50 Reasons Why We Are Living In The End Times: Part 1

The Bible says we cannot know the time of the Lord's return (Matthew 25:13). But the Scriptures make it equally clear that we can know the season of the Lord's return (1 Thessalonians 5:2-6):

This passage asserts that Jesus is coming like "a thief in the night." But then it proceeds to make it clear that this will be true only for the pagan world and not for believers. His return should be no surprise to those who know Him and His Word, for they have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to give them understanding of the nature of the times.

Furthermore, the Scriptures give us signs to watch for — signs that will signal that Jesus is ready to return. The writer of the Hebrew letter referred to these signs when he proclaimed that believers should encourage one another when they see the day of judgment drawing near (Hebrews 10:25-27). Jesus also referred to the end time signs in His Olivet Discourse, given during the last week of His life (Matthew 24 and Luke 21). Speaking of a whole series of signs which He had given to His disciples, He said, "When you see all these things, recognize that He [the Son of Man — that is, Jesus] is near, right at the door" (Matthew 24:33).

Every time I think of "Signs of the Times," I am reminded of a great man of God named Elbert Peak. I had the privilege of participating with him in a Bible prophecy conference held in Orlando, Florida in the early 1990's. Mr. Peak was about 80 years old at the time.

He had been assigned the topic, "The Signs of the Times." He began his presentation by observing, "Sixty years ago when I first started preaching, you had to scratch around like a chicken to find one sign of the Lord's soon return."

He paused for a moment, and then added, "But today there are so many signs I'm no longer looking for them. Instead, I'm listening for a sound — the sound of a trumpet!"

One hundred years ago in 1907 there was not one single, tangible, measurable sign that indicated we were living in the season of the Lord's return. The first to appear was the Balfour Declaration which was issued by the British government on November 2, 1917.

This Declaration was prompted by the fact that during World War I the Turks sided with the Germans. Thus, when Germany lost the war, so did the Turks, and the victorious Allies decided to divide up both the German and Turkish empires.

The Turkish territories, called the Ottoman Empire, contained the ancient homeland of the Jewish people — an area the Romans had named Palestine after the last Jewish revolt in 132-135 AD.

In 1917 Palestine included all of modern day Israel and Jordan. In the scheme the Allies concocted for dividing up the German and Turkish territories, Britain was allotted Palestine, and this is what prompted the Balfour Declaration. In that document, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, declared that it was the intention of the British government to establish in Palestine "a national home for the Jewish people."

The leading Evangelical in England at the time was F. B. Meyer. He immediately recognized the prophetic significance of the Declaration, for he was well aware that the Scriptures prophesy that the Jewish people will be regathered to their homeland in unbelief right before the return of the Messiah (Isaiah 11:11-12).

Meyer sent out a letter to the Evangelical leaders of England asking them to gather in London in December to discuss the prophetic implications of the Balfour Declaration. In that letter, he stated, "The signs of the times point toward the close of the time of the Gentiles... and the return of Jesus can be expected any moment."

Before Meyer's meeting could be convened, another momentous event occurred. On December 11, 1917 General Edmund Allenby liberated the city of Jerusalem from 400 years of Turkish rule.

There is no doubt that these events in 1917 marked the beginning of the end times because they led to the worldwide regathering of the Jewish people to their homeland and the reestablishment of their state.

Since the time of the Balfour Declaration, we have witnessed throughout the 20th Century the appearance of sign after sign pointing to the Lord's soon return. There are so many of these signs today, in fact, that one would have to be either biblically illiterate or spiritually blind not to realize that we are living on borrowed time.

I have personally been searching the Bible for years in an effort to identify all the signs, and it has not been an easy task to get a hold on them. That's because there are so many of them, both in the Old and New Testaments.

I have found that the best way to deal with them is to put them in categories, and in doing that, I have come up with six categories of end time signs. We will explore these catetories beginning in Part 2 of this series.

... The walls surrounding the camp were not fully intact and had many places where the enemy had broken through in previous encounters.

