Rev2022-11
220411AM
Transcript
REV2022-11 – How It All Ends – How Can We Know When The World Is Ending?
How can we know the world is ending? Jesus gave us a map. In your Bibles, if you have them, in Matthew 24, Jesus preaches His longest sermon on the end of the world. He does two chapters on that. His longest sermon is three chapters long, which is Matthew 5, 6, and 7, but Matthew 24 and 25 is His second longest sermon and it’s about the end of the world. He introduces the end of the world in Matthew 6, “Thy kingdom come.” That’s actually what the end of the world is when God’s kingdom comes to Earth. The first installment is the Second Coming of Christ. The second installment is the Millennial Rule. Then that bang at the end, I show you on that chart when the Great White Throne is, and then the Lord’s Kingdom Rules.
He outlines it right here in Matthew 24. Notice what happens in verse 3, “As He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” That’s a very biblical topic. What’s going to be the sign that You’re coming and what is going to be the sign of the end of the age. Jesus doesn’t give just one, He gives multiple. What He says is you’re going to see these signs and they’re going to first show up. Then they’re going to show up brighter and more intense, more visible, more widespread. Then boom, I’m going to come. How He says that is illustrated in the book we’re covering. I’m not teaching Matthew, I’m teaching Revelation, but look at this: what He introduced in Matthew 6 He outlines, and I’ll show you the outline of Matthew 24 in just a moment. Then He illustrates it in the seals, the trumpets, the bowls of Revelation now.
Where we are, you notice we’ve moved in our journey to Revelation. Chapters 1, 2, and 3, are the Church on Earth. In chapters 4 and 5 we saw the Church in Heaven. Now we’re moving to chapter 6 onward, which is the events of the Tribulation that fluctuate between Heaven and Earth. It goes back and forth and it’s very exciting to watch.
You’ve seen this chart many times, but you see we’re in the third section or the big red block, the Tribulation, which covers chapters 6 to 18. What we see in the outline is in Matthew 24 verse 8, then verse 33, then verse 34, we see God giving specific trends. Now this: Matthew 24 is Jesus describing what the world looks like as He’s coming to touch down on the Mount of Olives. It’s like a drone view. One of those drone pictures where it’s up above and the drone comes down until it’s down on the ground, that’s what Matthew 24 and 25 are. We can see what the world looks like when Christ returns.
Specifically, this is what He says, “All these things are the beginning of sorrows,” the Greek word, ōdin, the birth pangs or pains. Verse 33, “So you also, when you see all these things.” Remember what the original question was in verse 3, what are the signs? What is the sign? Jesus said there isn’t one, there are many. When you see all of them, He says, know it’s near, (verse 33) at the doors. Mark is teaching through the book of James. Remember what James says to the church in Jerusalem? He says, behold, the judge is at the door. Who he was talking to was the Church. What he’s saying is we’re not talking about the return of Christ at that moment. He was saying that the One who wants you to live for Him before His return is at the door, He’s watching, He wants to see if you are.
Look at verse 34. “Assuredly, I say to you, this generation.” The generation that sees the launch of the Tribulation events is going to live through it because it’s tacha. That’s the word in Revelation, like a tachometer, it means they’re rapid. The events that happen at the end are very rapid. He said the “generation will by no means pass away till,” and there it is again, “all these things take place.”
What are all the things? Well, on the left of that chart is the Olivet Discourse, and on the right is the book of Revelation. Remember I said Jesus outlined the book of Revelation so in verses 4 and 5 He talks about false Christs. 6 and 7 of Matthew He talks about the war. Verse 7 famine, verse 9 death, 9 to 13 martyrdom. Then in His corollary, parallel, synoptic version of this, which by the way is Mark 13 and Luke 21, He talks about the signs that are in the heavens and the kind of like a cosmic earthquake. Did you know that exactly parallels Revelation 6? The first seal is the white horse, which is the false Christ. The second seal is the red horse, which is global war. The third seal is of the black horse, which is global famine.
