In thinking on the topics about which I write, I’m blessed to have close friends of spiritually infused intellect and insight who sometimes help inspire commentaries. We speak on the phone occasionally throughout any given week about various topics of possible Bible prophecy import. Thus, it was in conversation this week when such a friend presented a fascinating matter that spawned the title you see above.

My friend of many years is clued in to many things going on within cutting-edge technologies. As a matter of fact, he works closely within some of these technological stratospherics as a consultant during various phases of development. At least that’s the take from my perspective. He tells no more than he can divulge in order to remain faithful to confidentiality.

So, it is with great interest that I pay attention when he brings forth information of an unusual sort. I listen carefully when I sense he wants me to consider those insider developments in writing these articles meant to look into what’s going on while we obviously are closing in on the very end of the age.

When we discuss things along these lines—well, when I mostly listen, because my thinking process can’t always quite engage due to the complexity involved—my friend usually prefaces his comments with, “I don’t quite know what to do with this.” He then says something like, “But isn’t that interesting?”

It usually is most certainly, at the very least, interesting. More like somewhat mystifying and, on occasion, stupefying.

The past week or so, this friend wanted to give me a heads-up on something that had come to his attention that he thought I would find fascinating. He said his information came to him from a familiar intel channel/forum. It is obviously one he holds in high regard.

The intel involves something called The Lazarus Project.

My friend said someone, under the cloak of anonymity, posted, in part, the following on February 23, 2023.

I’m a Meta insider working on Project Lazarus. We’re building an AI that can take over a deceased person’s social media accounts and continue making relevant posts as if that person is still alive. This includes age-progressed photos, interacting with other people’s content and everything else needed so that person continues on in the digital realm after physical death. We were originally told this would be a service offered to people struggling with the loss of loved ones and people who had missing children. Seemed like a decent idea. Things are getting weird now, and I’m having second thoughts about what this is actually going to be used for.

The AI is extremely capable of impersonating people. It doesn’t take as much initial input as one might think to train the AI how a certain person interacts with the digital world. It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing, and with little to no downtime, the AI could take over all of their social media, and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual. A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized. Things have taken a dark turn, it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right, and I don’t know what I should do. I’m not going to post any personally identifiable information, but I will try to answer questions that won’t expose my role within the project…

The AI came up with stuff that ranged from absolutely hilarious to completely horrifying. I guess that’s pretty accurate for the human experience. That’s more along the lines of a traditional bot, but it goes to a much deeper level than a bot just reposting the current talking point. It’s when we have live data on real individuals that things truly took off. It’s astoundingly accurate with reproducing real individuals.”

Now, my sensitivity meter is the first to start squawking when so-called reports come across cyberspace that seem bogus and/or contrived in any way. If it were not my friend of many years, who interacts within circles to which most of us haven’t entry, I might easily dismiss this insider’s concern as just another fictional creation. However, my friend doesn’t waste his time or mine with fiction. As a matter of fact, I doubt he has read any part of even one of my own novels. So I feel my thinking along these lines is worthwhile for us to consider.

My friend acknowledges that anything coming across even closely guarded, private communications can be of false origin. It has been my experience and observation through these many years, however, that his sense of what has credence and what doesn’t is exquisitely keen. Here are some of his thoughts about this Lazarus Project matter:

1) The project has a biblically significant name: Lazarus;

(2) Lazarus is said to be very good at impersonating people;

(3) Lazarus is supposed to be strong enough to pass the Turing Test;

(4) Meta is developing Lazarus to mimic the missing, dead, or otherwise unavailable; and

(5) Meta is developing Lazarus under extreme secrecy (small, compartmentalized teams under NDA).

Regarding his reference to the Turing test, a mathematician/cryptographer/pioneering computer scientist by the name of Alan Turing developed in 1950 what he called “the imitation game” but what is now better known as the Turing test.  It is a widely accepted test of the power of AI.  The Turing test involves two human beings and a machine (computer) having AI.  One human being serves as an interrogator. While the other human being and the machine are located out of the interrogator’s sight, the interrogator is tasked with interacting with the other human being and the machine, and discerning from those interactions, which is the machine and which is the human being.

The machine passes the test if the human is unable to discern between the two.  A machine passing the test is known as a “Turing machine.”  Passing the Turing test does not mean that the machine is as intelligent as the human being, only that the machine appears in that interaction to be as intelligent as the human being.  The Turing test is not the only test of AI, but it is by far the best-known.

Even were the posts false, Lazarus is plausible.  First, Mark Zuckerberg has publicly announced that Meta will focus on major AI development.  Second, Facebook’s user base has been seriously eroding, meaning that Facebook is in desperate need of content to retain and encourage its remaining users; AI is well-suited to generate this content.  Third, with the World Economic Forum and World Health Organization working hard to create and conceal mass casualties, simulating an enduring social media presence by the departed would help.  Fourth, the powers that be would be strongly motivated to conceal an act of God that resulted in the sudden disappearance of many millions of people.

From this, I gather that the purpose of Lazarus is to cover the mass disappearance or death of people due to one or a very few major events.  It may not be able perfectly to conceal the absence of people, but it probably can conceal their absence for a short time and should at least create confusion and doubt and provide the basis of an official narrative that the event or events did not occur.  It’s intriguing and plausible.