These places had never been repaired, but on top of the walls there were places to stand and watch for the enemy. The Lord said that this was the beginning of the second storm that He would bring to His Church but that the crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning would only wake a few of the fully equipped but peacefully slumbering soldiers. He said they were too busy dreaming about their churches, the success of their ministries and their material blessings. Because of this they would not wake up.

After the thunder and lightning passed over the camp of God, the Lord showed me many cannons that were similar in style to those used in the Civil War. These cannons came from the left as I viewed this scene. The Lord made it CLEAR that the storm came from the EAST and the cannons came from the LEFT. He did not refer to the East as the right and He did not refer to the left as the West. They were slowly but steadily rolling up to within close range of the walled camp, many within ten yards of the walls. The soldiers who had awakened earlier and were standing on the broken walls shouted a loud warning to the ones who were asleep, but few stirred and even fewer got up to see what was happening.

Then the cannons all rolled even closer and cut loose a terrible volley that brought down the wall that faced them. The cannons were then aimed at the people who were beginning to wake up. So devastating was their attack that the majority had time only to stand up and cry, “O My God,” and then were quickly cut down by the barrage. I saw that many were hit in the chest.

Most of the people were then completely awakened by the horrifying sound of the attack but were not ready and were cut down. A few woke up and had time to properly ready themselves to fight, but the majority of the people inside the sparsely-guarded, weak, and broken-walled camp were either killed or badly injured.

As I finished delivering this vision/prophecy to the Church, the Los Angeles skies lit up with what was the most awesome spectacle of thunder and lightning that I had ever seen. It was so unusual in our area that it made front-page headlines in the Los Angeles Times the next morning.

An unusual thing about this particular word was that it was the second storm that God had shown us. Earlier, in February of that year, God showed me a storm that was for the cleansing of His Church and the exposure of the sin of many men, particularly those in high places. When I received that message, I had asked that God would confirm the word with actual thunder and lightning. But He didn’t. In just two or three weeks, however, we saw the spiritual storm that He brought to the Body of Christ with the revelation of the P.T.L. scandal.

This second storm prophecy WAS confirmed by a tremendous electrical storm. I felt that God confirmed this vision and not the first, because the first storm happened very shortly after He told us about it. This next storm however, was likely not to happen for a long time.

Shortly after I shared this vision, the people were exhorted about our ties with material wealth. The Lord was showing us that we were far too involved with our toys, our comfort, and our ministry successes, and God was trying to shake us loose from this mentality. He was showing us that our time spent, our attention given, our identification with the world’s concept of what is important cripples us regarding the doing of His will. Our desire to seek men’s approval and our need to identify with success was especially dangerous to Christians.

If any of these attitudes are in our hearts, we will have to part with these attitudes in order to fully apprehend God and His will.

GOD RIPS OFF THE SKIN

In October of 1987 my wife and I took a trip to New York to witness the opening of David Wilkerson’s new work in the city. It was called the Times Square Church. We had attended several meetings and were between meetings touring the city with our two sons: Jedidiah who was 14 and John who was 13. I distinctly remember that we were walking on the sidewalk just talking together.

All of a sudden I was almost thrown to the ground by the impact of what God was showing me. I did not fall to the ground but my knees buckled and it was very hard to walk. I had never had an experience like that before and have never had one since. I saw a gigantic man standing before me that towered above the city. The man had no clothes on. All of a sudden a huge hand from the sky reached down and grabbed the scalp of the man and pulled straight up very quickly. Then I saw that all the skin of the man had been pulled off by this powerful yank. I saw sinews, muscles and nerve fibers. It looked just like the pictures that are in medical books that show a human without skin.

The man yelled in pain as he stood completely vulnerable to all the elements around him. In my mind I cried to the Lord, “What is this Lord?”

The Lord said quite clearly, “I am going to pull the skin off the city of New York.”

Immediately after this, He showed me a huge thumb that was pressing down on the City of New York. He said, “This will put great pressure on the people of New York and what is inside each person will be forced out for all to see. If love is in the heart of the person, love will be forced out. If hate is inside the person, hate will be forced out. If fear is inside the person, that will be forced out. If faith is inside the person, that will be forced out. What the person truly felt and believed would be exposed by this terrible event.”

