Bible Prophecy’s Great Purpose :: By Terry James

One of the falsest and most cutting accusations launched at the belief that the Bible teaches that people can’t lose their salvation when they’re truly born again (John 3:3) is: “If you believe once saved, always saved, you’re saying people can live any way they want without fear of punishment.” Or so the line of condemning criticism goes.

The absolute assurance of eternal security, of course, engenders no such thought within the mind truly regenerated by the saving power of Jesus Christ. The Bible teaches that the Lord convicts His children in their spirits and that habitual, unrepented-of sin will result in severe penalties—even physical death in some cases. The Heavenly Father’s patience is longsuffering, but it is not infinite.

A child of God cannot sin without severe repercussions if repentance isn’t forthcoming.

But that person will never be kicked out of God’s family. Never. Here is God’s own promise in that regard, given through Paul the apostle:

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

A kindred accusation is thrown at those who believe in the pre-Trib view of Bible prophecy, which, of course, is the one we at Rapture Ready and the Prophecy Line blog believe. It is the view that Jesus Christ will call all who are born again to Himself before the Tribulation (the last seven years of history leading to the Second Advent; see Revelation 19:11).

The angry diatribe against the pre-Trib Rapture view—by even genuine Christians in many cases—usually goes something like this: “People like you, who believe that the Lord is going to rapture them before the Tribulation, think you can live however you want, because you think and teach falsely that you’re going to be rescued before God’s judgment and wrath fall, no matter what.”

Non-Christian accusers who castigate those of us who hold the pre-Trib Rapture view have their own version. It goes something like: “Christians who believe like that don’t care anything about making the world better. You even hope for things to get worse and worse. You wish for earthquakes, famines, pestilence, war in the Middle East, and for Armageddon to hurry up and get here so you will go to your pie in the sky and watch the rest of us get ours.”

Although the first criticism is absolutely not true, I have to admit that, regarding the second, too often I’ve sensed—even heard—such sentiments from some who believe in the pre-Trib Rapture. And it is entirely the wrong attitude for the Christian to hold. There are no excuses for wanting the Christ-rejecting world of non-believers to receive God’s judgment and wrath. It is only by His unfathomable grace that every one of us isn’t headed into that time of unprecedented horror.

No matter how—to use Lot’s King James Version word—“vexed” we become by the debauched, debased actions of the lost world around us, our job as Christ’s children—His representatives here on earth—is of a completely different nature than wanting to see them “get what’s coming” to them. The changed nature produced by being born again should make us do just the opposite of wanting them, in our vexation, to get what we see as coming to them.

The Christian whose spirit is attuned to the Holy Spirit’s desire for the lost doesn’t want to see them “get what’s coming to them” either during the Tribulation or upon death. Rather, we want to do all within our power to keep them from having to go through the time of God’s judgment and wrath.

Like God Himself, we shouldn’t be willing for anyone to perish, but we should want everyone to come to repentance. That’s what Christ’s Great Commission to His disciples before He ascended to sit at the Father’s right hand is all about, you see. That’s what God’s love—love that those who have Christ indwelling them possess—is all about. (Read Matthew 28:18–20.)

In the same vein, that’s what Bible prophecy is all about. Prophecy given in God’s Word has purpose—profound purpose. It has at its center the commission from the Lord to warn of God’s judgment and wrath that will come upon all who oppose Him. It isn’t the hatred of God for the lost people of this fallen planet that drives prophecy. It is the love of God that powers His prophetic Word. It must be the Christian’s desire, therefore, to study Bible prophecy and put forth those warnings out of a spirit of God’s love, not through an anger-filled abhorrence of those who are lost.

Christians who do study prophecy—and they seem to be few these days, I’m sad to have to say—are often heard wondering about when Christ will call the Church (born-again believers) in the Rapture. Everything seems so ripe for Him to pluck His people from this sin-darkened sphere.

Nothing and no one can change God’s timing for His next catastrophic intervention into Earth’s history. It will happen exactly on time, as He has determined since before the foundation of this world. However, as believers, we might look to ourselves for the Lord’s—often in our view—delay in calling us, as outlined in 1 Corinthians 15:51–55 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18.

Again, the Apostle Peter gave the heart of the reason Christ hasn’t yet raptured His Church:

“The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

The purpose of Bible prophecy is to show the love of God to a lost and otherwise doomed world. God isn’t willing for anyone to die in their sins, but He wants everyone to accept Jesus Christ as the one and only sacrifice for sin that God will accept.

The Lord is “longsuffering.” The reason, I’m convinced, that the Lord seems so “slack” to many in His coming is because those same people have neglected their duty to share the love of God with the lost—the lost whom God loves so very much that He sent His only begotten Son so they would not perish.

