Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking!
Posted on 10/07/2008 8:41:53 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
The pages of failed end-of-the-world prophecies could make up a whole new testament. Now there's the Rev. David Jeremiah, an East County mega-pastor and TV evangelist who says the end is coming, in the words of a familiar church song, “soon and very soon.”
In a new book that hit bookstores this week, Jeremiah offers 10 “prophetic clues” he says point to an imminent conclusion many Christians have clung to for 2,000 years – the Rapture (when the faithful will be summoned instantly into Heaven), followed by the Tribulation (a seven-year period of turmoil), Armageddon (the final battle of good versus evil) and the Second Coming of Jesus (to reign on Earth).
Jeremiah doesn't set a date in “What in the World Is Going On?” (Thomas Nelson; $22.99). But his urgency is clear: “His return is close at hand,” he writes, adding that Christians should be motivated “as never before to live in readiness.”
“I have no intention of setting any dates or saying this is when this is going to happen,” Jeremiah says, settling back on a couch in his office at Turning Point, his international television and radio ministry headquartered in Lakeside.
“All I'm saying is some of the things that the word of God prophesied would take place as we near this time are happening in ways you cannot contradict.”
The 67-year-old senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, where he preaches to 7,000 people at weekend services, says he was motivated to write this book after so many people kept questioning him about world events.
He reached out to other biblical prophecy scholars for their thoughts. Among them was Tim LaHaye, co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of Christian apocalyptic novels. In 1981, Jeremiah followed LaHaye as senior pastor of Scott Memorial Baptist Church, which later became Shadow Mountain.
The 10 signs Jeremiah settled on range from the emergence of Israel as the dominant country-of-residence for Jews and the rise in power of Russia and Iran to the world's reliance on Middle Eastern oil and the coming together of countries under the European Union.
“I'm not a sensationalist,” says Jeremiah, a grandfather and two-time cancer survivor who is a well-known speaker at evangelical venues like the Billy Graham Training Center.
“I would be the last person in the world to try to draw sensationalist truths from the Scripture,” he adds. “You can get a crowd if you know how to frame your stuff, but I'm past all that. I don't need to do that. But what I do know is this: This is a different day unlike anything that I've ever known, unlike anything the world has ever known. So what does that mean?”
What it means for him is that conversion efforts need to be jump-started like a battery in a long-idled sedan.
“We've forgotten that there's an urgency about what we've been called to do,” he says. He leans forward on the couch, as if to emphasize his impatience. “I think it puts an urgency and a seriousness into our walk.” Jeremiah is particularly tough on Islam in his book. Islamic terrorism is among the signs he says are pointing toward the end times.
“One of the most baffling and unsettling puzzles about Islam is the constant contention on the part of some Muslim leaders that they are a peace-loving people,” he writes. “Yet even as they make the claim, Islamic terrorists continue to brutally murder any person or group with whom they find fault.”
Jeremiah does not believe Allah and God are the same. He also believes that Islam hates Jews and Christians.
“Experts say that 15 to 20 percent of Muslims are radical enough to strap a bomb on their bodies in order to kills Christians and Jews,” he writes. “If this number is accurate, it means about 300 million Muslims are willing to die in order to take you and me down.”
His solution: convert Muslims to Christianity.
Jeremiah says he is not trying to be incendiary; he's just being true to his convictions. “I'm not intolerant,” he insists. “I just believe totally what I believe, and if I have to go along in order to get along, water down what I believe, I'll never do that.”
But Khaleel Mohammed, associate professor of religious studies at San Diego State University and a voice for moderate Islam, says Jeremiah isn't helping matters.
“It's not constructive in any way for the Christian or the Muslim,” Mohammed says. “Everything he is saying is so divisive.”
Mohammed also thinks Jeremiah's portrait is one-sided; after all, thousands of Muslim civilians have died in the American-led invasion of Iraq.
“I'm not denying there are Christians and Muslims agitating against each other, but I don't think it's religious,” Mohammed says. Still, he adds, the future lies in interfaith cooperation, a move the “old guard” on both sides is resisting. “They are just fighting against the tide. ... Among Muslims, you'll find preachers who are as nonsensical as Jeremiah.”
Scholars who study end-times prophecies say Jeremiah's book, and others like it, should be handled with care.
“I would say the odds are enormous, if not overwhelming, that he, like every other Christian prophet over the last 2,000 years, will be wrong,” says Richard Landes, associate professor of history at Boston University and director of the Center for Millennial Studies.
Jews and Muslims also have their doomsday beliefs, Landes says, but apocalypticism has been particularly rampant in Christianity. It was, after all, Jesus himself who forewarned his followers in the New Testament to “keep watch” and “be ready” for his return.
Ever since, Christians have watched for signs of the Second Coming, scanning the Bible for clues and codes, says Jon Stone, a religious studies professor at Cal State Long Beach.
Stone acknowledges there is a built-in audience for books like Jeremiah's. “I think people like to be in on a secret, to know something other people don't know,” he explains. “This is, by far, the biggest secret in terms of religious things.”