After I recovered my senses and my composure (I was brought to tears by what I had seen) ...

http://www.cryfromthewall.com/chapter17SecondStormWarning.html

Kehrli

...(I was brought to tears by what I had seen), I haltingly tried to explain to my wife and sons what I had just seen. I didn’t really know what it meant, but I had some ideas. After contemplating what I had seen and after praying about it, it become clear that what God was going to do was remove His protection from the city of New York, and the people would be open to attacks of the enemy in a way that they had never been before.

He also made it quite clear that this dramatic experience of quickly removing His hand of protection would be duplicated throughout the whole country. I didn’t precisely know what New York or any other city, or the nation at large would experience. At first I thought that there would be a great stock market crash that would trigger another Great Depression. I thought that perhaps the skin was money. In fact, several days later, we saw the stock market drop 700 points in one day.

This crash ultimately did NOT affect the city of New York or the country at large in any significant way. But I knew that God would dramatically remove His hand of protection, and that New York City and our country would experience disasters and dealings like the heathen nations have experienced in other places. God would leave us to fend for ourselves because we have rejected Him in so many ways. Heathen countries on a regular basis have experienced disaster after disaster where thousands of people have been killed by earthquakes, flash floods and hurricanes. They have suffered greatly from attacks of “nature” and attacks from armies. They have experienced devastating financial collapses.

The United States compared to Russia, the European countries, China, Africa, India and the rest of the world has been relatively unscathed. These days soon will be over for America. These events will happen to America because the federal government, the judicial system and many state governments have done everything they could to reject God and His Word. Most judges and many politicians seem to hate the Word of God and want nothing to do with God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ or His Holy Spirit.

It is obvious from their rulings regarding the Name of Jesus Christ, the Ten Commandments and the freedom of Christians to express their views, that they either hate God or do not believe in His existence. The greater tragedy is that a huge number of people in our country really don’t care. If America will not listen to God and if its people choose to exclude Him from their lives, then God will no longer protect them as He has in the past.

More importantly and more disturbingly is that our country is in great danger because of the void that the Church has left. The Church fears and depends upon man more than the Church fears and depends upon God Himself.

As has been mentioned earlier, most churches have not taught the law of God. They are all too aware that many would leave their churches if they did so. They are afraid of offending people who have not left their sin and even in the midst of their churches, are comfortable with their sins and have no intention of leaving them and obeying God. They know that if they preach the law and its consequences as Jesus, Paul, James and John did, they would be accused of being legalistic. We have forgotten that trusting in, appreciation of and obedience to God and His law through faith in Jesus Christ protects us.

In the year 2005 God made it abundantly real to me that there was something wrong in the way we Christians protest so strongly the removal of the images of the law and the Ten Commandments displayed in and around our court rooms.

As I was praying about the court decisions that were to be made concerning the removal of the Ten Commandments from government property, He spoke very clearly to my heart: He said, “How can you expect Me to keep the images of the Ten Commandments in a secular court room while many in My churches have kept the Ten Commandments out of their churches?”

The Church in America MUST bear the greatest responsibility for the lawlessness and people pleasing attitude in our country. We have left a SPIRITUAL VOID in the land. At one time, the Puritans held a high standard of the law in America. In the last century or so the secular world has unmercifully mocked these holy men and women of the Reformation both in literature and movies. Even many modern Christians consider Puritans to be stodgy, sour faced and legalistic. This disrespectful and wrong headed notion must be dispelled by correct teaching of church history. We seem to have become much too sophisticated. In many churches it is common to see Christian parents turn a blind eye to the adulterous activities of children living in their home.

Because teaching the law as Jesus taught the law is discouraged from the pulpit, we have provided a HUGE spiritual void that has been filled by the cults, eastern religion and secular philosophy. ...

http://www.cryfromthewall.com/chapter17SecondStormWarning.html

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