Foreshadowing  the Mark :: By Terry James

If there is one element of the so-called Covid-19 pandemic that presages Tribulation era Bible prophecy, it is the hue and cry, the over-the-top clamor for vaccination compliance. I say so-called pandemic, because statistics have long since documented that this virus nowhere near reaches the level of previous true pandemics.

Again, I address the topic of the virus with the understanding that it is serious. All such infections are serious and must be dealt with care and common sense. However, it is the common sense aspect that is missing in this so-called pandemic. It is a manufactured pandemic with a biblically prophetic attachment that should not be missed by the spiritually-attuned believer.

Have you ever heard such a level of insistence that every individual on earth do something as is now being demanded with regard to taking the COVID-19 vaccines? There is nothing like it in my memory, and I’m an old guy to be sure.

Governments and corporations are offering money for those who will take the vaccines. My own state government –the government of one of America’s deepest red states—is, I understand, offering to pay some state employees nearly $150 each to take the vaccine. (My tax money, I might add.)

People are offered everything from free ice cream and dinners at restaurants to vacations, if they will but receive the jab, as the compliance enforcers demand. More and more businesses and governments are leaning toward developing vaccine passports of sort that will allow freedoms that were formerly…well… free, before COVID-19.

The entire continent of Australia seems to want all within its governmental reach to stay totally sequestered for the foreseeable future.

SYDNEY – Almost half of Australia’s population has been placed under lockdown as authorities face Covid-19 clusters in multiple cities across the country for the first time since the initial outbreak last year…

The measures, including parts of regional Queensland, left more than 40 per cent of Australia’s 25.7 million residents under stay-home orders…

In the most populous state of New South Wales, the premier Gladys Berejiklian said further sudden lockdowns would be needed until vaccination rates increase.

“Until at least 80 per cent of our adult population is vaccinated, we can’t have a conversation about what COVID normal looks like,” she said…(Almost half of Aussie population under lockdown, by Jonathan Pearlman, Strait Times, June 30, 2021)

Alarmists within the controlling medical community are now warning of the Delta variant, which is said to be “much more contagious” than the previous COVID-19 type. This further seems to validate those who have consistently believed that the vaccine was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The vaccine pushers will not stop with one or two jabs. They will insist on basically untested and not officially approved inoculations for as far into the future as we can project.

Many who look critically at this unprecedented drive to make all on earth compliant with vaccine acceptance believe it is all setting  up worldwide embrace of the marks and numbering system of Revelation 13: 16-18.—i.e., it is all a blueprint for control of the populations on earth during the time of Antichrist’s rule.

The forces behind the vaccine push are targeting the reluctant to take the jabs with threatening insinuation. In America, this obloquy is becoming more blatant.

Equity futures are in the red Wednesday morning as Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warnings about the supposedly “dire threat” posed by the Delta variant continue to be dramatically amplified by the American media…

On Wednesday, Bloomberg published the latest in a series of stories effectively re-stating the same facts: the vaccination rate in a handful of deep-red states has substantially lagged the rate in the rest of the country. The lead-in for Wednesday’s story was the fact that the gap between the most- and least-vaccinated states has continued to widen…(“Panic Porn Dressed Up As Science” – Exposing The Truth About The Delta Variant by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge)

Increasingly, those who hold to true science are reporting the overblown panic regarding the variants of COVID-19. On June 18, for example, Public Health England published its 16th report on “SARS-CoV-19 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England”.

The report showed that the Delta variant has a 0.1% case fatality rate (CFR) out of 31,132 Delta sequence infections confirmed by investigators. That is, according to those printing the report, the same rate as the flu and is much lower than the CFR for the ancestral strain or any of the other variants.

And the ZeroHedge article said the following: the CFR is always higher than the infection fatality rate (IFR), because many of the mildest and asymptomatic infections go undocumented, while the confirmed cases tend to have a bias toward those who are more evidently symptomatic.

