Rapture and End Times

Then another horse went out, a fiery red one, and its horseman was empowered to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another. And a large sword was given to him. (Revelation 6:4)

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Israel-Hamas War Latest developments AP, October 14, 2023

People are scrambling to evacuate northern Gaza even as Hamas told Palestinians to stay home

No decision on a ground offensive has been announced, although Israel has been massing troops along the Gaza border

An Israeli shell landed in a gathering of international journalists covering clashes on the border in southern Lebanon on Friday, killing one and wounding six

The war has claimed at least 3,200 lives since Hamas launched an incursion on Oct. 7

United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has assured Israel: “We have your back”

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Iran’s foreign minister warns Israel from Beirut it could suffer ‘a huge earthquake’ AP, October 14, 2023

BEIRUT (AP) — Iran’s foreign minister on Saturday called on Israel to stop its attacks on Gaza, warning that the war might expand to other parts of the Middle East if Hezbollah joins the battle, and that would make Israel suffer “a huge earthquake.”

Hossein Amirabdollahian told reporters in Beirut that Lebanon’s Hezbollah group has taken all the scenarios of a war into consideration and Israel should stop its attacks on Gaza as soon as possible.

Israel considers Hezbollah its most serious immediate threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles that can hit anywhere in Israel. The group, which has thousands of battle-hardened fighters who participated in Syria’s 12-year conflict, also has different types of military drones.

Hezbollah fighters have been on full alert along Lebanon’s borders with Israel following last Saturday’s attack by the militant Palestinian group Hamas that left hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers dead.

On Saturday, the Israeli military said an Israeli drone strike along the border with Lebanon killed a “cell” that was trying to infiltrate into Israel. On Friday, Hezbollah said its fighters fired several rockets at four Israel positions along the border.

Amirabdollahian said he met Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who briefed him on the group’s conditions in Lebanon.

“I know about the scenarios that Hezbollah has put in place,” Amirabdollahian said. “Any step the resistance (Hezbollah) will take will cause a huge earthquake in the Zionist entity.”

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Iranian Leaders Met with Hamas and Hezbollah Prior to Surprise Attack on Israel The Politics Brief, October 13, 2023

In March, a Hezbollah leader met with Iranian officials to discuss a military offensive against Israel, according to an exclusive report from The New York Times.

Earlier this year, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah conferred with a group of Iranian officials. The revelation sheds light on the circumstances surrounding the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, which began when the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip initiated a surprise attack against the Jewish state.

“Gen. Esmail Ghaani, who is in charge of supervising Iran’s network of proxy militias as head of the country’s paramilitary Quds Force, repeatedly traveled to Lebanon for covert sessions with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, a Shiite Lebanese militia that Iran also supports,” the Times reported.

“Over the past year, Mr. Ghaani worked to coordinate and unify all of Iran’s proxies, according to public statements from Iranian analysts and five Iranians familiar with the work of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,” the report added.

The report described Nasrallah’s meeting with Iran’s strategists, observing that the discussion centered on a new military confrontation with Israel.

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US must be ready for simultaneous wars with China, Russia, report says Reuters, October 12, 2023

WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) – The United States must prepare for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China by expanding its conventional forces, strengthening alliances and enhancing its nuclear weapons modernization program, a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel said on Thursday.

The report from the Strategic Posture Commission comes amid tensions with China over Taiwan and other issues and worsening frictions with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

A senior official involved in the report declined to say if the panel’s intelligence briefings showed any Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons cooperation.

“We worry … there may be ultimate coordination between them in some way, which gets us to this two-war construct,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

The findings would upend current U.S. national security strategy calling for winning one conflict while deterring another and require huge defense spending increases with uncertain congressional support.

“We do recognize budget realities, but we also believe the nation must make these investments,” the Democratic chair, Madelyn Creedon, a former deputy head of the agency that oversees U.S. nuclear weapons, and the vice chair, Jon Kyl, a retired Republican senator, said in the report’s preface.

Addressing a briefing held to release the report, Kyl said the president and Congress must “take the case to the American people” that higher defense spending is a small price to pay “to hopefully preclude” a possible nuclear war involving the United States, China and Russia.

