Today’s article came about as a most profound heavenly influence. Because it involves matters deeply personal in terms of family relationships, I must include details in an oblique way.

In beginning the search for a subject to address, I settled on the topic you see above: “Satan’s Wrath, God’s Wrath.” My thought was to contrast the two kinds of anger and their methods of imposition upon humanity.

No sooner had I settled on how to begin, the heavenly influence I mentioned made it clear why I was prompted to choose the topic I had already chosen.

A message from a family member that was disturbing immediately sent me into the position of prayer to address the Father about the matter at hand. By the time my prayer was finished, the impression that I received was forthcoming. I knew instantly that the assault causing the problem was from our ever-present enemy; Satan and his minions were at work.

The old serpent is working his nefarious evil to circumvent God’s protection over me, personally. Satan, for God’s own reasons, can’t directly get at me for the moment, so he is attacking those I love with all my heart.

I’m not one who claims to hear the literal voice of God or have constant, ecstatic experiences or heavenly interventions. As a matter of fact, I think I’m too much the other way. I’ve expressed on many occasions that the Good Friday 2011 clinical death I experienced after a widow-maker heart attack and the subsequent visit to the heavenly environs was something that went against my stodgy, Baptist sensibility.

But, it is a flawed sensibility, I now know. The Lord does indeed intervene—sometimes in dramatic, even spectacular, ways. I’m still wary—I believe properly so—about claims of supernatural experiences, but God does intervene.

He did so in the genesis of this commentary, as I’ve said.

The thrust of this article was and is to point out the evil within Satan’s wrath and the absolute purity and goodness of God’s wrath. 

As many who read these articles know, I believe we’ve been witnessing, through the political goings-on in America before and after the 2016 presidential elections, Satan’s wrath. The old serpent’s plans to build the platform for his so-called New World Order have been disrupted. The installing of a man in the office of president who believes in national borders and sticking to constitutional principles has taken Satan off his game plan.

The result is infectious rage. It has metastasized within the US and world populations to great extent, driving those who mostly oppose godly principles of personal and governmental conduct into a reprobate mindset. They call good evil, and evil good. Satan’s wrath is thus manifest for all to observe.

It is directed at all who oppose his desire to completely do away with anything godly. This is why anti-Semitism is again underway and growing. It will reach levels that even will exceed Hitler’s hatred for God’s chosen people.

Satan’s wrath is why hatred against Christians is progressing geometrically. The following news item illustrates:

Shortly before President Trump signed phase one of the historic trade deal with China, a Chinese pastor described the fear and intimidation believers are enduring under the Communist government.

“The Chinese government has now placed severe restrictions and policies on the house churches, asking neighbors to spy on one another, pressuring school teachers and college professors to betray and sign a statement to denounce their own faith as well to do the same to students,” Pastor Jean Zhu said.

Zhu described the Chinese government’s alarming actions as Christian persecution has continued to spread around the world…

Some 260 million Christians have been living in areas of high persecution — that’s one in eight believers worldwide — an increase of 10 percent compared to last year, according to the watchdog group Open Doors USA’s 2020 World Watch List.

“The drivers of persecution are still very significantly entrenched. Islamic extremism is spreading in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia,” David Curry, the president and CEO of Open Doors USA, told Fox News. “Then you add this rise of surveillance. Every year, Open Doors USA, a bipartisan grassroots organization, has released a list of the 50 most dangerous countries for Christians. North Korea topped the list for the 19th year in a row, but China became the focus this year because of its forced labor camps and oppression of Uighur Muslims that’s expected to spread and worsen. (Caleb Parke, “Christians see ‘alarming’ trend worldwide as China builds ‘blueprint of persecution’,” Fox News, January 18, 2020)

Satan’s rage is also seen in every direction in America one looks. Businesses are boycotted and have lawsuits filed against them because of “hate crimes”—for example, bakeries that refuse to prepare wedding cakes displaying that the marriage is same-sex suffer public obloquy. Restaurants are sued because their owners support biblical precepts when it comes to homosexuality or right-to-life issues contrary to abortion activists’ demands. The anti-Christian forces display, with increasing vigor, Satan’s hatred and wrath.

God’s Word warns of that rage and wrath:

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

“Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:12–13).

Satan’s wrath sits heavily upon humanity because he wants to destroy God’s creation called mankind. His wrath is steeped totally in hatred. God’s wrath, by contrast, is the ultimate expression of His absolute love for mankind.

He so loved us that He poured out His wrath on His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. He did so while Jesus hung on that old, rugged cross and took on all the past, present, and future sin of the world. God did this so that anyone who accepts Christ’s substitutionary, sin-death sacrifice as His grace gift for salvation will be saved—once and forever.

God—Jesus Christ, Himself—will one eternal day do away with sin and rebellion forever at the “Great White Throne,” where God’s mighty judgment and wrath will express His perfect love. There will be no more sin and death—forever.

He has promised that ultimate expression of His love through His Holy Word. John wrote the following:

“And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son” (Revelation 21:5-7).

The state of the economic condition of America and the world is often the subject of conversation in and around my office environs. One of our financial “experts,” whose name you would recognize, consistently voices our collective amazement. The comment goes something like: “The economy being in this building bubble for so long, without a massive correction, is unprecedented.”

