A recent news item about certain polling data grasped my attention. I’m sure many who peruse www.raptureready.com’s news section had their curiosity piqued and read it as well.

After looking into the matters reported, I found the poll wasn’t as thorough as I would have liked–but it was fascinating nonetheless. Also, it was too one-sided in ethnic make-up. However, I give it enough credence to examine it here because I believe it revolves around a concern the Lord Jesus Christ expressed while teaching about conditions that will prevail at the end of the age.

A new survey finds that Americans are divided over whether they believe Jesus Christ will return by the year 2050.

Among respondents to the survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and Smithsonian Magazine, 41 percent said they expect Jesus’ Second Coming in the next forty years, while 46 percent said it probably or definitely won’t happen.

The poll suggests that 58 percent of white evangelicals believe Jesus will return by 2050, compared to only 32 percent of Catholics, and respondents with no college education were three times as likely as those with college degrees to expect Christ’s Second Coming in the next forty years. (“Many Americans Expect Jesus’ Return by 2050,” Associated Press/Israel News, 6/23/10).

To be honest, I was quite surprised that 58 percent of white evangelicals believe Christ will return by 2050. This disconnect in my mind comes from the fact that in looking for interest in Bible prophecy with in the church today (by this I mean, of course, born-again believers–see John 3:3), my colleagues and I find no evidence to support that percentage.

Perhaps I should speak just for myself, but if my colleagues are honest, based upon conversations we’ve had among ourselves, they will confess that the interest just isn’t there in those kinds of numbers.

So, a few cynical (I suppose) thoughts regarding the poll come to mind:

1) The poll is a complete “guesstimate”–even a prefabrication.
2) The poll is skewed because it was taken from among a limited group of believers thoroughly educated in Bible prophecy.
3) The poll reflects a flippancy that will agree that Christ could return within the next forty years because the possibility is far enough in the future that the respondents need not worry about changing their personal conduct.
4) My colleagues and I are wrong and the church–“white evangelicals,” in this case–is expecting the Lord’s return in majority numbers.

If the last point is true, then the fact that so many are looking for Christ is well hidden. I’m a blind guy, as many know, so I can’t see things all that well. But interest in Christ’s return–and in Bible prophecy in general, according to everything I hear–is confined to an extremely small number of folks in relationship to the tremendous number of people who claim the name of Christ.

Clicking through Christian TV networks (yes, we blind guys “watch” TV), I rarely come across a prophetic message. The majority of the viewing fare consists of the prosperity gospel or entertainment that is for the most part a rather poor knockoff of secular entertainment. The preachers who do present a sound gospel message and sound doctrine seldom-to-rarely speak on Bible prophecy. And they certainly don’t touch upon the pre-trib return of Christ in the Rapture.

When I’ve personally asked some of the preachers and teachers why they avoid presenting prophecy, they have said things like: “The people just don’t understand Revelation”; “The subject is just too scary to most people”; or ” We just concentrate on getting people the gospel so they will be saved.”

The honest such preachers and teachers say: “I just don’t know anything about prophecy. I’ve not studied it enough to preach on it.”

What a tragedy, a travesty, this is! There is a singular hope (Titus 2:13) that God’s people have in this swiftly degenerating age. Yet, their shepherds–the preachers and teachers, their suppliers of spiritual food–use every conceivable excuse for not telling Christians about their returning Lord.

Some accuse those of us whose mission we believe it is to concentrate on Bible prophecy in these times of doing so to the point that we ignore Christ’s love and the Bible’s life lessons for His people.

We in no way believe that prophecy should be taught exclusively. However, prophecy constitutes almost 30 percent of the whole Word of God, so the Heavenly Father obviously means for prophecy to be a generous part of the mix for His children’s spiritual sustenance. This is especially true in these days when the signals of Christ’s coming again are every direction in which one looks.

Bible prophecy is being marginalized by those who are supposed to shepherd their flocks, but who don’t want to study it and/or don’t want to risk scaring people out of the pews. This is because it is the feel-good and do-good, entertainment-oriented sermonettes that tickle itching ears and build many of the elaborate end-times edifices.

