Each day, I receive emails—sometimes many—that lament the times we’re in. These include most often the question of how much longer the terrible things going on—the stage being set for the Tribulation—will be allowed to continue. That is, how long will it be before Christ calls believers to Himself in the Rapture?

Many pin their hopes on the Old Testament, Jewish holy days, and traditions. When these don’t produce the Rapture, they can become quite downhearted. This, despite the fact that some excellent people these days who write and speak on things like the Feast of Trumpets make it clear that these could be times for the Rapture, but that the Rapture won’t necessarily be tied to any such event. These folks, whom I respect greatly, give these Jewish points of interest as showing just how close we must be to God bringing all things to a conclusion. They point to how near the Tribulation and Second Advent of Christ must be, saying we must be even closer to the time of the pre-Trib Rapture.

Still, some are dejected when these Jewish tradition dates pass and the Rapture hasn’t occurred. It is perceived in such cases as bad news.

And the bad news compiles one report upon another, adding to the sometimes fear-filled angst. The cries grow even louder: When will the Lord get us out of here?!

I suppose this is one way of “looking up” and “watching” as Jesus commanded (Luke 21:28 and Mark 13:37). But it isn’t a healthy “looking up” or “watching” in terms of maintaining good and proper spiritual health.

And the bad news is indeed daunting. Some of the headlines found most recently in Rapture Ready News are fodder for that angst many Rapture Ready folks are expressing to me.

The Bad News

I Live in Sodom, and You Live in Gomorrah

If the Lord were to visit Washington DC, he would find that there were not 50 righteous men, there were not 40 righteous men, not 30, not 20, not even 10 righteous men, and just like Sodom and Gomorrah, we will surely be destroyed.

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In Five Years, AI Could Be So Advanced It Would Mean the “end of human-dominated history,” Yuval Noah Harari Says

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Yuval Noah Harari discussed how advanced AI will be in five years.  After hearing Suleyman’s predictions, Harari said: “This is the end of human history.  Not the end of history—the end of human-dominated history.”  In other words, humans will no longer be the dominant life force on Earth as we have been since time began.

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US Navy: China’s Shipbuilding Capacity Is 232 Times Greater Than US

China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than the US, per leaked US Navy intelligence.

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VIDEO LEAK: Arrested Child Trafficker Admits to Boarding School Used as Front for Organ Harvesting Network in Ukraine

In a video confession of a child trafficker who was caught on the Ukraine-Slovakian border, the trafficker admits that he had higher involvement in the trafficking of kids from a boarding school in Perechyn, Ukraine.

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SHOCKING INVESTIGATION: The COVID-19 Vaccines Cause a New Form of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; Here’s All the Evidence

Here, we present a series of strong evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are causing recipients to develop acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) or a novel condition with similar attributes that can only be described as Covid-19 Vaccine Induced Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (VAIDS).

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I could have found much worse news had I wanted to take the time. These are just from one day’s news cycle from Raptureready.com.

Within my own concerns are the growing, satanically inspired assaults on children. I ask myself—as do many others so concerned: How long will this be allowed to continue before God says, “Enough!”?

End-times Enlightenment

I believe the messenger who gave Daniel the instruction to “close up the book until the time of the end” was speaking of believers during our present day. We are to be the “wise” who are to “understand” the things taking place that signify the consummation of the age.

Unlike Daniel, who no doubt was for a brief moment disappointed that he would not be allowed to know how things would play out prophetically, we who are living in this late hour of the Age of Grace should joyfully embrace Jesus’ Words: “When you see all these things begin to come to pass…”.

Indeed, we have for quite some time seen these things begin to come to pass. The end-times markers are absolutely stunning in many cases. Those who are watching cannot miss the Good News!

The Good News

My great friend and mentor, the late Dr. Tim LaHaye, in asking different people to participate in writing commentary for the Bible whose publisher he reluctantly allowed to use his name as its title—The Tim LaHaye Prophecy Bible—asked me to write briefly on a particular verse. I believe that, in regard to Christians looking at the future in a healthy way rather than in an unhealthy way filled with fear, the passage I recall being assigned is close to being the perfect perspective from God’s Holy Word:

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

This verse is all-encompassing if we truly consider its meaning.

It tells us that, no matter what, everything we see of an evil nature will ultimately turn out to be used by our God in a way to benefit us. There is no need to worry. Our job is to fulfill the purpose He has assigned each of us.

As the late Charles Stanley always put it: “Obey God no matter what, and leave all the consequences to Him.”

The Best News

The best news, second only to the Good News of the Gospel itself, is that Jesus has promised the Rapture for which we are all prayerfully wishing. Again, His promise is the following:

“And when you see all these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your head, for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).

NOTE FROM TERRY: The article below was first posted on July 19, 2018. At that time, America was indeed in a state of degeneration. That is, the culture and society were moving away from God’s governance. The drift had become a swift flow in that direction apart from its founding principles.

Despite the Trump presidential administration—which I’m convinced was put in place to slow the flow of wickedness perpetrated within the government—the proof could not be missed. The society and culture nonetheless became coarser, more debauched, by the day. This is despite many steps being taken by the government to make things better through positive actions.

Five years hence, it has become more than obvious to me that liberty’s light is being quenched by the human and demonic minions of Ephesians 6:12, who are determined to forever darken the nation Ronald Reagan called “the shining city on the hill.”