This morning, there was a new thing, what is the name of that popular stock investing thing? I don’t know what it’s called. It’s the one that kind of broke stock investing into everybody. It’s some app, I can’t even remember what the name of it is. They send out a daily report and they call the current condition of the Earth, listen to this, farm like FARM, ageddon. Like Armageddon only they called it farmageddon. They said the world is heading toward an incredible time of food scarcity and famine. Wow. That’s the black horse, but that’s not the Tribulation black horse. That’s the beginning of the run-up for it.
The pale horse is death. We’ve seen that with the pandemic of COVID, which has morphed into all these variants and has shown the whole world what one pathogen can do to the planet. Can you imagine the pale horse with a fourth of the population of the world? We’re seeing horrors now that are only going to intensify. Then martyrdom, that’s the fifth seal of Revelation, and the sixth seal is just the complete explosion of all the End-Time events.
Here are the trends. What Jesus said is this is the beginning, verse 8 of Matthew 24, of the sorrows, the birth pains. What this means is that what starts small gets bigger. What happens? There’s greater visibility. What we’re seeing right now is truly an End of Days thing. Everybody in the world now knows about everything within seconds. A missile hits Ukraine. Someone’s filming it on Facebook or YouTube live and it’s out there, or they tweeted it out or they post a picture on Instagram. We’re seeing nearly instantaneous visibility of events, but the Bible says they’re going to get more frequent and they’re going to get more intense. See that’s what birth pains are. First, there’s this visible pain and saying oh! The expectant mother goes, oh! She’s paralyzed for a second because, you can see it, she’s feeling this contraction. The contractions get more frequent, they get more intense, and they have a greater impact, which for birth is the arrival of a baby.
Look at this. These are just great charts. This is the NOAA, National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration of America. They track the big weather events, and this is just right off their site, from 1980 to 2020 NOAA climate. Look at that. That’s the droughts, the freezes, tropical cyclones, wildfires, winter storms, severe storms, flooding, the cost, blah, blah, blah. Just the total number of events. Does that mean there are more events? Not necessarily. We’re aware now. What they were not aware of in 1980. We were just at the front end of all this satellite stuff. We were in the space race and all that.
Then all of a sudden, they commercialized all this, and they started watching everything with satellites for crop planning and weather prediction. Weather prediction is a phenomenal thing that you have grown up with. We didn’t have that. We had the Almanac, a paper that was written for a whole year. It told you about the weather. Oh, it was very interesting. It had the trends, and they were usually very right. You didn’t look at your phone and say it’s going to rain at 9:37. Now, with these satellites, they’re seeing all the weather events going on.
Look what Jesus said in Luke 21 on the left. “Nation will rise against nation,” verse 11. Great earthquakes, famines, pestilences, fearful sights, signs up in space, the sun, moon, and stars, and on the Earth distress, perplexity, the sea, and the waves roaring and all of this because everyone is seeing it. Verse 26 says men’s hearts will fail them. The Greek word apopsychō is your spirit, apo means to pop out, and people’s spirits will pop out. What that means is they’ll just drop dead from fear because what’s going to happen is people are going to be watching these global events, like that strange cloud that went over Alaska over the weekend. They don’t know what it was, whether it was a burning meteorite coming down, some space junk, some Russian or American vehicle. We don’t know what it was, but it was a very strange dark burning across the sky. It scared people. Over the weekend in Times Square, if you’d been doing open air evangelism, it was a great time. A manhole cover popped and made a big loud explosion sound, and everyone ran for their lives. They thought they didn’t know what it was. The Bible says that as people see these global events, they’re going to die of fear.
