.

You have contributed to a mission in that foreign land and region where human history will one day culminate. When we work to get prophetic truth into the minds and hearts of pastors and their flocks, we are performing an equally worthy mission. It is a vital mission since we see that day approaching.

Like you, I want to hear the words of our Lord when we see Him face to face in that moment of Rapture. And I want every Christian to hear those words also. There will be no greater reward than to hear them as we look into the all-knowing eyes of our Savior, Lord, and God:

“Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord” (Matthew 25:23).

—Terry

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The Hope that Flows from Jesus’ Resurrection

At the lowest point in my life, I wanted to run far away from the faith, Christians, and the Lord. Feeling the full impact of the betrayal of those closest to me, I went for many late-night walks, pouring my heart out to the Lord. In my book, The Triumph of the Redeemed, I summarize just a few of the circumstances that led to my despair so long ago. I do not wish to recount what happened back then, but rather write about how the Lord guarded my heart during that dark period in my life, as I also did in my book.

It was His resurrection and the hope that flows from it that Jesus used to keep me close to Him in spite of my feelings. Later, when I heard a sermon on John 6, Peter’s response to the Lord resonated deep in my soul, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). I knew all along that Jesus’ resurrection was an absolute certainty and thus my hope of eternity regardless of my dire circumstances. I knew I had nowhere to go but to remain with the One who gave His life for me.

The lengthy healing process led to a deeper appreciation of my hope in Jesus’ imminent appearing; as for me, that was and is the connection between Jesus’ resurrection and my hope of eternity. As a young pastor, I could recite twenty reasons for my belief in the pre-Tribulation Rapture. But when my world turned upside down and inside out, I came to cherish this hope in a far deeper way as the culmination of the life Jesus promised me.

When all my earthly aspirations perished in a moment, Jesus’ resurrection meant that nothing could take away my hope of eternity. That’s when the Rapture became much more than a doctrine to defend, but rather the time when I would fully experience all the wonders of eternity that Jesus promises to us.

Is this not the theme of 1 Corinthians 15?

Our Hope Begins with the Resurrection

Do you know that many of the people who scoff at our belief in a Rapture also tell us that the promises of 1 Corinthians 15:50-55 happen at the moment Jesus saves us? I was shocked when I first read that someone denied our resurrection hope in such a way, but I have since come to realize that it’s a rather common belief among those who say the church is now God’s kingdom on the earth rather than Israel. They throw out the promise of an incorruptible body along with the Rapture.

I regard such assertions as a form of unbelief because in order to eliminate the Rapture from the promises at the end of I Corinthians 15, one must discard all that Paul wrote in the first forty-nine verses of the chapter.

The apostle begins 1 Corinthians 15 with a concise presentation of the Gospel, highlighting Jesus’ resurrection. He then addresses a faction within the Corinth church who maintained that there was no such thing as a resurrection, to which Paul responded that such a belief undermines the entire Gospel (I Corinthians 15:18-19). Apart from our hope of a future bodily resurrection, our faith accomplishes nothing of any lasting value. It’s not me saying this; it’s the Apostle Paul.

In the verses that follow, he highlights Jesus’ resurrection as “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (I Corinthians 15:20). The fact that He rose from the dead is the basis of our hope that someday He will raise us to new life with immortal bodies. The apostle makes this unmistakably clear in verses 47-49:

“The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”

As New Testament saints, we know there’s coming a day when just as surely as we have lived in bodies patterned after Adam, we “shall also bear the image” of Jesus, “the man of heaven.” He “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). That happens during the event we call the Rapture.

We Look Forward to a Future Event

If context and the words of the New Testament matter, then the Lord’s promises to us in 1 Corinthians 15:50-55 speak to a future event that’s just as sure as Jesus’ resurrection. It’s as Ed Hindson wrote in His book Future Glory:

If you disagree on the timing of the rapture, please don’t tell people, “There’s never going to be a rapture.” No, there must be a rapture, or the Bible is not true.

Because Jesus rose from the dead, there will most assuredly be a time when He appears, raises the dead in Christ from their graves, and gives both dead and living saints incorruptible and immortal bodies (see also Philippians 3:20-21; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-18). Our hope of eternal life in glorified bodies like that of Jesus flows from the fact that He rose from the dead and is coming back to take us, complete with glorious new bodies, back to His Father’s house in Heaven.

