Fearful Forecasts/Prophetic Pronouncements :: By Terry James

An incendiary heads-up made our Rapture Ready News headlines recently: “Humanity on brink of nuclear annihilation with threat highest for 40 YEARS, UN chief warns in chilling message.”

The story was no less troubling than the headline:

HUMANITY is on the brink of “nuclear annihilation” with the threat reaching its highest boiling point in forty years, a top UN chief has warned.

The nuclear arms race has the globe teetering “unacceptably close” to mass atomic destruction, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the world is on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Credit: Getty

He urged nations that have “stockpiled nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons” to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to avoid an international crisis.

It comes as wealthy countries continue to show off a string of advanced destructive arms that could result in catastrophic conflict.

He addressed the issue in a powerful tweet pleading with global powers.

“Now is the time to lift the cloud of nuclear conflict for good, eliminate nuclear weapons from our world, and usher in a new era of trust and peace,” he wrote. (Olivia Burke and Aliki Kraterou, News Corp—The Sun, September 29, 2021)

Peace and safety are at the top of the New World Order elite in light of things happening within the ranks of CCP leadership. China seems to be deliberately creating a war-like atmosphere by sending fighter aircraft over the territorial boundaries of Taiwan. They have apparently flown bombers into airspace claimed by the tiny state that broke away from China, as it was then known as Formosa.

Many observers believe China’s increasing aggression was the result of the weakness displayed by the Biden administration. The militancy has definitely increased significantly since the days when the Trump administration stood staunchly in keeping a strong naval presence in the area of the South China Sea and waters around the area of Taiwan.

The Chinese government is now emboldened to make threats most politically conservative observers believe would never have been made while Donald Trump was commander-in-chief. For example, Beijing’s former ambassador to the UN, Sha Zukang, said China must make the first nuclear strike against the US if Joe Biden continues to defend Taiwan.

This sort of rhetoric has set in motion all sorts of fears among the weak-kneed among the political left and the diplomatic appointees from this and past administrations.

Even considering the fact that China has a much smaller nuclear capability than the US, which has by far the largest nuclear force on earth, there is fear China will initiate a nuclear conflict.

During a meeting of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association in Beijing last week, Sha Zukang said: “The policy not to be the first to use nuclear weapons unconditionally has given China the moral high ground internationally.” But in the next breath, the Chinese say they must reconsider this policy if Biden continues to defend Taiwan against Chinese invasion to take back their rightful territory.

Another worry to those forecasting imminent war that will ignite all-out nuclear warfare are the reports coming out of Iran. Strange things are happening there, and more and more, Israel is suspected by the Israel-hating UN and others as the cause of those strange happenings.

The following news item tells more.

A fire erupted in an IRGC facility in Iran on Sunday leaving two dead and one injured. On Thursday, Tel Aviv-based ImageSat International—ISI, a commercial servicer for satellite images—estimated that the facility was not just any military compound—it was a secret missile base.

ISI reveals: On Monday, 27 September 2021, a mysterious explosion shook western Tehran, Iran. According to ISI intelligence report, the explosion occurred at an IRGC secret missile base of Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group.

It is still unclear why the fire erupted on Sunday.

A series of explosions and fires have hit industrial sites across Iran, including a number of petrochemical plants, in recent months and over the past year.

Iranian officials have referred to most of the cases as incidents or accidents, although some reports have claimed that at least some of them involved foul play.

The aging infrastructure in Iran has also been blamed for at least some of the incidents. Frequent blackouts have plagued Iran recently amid a heatwave. (“Fire in Iran occurred at secret IRGC missile base,” Israeli report by JP staff, Jerusalem Post, September 30, 2021)

It seems that Israel’s IDF and more surreptitious entities within that force might be assisting the Lord in “Restraining” things moving ahead of Heaven’s prophetic schedule for the wrap-up of the Church Age. Our friend Bill Salus has long kept his thumb on the pulse of the developing things in the Middle East and wonders frequently if Israel is about to begin fulfilling prophecies involving that area of ancient Persia—in Elam, for example.

One thing we can be sure of is that there will not be all-out nuclear war this side of the Rapture. China will fulfill its devastating role sometime near the end of the Tribulation, as given in Revelation chapters 9 and 16. The kings of the east force will kill fully one-third of earth’s population at that future time.

There will be no all-out nuclear war between Israel and her enemies, even if there are other conflicts. Prophetic Scripture is quite specific about these conflicts and how they will play out.

So we must, as believers, not listen to the fearful forecasts, but rather to God’s prophetic pronouncements.

 

Lawlessness and Other Proof :: By Terry James

My daily emails and conversations usually include a statement similar to: “With everything going on, we must be very near the end.”

This usually means that this generation of anti-God rebels alive on the planet must be about to get their comeuppance; God must be fed up much like He was with the likes of the inhabitants at the lower end of the Dead Sea during the days of Lot.