We are perhaps now seeing America’s last gleaming. But while that seems true in every respect, the glorious light from above calls all to repentance. At any moment, you can be made a citizen of that heavenly, shining city, New Jerusalem. Here is how:

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10: 9-10).

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God Bless America Again

A country song from way back in the 1960s and 1970s, during the Vietnam War era, plays through my mind these days. The chorus goes: “God bless America again. You must know the trouble that she’s in. Wash her pretty face, dry her eyes, and then, God bless America again.”

The war was raging while Walter Cronkite read the mainstream view of the news to us at dinnertime. Film of bloodied American GIs and corpses of black-pajamaed Vietcong projected from our TV screens while we downed our evening meals.

B-52s dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives, carpet-bombing an unseen enemy many thousands of feet below. Rolling Thunder, as it was called, churned up killing fields of earth mixed with flesh and blood night after night, day after day.

More than fifty thousand American soldiers and airmen went through the horrific, grinding process of becoming casualties of war their country’s leaders, it turned out, never intended to bring to total victory—giving their last measure of devotion for America the beautiful. At the same time, the ugliness of political warfare was being uncovered and displayed in a news media orgy of, in my view, pro-Communist glee.

A US president of the United States was turned out of office in disgrace—and rightfully so. The term “Watergate” became forever ingrained within the American-English lexicon.

Would America ever recover? Would the curse that had descended since the time of Korea, with America’s young men and women dying in a “police action” purposely fought to stalemate rather than to complete victory, ever lift from our nation?

There have been moments of seemingly possible national egress from the plunge into the abyss of political corrosiveness. It looked like the nation might pull away from the cultural rot that began in earnest during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the legitimization of murdering babies in their mother’s wombs.

The Moral Majority appeared for a brief, shining moment to be making headway in engendering movement toward moral sanity. Somehow, however, a national, cultural darkness began descending following the Reagan years. An almost tangible veil separating America’s formerly flawed but Judeo-Christian-governed morality from a new immoral malignity fell with the Clinton years, the White House intern’s stained blue dress, and all the rest.

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Hussein Obama’s black-liberation theology pastor, from his Chicago pulpit, spewed a venomous rant that America’s chickens had come home to roost and implied that the Lord of Heaven should damn America—using God’s name in vain with the invective. Wright was, I infer, talking about the Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

As much as I detested Wright’s hate speech against the United States, I must admit that, indeed, America’s chickens appeared to have come home to roost, suffering on that September 11, 2001, Tuesday at least some degree of God’s judgment. In my view, the eight years of Wright’s best-known parishioner’s time in the Oval Office brought an intensification of that judgment.

The year 2016 truly was a pivotal year for this nation and the world. It was proper, I believe, to wonder whether God’s judgment was on track to preclude that of the corrective sort, such as in the past. I’m thinking of times like the Great Depression of the 1930s following the debauched era of the Roaring Twenties.

It was within reason to consider that God’s judgment might be entering a destructive phrase rather than another corrective one. Was America entering a time such as when Sodom and Gomorrah came to their end—i.e., was it possible that God would never again bless America?

Like that country song tells throughout its lyrics, I, too, love America and don’t want to ever let it fall because I haven’t done my part in helping keep it upright in every sense.

All of this said, spiritually enlightened Bible students know that neither the leaders of this nation nor of any other will rectify the rapidly mounting problems. Only Jesus Christ will solve the otherwise unsolvable, sinister evil at humanity’s core.

There are within the community of Bible prophecy observers those who wonder whether America is the most likely candidate for being the Babylon of the eighteenth chapter of Revelation. That’s the country that will be the most materially accomplished of all nations of earth’s history.

I’m one of those who pondered this possibility more seriously with each passing news headline involving the Obama administration and State Department dealing with Israel.

God, it is abundantly clear, has more than lived up to His promise to bless those who bless the progeny that would come from Abraham through Isaac. America, acting as midwife in the rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948, has been the recipient of bountiful material blessings beyond measure. God has truly blessed America.

Conversely, God has promised to curse those who curse His chosen nation, Israel. The cultural war is observably causing the loss of America’s former striving to promote Judeo-Christian values the Founding Fathers infused into the Constitution. Just as troubling was the obvious disdain Obama and those around him had for Israel, even choosing to champion Israel’s enemies at every diplomatic opportunity, it seems.

Such continued folly would not perhaps, but certainly, bring national disaster the likes of which our previously blessed nation has never experienced.

If indeed forgiveness of our national sins is possible, given the lateness of the prophetic hour, let us who name the matchless name that is above every name implore God to bless America again. This must be done, however, not with vain repetition in the idle words “God bless America” often used by presidents and politicians when ending their meaningless speeches.

There is but one heavenly prescription for obtaining an answer to such a prayer:

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

God does not change. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That call to repentance is still in effect—and it is for Church Age saints, just as it was for His chosen people of ancient Israel. But, time is swiftly fleeting.

“We will make America great again!” [was Trump’s] presidential politics proclamation. No, “we” won’t. We have proven, through our actions and lack thereof, that, as a people, we want to take America in the other direction. “We” didn’t make America great in the first place, and “we” certainly can’t make it great in the future.

“God bless America again,” when offered in genuine spiritual, obedient humility—not in politically prideful demand—before the throne of Almighty God is the only petition that has a prayer of a chance to save our nation.