What are the end of world trends? Global diseases will get more lethal. Haven’t we seen that in the last two years? Global warming will get hotter. Don’t we hear about that? Global water shortages will get worse. Have you been watching Lake Mead? Have you watched that? There’s an argument in America over the Colorado River. Are we going to send the water in one direction to help Colorado or are we going to send it the other way to help the millions of people in Arizona and California? Wow. That’s just our little dilemma with water. Global food scarcity. Need I say anymore? There are 12 million metric tons of wheat that are in the storehouses of Ukraine that are getting destroyed, which is equivalent to giving a loaf of bread to everybody on Earth once a week. That is a huge amount of food that is going to be soon destroyed. Global conflicts are going to get bigger and deadlier. Global hatred. This is everything Jesus said in Matthew. Global hatred for Christ. It used to be for Christ, now it’s getting personalized down for Christians. See, it’s getting more intensely personal. Global tracking. We’ll see that in just a second. It’s going to get more complete. I can’t buy gas at a gas station without getting an immediate text from Visa or MasterCard telling me I just purchased something. Instantly like that. It’s gone from the gas station through their satellite dish, up to a geosynchronous satellite, back down to Omaha in Nebraska where all those things are processed underground in that vast computer housed credit area, then it goes back to me, and it does it in less than a second.
Here’s the first trend. Daniel said this. Remember Daniel was Jesus’ favorite prophetic prophet. He’s the only one He names by name. When He preaches his sermon on prophecy, He says, do you remember what Daniel the prophet said? What did Daniel the prophet say? Here’s one thing, Daniel 12:4, “But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end.” How are we going to know when it’s the time of the end? Number one, many are going to run to and fro. There is going to be this movement. That’s going to be unlike any other time in history. No matter how you take this, something is going to happen that’s going to characterize the end of to and fro.
Let’s just look at global transportation history. 3,000 years ago, Jonah went down to a port in Jaffa to run away from the Lord and got in a boat very similar to the boat that Paul, 2000 years ago, would have sailed on his missionary journeys. Very similar to the boat that Columbus got on 500 years ago and tried to find the new world. Not very dissimilar to the boat that Ben Franklin, as in from Philadelphia Ben Franklin, went to the French to have him aid us in the revolution.
Then everything after 3000 years started changing just over 150 years ago with the advent of the steam engine. Before that everything traveled by the speed of wind or the speed of a horse or the speed of foot. Those were the three; either a horse was pulling you, you were on it, you were in a chariot, the wind was pushing you, or you were running. Everything changed. We went from wind to steam and then, you know what happened. We went right from that to the internal combustion, then to the airplane, then to the rocket. Look at where we are. Over 4.9 billion people in 2019 were flying anywhere they want. They’re running to and fro.
The next thing is a global explosion of knowledge. He says, and knowledge shall increase. Let me show you how knowledge is increased. I brought you a prop. This is my phone. Let me read to you an ad. This is an old one. WWDC, or whatever they call it, is the new Apple event. They’re already unveiling the new stuff. This is old, the old one I have. My phone as Apple describes it, just the camera on the back is powered by a chip with 11.8 billion transistors. That’s just the camera. You say uh-huh, what does that mean? It has a 16 core Neural engine. It’s capable of 11 trillion operations per second, aka tera, that’s for the trillion teraFLOPs. You say, what is that? For perspective, just 15 years ago teraFLOP computing could only be done by building sized, government funded computers in Japan, the USA, and the EU. Now we have one in our pocket. See, you have grown up with this. You don’t realize how staggering this is. I have on my phone my whole Logos library of 7,500 books. The books I have on my shelf at home number about 6,800 in my office. I have all of them on here with Logos and I can search any word I want with them. That’s unheard of, unparalleled, it’s an indescribable transformation of knowledge. You all have the collection of everything, Google, in your pocket.
What’s happening? Look, they’re analyzing everything. Did you know this week two things happened? One thing is they announced that some doctor somewhere as he was drawing blood with a normal blood drawing needle out of someone’s vein, it’s the first time in history he pulled into the syringe microplastic, in the bloodstream.
First of all, in the ancient world, they didn’t know what plastic was and they didn’t know how to make it. Now we’re making so much of it it’s breaking down that they’re finding it on top of the highest mountains in the world in the virgin white, pure snow. It’s laced with microplastics, so is the ocean. You guys are reading this. Everyone talks about how the straws are harming fish life. It’s not just the straws. It’s that microplastics are everywhere. Plastic is ground up into such small pieces that we’re breathing it in. It’s going into our lungs, into the alveoli, into the bloodstream, circulating through our body, collecting in our organs and now they’re pulling it out in blood draws. That’s unprecedented knowledge.