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Falling Dominoes

A domino effect or chain reaction is the cumulative effect produced when one event sets off a chain of similar or other events. It typically refers to a linked sequence of events where the time between successive events is relatively small.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan remarked on the attack: “Today is Israel’s 9/11 moment. Life for us will never be the same after today’s vicious terror attacks by Hamas terrorists.

The attack, likened to the surprise Arab invasion that triggered the Yom Kippur War a half century ago, marked the bloodiest single day in modern Israel’s tumultuous history.

The multi-pronged attack was an incursion the likes of which Israel has not seen since its 1948 War of Independence.

The cause of World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914, by a Serbian nationalist terrorist group called the Black Hand. The cause of World War II was the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939.

The Israel-Hamas war looks very much like the beginnings of world war 3:

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Then Jesus replied to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and they will deceive many. You are going to hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, because these things must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these events are the beginning of birth pains. (Matthew 24:4-8)

Then another horse went out, a fiery red one, and its horseman was empowered to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another. And a large sword was given to him. (Revelation 6:4)

1 big thing: World War

Deal or No Deal, Iran-Israel War Is Coming to the Middle East / The National Interest, June 22, 2022

In late May 2022, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) conducted drills which included “long-range flights, aerial refueling and striking distant targets.” It was, the Times of Israel noted, meant to simulate striking Iranian nuclear facilities. According to Israel’s Channel 13 news, the exercises spanned more than 10,000 kilometers and included more than 100 aircraft and navy submarines.

The IAF, the Jerusalem Post reported in early June 2022, can now fly F-35 fighter jets from Israel to Iran without refueling. And now they can be equipped with a new one-ton bomb “that can be carried inside the plane’s internal weapons compartment without jeopardizing its stealth radar signature.”

The IDF is, of course, an exceptionally well-trained military. It isn’t a stranger to major drills and exercises. But it seems clear that something is afoot and the parameters of the long-running conflict between Israel and Iran are changing. Coupled with Tehran’s imminent “nuclear break out,” such developments indicate that Jerusalem is doing more than mowing the grass—it might be preparing to get rid of the entire yard.

Should Israel strike Iran’s nuclear facilities it would likely bring about the worst war that the Middle East has seen in decades—if not longer. The conflict that would follow would look nothing like many of the recent wars between Israel and Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. For both Israel and the Islamic Republic, it would be an existential battle, with the fate of both the Jewish state and the regime in Tehran hinging on the war’s outcome. The losses and destruction would be devastating.

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Why it matters:

Even a limited nuclear war could kill a third of world’s population, study shows / L.A. Times, AUG. 15, 2022

As escalating tensions among the United States, Russia and China revive old fears of nuclear war, some researchers are warning that even a limited-scale exchange between such nations as India and Pakistan could have catastrophic consequences for global food supplies and trigger mass death worldwide.

A nuclear conflict involving less than 3% of the world’s stockpiles could kill a third of the world’s population within two years, according to a new international study led by scientists at Rutgers University. A larger nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States could kill three-fourths of the world’s population in the same timeframe, according to the research published Monday in Nature Food.

“It’s really a cautionary tale that any use of nuclear weapons could be a catastrophe for the world,” said climate scientist and study author Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in Rutgers’ Department of Environmental Sciences.

The findings come at a time when — 30 years after the end of the Cold War — the threat of a nuclear holocaust may be greater now than it ever was.

Recently, U.K. National Security Advisor Stephen Lovegrove argued that the breakdown in dialogue between nations, as well as the loss of safeguards that had been created between nuclear superpowers decades ago, has plunged the world into “a dangerous new age.” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also warned that “the prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”

Although Robock and others have previously projected that nuclear war would result in tremendous disruption to the climate and food supplies, the recent study marks the first time that researchers have calculated the potential extent of the famine that would result and how many people would die.

The detonation of even just a small fraction of the world’s nuclear weapons would spark massive firestorms that would rapidly inject sun-blocking soot into the atmosphere, touching off a sudden cooling of the climate, the researchers theorized.

The data is being released on the heels of a growing consensus among experts that the threat of nuclear war is greater than it’s ever been, said Ira Helfand, immediate past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

In the event of a larger war between the U.S. and Russia, which together are believed to hold more than 90% of the world’s nuclear stockpile, an estimated 5 billion out of 6.7 billion people worldwide would die, according to the research.

