June 15
Rapture Ready's Final Aspiration
I'm sure most of you folks are aware that Rapture Ready is one of the largest prophecy sites on the internet. For several years, it has maintained a huge lead over it rivals. The gap we have with other end-time domains is not so much the result of outpacing the competitors. It is mostly the result of other Christians not realizing we are in a race for souls.
When the rapture takes place, I expect a massive influx of traffic to this site. I have said before that the number of people who come to RR
after the rapture will likely be greater than a hundred times what we've seen in the entire history of this site.
Rapture Ready has a stranglehold on hundreds of key phrases related to the end times. In fact, “end times” is one such phrase. If you do a Google search of these two words, RR will be right at the top of the list.
We are now in the age when, if people want to find information about something, they turn to the internet. The web is the reason newspapers, libraries, and phone books are becoming obsolete.
It is not yet possible for the whole world to log onto the site. Advanced Micro Devices recently estimated the global population of internet users to be 1.5 billion. A visit by even a small portion of this number would be overwhelming.
The good news is that technology is rapidly making it possible for RR to reach untold millions of people with the end-time message. When I uploaded our first web page, the maximum number of monthly visitors was 40,000. We now have a total capacity that can handle 100 million visitors.
In 1987, my first computer had a hard drive of 20 megabytes. Today, you can buy a hard drive with 2,000 gigabytes. It is amazing to think that there has been an increase of 100,000 times in the capacity of hard drives.
We don't need a 100,000- fold increase. If our monthly capacity would double a couple more times, I'd be more than satisfied. Companies like Intel are already planning microprocessors that will operate at speeds a hundred times faster than the ones currently on the market. In the coming few years, I expect the site to obtain an unlimited reach.
Well over a decade ago, I made a decision that has allowed RR to have a huge advantage in the moments that follow the rapture. The file structure for the site is based on what is called flat file system--each page has its own text file. Most sites today are database-driven--this is where all the content is stored as one single file unit.
Flat files are a big pain to update. If I wanted to change the header on the site, we would have to update all 21,000 pages. On a database system, you only need to change one page to update all the headers.
The advantage of text files is that you can feed out a vast amount of content with very little strain on the server. The data goes out easily because it's not encoded. Our message board has a database system, and it will overload if more than 2,000 people try to log on all at once. Just to bring up a single page, the board might have to search through over 200 records. The board has gone down four times from too much traffic. The main site has never crashed from traffic, and it's on a smaller server.
The vast majority of prophecy sites are database-driven and would instantly go tilt in a post-rapture traffic surge. Rapture Ready already has a 100-times advantage in total bandwidth. When you add file system structure, our lead jumps by another hundredfold.
I have no idea how many people will come to RR. We might hit 80 million and the government might suddenly decide to put the clap on prophecy sites. Blocking RR would not an easy task. We have 30 mirror sites, several search engines keep copies of our domain, and it would be easy for people to create new mirrors of RR or just forward zip files to friends and family.
It is always good to have more capacity to reach people. Now that that we are over the 100-million mark, I feel that we are within the range that I had long hoped RR would achieve.
I am always looking for people to mirror the content of the site. If any of you folks have your own web hosting account, it would be very easy to mirror RR. These stripped-down versions of the mother site are only 100 megs in size, and they put zero demand on a server. If you are interested in mirroring RR, please contact me at:
todd1@raptureready.com
-- Todd
Jerusalem: Trigger to Armageddon
Normally, I would not use my previous writings in a “Nearing Midnight” column. However, because I sense as being so egregious the noose presently being tightened around the Jewish people and Jerusalem, the city on earth considered by God the most important in His relationship to man, the previous segments I’ve chosen are, I believe, appropriate as part of this update.
Current issues and events that look to be harbingers of the biblically-prophesied apocalypse bombard this generation of earth’s inhabitants. Jesus’ Olivet Discourse prophecies, foretelling things to come in the time of “great tribulation,” seem to leap from news reports that are becoming so routine that they no longer shock. No signal is more prophetically significant than present circumstances involving the city where Jesus was crucified nearly twenty centuries ago.
This is as the Old and New Testament prophets said it will be just before Christ returns to a planet that is home to a world of rebels against God. That rebellion is scheduled, the prophets forewarn, to culminate in history’s final and most destructive war. Armageddon will be triggered because of the determination of Satan and fallen mankind to install themselves upon the single spot on earth dearest to the heart of God.
Mt. Moriah sits at the southern end of the ancient city, crested by a golden dome that represents as many as 1.2 billion people whose religion demands of its adherents’ blood-vowed opposition to God’s chosen nation, Israel. This is the place God picked to have His temple on earth constructed. It is the precise location where the third temple will sit–the temple that will be desecrated by Antichrist, earth’s last and most beastly tyrant.