How about our weather? Jesus said there’s going to be distress with perplexity in the sea. Waves roar and people’s hearts fail them from the expectation of what’s coming. Look, here’s the NOAA satellite image. Do you see that? Bonnie and I experienced that. That was last summer. That was the derecho they called it. It was a wall of winds that devastated the crops across the breadbasket of the United States. The satellites caught this, and it was devastating to the people that were there. We were driving across Nebraska then we went into Iowa. I said, honey, look, all the corn fields are pushed over. They were like Dagon’s statue bowing down to the ark, all of them had fallen. The further we drove the wider it was. It was one of the greatest crop losses in the United States. That’s been going on all the time, but people see this now on the news and it’s scaring them.
Number four. The global communications explosion is part of what I’m talking about. You guys don’t think anything of it. You can text, you can tweet, you can post, you can do whatever all those terms are with friends that maybe were here and now they’re in Asia or wherever. You don’t think anything of that. Did you know when the Roman emperor died during the time of the Bible the world didn’t know about it, to the end of the empire, for six months? They were still at the outpost, still operating like the former emperor was in power. There was a big war, and three emperors came in. Finally, the final emperor came. They eventually got word six months later. They didn’t even know about it because news traveled at the speed of foot or horse or wind and the empire was really big.
Look at what Revelation 11 says, “Then those from the peoples, tribes, tongues and nations.” That’s the way the Lord describes the world. How else are you designated? Peoples, tongues, tribes, nations. That’s just like all the groupings of humans. People around the world are going to see the dead bodies of the two witnesses for three and a half days. As if we didn’t catch that verse 10 says, “And those who dwell on the Earth will rejoice over them, make merry.” Here’s the amazing ability to communicate. They’re going to send gifts to one. That means Amazon or something is going to be operating during the Tribulation. People are going to be able to send gifts all over the place and communicate and watch events.
Watch, this is yesterday at 4:30 PM. That’s Facebook’s chart of Facebook live. The people that are watching it, that’s the blue. The green is the people that are broadcasting something to be watched. If you look it’s everywhere, this is encompassing about 90% or more of the global population yesterday. We’re able to see live events. Unbelievable. Until God turns everything off. By the way, He turns it all off in Revelation 18 to get the Earth’s attention. He turns off the music, He even turns off the electricity in verses 23 and 24. I like this, this was a headline. “Digital daze: 73% of adults ‘can’t imagine’ going a full day without looking at a screen.” That’s where we’ve gotten. Okay.
Number five, the trends of global pandemic explosion. I don’t even need to discuss that. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines and pestilence.” Here’s a pestilence. Don’t we all know what it looks like? The rapid spread of COVID, the mutations, and the variants have gotten the attention of the world. Guess what? There are so many super pathogens lurking out there ready to mutate with COVID, ready to infect this world. They just had a conference about Ebola, the hemorrhagic, horrible, gross, terrible blood disease. Okay. Wouldn’t it be awful if that merged and became as widely spread as COVID has gotten?
How about this? We don’t even think of this. You guys grew up with it. The Bible says no one can buy or sell without a number. First of all, in the ancient world, they laughed. Then in the more modern world, they wondered. We don’t even think of it. You just wave your phone in front of, if you have apple pay, you swipe your phone across, or you touch, you tap your card. What is all that? Money is digitalized. Before you worry about what the forehead or the hand means you can’t buy or sell without a number. In other words, no longer were people going to be trading gold and silver and grain and oil, or wine or some other good for something. Wealth no longer is physical, it’s digital. It’s in the ether as they call it.