Jeremiah is planning a series of sermons at Shadow Mountain this fall on living with confidence in a chaotic world. He plans to tell the congregation, among other things, that this is the time for the faithful to hang together, to focus on the church and the Bible.
Jeremiah says biblical prophecy isn't a popular pulpit topic. “A lot of buddies of mine say they don't ever preach on prophecy because they think it's irrelevant. ... Well, if they read the Bible, they will find out that if you study prophecy, it gives you incredible insight as to how you should live your life today.”
He resists efforts to be coaxed into being more specific about when all this is going to happen. It's not about that, he repeats. “It is about the awareness of what the events that are happening in the world today mean and how we can look at it through the third lens of the Bible and make more sense of it than we would otherwise.”
Thanks!
There is nothing about the North Star or any specific compass heading in those verses. (Which way do they head if they are on the opposite side of the globe?) Like so much associated with this secret rapture theory, you have to read a whole lot into the verse that is not there. Exegesis by imagination.
This is precisely why it is hard to take these theories seriously from a biblical standpoint.
It doesn't say trumpet...It says trump...Trump is the sound a trumpet makes...This is NOT one of the seven trumpets in Revelation...
Yup we have the Lord descending..... at a "trump" the last one as there are seven. Now the 'dead' will rise first as that is what happens when flesh dies the 'soul' returns to the Maker that sent it.
It's not talking about the soul...It's talking about the graves...The graves being opened and dead BODIES being raised...Just as Jesus' dead body was raised...
And then it speaks about these bodies (dead and alive) being changed...Just as Jesus' body was changed...
Center it. Font size must be 7. Bold. Four exclamation points.
I give this a 6.9
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking!
Two different events...As you know the first one says we will meet the Lord in the air and ever be with the Lord...Now look at this one...
2Th 1:7 And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels,
2Th 1:8 In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:
2Th 1:9 Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power;
There aren't any Christians meeting the Lord in the air here...The Lord shows up with His army and He's killing people left and right...These are the people that got LEFT BEHIND at the Rapture...
You can't make both of these events the same even if you stood on your head and twirled pencils with your toes...
Revelation 8:6 And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.... make that noise or trump. And here Paul writes in I Thessalonians For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God:... are you saying there are more than seven trumpets making that sound??? The seventh trumpet sounding is the trump that describes the return of Christ and here Paul's subject is the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven.
How is it that the Savior's descent gets ignored and a doctrine of air got its inception?
When is the evil day???
I can say that He is just. Babies are pure and full of God. There is an age (different for us all), when we know difference between God/Satan, good/evil.
take a look at this... matthew 24:
19 How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!
20 Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath.
21 For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.
We can clearly see that, can't we...There's about 33,000 other verses in the bible...Maybe one of those has some correlating information???
I'm sure if there were you would be quick to provide the info.
Once again an English translation of the Greek NT gets the best of the argument.
There is but one Greek word translated "trump" and "trumpet" in the KJV NT ( savlpigx). Any distinction, such as the one above, based on the KJV rendering is arbitrary and unsupported by the Greek text.
In fact, the NJKV corrects the language of the older version by replacing all the "trumps" with "trumpet"
"For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first." (1 Thess. 4:16)
Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 15 that believers rise “at the last trumpet” on the last day which corresponds to the “trumpet” in 1 Thess. 4:16.
Besides, in virtually all the cases where the word is used in the NT, it is not the instrument that is in focus but the sound the instrument is making. So trying to make some distinction between the sound and the instrument is theologically unnecessary.
Whoa, The Lord shows up with His army and He's killing people left and right....
Paul says (Ephesians 6) this 'war' is NOT against flesh and blood, why because at that 'day' the Lord's day alllllllllllll flesh will be changed, and Paul also says in ICorinthians 15:51-51 that allllll will not sleep (flesh dying) but ALLLLLL would be changed. So what kind of killing do you think is going to be going on?
Who do you think makes up the Lord's army? Your doctrine makes you sound like pacifists getting front row seats while somebody else does the dirty work.
The day when the majority of this world believes that the devil is actually Jesus, because of deception. What did the devil offer Jesus in that temptation, well the devil is going to be allowed to offer the same to us still dwelling in flesh bodies and as Christ Himself said all but the elect will follow after him. Christ did not say after I remove my Church the devil will be allowed his final stage performance pretending to be Jesus coming to 'save'.
Iscool>It doesn't say trumpet...It says trump...Trump is the sound a trumpet makes...This is NOT one of the seven trumpets in Revelation...
Once again an English translation of the Greek NT gets the best of the argument.
There is but one Greek word translated "trump" and "trumpet" in the KJV NT ( savlpigx). Any distinction, such as the one above, based on the KJV rendering is arbitrary and unsupported by the Greek text.
In fact, the NJKV corrects the language of the older version by replacing all the "trumps" with "trumpet"
"For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first." (1 Thess. 4:16)
Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 15 that believers rise “at the last trumpet” on the last day which corresponds to the “trumpet” in 1 Thess. 4:16.