Even more importantly, the Temple Mount will be the home of Christ’s millennial temple. Moriah, then to be known as Zion, will be supernaturally elevated by the tremendous topographical changes caused when the Lord’s foot touches the Mount of Olives at His return. The person who takes upon himself the mantle of responsibility for overseeing the rebuilding of a Jewish temple has weighed in about controversies surrounding Mt. Moriah at present.
“U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last week robbed Judaism of its legacy and threatens the existence of the Jewish state, according to Temple Institute Rabbi Chaim Richman. The rabbi also said the president’s comments were in essence perverse and obscene. He responded point by point to President Obama’s speech in which he said that ‘settlements are illegitimate,’ that the re-establishment of the State of Israel is rooted in the Holocaust, and that denying the Holocaust is a sin but that Iran, whose leader denies the Holocaust, has a right to nuclear power.
President Obama ‘is making our right to be here illegitimate,’ according to Rabbi Richman, who is director of the Temple Institute.
Regarding President Obama’s statement that Jerusalem is holy to the Muslims, the rabbi pointed out that when praying, ‘the Muslims bow down, and they face Mecca and they turn their back sides up to” Jerusalem’” (“Temple Institute Rabbi: Obama is a Robber,” by IsraelNN staff, IsraelNN.com, 6/11/09).
Hostilities surrounding Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are all-consuming in the heretofore unachievable quest for peace. Diplomats of the world have, for the past four decades, engaged in effort after effort to bring stability to the region, at whose heart the city of Jerusalem sits. We remember the many jettings to and from Washington D.C., Jerusalem, and other capitals of the Mideast. From Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, to, now, Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama–America’s secretaries of state and a most strangely assertive president have burned mega-gallons of jet fuel in trying to find the formula for peace that would diffuse the Armageddon bomb.
All of that diplomatic shuffling is mere prelude to the fretting that is about to take place over this, the most important, thus most volatile city on planet earth.
Zechariah the prophet foretold the end-time anxiety that we believe is observably now on the precipice of gripping the international community:
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).
There is good reason for the building anxiety. Israel’s terrorist-sponsoring neighbors to the north strive mightily to develop neuclear bombs and missiles that will deliver them. No one doubts in which direction these missiles will be pointed should Iran be successful in producing such weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s one, common declaration, amid all of the political infighting remains the core of its defense: “Never again!”
The following summary of atrocities to the Jewish race presents compelling evidence why “Never again!” must be their passionate declaration, backed by nuclear strength:
“Due to [Israel’s] disobedience the Jews have suffered terribly. They were ruled by Rome in Christ's day but rebelled in A.D. 70 and 250,000 were killed. They rebelled again in A.D. 135 and again Rome smashed them, killing even more and scattering them throughout the empire. Since then, they have been bitterly persecuted. Forcibly expelled from England in 1290 and from France 1306. In 1298 more than 100,000 were killed in Europe. >From 1648 to 1658 some 400,000 were massacred. From 1939-45 Hitler's Nazis killed more than 4 million… In its history, Egyptian Pharoahs, Assyrian kings, Babylonian rulers, Persian satraps, Greek Hellenists, Roman Caesars, Holy Roman emperors, Roman Catholic pontiffs, Medieval monarchs, Christian crusaders, Spanish inquisitors, Nazi dictators, Communist commissars, Arab sheiks and United Nation delegates have all turned against the Jews yet they still survive” (Charles L. Monk, “A Look at Bible Covenants and Their Meanings,” 02/22/2003, Category: Bible Studies, Sugar Land Bible Church, COVENANTS – 1987).
The Jewish people of Israel collectively declare they will never again let themselves be enslaved within regimes that want them erased from the earth. Never again will they allow the genocide they have suffered through the centuries. Their national vow is backed by the ominous “Samson Option.” This last-ditch military imperative is not lost on the leaders of the international community. These leaders of this enlightened age might not believe the Bible is the word of God, but, they know the story of Samson and what happened when he was finally put in a predicament in which he could no longer be free. The world’s diplomats–at least those of the Western world—have no doubt that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) will bring the house down around them, if it comes to that as Israel’s only viable option. The international community–once termed “the new world order”—has developed a systemic neurosis involving the bleak outlook for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The “Roadmap to Peace” seems to be the nerves-soothing theraputic course of action upon which the powers-that-be have chosen to eliminate the possibility of nuclear conflict being triggered over earth’s most coveted city.
World leaders consider Jerusalem the trigger to Armageddon; they will do whatever it takes to diffuse that trigger. In so doing, they will violate God’s touchstone to mankind, about which the Lord says: “For thus saith the LORD of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled you: for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye” (Zechariah 2:8).
--Terry