That’s why we have hope regardless of our circumstances or age.

Even after the Lord brought healing to the wounds of my past, I believed my usefulness for Him was at a complete and total end. Little did I know at the time, or could even begin to imagine, was that the Lord would someday weave all that happened during the years of hardship into a ministry that seeks to use Bible prophecy as the means to encourage and comfort hurting saints.

Maranatha!!

-Jonathan

Chaos, Calamity or Comfort?

It seems sometimes that Americans, particularly Christian Americans, are anesthetized to things going on around them.

Things like the attempted takeover by the dark spiritual forces behind Marxism and worse don’t seem to register on Christian Americans’ worry meters—at least not to the degree it registers on my own meter of concern.

Some will say Christians are confident that God is always in complete control, so they just don’t worry about these things. But the truth is that most American Christians are complacent; they’re not interested in thinking about the evil around us.

Even what’s going on in the Middle East, the war with Iran, and the threat closing the Strait of Hormuz presents doesn’t seem to heighten the level of worry that World War III or, at the very least, a portentous economic crisis is in view.

And the Church–all who are in God’s family—for the most part doesn’t seem to have an idea of what Israel being at the center of all this worrisome news means. There is no concern about how it all relates to Bible prophecy among those who should be most aware of and alert to the fact that the world is teetering on the edge of a time Jesus called the worst that would ever be.

Yet this is another sign of where we are on God’s prophetic timeline, in my view, as we look out across that horizon of “things to come,” as Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost titled his great volume on Bible prophecy.

As I’ve written many times, I believe Jesus described exactly the condition of humanity as it will be when He next catastrophically intervenes into the affairs of fallen humankind. The Lord’s “days of Lot” prophecy (Luke 17:28–30) says it will be business as usual, like it was when Lot and his family were removed from Sodom by the angels.

The Lord indicated that business and life in general itself were ongoing, even doing well at that time, while the subsurface society and culture in that twin-cities area were as wicked as when God intervened previously in the “days of Noah” (Luke 17:26-27).

This is what we who “watch,” as commanded by our Lord (Mark 13: 37 and Luke 21: 28), should expect the world around us to look like at the twinkling-of-an-eye moment when He will again intervene as He did in those earlier times.

One of my frustrations continues to be that the Christians who say we who hold to the clearly taught, pre-Trib view of Rapture are wrong and that we’re leading believers astray. These writers, preachers, teachers, and others most often imply, or even say outright, that all the troubles we see around us mean the following: Either the world—including all believers in Jesus Christ—is about to enter the Tribulation, or we’ve already entered it. Some believe we’re already engaged in World War III.

These aren’t looking for Jesus Christ to rescue believers before the Tribulation as Paul taught; they’re looking for chaos, calamity, and—to be frank—the Antichrist rather than for the True Christ.

The following article presents the view that the world is on the brink of Tribulation but offers no hope of Heaven’s rescue for the Christian.

We live at a time when millions upon millions of us feel deeply unsettled. The news is filled with constant headlines about war, political chaos, economic problems and major natural disasters. A lot of people feel like humanity’s story is building up to some sort of a crescendo, and they are not optimistic about what that will mean.

In fact, a new study conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia has discovered that nearly one-third of the people living in the United States and Canada actually believe that the world will end within their lifetimes.…

Of course, the world is not going to end any time soon.

But as global events spiral out of control, it will certainly feel like “the world is ending” to much of the population…

We really are living in apocalyptic times, and much more mayhem is in our future. (“Nearly One-Third of People Living in North America Believe The World Will End,” Tyler Durden, authored by Michael Snyder, March 13, 2026, Zerohedge)

Well…I guess one-third of people paying attention is a bit more than I thought–if the survey is correct. But one thing is sure: There is very little acknowledgment, as expressed in the article, of the need or hope of Heaven’s rescue, or even of a desire for Heaven to rescue us. This is exactly as it was in Sodom and Gomorrah and in Noah’s day, according to the Lord Jesus.

And Christian writers, preachers, and teachers who rail against the pre-Trib view by and large offer no hope of such rescue as promised by the Apostle Paul, who, again, wrote this to the Thessalonians, and also to us, these thousands of years later:

“But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. 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 Thessalonians 4:13-18).  