Besides, in virtually all the cases where the word is used in the NT, it is not the instrument that is in focus but the sound the instrument is making. So trying to make some distinction between the sound and the instrument is theologically unnecessary.
72 posted on October 8, 2008 9:22:15 AM MDT by topcat54
Review Leviticus 25:9 where it(GSN - 4538) is used in the LXX as a replacement for the word shofer HSN - 7782.
You are correct They are all the GSN - 4536.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach Adonai
NAsbU Leviticus 25:9 'You shall then sound a ram's horn abroad on the tenth day
So the trump( 1 Thess. 4:16) that Paul is speaking of just might be a shofer on the day of atonment.
of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land.
You said — “In either case, the theory did not exist in Christian theology until the 1830s when it took root in one part of England.”
In reference to the “idea” (being presented here and elsewhere) that the teaching (and/or preaching) about the so-called “rapture” (or “taking up”) is something that has not been taught before in history, prior to the time that you mentioned (around the 1800s) — there are written historical comments going back centuries that do mention the teaching.
The Catholic Church, which held sway for many centuries over teachings from the Bible (overwhelmingly) did not teach this and would actually persecute and/or kill anyone who taught different from their own doctrines (if they wouldn’t repent). So, it’s definitely not in the mainstream of Catholic teaching and they did hold a *major* position over the centuries, until just recently.
It’s been because it’s only recently (last few hundred years) that Protestants have been able to develop doctrines that proceed *out of the Bible* instead of “out of the traditions of the Catholic Church”. And that’s why you’ll find many recent teachings and developments from Protestants over the last few hundred years.
I mean..., the Catholic Church was persecuting those who tried to translate the Bible into the local languages (and English). And there are still (remaining today) many “anathemas” against Protestants, which are considered still binding (even if not mentioned as much these days), as they are infallible pronouncements from the Catholic Church.
Thus, there *are* documents from ancient history and church teachers/leaders/pastors/priests (whatever fits that category they were in) that show the teaching of the Rapture.
Mind you, there is a huge amount of documentation that has never been translated and/or has never seen the “light of day”. Since the search has gone on to find these documents (about these teachings from history), they have been found. I’m sure more will be found as scholars pore over the ancient documents from many church writers.
Here is a short article outlining three of them, which have been found...
“Yet, Another Pre-Darby Rapture Statement”
http://www.pre-trib.org/article-view.php?id=76
And this one is a sample of one of those documents...
“On the Last Times, the Antichrist, and the End of the World (English)”
http://www.pre-trib.org/article-view.php?id=169
AND, in looking up the verses in 1 Thessalonians, Chapter 4, verses 13-18
13 But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope.
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.
15 For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep.
16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.
18 Therefore comfort one another with these words.
... here we see that the words “caught up” — which (when looking in the Strong’s Concordance) comes up with the following...
KJV using Strong’s
From a derivative of G138; to seize (in various applications): - catch (away, up), pluck, pull, take (by force).
That’s what is happening to those who are still “alive” at that time — they are “caught up” [or “pluck, pull, take (by force)”]...
And “together” all are with the Lord from then on... (that is..., together with those who were just taken up “out of the grave” — the ones who are “alive” [at the time] are “taking up” with them [who were just raised out of the grave]).
This is a pretty clear picture of the “Rapture”...
And, the word Rapture is a transliteration of the Latin word for this very same word that I’m referencing in Strong’s (the one that means “pluck, pull, or take [by force]). Since the Catholic Church held sway for many centuries and wouldn’t allow any other translations to come into existence (at the time they had the power to prevent it from happening), the “Bible” they used was the Latin Bible. And this word, in the Latin Vulgate (Jerome’s Vulgate), is — “rapiemur”.
Now, we’ve got the word “Rapture” which comes from that Latin version. However, the meaning is there in our English Bible (and in looking at the Strong’s Number Reference) — as “taken up”.
So, if anyone feels better using the words — “taken up” — that’s fine, too — as that is there in the English and it has the meanings (as we see in Strong’s) — to “pluck, pull, take (by force)”.
That should clear up a lot for everyone, I hope.
If one doesn’t like the use the word “Rapture” — simply substitute the words “taken up” and you will find that in the English...
No evidence that Paul had this image specifically in view when he wrote to the Church of predominately former gentiles at Thessalonica (Acts 17:4). It was also used as a general announcement of one of seeming importance (cf. Matt. 6:2).
But I think it’s more likely that it is a reference to the trumpet sounds of Exodus 20:18 where the LXX utilizes the same Greek word to indicate the presence of God to the people.
Would it be your contention that the angels will be utilizing instruments constructed from parts of animal carcasses?
GREAT HISTORICALLY AND BIBLICALLY ACCURATE POINTS.
THANKS.
Much appreciated.
Of course, those without eyes to see or ears to hear will maintain their death grip on
their stinking pile of
UNBiblical assumptions, fantasies, rationalizations, extrapolations and the like . . .
How do you know some Souls might reside in the heavens (New) while new bodies in Christ will reside on the New earth?
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