Let’s talk about the number of the beast. In Revelation 13:16 it says they have to have this number on their right hand or their foreheads. What’s interesting is we’re getting ready for it. Biometric facial recognition stuff is everywhere. The more we travel you’re checking onto airplanes by smiling, you don’t need paper. They can see you. Look at what’s going on. We have doorbells that are tracking visits. Bonnie and I travel and are usually gone 10 to 11 months a year. Yet we get a little notice when anybody goes near our front door and it doesn’t just tell us someone went there, it tells us who it is. Wherever we are in the world we get a notice. That’s nothing. That’s a $79 doorbell from Amazon and it’s low tech compared to what the government has. Okay.
How about this? Every car you get, a rental car or a company car or you have a delivery van, your movements are being tracked. My son rented a car in New York to drive to see another family member in Colorado. He rented the car in New York, with unlimited mileage, and he was driving across the country to Colorado. In Kentucky, as he pulled into a rest area a black car pulled in beside him and a US Marshall got out. He smiled at him and said where are we going, son, with this rental car? He said, Hertz said, that it’s crossed about six states, and they wonder where you’re headed. My son said I’m going to see my family in Colorado and will get back over the weekend. They said, okay, fine. They got in their car and drove away. They knew right where he was. They were following him into the rest area. He was not a criminal. He was a renter of a rental vehicle that they track everywhere when the algorithm says it did something strange.
How about tracking your conversation? Bonnie and I were talking, we were in Hungary, I think. We were in our rental car between the Word of Life Institute and Budapest. We were driving and I said, you know honey, you have some unread messages. The car said, unread messages, do you want me to read them? It said that in English in a Hungarian rental car that had a listening device because I hooked up my phone to use CarPlay. It’s listening all the time, not just when you want it, all the time it’s listening. Of course, your phone is constantly being tracked. Our daily lives are tracked by phones, laptops, and even by our doorbells. It’s all being used.
Do you know how they’re using it in China? They now have an app they’ve given out to everybody in China where you can tell the government when someone expresses, how does it put it? A mistaken opinion. A mistaken opinion. If you read the article, it’s about anybody that says something wrong about the history of China or the government of China or whatever. You can immediately take their picture or tag them and say Bill has a mistaken opinion and the police will come to visit Bill. What is it going to be like when the Bible is a mistaken opinion, and the leader called the Anti-Christ gives the world an app that when you express a mistaken opinion, they’ll come to visit you? See how fast it’s coming?
In the midst of all this, you know how it says no one can buy or sell, except one who has the mark of the beast. Did you know cryptocurrency is now worth more, even though it keeps crashing than all US currency in circulation? See there isn’t as much paper money as there is digital money. There’s a constant problem with what happens if everybody wants to take out of the digital repository, the bank account, and paper money because there isn’t enough of it. That’s why this whole Bitcoin thing is interesting to people. It’s all happening before our eyes.
How about number seven of 10. The trend of weapons of global human death and destruction. Look what Jesus says in Matthew 24. “For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.” Listen to what Jesus says in verse 22, “unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved.” Those are what we call WMDs, weapons of mass destruction. In the ancient world, the world of the Bible, the only way that you could kill someone was to be close enough to them to get them with your sword or knife, or a little further away you could get them with your spear, or a little further away you could get them with your bow and arrow or your slingshot, or a little further away with your catapult. What else was there? What would people do; stand there and wait for you to reload your catapult or your arrow or your slingshot, or run toward you with a sword? No! They ran in every direction so they never got everybody in any battle unless the Lord was doing the conquest of Canaan. All the rest of the people would just run off and hide and dive into the river and go crawl into a cave.
Then something changed in World War II. We had the unleashing of the power of atomic weapons. Then they started bettering, not better, but making them more powerful. We went from the idea of just splitting the atom to fusing the atom. We had hydrogen bombs, which were far more devastating. Then the Israelis, you know Israel, Jewish people were involved with all this because of their love for physics. The Israeli physicists said, hey, if we use an atom bomb around here, we’ll blow everything up. We’ve got to figure out something else. They came up with neutron bombs. Do you know what neutron bombs do? They kill every organic life form. They just leave all the buildings. If they bombed us with a neutron bomb here, we would all be dead, and the building would look great. It wouldn’t ruin anything. It doesn’t destroy anything but organic life. Amazing.