The chaos, the calamities, the unbelievable evil we see taking place offer nothing but fear and worry to those who are paying attention. But all this evil that threatens shouldn’t induce fear in those who know Christ as Savior and Lord. We’re not looking for Antichrist, or for the chaos and calamity that Beast is about to foist upon a world lost in sin and rejection of God’s Word.

We are looking for Jesus Christ and His 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” (Revelation 3:10).

Now, there is nothing but comfort in those magnificent words of promise given by the One who cannot lie.

Here is what we must share with those who want not chaos and calamity in their thoughts of the future, but comfort from the very heart of God:

“That if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and will believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:9-10).

—Terry

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Trusting God in Dark Times

Have you ever thought about the role God’s sovereignty plays in the fulfillment of Bible prophecy? Far too often we ignore this divine attribute as much too abstract or of having little to do with our daily lives when, in reality, it’s the basis of how we know the Lord is able to deliver on all His promises to us. Author and pastor Paul David Tripp put it like this in his book, New Morning Mercies:

I don’t know whether you have ever thought of this before, but God’s promises are only as good as the extent of his sovereignty. He can deliver what you need only in the places where he rules. If his rule is not firm and unchanging, his promises are not either.

Tripp then explained how the Lord exercised control over history leading up to Jesus’ birth. Through many centuries of turmoil, wars, and rebellion against Him, He orchestrated history so precisely that Christ fulfilled forty-eight specific prophecies related to His first appearing on Earth. God worked through a myriad of events and outcomes over a vast expanse of time so that upon His arrival, the Savior would fulfill all the Scriptures concerning His first appearance.

Several students of Bible prophecy have calculated that the first sixty-nine weeks of Daniel’s prophecy ended precisely on the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem just a week before His crucifixion (Daniel 9:24-27). So not only did he fulfill the words of Zechariah 9:9, He did so at the exact time that the Lord told His prophet Daniel it would happen. Only a sovereign and all-powerful God could accomplish such precision.

What’s the relevance for today? Despite the troubling news we read concerning the Middle East war, the warnings of impending economic disaster as a result of the growing oil crisis, and the political strife of our day, we rest assured that the Lord is still in the business of orchestrating events so that the result of all we see will in the end turn out exactly as He prophesied in His Word.

I have recently read many predictions of imminent economic disaster due to the war in the Middle East, and while they are troubling, I remind myself of two things. First, if not for the Lord’s restraining hand, we would already be in the midst of a great economic depression that many experts warned would soon happen a dozen years ago. Second, as He has done throughout history, God is still sovereignly orchestrating events to bring about all that He has promised us regarding the Rapture and to Israel concerning His restoration of a kingdom to them.

I also realize that many of the warnings of imminent catastrophe come from those who don’t believe the Rapture will happen before the Tribulation. As such, they warn us about Day of the Lord conditions without the assurance of 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 and Jesus’ promise of deliverance before the “sudden destruction” that will mark the beginning of God’s wrath upon the earth.

If you are like me, you remain a bit unsettled over the fact that Iran is still able to strike Israel with deadly missiles, attack oil and gas reserves through the region, and severely disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The political strife here in the U.S. also contributes to my uneasy feelings as I read accounts of the enormous theft of taxpayer funds with no one held accountable for it.

That’s again when Scripture, along with God’s sovereignty, brings relief to my troubling thoughts. God didn’t intend for us to find comfort in looking at this vile and violent world where everything seems out of control and about to erupt into further chaos. We rather find encouragement in Scripture with its amazing promises that pertain to us as New Testament saints. We know that our Lord is more than able to make good on His word because His sovereign power is so much greater than we can even begin to imagine.

As someone who has watched for the Rapture for a very long time, it’s easy for me to grow impatient at times and tell the Lord that “today would be a very good time for it to happen.” Thoughts of His sovereignty, however, remind me that His appearing and all the other prophesied events concerning the world and Israel will happen at the precise time the Father set long ago.

In the words below from Isaiah 46:9-10, God declares His sovereignty over history, assuring us that no matter how crazy and dark our day seems, He remains in total control of future events:

“I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose.’”

God has already decreed the future for this world. That’s a key reason for resisting the temptation to “fret” over wickedness that is rapidly growing around us (see Psalm 37:1-20). Furthermore, our relief also comes from the assurance that He’s more than able to do what He’s promised us and will soon take us home to the place He’s preparing for us.

Maranatha!

-Jonathan