In other words, Delta is literally the flu with a CFR identical to it. This is exactly what every respiratory pandemic has done through history: morphed into more transmissible and less virulent form that forces the other mutations out since you get that one. Nothing about masks, lockdowns, or experimental shots did this. To the extent this really is more transmissible, it’s going to be less deadly, as is the case with the common cold.

The Vatican is weighing in on the demand that all the world be vaccinated. Rapture Ready News for June 3 previews the story in its daily list of most relevant news items.

Vatican seeks all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy
The Vatican’s bioethics academy and the World Medical Association on Friday called for an all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and correct the “myths and disinformation” that are slowing the fight against the coronavirus. They demanded that “all relevant stakeholders exhaust all efforts to…confront vaccine hesitancy by sending a clear message about the safety and necessity of vaccines and counteracting vaccine myths and disinformation.” (Ibid)

Control is the operative term in consideration of the drive toward vaccination, the likes of which has never been seen, planet-wide. Whether the vaccines are a justifiable means of controlling the virus or its variants is open to considerable conjecture. Time will perhaps tell if they are what they are claimed by CDC and others to be. –Or whether they are a means of bringing down populations –a claim that, while I don’t wholeheartedly accept, should, in my view, be granted some degree of credence. The stated goal of some globalists is to bring the world’s population down to under 500 million people, as engraved on the so-called Georgia Guidestone.

Control is what Antichrist will demand when instituting his 666 marks-and-numbering system. It seems that a considerable percentage of the world’s population is willingly susceptible (compliant) in eagerly taking a shot upon demand by those who want to rule rather than govern in most cases–at least from my perspective.

One writer, after citing numerous top experts’ opinions that masks don’t work, says the following, in part:

When I see people walking outside, often alone with no one anywhere near them, wearing a mask, my primary reactions are disappointment and sadness.

I am disappointed because I expected better from my fellow Americans. I never thought most Americans would be governed by irrational fears and unquestioning obedience to authority. I have come to realize that I had a somewhat romanticized view of my countrymen.

Had you told me a year ago that nearly every American in nearly every metropolitan area would cover their faces for over a year because one man, one political party, and the media told them to, I would have responded that you underestimate the strength of the American character…

People say they “follow the science.” They rarely do. They follow the scientists the media tell them to follow. (Mask-Wearing Represents Fear and Blind Obedience, Not Science by Dennis Prager, WorldNetDaily)

A friend who emails me with news updates from time to time, whose name is, ironically, Mark, wrote the following in summation of his concerns for the vaccine militancy.

“What I’m driving at is that it all makes such good sense that it is going to be difficult to refute the common sense of it.  And this will be the logic used to get the global population in line. It is all a precursor (I believe) to condition the world (and the United States especially) to taking the mark of the beast however it is administered.”

If you know Jesus Christ for salvation, according to Romans 10: 9-10, you will never have to worry about taking Antichrist’s mark. The current vaccinations for COVID, or for any other disease, is not that prophesied mark. It will come on the scene during the Tribulation, after the Rapture of the Church.

Whether you choose to take the vaccine or choose to resist taking it, the process, whether beneficial or detrimental in terms of human health, itself is, without question in my mind, part of a control process being implemented by the powers and principalities of  Ephesians 6: 12.

A Muslim Antichrist? :: By Terry James

Before Donald J. Trump, the Muslim world was on the rise, with ISIS (ISIL, as President Obama would have it) threatening to take over most of the Middle East. While Trump was in the White House, it was increasingly apparent that the forces of Islam were scattering, to an extent. There was even a move toward ancient enemies beginning to put aside some differences in order to seek at least a modicum of peace with Israel.

As a matter of fact, there were fears among some of those knowledgeable about Bible prophecy that the so-called Abrahamic Accords involving Israel and the Islamic world would bring about cursing for the effort—thus because of Joel 3:2, in which the prophet foretold that all nations of the world will be brought to the Valley of Jehoshaphat because of the dividing of God’s land.