Why am I saying all that? Because we’re there. Jesus said the end is going to be when it’s possible to kill everybody on Earth. Just one of the Soviet Sarmat missiles can destroy everything in a 250,000 square mile area, one missile. That’s horrible, but we have 6,000 of them in America. We have enough to do the whole world over and over and over, it’s global human death and destruction.
A lot more people are getting on it. This on the left is just the Cold War. It was the US and the Soviets and also the US and Russia, but now we’ve got more people. In the middle picture, on the righthand side, that’s China’s second nuclear missile field. They’re building their ICBMs as fast as they can in China and they’re expanding all their missile fields.
Here’s something interesting to think about. In Revelation 16 the final war, Armageddon, involves the armies of the east, China, Iran, and Russia, Ezekiel 38. Look to the left. Just before the war in Ukraine, I clipped this. This is a headline from a newspaper, an online news service. “Warzones: Biggest US Navy war games in 40 years to prepare for World War III.” They use that so lightly. World War III? Across 17 times amid tensions with Russia, China, and Iran. This is not Left Behind, Tim LaHaye’s prophecy. This is not any prophetic writer. This is public secular news. Look at the elements. They say World War III and they named three countries that look like they’re going to be the trigger: Russia, China, and Iran. That’s exactly what the Bible says. When you read the news, looking through the window of the scriptures, it’s fascinating to see how it frames everything and explains everything.
That helps us to understand Jesus saying there’ll be wars and rumors of wars. He called them birth pangs, but they’re just starting now. They’re getting more and they’re getting louder. Look at that on the left, Death From Above, do you see that headline? That’s the thermobaric missiles. Each one of those missile launchers weighs 50 tons and they tow them behind these big tank things, and they have all the missiles in there. When the Russian troops shoot those thermobaric missiles, they go up, explode a bunch of gas vapor and it permeates the air, and starts settling down. Then a delayed explosion ignites it all so that it makes a thermo, hot, baric, having to do with the atmospheric pressure, and it ignites. It sucks the air out of people’s lungs. If you ever light gas there’s this quick suction, it’s a concussive movement of the air. This is a large movement of air that pulls the air out of your lungs. When you gasp in you breathe in the hot, deadly, explosive gas that’s on fire. It’s a very cruel way to fight a war and they have been using them. Death From Above. “Putin is feared to have deployed thermobaric rocket launchers in Ukraine.” Not feared, that’s an old headline, that was from the beginning of March. He did.
Revelation 9 doesn’t say that everybody dies with plagues and worshiping demons and idols. In verse 21 it says they don’t repent of their murders. Here’s another article I clipped out. “American Horror Story: Map reveals where 54 mass shootings erupted over past month as CNN host says there’s an ‘active shooter situation in US.'” That was not quite one year ago. America made the record that in one month we had 54 mass shootings. Let’s call them what they are, murders. That’s just America. God says the whole world is going to be involved with murders, sorceries, that’s occultic drug use, sexual immoralities, and deaths. That’s going to be what the Tribulation is like. That’s the seventh trend.
The eighth trend is global peace, prosperity, and materialism. What Paul adds to all this in 1 Thessalonians 5 is this: Paul says, “For when they say, ‘Peace and safety!’ then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains.” What does the world want? Peace and safety. They want prosperity. They don’t want unrest. Did you know that the Ukraine grain shortage affects other countries? Primarily Ukraine feeds Northern Africa, the largest populous Arab nation is Egypt. Already the Egyptian president is bracing his people for food scarcity.
Do you remember the last time there was food scarcity in Northern Africa and the Middle East? We had what was called the Arab Spring. It was terrible across North Africa and everything going on in Syria and everything going on all over the Arab world. 10 years ago, it flooded Europe with millions and millions of refugees from all those conflicts. That is starting to rumble again because of the food scarcity.