Understand that I recognize there are huge churches that hold to doctrinal truth and include God’s prophetic Word as part of feeding their attending flocks. This is not to castigate these wonderful pastors, teachers, and staffs. God bless them! But these are in the minority. The dearth of interest in Christ’s coming back in the Rapture, then in the Second Advent, demonstrates the lack of faith resident within Christ’s body at this crucial hour.

Jesus asked the following profoundly troubling question in that prophetic context: “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8b). The Lord had a somber message for God’s people who will be alive at His sudden, unannounced coming. I wrote the following as part of a chapter for an upcoming book that I believe gets across the gist of this “Nearing Midnight” commentary:

The indifference so prevalent within the church is, itself, an end-times signal, it seems. The Lord obviously spoke to the fact that God’s own children will in large part be indifferent to the prophetic signals. They will not be living as they should at the time of His coming for them, as He promised in John 14:1-3. As a matter of fact, He forewarned: “And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.” (Luke 21:34-36; from a chapter by Terry James in a book to be released in 2010)

I pray more born-again pastors, Bible teachers, and God’s children of this nation and the world will awaken en masse to the staggering implications of Christ’s Second Coming.

Do you ever read, watch, or hear news reports and say to yourself: “The world has gone crazy!” or something to that effect? Certainly, this seems to be a world going–or already gone–mad. The observation is worthy of in-depth investigation.

Looking in any direction across the landscape of human interaction produces undeniable evidence. This is a planet of people whose sanity is under assault by an unseen force. It is the same sin-sickness that infected the first recorded rebel, Lucifer the fallen one, who is so delusional that he thinks he can still defeat the God of heaven. Thus, I give the malady the designation the “Devil’s dementia.” Indeed, it has gone viral upon planet earth.

The supernaturally inflicted dementia has brought much of humanity to the point that mankind’s thinking has become reprobate. The word reprobate is defined as: morally depraved; unprincipled; bad. Reprobate thinking is rejected by God and beyond hope of salvation (apart from redemption found only in Jesus Christ). It is the kind of thinking with which Satan, the devil, now incessantly assaults God’s creation called man. Mankind is thus fatally infected, his mind only on evil continually, just as prophesied.

Jesus said it would be like in the days of Noah at the time of His Second Coming (Lk. 17:26-27). When we check those days, we find the following: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5).

Let us consider the spreading dementia that afflicts our nation and the world at this late hour in history. Analyzing the arenas of human endeavor and the upside-down thinking that pervades will quite possibly further give us a sense of where this generation stands on God’s prophetic timeline.

Religious Dementia
Religion, rather than acting as a comforting abode for the spirit as it is purported to do, more often inflames passions and ignites wars than soothes the savage beast within man. The most volatile religion of our time has at its very heart the demand that genocide be perpetrated upon God’s chosen people. Jihad is the term for “holy war” that inspires much of Islam. It is sheer insanity that demands that parents strap bombs to their sons and daughters to blow up others–this in the name of bringing into being peace on earth!

Christianity today more and more spotlights the madness of the hour. Many who say they are Christians have turned from the very reason for Christianity’s name–Jesus Christ and His death, burial, and resurrection as sacrifice so men, women, and children can be redeemed from sin. False teachers and preachers divert the minds and hearts of people to fables. It is an inward turning toward self-centeredness and away from reaching out to the lost of the world as Christ commissioned His followers to do.

In the name of Christ, Catholicism harbors a seemingly endless number of priests who are pedophiles, who prey on the innocent children who are supposed to be under their watch care. This is reprobate thinking and an assault on God–perversion of the worst sort.

The devil’s dementia is working within the Church today, through the wolves in sheep’s clothing, as condemned by Scripture:

“Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith” (2 Tim 3:8).

“They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate” (Titus 1:16).