But any of the nine nuclear-armed nations, which also include China, North Korea, France, Israel and the United Kingdom, have enough firepower at their fingertips to cause immense worldwide suffering and death, with soot rising into the sky and touching off a domino effect of catastrophic cooling and famine, the study suggests.

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Reality check:

We may not be at the brink of a nuclear war, but one of the critical signs pointing to the imminent Rapture of the Church is the invasion of Israel, which begins World War 3. This invasion was foretold in Ezekiel 38 – 39, and in Psalm 83:

God, do not keep silent.
Do not be deaf, God; do not be idle.
See how Your enemies make an uproar;
those who hate You have acted arrogantly.

They devise clever schemes against Your people;
they conspire against Your treasured ones.
They say, “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation
so that Israel’s name will no longer be remembered.”

For they have conspired with one mind;
they form an alliance against You—
the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
Moab and the Hagrites,
Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek,
Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre.
Even Assyria has joined them;
they lend support to the sons of Lot. (Psalm 83:1-8)

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The big picture:

In Israel’s history, the Lord has rained down punishment on her enemies many times:

The sun had risen over the land when Lot reached Zoar. Then out of the sky the Lord rained burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord. He demolished these cities, the entire plain, all the inhabitants of the cities, and whatever grew on the ground. (Genesis 19: 23-25)

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward heaven and let there be hail throughout the land of Egypt—on man and beast and every plant of the field in the land of Egypt.” So Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail. Lightning struck the earth, and the Lord rained hail on the land of Egypt. The hail, with lightning flashing through it, was so severe that nothing like it had occurred in the land of Egypt since it had become a nation. Throughout the land of Egypt, the hail struck down everything in the field, both man and beast. The hail beat down every plant of the field and shattered every tree in the field. The only place it didn’t hail was in the land of Goshen where the Israelites were. (Exodus 9:22-26)

The Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid of them, for I have handed them over to you. Not one of them will be able to stand against you.”

So Joshua caught them by surprise, after marching all night from Gilgal. The Lord threw them into confusion before Israel. He defeated them in a great slaughter at Gibeon, chased them through the ascent of Beth-horon, and struck them down as far as Azekah and Makkedah. As they fled before Israel, the Lord threw large hailstones on them from the sky along the descent of Beth-horon all the way to Azekah, and they died. More of them died from the hail than the Israelites killed with the sword. (Joshua 10: 8-11)

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Now on that day, the day when Gog comes against the land of Israel”—this is the declaration of the Lord God—“My wrath will flare up. I swear in My zeal and fiery rage: On that day there will be a great earthquake in the land of Israel. The fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the animals of the field, every creature that crawls on the ground, and every human being on the face of the earth will tremble before Me. The mountains will be thrown down, the cliffs will collapse, and every wall will fall to the ground. I will call for a sword against him on all My mountains”—the declaration of the Lord God—“and every man’s sword will be against his brother. I will execute judgment on him with plague and bloodshed. I will pour out torrential rain, hailstones, fire, and brimstone on him, as well as his troops and the many peoples who are with him. (Ezekiel 38: 17-22)

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The bottom line:

To fall under the judgement of the Lord is a terrible fate. For Russian, Iran, and her hordes, it will be too late. For them, this is the endgame.

Ultimately, all nations who do not turn to the Lord will also be judged:

This will be the plague the Lord strikes all the peoples with, who have warred against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. (Zechariah 14:12)

Unless those days were limited, no one would survive. But those days will be limited because of the elect. (Matthew 24:22)

The “birth pains” of the world are building and converging towards an unprecedented climax. There is an upcoming “delivery date” for the Rapture, known only to the Lord.

Go deeper: Spirit Wars

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:10-12)

The war between nations uses conventional, economic, and information warfare. Another kind of battle – invisible and deadly, with the aim of destroying souls – is spiritual warfare.

The topic of Satan and spiritual warfare is one that some Christians find challenging and even difficult to consider. However, one must consider the truth: By choosing to ignore that the devil exists and that his sole aim is to ruin us, we set ourselves up to fall victim to his ploys. In particular, his use of lies that makes us doubt God and His promises over us. In Hosea 4:6, it states, “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.”