It is well past the time for God’s people to invest in getting the message of the love of God to those who otherwise won’t hear the warning of deadly things soon to befall this Christ-rejecting planet. Considering these times that are so dramatically signaling the coming Tribulation, Bible prophecy can and must be used as a productive tool for evangelism.

Here We Go Again –Doomsdayer Déjà vu :: By Terry James

As is readily apparent every day, the Trump haters are back in full “derangement syndrome” mode. This delusion includes that embraced by the so-called scientists who give us the Doomsday Clock.

These doomsdayers have, as of the January 20, 2025, installment of the Donald J. Trump presidency, begun the second hand of their Doomsday Clock clicking forward, setting it at 89 seconds until midnight.

Midnight, in their terms, is when the world will come to its end in a gigantic nuclear catastrophe. They tell us this is the closest the world has come to that midnight cataclysm.

So, as that famous New York Yankee philosopher Yogi Berra put it: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

In February 2017, just days after Trump 45 took office, we posted my following commentary.

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Doomsdayers’ Diatribe

Six days into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the humanistic gurus of the community known as the “atomic scientists” raised a ruckus. They lamented that we are within two and a half minutes of nuclear midnight. This is supposed to mean that global catastrophe is closer, perhaps, than it has ever been.

The atomic scientists’ perception of the unthinking bumbling—or perhaps deliberate evil—of the new president makes the Doomsday Clock time-setters nervous indeed.

Their joint declaration states:

Both his statements and his actions as president-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways. He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts. And his nominees to head the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science.

I have written in these commentaries for many months that the globalists’ key rallying point for trying to bring about the new world order they seek has been global warming. It is now called “climate change.” The Luciferian rant is ratcheting up in every aspect of geopolitical atmospherics. However, we can expect, I have absolutely no doubt, an even more massive uptick in the assault. Climate change will be the spear tip of the campaign against God’s order of things as we move deeper into this administration.

The scientists in question collectively issued the accusation—highly disturbing, in their view—that Trump, during the presidential campaign, talked about the need to increase and upgrade nuclear weapons capability. At the same time, they ranted that he spoke against their and the general scientific community’s overwhelming consensus that climate change poses a threat beyond any other to the well-being of the planet.

All the while, they’ve said nothing of former President Obama’s trying to anger Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the last months of the Obama administration – a thing that gave Putin fodder to proclaim the need to further increase the Russian nuclear arsenal.

Like in every other instance of hypocritical treatment by media and the humanistic, scientific community, Obama gets a pass while their collective ire descends full force on the one who defeated them in the American electoral process.

They ignored that international relations have deteriorated dangerously during the Obama years; rather, they noted fawningly that the former president in 2010 called for a nuclear-free world.

At the same time, they pointed out angrily their convoluted and quasi-accurate assessment that Trump suggested South Korea and Japan might consider developing nuclear weapons since North Korea and even China represent growing threats. They berated Trump and his six-day-old administration for having no “firm plans” to extend the controversial “Iran nuclear deal.”

The doomsdayers further castigated Trump and laid out their great fear his winning the American presidency has wrought:

The political situation in the United States is of particular concern. The Trump transition team has put forward candidates for cabinet-level positions (especially at the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department) who foreshadow the possibility that the new administration will be openly hostile to progress toward even the most modest efforts to avert catastrophic climate disruption.

Please believe me. This is not the last we will hear of the climate-change madness.

Those of the Million Woman March and the “if-it-feels-good-do-it” crowd lost their political fast-track to succeeding they were previously on. These, as we have witnessed, are furious to the point of displaying mental instability. But the globalist elite of this world, working to bring in Antichrist’s regime—even if unknowingly—are exceedingly angrier and more determined that this president will be removed by hook or crook.

We already hear the volume increase on talk of impeaching him. There are more than mere hints that a coup d’état is in the wishful thinking of the angriest of the nation’s power brokers.

It does not, nor should it, surprise that this level of rebellion is raising its ugly, serpent-like head. We only have to go to the great book of Revelation to understand the extremes to which fallen man will go when they don’t get their way.

There will be a rebellion of the most horrific magnitude ever at the end of the Millennium—the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ. This uprising will occur, we are told through prophecy, after the rule of the only perfect ruler in all of human history.

And this gets us back to the Doomsday Clock scientists’ warning about Trump causing the destruction of the earth because of his declaring as lunacy their climate-change mantra. Well, maybe it’s I—not Trump—who call it lunacy, but he adamantly opposes it, and them, nonetheless.

The fact that Revelation 20:7-9 tells us there will be this last, satanically led rebellion in an attempt to dethrone the Creator of all things lets us know there will still be a planet Earth despite President Donald Trump and even seven years of Tribulation.

Also, it proves, in my estimation, the lunacy of the doomsdayers’ diatribe.

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That was all part of Trump’s election in 2017. Yep, Yogi! It’s déjà vu all over again!

—Terry