Mark 13:32-34 (NIV)
No one knows the day or the time. The angels in heaven don't know, and the Son himself doesn't know. Only the Father knows. So watch out and be ready! You don't know when the time will come. It is like what happens when a man goes away for a while and places his servants in charge of everything. He tells each of them what to do, and he orders the guard to keep alert.
I attended high school during the Cold War during the beginning of Nuclear Disarmament. We learned at school that the government had created missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Theses bombs could destroy any city with the push of a button.
At church we spent a year covering the book of Revelations and prophecies. Israel had become a nation again. Many of the conditions written in the Bible were happening everywhere. We expected the world to end via nuclear attack any day.
At the time, there were as many books on the bookstands, and new science fiction being written on the last days every time you turned around. We tossed images of the four horsemen, the number of the beast, around the dinner table many an evening.
Passages like Revelation 1 verse 7: (NIV)
Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.
certainly seemed to support the nuclear bomb theory. We decided it was too scary and too abstract to really worry about. Speculation is often laced with facts but seldom is truth. The end of the world stories became boring and redundant.
With a full scale nuclear war, there are no survivors.
Revelation 20 verses 2 and 3: (NIV)
He laid hold of the dragon, that serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; and he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal on him, so that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years were finished.
If Jesus is to reign on this earth for a thousand years, then it follows that Jesus would have people to reign over. We were fighting with Russia and communism in the Cold War. The Bible Prophecies center around Israel. We put the prophecies in the Bible on hold for twelve years while we focused on life in the 80's and 90's.
The early Christians seemed to think that Christ's Second Coming would happen soon in their time. All kinds of weird religious sects formed around 1000 AD for the same reason. History repeated itself with more false prophets, and bizarre religious sects in what is now known as the Millennium scare 2000 AD.
God obviously has a different concept of time than man does. Whatever is suppose to happen, will happen in God's time frame.
Many of the signs, like the number of the beast have been attributed to too many people; Nero, Hitler, Napoleon, Clinton to name a few.
Revelation 13 verse 18: (BBE)
Here is wisdom. He who has knowledge let him get the number of the beast; because it is the number of a man: and his number is Six hundred and sixty-six.
I do not feel like I have the right background to recognize the number of the beast.
The only sign we felt qualified to recognize was that of the red moon. The moon is a common sight, normally yellow, orange, or white. This one seemed fairly easy.
Acts 2:20 (NIV)
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before that great and notable Day of the Lord come.
The moon was red for two weeks in November of 1999.
The content in the passage that proceeds that one are familiar occurrences of the late twentieth century.
Acts 2:19 (NIV)
I will show wonders in heaven above And signs in the earth beneath: Blood and fire and vapor of smoke.
Part of me wanted to put some credence to the Millennium scare. The rest of me said what a clever way to sell magazines and newspapers. We celebrated a very Happy New Year when none of the dire predictions turned out to be unwarranted January 1, 2000. Not even the Y2K scare seemed to have any effect on life as we know it.
Then again...The moon was blood red for 2 weeks November, 1999 and there have been other reports of a blood red moon over Jerusalem. Perhaps we are indeed living in the beginning of the end.
To continue the short version of this story choose Faces in the Smoke.
Matthew 24:32-35 Mark 13.28-31; Luke 21.29-33 (NIV)
Learn a lesson from a fig tree. When its branches sprout and start putting out leaves, you know that summer is near. So when you see all these things happening, you will know that the time has almost come. I can promise you that some of the people of this generation will still be alive when all this happens. The sky and the earth won't last forever, but my words will.
An understanding based on Luke, John, Matthew and 1 Thessalonians.
Millennium Screen Saver counts down to when the world is going to end. It allows you to choose your own date, which is good because God's word says this info is top secret. Even angels and Jesus don't have the need to know.