While that’s going on, look at this, that’s Apple. Right now, Apple’s total sales last year made them larger than the whole world’s GDP, except for seven nations. In other words, Apple is bigger than Italy, and bigger than Brazil. The GDP is bigger than Canada, across the bottom. Bigger than Russia, bigger than Korea, bigger than Australia, bigger than Spain, bigger than Mexico, and bigger than India. It is bigger than the GDP of all those countries. If Apple were a nation, it would be the seventh most powerfully affluent nation in the world, only ahead would be the US, China, Japan, Germany, UK. Wow. It’s amazing to think about where the wealth is.
The richest 1%, you hear about the 1% all the time. They own half of everything. One out of a hundred own 50% of everything. You add to them the rest of the developed world, 19% of the population, and they have 94.5% of everything. 1/5th of all people have almost everything. Did you know, that’s exactly what Revelation describes? While everybody is starving to death, the rich you read in chapter 18, they’re getting their boatloads of ivory, and peacocks, and all the fine things, and their silk, and their pearls, and everything they want. There is going to be a greater and greater dichotomy, a greater and greater stratification, or whatever you want to call it, of concentrated wealth. It already is and it’s amazing.
The poorest 80% of the world live on 5.5%. It’s almost like the balcony is 20% up there. They’re looking down at the 80% and the 20% have everything. The people down there in the flatlands don’t have very much of anything. The average family in Egypt lives on $232 a month. Amazing. They spend a third of it on food not to build up, just to survive. Their food has gone up by 50% in the last couple of weeks. See, that’s very dangerous and ominous.
Number nine is the trend of global hatred for Israel. Do you know what the Bible says? “On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will surely hurt themselves. And all the nations of the Earth will gather against it.” There is going to be a united global hatred of Israel. Guess what? It is already there. Did you know no one flinches when the top Iranian general says our forces in Syria are awaiting orders to destroy Israel, destroy. That’s exactly what God said. By the way, when Zechariah wrote that there wasn’t an Israel to destroy, it had been carried off into captivity and never was a nation after that. After the Babylonian captivity, they came back into the land, fought wars, and tried to throw off their occupiers. The Romans finally just devastated them. There was not a nation for 2,600 years called Israel on Earth from the Babylonian times until 1948. There’s a target called Israel and all the world is going to hate and want to destroy Israel.
Recently, they showed the new Cold War. It’s the Middle East, the green, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen who are committed completely to the annihilation of Israel. The UAE and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Jordan are not wanting them to be annihilated because they’re a buffer against Iran. It’s the Sunni-Shiite conflict.
Here’s the good news. The last thing Jesus said in Matthew, look at Matthew 24:14, “And this Gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” Mark 13:10, “And the Gospel must first be preached to all the nations.” There are two elements to this. First of all, that’s all we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be going into all the world and preaching the Gospel. We live on Earth with our soul mission from God to share the light of the Gospel of Christ. We do that, as a schoolteacher, a plumber, or as a pastor or as a missionary, or as an artist, or a draftsman. It doesn’t matter. God wants to infiltrate every part of society. He wants all of us to be missionaries where He placed us. It’s wonderful.
Look what’s happening. Global evangelism has never been like it is now. What you see on that big map, those red dots, are the unreached people groups. What an unreached people group is, is that there’s no Christian yet in that language and there’s no scripture yet in that language. There are two problems. No one communicates with those people verbally that’s a believer, and no one knows their language that can communicate. Secondly, there is no copy of scripture to share with them in their language. It’s a double whammo, but guess what? With machine learning, artificial intelligence, and this teraFLOP computing we have in our pockets now, Wycliffe and all the rest of the people that are on the cutting edge can go in, they can record these people talking, they can use machine learning to isolate the language structure and sometimes in just two and a half years produce the scriptures in their language. Some three years, some five.
This is the IMB, the International Mission Board, and the Southern Baptist Convention. They produce this regularly to show where those unreached people groups are and encourage people to go and become a part of getting the scriptures into their language. Missions are going forward, and we are at the place where it’s going to soon be possible to say that, according to the mission organizations, in the next 10 years every language known on Earth will be in the process of somehow getting scriptures of some form into it.
