Episode 49: I've Been Issued a Challenge

Bible Prophecy Under the Microscope-Episode 49

Gary responds to a challenge issued to him on Facebook about the great tribulation and the “end times.”

St. Paul tells Timothy, “If you instruct the brethren in these things, you will be a good minister of Jesus Christ” (I Timothy 4:6). The members of Timothy’s congregation needed to know about what would take place in the “latter days,” because they would be personally affected by those events. In particular, they needed the assurance that the coming apostasy was part of the overall pattern of events leading up to the end of the old order and the full establishing of Christ’s Kingdom. As we can see from passages such as Colossians 2:18-23, the “doctrines of demons” St. Paul warned of were current during the first century. The “latter times” were already taking place. This is quite clear in St. Paul’s later statement to Timothy:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come; for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so also do these resist the truth; men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith (Il Timothy 3:1-8).

The very things St. Paul said would happen in “the last days” were happening as he wrote, and he was simply warning Timothy about what to expect as the age rushed on to its climax. Antichrist was beginning to rear its head.

Other New Testament writers shared this perspective with St. Paul. The letter to the Hebrews begins by saying that God “has in these last days spoken to us in His Son” (Hebrews 1:2); the writer goes on to show that “now once at the end of the ages He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Hebrews 9:26). St. Peter wrote that Christ “was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for you who through Him are believers in God” (I Peter 1:20-21). Apostolic testimony is unmistakably clear: when Christ came, the “last days” arrived with Him. He came to bring in the new age of the Kingdom of God. The old age was winding down, and would be thoroughly abolished when God destroyed the Temple.

The Great Tribulation

This book introduces readers to the theology of judgment: specifically, God’s judgment sanctions against Israel. The sanctions were curses. God gave blessings to the church and cursings to rebellious Israel, which had crucified the Lord and publicly called God’s judgment down on themselves: “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). God’s cursings on ancient Israel in A.D. 70 matched their crime, the crucifixion of Christ. This crime was the greatest (worst) in history; their punishment was also the greatest (worst) in history. To call anything else “the great tribulation” is to downplay the im­mensity of that generation’s crime.

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Gary responds to a challenge issued to him on Facebook about the great tribulation and the “end times.” The challenge-writer is convinced that we are living in the last days now, based on Israel becoming a nation again in 1948, and all of the modern “signs” of the times confirming Jesus warnings from the Olivet Discourse.

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