Free Republic

For months, Peter Thiel, the right-wing tech billionaire, has warned of what he sees as an imminent threat from the Antichrist, an entity portrayed in some Christian traditions as one of Jesus’ ultimate enemies. Mr. Thiel, an investor in artificial intelligence, says he is drawing on biblical prophesies to warn of an Antichrist who will promise safety from existential risks like nuclear war, climate change and artificial intelligence only to bring about something worse: one-world, totalitarian government. Now, Mr. Thiel is encountering resistance from Christian thinkers in the Roman Catholic Church, just as he tries to build support for his...

Originally published March 19, 2018, updated 2026 Author’s note: I asked this question over five years ago when I began Rev310 on my old WordPress site, which, in hindsight, seems like a lifetime ago. But just think about how much the world has changed since 2018. The events of 2020 included COVID, race riots, and a stolen election. 2021 included the disastrous US pullout of Afghanistan. 2022 saw the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and ChatGPT went public. By 2023, the world was racing toward digital currencies, global government, and a barbaric assault on Israel by Hamas. In 2024, Israel...

Is the Rapture real? There’s always debate around this topic. Let’s start with the obvious: the Rapture sounds crazy. Jesus descends from Heaven, dead people rise from their graves, and living believers are suddenly caught up into the sky—like the world’s strangest episode of “Stranger Things.” Sounds like the stuff your uncle mutters about after three cups of church coffee. Except—the Rapture is right there in Scripture. Paul says it. John says it. Jesus says it. Opposing Views Now, critics like to pounce: “But the word Rapture isn’t even in the Bible!” Neither are the words Trinity or even Bible....

Why the End Times Confuse So Many Christians For a topic that occupies nearly a third of the Bible, the end times remain one of the most misunderstood areas of Scripture. Many Christians care deeply about God’s Word, attend church faithfully, and read their Bibles regularly, yet still feel uncertain when the conversation turns to prophecy. For some, the subject feels intimidating. For others, it feels divisive. For many, it simply feels overwhelming. Conversations about the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Antichrist, the Millennium, or the eternal state can quickly become technical or emotionally charged. Instead of clarity, believers often walk...

Over the years, people have told me that the Rapture must happen after the seven-year Tribulation. More often than not, they support their belief by offering an assortment of statements supposedly confirming their assertion. Of course, those who adhere to Replacement Theology combine the Rapture and Second Coming since they reject the tenets of Premillennialists, such as a literal seven-year period of judgment and Jesus’ thousand-year reign over the nations that includes a restored Israel. Some amillennialists say they believe in a “post-Tribulation Rapture,” but that’s highly misleading since they view the judgments of Revelation chapters 6-18 as either an...

Jesus spoke in many parables before the masses using agrarian imagery and common motifs to illustrate profound truths. And these truths were only meant for those with eyes that would see and ears that could hear. In other words, Jesus spoke to all but intended for His followers to understand the hidden lessons behind the parable. Even then, He would need to expound upon them until the disciples understood their meaning. Out of 39 parables that Jesus taught, two were of the fig tree. One of them contained the barren fig tree as described in Luke 13:6-9. The vineyard owner...

Of all the End Time events, the Rapture of the Church generates the most interest and the most controversy. I have a friend who wrote that the Rapture is third in the list of top 10 topics that have most divided the Church—right after COVID-19 vaccinations and the Harry Potter books! There has been disagreement about both the promise and the timing of the Rapture. When I was a new believer, I thought the Rapture was nonsense. I had never heard of it before in the church I’d grown up in and it simply did not compute. Then I read...

On Feb. 19, 2026, Worthy News posted an article by Emitt Barry about Pres. Trump’s launch of his historic new “Board of Peace.” Concerning the UN, Trump said: We’re going to strengthen up the United Nations. We’re going to make sure it’s viable. Concerning the Israel-Hamas war, Trump said: The war in Gaza is over. If Hamas fails to surrender its weapons, it would be harshly met. We will help Gaza. We will straighten it out. We will make it successful. We will make it peaceful. (FYI: Before I continue, I want to point out that the Bible says the...

On Feb. 6, 2026, an article by Bible prophecy expert Jim Fletcher was posted on Koenig’s Eye View that said: Iranian researcher Hamid Reza Bigdelo claimed on the Iranian television program “Toward the Horizon of Palestine” that Israel’s fate is “destruction.” Relying on religious sources, Bigdelo said that Islamic texts mention the end of the Jewish state prior to the reappearance of the Twelfth Shiite Imam (the Mahdi). According to him, the elimination of the Jewish political structure is described in religious sources as an event to be led by the Iranian people. He added that with the Mahdi’s reappearance,...

Everyone here in the Middle East continues in our hold pattern as the United States and Iran decide what they’re going to do about each other. Other countries, such as Turkey, Qatar, and Russia, are throwing in their two shekels of advice and warnings. Here in Israel, we saw our Prime Minister take his sixth trip to Washington, seventh to the US, where he held a three-hour meeting with the American President. Meanwhile, back home, our military continued its preparations for a brief and violent visit to Iran. In other words, it’s kind of business as usual. There’s one more...