Socio-economic Dementia
All one has to do to understand what is going on in bringing down the United States is to cogitate on the thoughts recently uttered by one of America’s avowed enemies. “Fidel Castro, Cuba’s former president, wrote in an essay that passage of the American healthcare overhaul is ‘a miracle’ and a major victory for Barack Obama’s presidency, but called it ‘really incredible’ that the U.S. took more than two centuries from its founding to approve health benefits for all” (“In the News,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 3/26/10, p. 1).

The American government and the present administration demonstrate beyond any doubt the dementia that affects U.S. leadership. These “leaders” demand that Americans learn to live within their means, yet the politicians run up tabs of trillions of dollars in the drive to convert the nation to European-style socialism at best–to a Marxist state at worst. The big tax-and-spenders have strapped and continue to strap future generations with debt that can never be repaid. Only God’s staying hand has prevented the complete implosion of the U.S. and world economies to this point.

It is madness, but if viewed through spiritually attuned senses, it’s madness that can be understood as defiantly following the reprobate thinking that opposes the God of heaven. With a considerable majority of U.S. citizenry opposing the massive spending spree, the majority party ignores the people’s wishes. Instead they tie to their insane fiscal scheme taxpayer-funded abortions and other anti-God legislation, which enables atrocities such as public schools outlawing Bibles in classrooms while distributing condoms and birth control pills to students.

The madness spreads and metastasizes. FOX News reported Thursday, March 25, 2010, that a mother was devastated that her fifteen-year-old daughter was transported to an abortion facility by a public school in Seattle, Washington, for an abortion. This was done because the mother had signed a consent form she thought was for the child’s medical safety, in case there was a medical emergency while she was at school. The school powers-that-be interpreted the consent form as meaning they had the right to abort the child’s baby. That the girl was pregnant is troubling enough, but the government-funded school taking such godless action demonstrates a reprobate mindset that would have in earlier generations been unfathomable.

FOX News reported the same day that a phenomenon known as the “flash mob” has come into being, whereby young people assemble on an Internet gathering site, organize, then physically take to the streets to vandalize and destroy merchandise within stores and damage other places. The report disclosed that an activity known as “catch and wretch” is the recreational activity of a growing number of children as young as nine years old. They pick out a victim (sometimes the elderly), as would a pack of wolves, then they beat them and do other dastardly things. Lawlessness is the result of the devil’s dementia, of which Antichrist will one day be the chief proponent.

Geopolitical Dementia Nowhere is the upside-down thinking that is the devil’s dementia more evident, from the biblically prophetic perspective, than in the arena of geopolitics. Again, on FOX–“FOX and Friends,” Friday, March 26, 2010–I heard contributor Geraldo Rivera accuse Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being the cause of Middle East tensions. He implied that they were the roadblock to peace in the region because they consistently perpetrated acts against the impoverished Palestinian people.

Rivera had just returned from the region, and, in my view, painted Netanyahu as a tyrant, whose Likkud party wanted only to stir the boiling pot that is the Middle East, and was an obstacle to peace. He praised the Obama administration as the sane influence, and said the Israeli government should be pressured to give in to the two-state solution and the division of Jerusalem.

The devil’s dementia–the reprobate, woolly-mindedness–couldn’t be more exposed than through Rivera’s diatribe. Despite the fact that Israel’s enemies, since its reestablishment as a nation in 1948, have been blood-vowed to wipe the Jewish state from off the earth, Rivera and his ilk still spew with a straight face that Israel is the troublemaker.

The history is plain for anyone with a sound mind to understand. Gamel Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian tyrant, attacked Israel with a huge coalition of Arab states in 1956, and again in 1967. Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s leader, accompanied by another huge contingent of Arab states, assaulted Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973. The objective in all the wars initiated by the anti-Israel forces was to wipe the nation off the map. The Arab enemies of Israel still hold to the eradication of Israel as their focus of hatred. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has at every opportunity declared that he wants to scour the Jewish State from the earth; he even wants to bring on Armageddon so the 12th Imam can emerge from the ashes to institute Allah’s glorious reign upon earth.

And the world’s diplomats and media call Israel the culprit! The devil’s dementia has gone viral, and Jesus Christ is the only cure.