All my life for as long as I can remember, Grandma McGrew preached that we were in the end times. She was a Southern Baptist, a fire-and-brimstone religion. She often read the bible to me when I was a small child, and the passages were usually from the old testament–-Genesis; Daniel in the lion’s den, the three cast into the furnace (My grandparents’ dog was named Shadrack, one of the men who were miraculously saved from the fire), Jonah and the whale, Noah and the flood… and from the new testament (except at Easter and Christmas), the book of Revelations.
In that book, one of the signs of the end times was the re-establishment of Israel as a nation. She was forty four when that came about, five years before I was born. That was the fifth trump spoken of in Revelations.
Never forget that Christ comes at the seventh trump. The false Christ comes first; he is the sixth trump. Don’t let him fool you!
People have been claiming that now, whenever “now” was, was the end times for centuries at least. When I was fourteen, everyone thought that June 6, 1966 was the end date, since that date was 6/6/66. In the late nineties a pastor (from Texas if I remember correctly) gave us a date in that decade that was to be the last day.
It came and went. He then said he’d made a mistake in his calculations. The newly calculated date came and went, too.
Then December 14, 2012 was slated to be the end of the world, because that’s when the Mayan calendar ended. Silliness to the extreme; does the world end every December thirty first?
But the world did end. For Grandma McGrew it ended in her hundredth year, when she fell down in her nursing home, broke her hip, and died from complications. It ended for the preacher who said the end was soon, although his end was a year or two after what he’d predicted.
It will end for you. It will end for me. “But when will Christ return? Two thousand years is a long time!”
Well, it is to you and me, but not to God. The bible says in more than one place in both testaments that a thousand years to man is only a single day to God.
Jesus said he would return in three days. He rose from his physical burial three human days after his execution, and It’s now God’s third day. A few minutes past midnight, in fact.
Mary found the tomb empty early in the morning, and he showed up before his followers around lunchtime. If Jesus shows up at noon, that will be in about two hundred fifty years from now. He could wait until evening, in about five hundred years. Or he could wait until very close to the end of the third day. It could be almost another thousand years.
Jesus said that no one knows when he will return, not even him. I certainly don’t—but it’s now shortly after midnight of the third day. It could be tomorrow.
In fact, it will be tomorrow for a lot of people. Armageddon was in January of 2003 for Grandma. It could be in less than five minutes for you, and is for thousands, because somebody somewhere is dying right now.
It’s almost certain that you will meet Jesus in paradise, long before he returns here. So “let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32).
Be ready for it. It’s coming.