There’s an interesting line in the movie The Magic of Belle Isle that provokes thought. It’s a story about a novelist, played by Morgan Freeman, who has lost his passion for writing and, frankly, his will to live. But he befriends a young girl on the Isle who admires his talent for storytelling and wishes to also write stories. The author’s advice to her is, “Never stop looking for what’s not there.” This seems to be the crux of how good imagination works. Look at your surroundings in their ordinary habitat and stretch your mind to see something unusual, unexpected,...

The kingdom of the Beast is coming… …and it’s coming FAST! Things may look like a vast sea of disorganized chaos right now, but each piece is carefully and rapidly being assembled and positioned, and soon it will all come together into one giant nightmare for humanity. All the disinformation, the deception, the uncertainty, the manipulation, and the distracting illusions are heading to one final climactic endgame. And that big finish has been planned for eons. What no wise man, no philosopher, no king, no tyrant, and no President has ever been able to pull together will finally all be...

Artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction. It’s part of daily life. But as AI becomes more powerful, serious spiritual questions have been raised: Is AI the Antichrist? Is AI connected to end times? And how should Christians think about AI? In my recent podcast, we cover the topic of AI because it isn’t something to discuss in the future. These are questions for right now. Is AI the Antichrist? The Bible tells us that in the last days, there’s going to be a world figure that will emerge—the Antichrist, also called the Beast and the Wicked One. I don’t...

The Bible describes a future period in which authority is concentrated not solely in traditional kingdoms, but in a limited number of powerful figures who operate beyond national boundaries. And that is why I am paying close attention to President Trump’s Board of Peace. Here are some fast facts: 1) President Trump will serve as chairman and wield considerable overall control. It will help resolve conflicts globally. He has the sole authority to invite new members and appoint a successor. 2) Global peace seems to be their goal, though they will participate in other global duties as well. The immediate...

On Jan. 19, 2026, the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) staff reported that Israel’s Finance Minister and head of the Religious Zionist Party, Bezalel Smotrich, said: Israel should issue Hamas a short ultimatum for disarmament and true exile, and once it expires—Israel should storm Gaza with all its might, destroy Hamas militarily and civilly, open the Rafah crossing with or without Egyptian consent, and allow Gaza residents to leave and seek their future elsewhere, where they won’t endanger the future of our children. This was the simple, self-evident position of the overwhelming majority of Israelis in the days after the massacre...

BLUF: With the impossible third reelection of DJT, the political left knows they are losing “bigly” and are desperate. The changes Team Trump is making are not superficial like with previous Republican administrations; no, these are substantive, foundational, and will permanently remove the funding and power from political leftists of all stripes from now on, forever. But the leftists aren’t going to take this lying down. If they can’t have their own version of America, no one can. They’d rather watch it burn than see MAGA ever succeed. The tragic irony in all this is that the resistance the left...

I often hear statements such as, “Today is no different than any other time in history; look at what happened in the last century with its deadly wars and oppression.” Others point to New Testament times when immorality across the Roman Empire rivaled that of our day, as if to say there’s nothing new about our day. How do we answer such objections? Is our day truly unique in we live in the season of Jesus’ imminent appearing? The most telling difference between today and no other time in all of Church history is this: since 1948, Israel has existed...

Minneapolis saw it in 2020 with George Floyd, and low and behold, that same spirit reigns again in my home town. This time the accused are ICE agents doing their job. And well. In 2020 I wrote in an E-newsletter like this one, stating, “In the Twin Cities, 1,000 properties have been vandalized, looted, burned, or totally destroyed along with apartments above these businesses and homes. “Our media shows business owners staring in stunned disbelief as many were reeling from Coronavirus destruction, but now they face the result of rampant anarchy due to George Floyd fall-out. The media adds insult...

On this date 45 years ago, Blondie released “Rapture,” a genre bending single that quietly became one of the most important crossover records in Hip Hop history. Released in 1981 from the album Autoamerican, the song did far more than expand the band’s sonic palette. It helped introduce rap music and Hip Hop culture to a global mainstream audience at a time when the genre was still largely confined to New York City neighborhoods. “Rapture” blended new wave, disco, funk, and spoken word rap into something unfamiliar yet accessible. Debbie Harry’s rhythmic verses referenced early Hip Hop figures and...

Backdrop On October 31, 2025, Pastor Gary McKibben and I conducted a livestream titled Per Aspera Ad Astra—Latin for “through hardship to the stars”—a phrase famously embraced by Jack Parsons, one of the godfathers of America’s early space program. In that discussion, we traced the modern rocketry enterprise back to Parsons and his notorious, explosion-prone circle of engineers at Caltech and JPL, sometimes nicknamed the “Suicide Squad.” Yet Parsons’s obsession extended far beyond propulsion and pyrotechnics. By the mid-1940s, he was deeply immersed in the ritual occultism of Aleister Crowley and Crowley’s system of Thelema, attempting to merge technological ascent...