We all agree that is true, and that the fact has to go far beyond the natural world of fiscal reality. The economy is propped up, we conjecture, held up by supernatural rather than natural forces.

By this, we who are in our ”conflab” sessions (yes, I know the word is confab, not conflab) mean we believe the holdup of the crash that is inevitable, according to all that is part of reality, has some heavenly determined purpose.

Again, I wrote of this as far back as 2010. I wrote that I was convinced–and remain so—that neither the United States nor the world would experience a crash of catastrophic dimension, at least not during this dispensation—the dispensation of grace (Church Age).

Those who emailed during 2010–2011 expressed that some in secular media as well as high-profile prophecy teachers were predicting any-day financial collapse. We would one morning awaken to a world like in that of the Dark Ages, economically speaking, the emailers feared.

My series at the time, “Scanning a Fearful Future,” involved ten articles on Rapture Ready that painted a different picture. I believe I was impressed by the Holy Spirit that such a collapse was not going to occur—at least not at that time.

I’m still impressed that such a dire situation is not in the offing—not yet, at least.

A recent opinion piece shed some light on the matters I believe are involved in consideration of the economy and biblical perspective. The article sets the stage for prophetic eventuality.

Financial writer and book author John Rubino sees the world careening toward a debt reset at an increasing pace.

Rubino explains, “The coming monetary reset and what that means for gold and what that means for the rest of the global financial system, you don’t need a war to bring that about because we are making enough financial mistakes that will get us there in no time flat now without geopolitical turmoil….”

“If you add a big war in the Middle East into the equation, then anything can happen. A scenario right now that is very, very feasible is we start shooting in the Middle East and Russia and China is on the other side of this in one way or another. They help Iran, and we have our allies helping us, and we start using these next generation weapons that are breathtakingly powerful. Nobody has any idea what’s going to happen when we start throwing these things at each other…. Oil spikes to $100—$150 per barrel, and that tips the already extremely fragile global financial system over the edge. So, we get the ‘Greater Depression’ or the monetary reset or a hyperinflation or whatever we get sooner rather than later. It’s a disaster for everybody when it happens that way.” (Tyler Durden, “The End Stage Has Begun,” Rubino Warns “We’re Past The Point Of No Return” Zero Hedge, Rapture Ready News, January 10, 2020)

The writer is correct. Such a scenario—or scenarios—would, it seems, bring American and world economies into an era that would likely eclipse, in disastrous ramifications, the Great Depression of the 1930s.

World debt is at an astronomical high—one absolutely unfathomable back in 2010–-2011, when I wrote ”Scanning a Fearful Future.” The tremendous fiscal gravity should have long ago brought the great adjustment the writer claims as necessary and inevitable.

In that series, I explained why I believe that crash, that great “reset,” won’t happen during this dispensation. For America and the world to experience a total economic collapse—or even a collapse of tremendous, if not catastrophic, proportion—would mean the world situation would take years, if not decades, to recover. That is, the world would not be anything like Jesus, Himself, prophesied for the time of His next catastrophic intervention into the affairs of fallen mankind.

The Lord said that when He next intervenes, there would be buying, selling, marrying, giving in marriage, building, and planting—i.e., business would be going along just fine, like in the days of Lot, when Sodom was perking right along when the fire and brimstone began to fall.

As a matter of fact, I am convinced the Lord was prophesying that a great, economic boom will be in place when He next intervenes. A great, economic boom is what the economic experts are telling us we are having at present. The Dow Jones Industrials went over 29,000 points on Friday, January 10—something not thought anywhere near likely before the Trump presidency.

Jesus, in giving the “days of Lot” prophecy, wasn’t talking about the time of His Second Advent as given in Revelation 19:11. At that time, two-thirds to three-fourths of mankind will have been killed through the twenty-one specific judgments of God’s wrath upon a rebellious world. It will not be business as usual at that terrible time in human history

“So what!?” you say. “So what if the world collapses, then takes all that time to recover? The Rapture could be that far off in the future.”

That, of course, is possible. We can’t name the timing of that blessed hope’s intervention. But, we are told to determine the times and seasons—the general time frame of that great event. We are told to “look up and lift our heads” when we “see all these things begin to come to pass.”

What things? What are we to be looking for that will tip us off as to the nearness to “our redemption drawing near”?

“Convergence” is the word we hear most often in prophetic terms. At least, it is the term we who are of the pre-Trib view of the Rapture use. It means the coming together of all the signs Jesus and the prophets gave in the Olivet Discourse and throughout God’s Word, signals that indicate we’re at the very end of this dispensation and near the beginning of the Tribulation, the last seven years of human history before Christ’s Second Coming. We are seeing these many signals proliferating on a daily basis!

Jesus forewarned that judgment would begin falling the very day He is next revealed. That will be when the whole world will know something of unprecedented, world-shaking import has occurred. That will be the moment when Jesus will say “Come up here!”

All believers will vanish from this judgment-bound planet and appear with their Lord and Bridegroom.

The collapse is coming. But first, I believe, so will the Lord Jesus Christ.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.