It was a time of evil, debauchery, and violence, as we read in Genesis 19. Jesus gave condemning words by saying that the time He returns (that is, when He is next revealed to an unsuspecting world) will be just like it was in Lot’s day in Sodom and during Noah’s day. (Lot’s day in Sodom was a microcosm of what the entire world was like during Noah’s day.)

In both instances—Noah’s day and Lot’s day—God found mankind so repulsive in the way they were acting that He had to destroy all but the very few He found to be righteous. The biblical account says the destruction in both cases was complete. To the believer in biblical truth, that is proven to be the case as we look around.

The antediluvian world is no more. There’s not a trace of it, except perhaps in geographical sites, etc. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah can’t be found, either. We do have proof that they existed and were destroyed, however, as we will look at a bit further on.

First, it’s interesting to consider that Noah’s day and Lot’s day bore similar characteristics. We will, in this case, look basically at only one similarity: violence was rampant. Jesus said, by inference, that the time He is next revealed will be in a period of extreme violence.

This is because Genesis chapter 6 said that violence filled the whole earth during the time just before the Flood that destroyed all but Noah and his family. It must have indeed been a murderous time, one when everyone did what was right in their own eyes, with little or no attention paid to God’s prescription for living.

So we are looking at “proof” for the lawlessness—the violence that stems from throwing off God’s Law and instead doing what is right in our own, sinful eyes. Is there any evidence that this generation is coursing toward violence of such significant levels? Are we in the time like Noah’s day and Lot’s day that Jesus was talking about in the Olivet Discourse? (Matthew 24:36–42 and Luke 17:26–30). Are we at the very end of God’s holy patience, as were those earlier generations?

The following excerpt of an article may give us a clue.

Our violent, blood-soaked culture has produced a violent, blood-soaked reality in our streets. The final numbers for 2020 have finally been released by the FBI, and they are stunning.

Prior to last year, the largest one-year increase in the murder rate in the United States was 12.7 percent, and that came all the way back in 1968. Needless to say, many of you that are reading this article were not even alive in 1968. Well, we didn’t just break the old record last year. We more than doubled it. According to the FBI’s annual report on crime, the nationwide murder rate was up about 29 percent in 2020…

The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, according to data gathered by the FBI for its annual report on crime.

The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29%. The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7% increase in 1968. (“The Largest One-Year Increase in Murder in the History of the United States,” by Michael Snyder, Prophecy News Watch, 9/24/21)

In our book, LAWLESS: End-Times War Against the Spirit of Antichrist, a number of authors delineated the exponential increase in every sort of anti-God activity. Just since the recent release of that book, we witness even greater increase in violence in every direction as we look across the prophetic horizon. Thus, we must conclude that the answer to the consistent comments in the emails and the conversations have proof to back up the near-consensus. We are living at the very end of this Church Age (Age of Grace).

Proof that God is dealing with absolute evil from which people refuse to repent now confronts the eyes of mankind, if we will believe what we see.

Archaeologists have unearthed physical proof of what points to the destruction of Tell el-Hammam in the Jordan valley, the region of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, and what they found was really wild. They found evidence of an incredible explosion that occurred in the skies above ancient Sodom, an explosion so intense that buildings down below were destroyed and things were literally vaporized…

FROM THE JERUSALEM POST: Tell el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley might have inspired the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, according to a new study that has spanned 15 years. In the study, published in the journal Nature on Monday, archaeologists researched the remains of Tell el-Hammam in an attempt to discover what destroyed the ancient city during the Middle Bronze Age. During the period, there were roughly 50,000 people living in the area of the Jordan Valley in three cities: Tell el-Hammam, Jericho, and Tell Nimrin, with Tell el-Hammam the biggest of the three, implying that until its destruction, it would have been the political center of the area. Radiocarbon dating dates the destruction to within 50 years of 1650 BCE.

Examination of the remains revealed evidence of a destructive event that involved high temperatures, such as pottery pieces that were melted and boiled on the exterior, but normal on the inside. The buildings of Tell el-Hammam were made of mud bricks, some five stories tall. In the upper part of the city, the destructive force demolished the buildings to the height of their foundations in the walls, and little mud-brick remained. Of the palace that was in this part of the city, the first-floor walls and the upper stories are missing, and most of the mud-brick was pulverized. (“Archaeologists Discover Physical Proof for Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” Jerusalem Post and NTEB, 9/23/21)

It is more evident by the hour that we are in a time similar to those in which the Lord said “enough is enough.” Judgment is coming. But for those who believe in Jesus Christ for redemption from sin and rebelliousness, the moment of God’s next catastrophic intervention into man’s history will be a glorious one, not one to dread. Christ’s shout from above, “Come up here!” will instantaneously take all believers into His magnificent presence.

Here is how to make sure your eternal soul is prepared to leave this wrath-bound planet when the Lord calls.

“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).