My friend and I frequently discuss the rapid development across the spectrum of stage-setting for prophetic fulfillment. Spectacular progress in artificial intelligence adds to stage-setting, not only for the fulfillment of prophecy about the coming Tribulation but also about stage-setting for the narratives that will be floated when millions of people vanish from the nation and world. In that light, the Lazarus Project is indeed most interesting, as my friend would have it.

Dr. Dave Breese was my personal friend, but he was much more than that to the believers who were blessed to be beneficiaries of his monumental spiritual and intellectual dissection of God’s Holy Word. In his scholarship and understanding of biblical prophecy–particularly from the pre-Trib, premillennial view, he had no superiors and few peers.

He was on-air host of The King Is Coming television ministry viewed weekly throughout the US and abroad. You may remember that, until his recent death, Dr. Ed Hindson was Dave’s successor to that program. Both were great servants of God, and I’m thankful to have had them in my life as mentors and friends.

Here we continue with Dr. Breese’s answers to the many questions on the Rapture he received throughout his many years of ministry.

Questions and Answers about the Rapture

Why is the Rapture not mentioned in the Old Testament? The prophets of the Old Testament were not given the revelation of the Church, the Body of Christ. Neither were they told of the Rapture of the Church. This is particularly a New Testament revelation. The Scripture speaks of the message of salvation by grace, given to the Church to preach to the world, and testifies of the concern of the prophets. It says,

“Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into” (1 Pet.1:10-12).

So, the Church and its message was a mystery in the Old Testament. Paul says,

Does Israel then have a different calling and destiny from that of the Church? The Scripture teaches that Israel is the heir of the world (Rom. 4:13). But it teaches that the Church is the heir of the universe. “All things” are the inheritance of the Christian, of the Church (1 Cor.3:21-23).

If the Kingdom is now, why the Rapture? Why can’t the Church just grow and take over everything? There are various kinds of “kingdom now” teachings in the world. The fact, however, is that the Kingdom was rejected by Israel and will not be instituted in the world until Christ comes in power and great glory. The Kingdom in its external form is not promised to the world in our time. In this day and age, God represents Himself in this world via the unseen body of Christ and through the seen, observable lives of individual believers. The program of God becomes “visible” in Christians who testify for the Lord Jesus and live holy lives before the watching world. The Kingdom, by the way, will not “grow in the world,” but it will come suddenly, imposed upon the world by its King, the Lord Jesus Christ. [Read Dan 2:44-45]

Where does the Rapture fit into the “big picture” of history? The Rapture ends the day of grace and begins the day of the Lord, which begins with the Tribulation. It will end a day of grace, the time of divine forbearance, and begin a time called the day of the Lord, in which God is at liberty to work with His promised program of judgment upon the world.

I recommend a book called The Two Futures, which will give you a presentation of “the big picture.

The Glory to Come

Let each of us be finally reminded that the story of the future is not simply that of one day after another, ad infinitum. No indeed! There is a glorious future for the Church, and there is a dismal future for the world. The sojourn of the Church in this world will come to an instantaneous end, at which time every believer will be taken from this dark planet to the glory which is to come.

At the moment of that transition, each of us will receive a new body, a glorified body that is not unlike the body of Christ himself. We will, at this point, be given the capacity to feel, to appreciate, to enjoy all of the unspeakably wonderful things that will be ours in eternity. The Scripture says, “In thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16:11).

So great will be the delights of heaven that they are impossible to describe under the constraints, the limitations of human language. It may, therefore, be well to exercise a sanctified imagination, to ask the question, “What will it be like when Jesus comes?” The answer, of course, is that it will be like nothing we can imagine in all of life. There is no human experience that resembles in any but the palest fashion the ecstasy that will be ours when we step across the great divide into the fadeless light of heaven.

What is heaven like? The answer must be that heaven is not exactly like anything that we know in this world. We do well to take the greatest joys of earth and multiply them by a thousand times. Only then do we have even the beginning of the joys that will be ours in heaven.

The Christian is invited to use his “sanctified imagination” to think of golden streets, ivory palaces, a city where there is no night, and endless “pleasure forever more.” In heaven also, we will have the opportunity to meet the saints who have gone before and, of course, loved ones who have, in earlier days, moved from the Church militant to the Church triumphant. How wonderful to contemplate that golden moment when the Church will be translated from this world to the world to come. What a moment that will be!

The real point is that we be prepared for that moment. The preparation is that we must be Christians. A Christian is one who believes the gospel of Jesus Christ, who has accepted the Son of the living God as personal Saviour. Because of the shed blood of Jesus Christ, the sufficient sacrifice for sin, each person in all of the world is invited to receive the free gift, the gift of God, which is everlasting life. The single requirement is faith alone. By believing in Jesus Christ – who He was and what He did for man on the cross – by that act of faith, I receive the gift of God, which is life eternal.

Meanwhile, in these days, let us gather together at the cross, recognizing Jesus Christ as the Saviour whose sacrifice made eternal life possible. While laboring for Him here, let us also anticipate the sound of the trumpet when we will be caught up to be with Him.

To follow up on Dave’s call to heed God’s invitation to become part of His eternal family, we again present here God’s formula–the only way—to bring you into that relationship with the Heavenly Father forever.

“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).