Why is all that important? Because Revelation shows us life is fragile. As we’ll see in the next two hours when we come to the fourth seal, 25% of all Earth’s population dies in the fourth seal of Revelation 6. By the time we get to chapter 9, and we get to the fifth trumpet, 1/3rd of all humanity dies, already having lost 1/4th. That’s 58% when you add it together. Life is fragile, death is inevitable, and Christ is the answer. That’s what we’re supposed to share with people. What’s the only thing you can take with you to Heaven? Only one thing, people.
Real quickly. I want to tell you I was on an airplane. I was going to speak, and Bonnie knows this. I speak all the time. I’m a professional Bible teacher, but every time I work and work till the last minute. I was working on this until 9:25. I was still fiddling and doing corrections on the slides and looking at verses. I got on this airplane flying to a men’s retreat and I sat down, and I couldn’t believe it. The plane was almost empty so I got the tray table down and I turned, and I could look out the window and see the clouds. I had my Bible, and I had my pen, and I was studying. There were only about six of us on the airplane and believe it or not one of the other passengers was seated right across from me, right across the aisle.
I turned a little bit in my seat, so I wouldn’t be bothered and distracted by them. I was underlining and this person kept pushing the button. You know how you push the call button and call the stewardess. It went beep and she came and said, yes sir. He said, could I have one of the little bottles, the $3 bottle of whatever alcohol they sell on airplanes. She got him one. I thought, here I am reading. Beep, he pushed it again, she came, he said, could I have another one of those? I was thinking, wow. There was a third beep. He got pretty happy over there.
I’m studying and underlining. He says, hey, what are you doing over there? I wouldn’t even look at him. I said, I’m studying the Bible. Why are you studying the Bible, he said across the aisle? I said because I teach the Bible. I wouldn’t even look at him. I’m underlining and writing my message. He said I have a question for you. I put my finger where I was working and for the first time, I turned and looked across the aisle and said, yes, totally disengaged, totally disinterested. I was going to minister to a men’s retreat and that was my whole focus. He said, my Hispanic housekeeper, every time I see her, she’ll look right at me and say, you go Hell. He said I’ll see her again. She goes, you go Hell.
I’m sitting there holding my place, looking at him. He said, why does she say that to me? I said because you probably are. I turned in my seat and went back to studying for two seconds. That’s when the Holy Spirit’s baseball bat hit me on the head, and I realized something. Do you know why hardly anybody’s on that airplane? Do you know why they seated you in the same row? Do you know why he’s scared to death of flying? He thinks he’s going to die. I put him on this plane across from you, the Lord was saying, reading your Bible so that he would be brazen enough to ask why does my Hispanic housekeeper, who is an evangelical Christian, keep telling me I’m going to die and go to Hell if I don’t get saved? He put you with someone that would communicate the Gospel to him across the aisle.
I felt so bad that I turned right around my chair and said, excuse me. I said the reason why your Hispanic housekeeper says that in her limited vocabulary of English is because she’s trying to share the Gospel with you. Has anybody ever tried to share the Gospel with you? I went to share the Gospel with him and sadly I wasted most of the time because we were landing. They were saying put up your tray tables and get your seats in the most uncomfortable, upright position. I was doing all that, so I wrote on the back of a tract my name and I was going to try and write my cell phone number, but he said I’ve got to go, I’m catching another flight, I have to run. I handed him the tract and he ran right off the plane.
That was it. I got his name. I wrote it in my prayer journal, and I prayed for him. Six months later, I was back at the home church where I was pastoring. I was walking and looking down at my notes between the two services and someone stood there so I just moved over. I was looking at my notes and they moved over so I moved back over. Finally, I looked up and there was the guy from the airplane. He found me. He said, as soon as I got off that airplane I was so scared I was going to die. At the first bank of airline seats, I got right down on my knees, opened your tract, I read it all and I asked God to save me. He said I’ve been looking for you for six months. He said God found me at 38,000 feet. We’re living in an unprecedented time. The Lord has told us the world is ending and we’re supposed to be sharing the Gospel.
Slides
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