We continue with my series first posted in 2007. Understand that this is a scenario, thus is postulation, but that based upon Bible prophecy truth.

We live in the last time. This is undeniable, if we accept God’s Word. It is indisputable to anyone who holds the Bible as truth. Proof is found right here:

“Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time” (1 John 2:18).

So, this is the end of days, for sure. At least, that’s how I read the apostle John’s words. It was already the end of days at the time he wrote his epistles and the Revelation. I’m aware some don’t believe the same John wrote both. I profoundly disagree. And there are those who believe the reference here is to the “spirit of Antichrist,” not to “Antichrist,” as the Beast of Revelation 13. I profoundly disagree with that assessment, too. John, here, is writing about BOTH the spirit of Antichrist and a specific man who will come on the scene at some point. He will both come posing as (the counterfeit of) Jesus Christ, and as against all that is Christian. He will be the worst man who has ever walked the surface of this fallen planet.

We will begin to postulate how this Beast might come to power while we continue with our hypothetical, though well-studied and scripturally-based, consideration of things that will quite possibly happen from this point in time forward.

Following the rapture of all born-again believers, the leadership of Israel will look around to find its world support gone with the disappearance of millions of people. All who truly believe Israel has a God-given right to the land, based upon passages in Genesis, will be missing. America will be in total turmoil and desperately searching for ways to regain its national equilibrium. This can only be accomplished by reestablishing a government that will provide structure for restoring order. The European Union, somewhat shaken, nonetheless will remain solid. All civilized parts of the Western world will rush to the EU for help in trying to regain and/or preserve things lost in the greatest catastrophe in recorded human history.

The Islamists of the Middle East, who have for centuries held the people under their despotic thumbs, will not be cowered by the disappearances—even of all of their young children. Rather, they will be emboldened to look toward Israel and see an Allah-sent opportunity to once-and-for-all scour the Jew from the face of what they consider to be their land. This rumor of war will not escape Israel’s leadership.

While the Arab-Islamic forces gather in council of war, the military leadership of Israel will be given the top spot in doing whatever is necessary to ensure the nation’s continued existence. The liberals and woolly-minded who harbor delusional thoughts that peace is primary will be pushed to the margins. Israel must survive.

Gamel Abdel Nasser will be remembered in the councils of both Israel and its enemies who spawned that Egyptian warlord. Nasser gathered the combined forces of Arab nations and attacked Israel in 1956. He was in the process of again doing so in 1967, when the Israeli Defense Force pre-empted the Egyptian dictator’s plans and thoroughly defeated that collective foe. The people who declare they will never again sit still while forces gather to destroy the nation will now be in charge in Israel. Dramatic action is called for; it will be taken.

Leadership of the major Mideast terrorist organizations will gather at the one place they’re all headquartered—the oldest inhabited city on earth, Damascus, Syria. Their drumbeat of blood-vowed hatred will make the inevitable obvious to the Israeli hawks–most all within Israeli leadership. They will decide to cut off the heads of the hydra-headed serpent in one mighty blow. That blow will be delivered by the nuclear sword:

“The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap” (Isaiah 17:1).

One Israeli jet with a fifteen-kiloton bomb will cut off the heads, bringing much of Islam into confusion and immense rage. Then, there will be jihad of the most nightmarish sort. But preparation for such jihad will take time. Much of the diabolical terrorists most proficient at planning such a holy war will have gone to their seventy-two virgins.

Now, America will agree to agree with EU brainstorming. Something, all agree in the Western power sphere, must be done—immediately. World War III—that some have said has already begun with the War on Terrorism—will be about to get underway in full-blown fury. Israel will then sense the collective wrath not just of its Islamic neighbors, but of the entire world, including its former staunchest ally—the United States of America.

Israel, through its preemptive destruction of Damascus with a nuclear weapon, will have enraged everyone, who now looks at the tiny Jewish state as the number-one troublemaker on the planet:

“The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him. Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:1-3).

Israel will be friendless. Most all Jews will know they are doomed. There will be no choice but to invoke the Samson Option. They will bring all who come against them down with their own deadly fall.

But there will be one man within the hierarchy of the EU who wants to try a diplomatic tact others haven’t considered.

Again, we are at the end of space limitations. We will hear this fellow out next time.

—Terry

Author’s note: We continue with the series first posted in 2007.

