THX.
I still hold to the 7 years of Tribulation with the last 3.5 years being THE GREAT TRIBULATION with the beginning of God’s utter wrath being poured out on the world at the 3.5 year half-way mark.
imho.
As we both know, there are numerous beliefs as to the Tribulation and Apocalypse. The various beliefs disagree on a lot of details and times, but they all agree that things are going to be REALLY, REALLY BAD - far worse than anything we can even imagine. However, I personally hold to the belief that none of us know exactly when these events will begin.
I love medieval Western European history and one of the most fascinating periods for me is the 14th and early 15th centuries. The Crusades had pretty much turned into a disaster and the Muslims controlled the Holy Land. The Hundred Years War between England and France brought incredible bloodshed, hardship and eventually peasant revolts. The Papal schism began (remember that Western Europe was completely Catholic) and people began to have doubts about the survival of the Church especially since the East-West Schism had only occurred a couple centuries before. And then, to cap it all off, the Black Death swept across Europe in the mid-14 century and wiped out a significant portion of the population, and it would continue to return with decreasing severity every couple of decades. In short, the Christian world had every reason to believe that this was the Apocalypse, nobody had ever witnessed devastation on this scale.
But it wasn't the end, these events marked the beginning of the end of feudalism and with it the emergence of the middle class. Within a century the Renaissance began and education became available to many more people. The foundations of modern capitalism were laid and with it came the first non-architectural technological advances since the days of the Roman Empire. In short, the world changed dramatically in a relatively short period of time (I say short because we have to realize that the average person in 14th century Europe lived EXACTLY THE SAME WAY that his ancestors had lived a thousand years before). Were all of the changes good? Probably not, but the point is that the world didn't end.
So, while it's possible that we are right now very close to End Times, it is also possible that we are sitting on the cusp of a major political and socio-economic shift (maybe even for the better), but I am certain that we will soon witness major changes.