Our struggle is ultimately against “spiritual forces of evil,” meaning the real battle is the spiritual warfare of good versus evil. There is a spiritual war ongoing for the hearts of man, as the forces of evil want to turn us away from God and separate us from Him.

Ephesians 6 includes a description of the spiritual armor God gives us. What do these pieces of spiritual armor represent in spiritual warfare? We are to know the truth, believe the truth, and speak the truth. We are to rest in the fact that we are declared righteous because of Christ’s sacrifice for us. We are to proclaim the gospel no matter how much resistance we face. We are not to waver in our faith, trusting God’s promises no matter how strongly we are attacked. Our ultimate defense is the assurance we have of our salvation, an assurance that no spiritual force can take away. Our offensive weapon is the Word of God, not our own opinions and feelings.

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Case in point:

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in labor and agony as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: There was a great fiery red dragon having seven heads and 10 horns, and on his heads were seven diadems. His tail swept away a third of the stars in heaven and hurled them to the earth. And the dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she did give birth he might devour her child. But she gave birth to a Son—a male who is going to shepherd all nations with an iron scepter—and her child was caught up to God and to His throne. The woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared by God, to be fed there for 1,260 days.

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The Dragon Thrown Out of Heaven

Then war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels also fought, but he could not prevail, and there was no place for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was thrown out—the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the one who deceives the whole world. He was thrown to earth, and his angels with him.

 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

The salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God
and the authority of His Messiah
have now come,
because the accuser of our brothers
has been thrown out:
the one who accuses them
before our God day and night.

How do we have victory over the dragon?

They conquered him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony,
for they did not love their lives
in the face of death.

Therefore rejoice, you heavens,
and you who dwell in them!
Woe to the earth and the sea,
for the Devil has come down to you
with great fury,
because he knows he has a short time. (Revelation 12:1-12)

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Right at this moment, the Devil, his angels, and his human agents are planning to destroy all of the Christians – the Lord’s seed. They are following a One World Plan that will make it impossible to survive as a Christian. The Plan has always been to “devour” the Christian offspring – through abortion, war, imprisonment, martyrdom, debt slavery, and any other method that will kill, steal or destroy.

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In the very near future, a real version of Star Wars will rock the Universe. The Lord’s angels will round up the Devil and his angels, and cast them to the Earth. At the same time, the Rapture will remove all of the Lord’s true believers. This is symbolized by the child being caught up to God and His throne.

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Where does our hope come from?

On February 6, 1999 I was sitting on my bed praying and the Lord spoke to me in a loud voice.

He said, “Tell them that I love them. Tell them that I care. Tell them that I am coming for them. Prepare, like a man who has been told he has just a short time to live. Heal, forgive, and perform those acts of charity that you have been putting off. Tell everyone that I am coming soon for My bride.”

At this point, He said, “What do you see?” I looked down at the pattern on the bed. It was a pattern of budding flowers.

He said, “Open yourself up to praise Me…receive My love…stretch yourself out to Me”.  After that, He said: “My reward is with Me”.

Then I said: “Lord, give me a sign in the heavens or on the earth, so that they will know that this word is from You!” Then I saw a vision of an arm, up to the shoulder, with a gun in its hand. The gun fired two times. The arm was pointing downward. The Lord said: “There will be two shots fired that will be heard around the world. This is a sign, so they will believe that this word proceeded from My throne.”

After He left, I quickly wrote down what happened so that I would have a record of this message. I sent the message to many churches and ministries, but it was mostly ignored. I went on with my life.

“There will be two shots fired that will be heard around the world. This is a sign, so they will believe that this word proceeded from My throne.”

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In September of 2001, I saw the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. I knew then that the Lord confirmed His word. The Lord is coming very soon!

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If you are not sure that you are saved, you can accept Christ into your life right now, by praying:

“Lord Jesus, I believe you are the Son of God. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins.  Please forgive my sins and give me the gift of eternal life.  I ask you into my life and heart to be my Lord and Savior.”

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Spread the Word:

Send any comments, suggestions, or prayer requests to raptureandendtime@gmail.com 

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