Believers are translated, changed in an atomos of time–in a fraction of an element of time that cannot be divided. They now look into the holy, omniscient eyes of their Lord that are fathomless in the depths of God’s love. He leads them through the portals of glory, to the city called Heaven.

On earth, millions have vanished into nothingness before the stupefied eyes of billions of others. All earthly things that belonged to the departed ones remain behind, including clothing, jewelry, and prosthetics of every description.

I once heard a nationally known reverend–so-called– (I don’t like the word “reverend” in reference to anyone on this fallen planet, because there is only one Reverend, and He has just whisked all who are His into Heaven for their eternal rewards) say something like this: “A rapture—if it were to be something that really happens—would mean that there would be unbelievable carnage upon the earth. God won’t let that happen.”

Hello, reverend, but what about the judgments for the end of days given by the Old and New Testaments? What about the Book of Revelation? The seals, trumpets, and vials don’t exactly give us the warm, fuzzy feeling that the era of apocalypse will be a tiptoe through the tulips.

The Kingdom-Now folks, with their replacement theology, however, see these things written in the areas of biblical judgments and God’s wrath as allegory or symbolism. They spiritualize these prophecies or treat them as already fulfilled. They preach and teach that the Church (Christians) will make this earth a better and better place until Christ can safely return to occupy His earthly throne. My dear Rapture Ready visitors and family—they are simply not looking at the same headlines as yours truly. And the headlines I’m hearing every day coincide precisely with what God’s holy, inerrant Word has to say about the end of days–again—as the secular media like to call the end time.

“But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13).

Jesus Himself prophesied for the very end of the Tribulation: “And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect’s sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days” (Mark 13:20).

This world is in for a very rough ride, and the reverend was and is wrong in pronouncing that God would not allow carnage, thus a Rapture is not in the future of humankind. Nothing could be more ludicrous.

The “thief in the night” prophecy is aimed particularly at the people who will be left behind after the Rapture. That great event will certainly take most willfully ignorant Christians by total surprise, but it will not be like a “thief in the night” experience to them. We can know this from Paul the apostle’s words, when he writes to the Thessalonians–to all Christians of the Church Age (Age of Grace):

“For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness” (1 Thessalonians 5:2–5).

Note Paul’s use of the pronouns “they” and “them” versus “you,” “ye,” and “we.” He is differentiating between unbelievers and believers during this Church Age. The Rapture, for all Christians who are alive at the time, will be an entirely different experience than the “thief in the night” experience of those left behind. We see this in John 14:1-3, and in Paul’s following comforting prophecy:

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

So, getting back to our earth-bound scenarios that we speculate will immediately follow the Rapture, let us look at some dark probabilities.

The most immediate things that assault the senses, while people look around them, are the clothing and other things that fall to the ground, the pavement, the floors. The only evidence that those who suddenly vanished were ever on Earth are the clothing and other personal items they no longer need. The prosthetic devices, too, of every sort, give the news pundits something to talk about on the programs that are dominated by one subject: the disappearance of millions.

But, in my speculative view, the most frightening, then, as the knowledge sets in, the most agonizing thing that will grip the world will be the fact that every single child who hasn’t reached the age of accountability for his or her soul will be gone from the planet in that millisecond of time. Every womb of every left-behind woman who was with child at the time of the disappearances will be instantaneously empty. God, in that astonishing moment, will make a monumental and unmistakable statement about His opinion of when life begins in the conception process!

Can we even begin to imagine the excruciating emotional explosion that will take place all over the world?

With the intimately personal cataclysms still raging, other just as staggering considerations flood the fear-filled thoughts of men and women left behind.

Again, in America, martial law is immediately invoked. But, before the much-denuded military and law enforcement personnel can regroup to enforce martial law, looters of every sort move freely throughout decimated society, pillaging, destroying, and raping whatever and whomever they find in their rampaging paths.

The consciences of man are no longer under the governance of the Holy Spirit, as in the time just before the disappearances occurred. Homes, empty of their vanished occupants, are open game, and the looters don’t stop to give a second thought to the horrendous future mankind now faces. They think, as I heard Dr. Charles Stanley say, they have died and gone to their warped picture of Heaven.

Well, we are again at the limits of our space allotment for the Nearing Midnight section. And, we’ve only begun to explore, through our Bible prophecy postulations, what the left-behind world will be like, and the likely dynamics that will rearrange planet Earth for Antichrist’s appearance.