I’ve read numerous opinions that state the writers believe Donald Trump lost the presidency because he supported the Abrahamic Accords effort, which they viewed as, like all other peace efforts, offering God’s land for promises of peace.

Now, with the Biden administration and a return to business as usual (as carried out by the Obama administration,) Islam is on the grow again. They are once again flexing their muscles, atrophied because of Trump’s strong hand during his years as president.

All of that is to say that writers in Bible prophecy who were, during the Obama years, making inroads with their “Antichrist will be a Muslim” predictions, and lost audience as the Muslim world retracted during the Trump years, are now again in vogue. Some Middle East observers are seeing a resurgence in forces that made up ISIS and the other terrorist organizations. This means to some observers that the Muslim world is on track again to bring the Dajjal (Antichrist) to power.

Islamic scholars who are Muslim themselves are in disagreement with each other in a number of critical ways—so much so that there continue to be deep divisions of intramural ideological pyrotechnics that threaten bloody conflicts. Those differences and what they portend will have to be considered in another essay because of space limitations. Suffice it to say that the two major branches of Islam, Sunni and Shiite, diverge in eschatology in profoundly different ways.

Dr. David Reagan of Lamb & Lion Ministries, however, writes about the major signs generally covered in the eschatological belief system of Islam according to the Hadith (any of the various collections of the words, actions, and habits of the prophet Mohammad during his lifetime):

The major signs pointing to “the Hour” are all critical events that are part of the end-time sequence of events, beginning with the appearance of the Antichrist. Muslim scholars generally don’t try to present a strict chronological order of what is going to ultimately transpire, but the order presented below is representative:

  1. The appearance of the Antichrist, called the Dajjal.
  2. The rising of the Islamic Messiah, called the Mahdi.
  3. The Return of Jesus.
  4. The Reign of Jesus.
  5. The Day of Resurrection, called “The Hour.”
  6. The Day of Judgment.

There are many other end-time events mentioned in the Hadith, but these are the most important:

The Return of Jesus.

It is not clear at what point in the career of the Mahdi Jesus will return. Some believe it will be as soon as the Mahdi is able to organize his Muslim army to oppose the Dajjal’s Jewish army. Jesus will return to the Mount of Olives and then head to Damascus where he will meet up with the Mahdi and submit himself to him as a subordinate. At some point in the Mahdi’s wars Jesus himself will be the one who will kill the Dajjal and see to the annihilation of the Jews. Jesus will then serve as an Islamic evangelist, proclaiming Islam as the one and only true religion, and he will establish Islamic Shari’ah law throughout the entire earth. (“The Muslim Antichrist Theory,” Lamb & Lion, Dr. David Reagan, https://christinprophecy.org/articles/the-muslim-antichrist-theory)

It isn’t too hard to understand how such an evil, mixed-up view as presented by Islam could lead those not spiritually attuned to the conclusion that the “man of sin” will be a Muslim. But this is not what God’s Word says. It is clear from Daniel 9:26–27 that this “son of perdition” will come out of the people who, in AD 70, destroyed the city and the sanctuary—i.e., Jerusalem and the Temple atop Mount Moriah.

Nonetheless, I heard a preacher on his program, with all the sincerity he could muster, tell of the book he has written proving Antichrist will be a Muslim. He seemed, otherwise, a soundly grounded pastor of a local church—i.e., he presented the gospel and other doctrine from a true, biblical perspective, best I could tell.

The people who destroyed the city and the sanctuary in AD 70 were Romans , dear pastor. They were not from Islam, which didn’t even exist until hundreds of years later.

Deep studies into the matters involving who this beast of Revelation 13 will be show that he will come from a revived form of the Roman Empire. That can be determined, most scholars I trust teach, through looking into the following prophecy:

And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast. These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. (Revelation 17:10–14)