Growing
up in Oklahoma, I’m well acquainted with tornadoes.
I’ve seen quite a number with my own eyes and
experienced its roar when one flew over my house in
the spring of 1970.
The twister skipped to and fro throughout our
northwest Oklahoma City neighborhood.
Some good friends had their house completely
destroyed while the houses on either side and across
the street completely missed the damage.
The capaciousness of that storm is
characteristic of many “rope-like” tornadoes.
If you are going to be in the midst of such a
frightening act of nature, I learned that’s the best
type of tornado to experience.
There’s a good chance to escape damage and
especially death.
Folks in Joplin a couple of weeks ago were no
so lucky. While
May 21st was a much ballyhooed doomsday that failed to
materialize, our friends in that southeastern Missouri
town aren’t so sure it wasn’t a day of doom.
Saturday May 21st was devastating
for most of their community.
Viewers of the cable news networks have been
stunned again and again observing the unbelievable
destruction in the wake of this F5 “wedge-like”
tornado packing winds in excess of 200 miles per hour.
When you are in the path of a storm like this,
that is “rain-wrapped” and a mile-wide, there is
no escaping it. You
probably can’t see it.
The roar is so loud you feel surrounded and
lose your sense of direction.
You simply can’t avoid the coming storm.
This situation reminded me of the
inevitability of the apocalypse I believe is soon to
come upon the world.
In my new book, Black Sun, Blood Moon: Can
We Escape the Cataclysms of the Last Days?
I hope to underscore for Christians that the
vast fulfillment of prophecy in our day demands we
recognize that we have now passed the point of no
return. We
live in the last days.
They won’t go on forever.
I do believe we can escape the most horrendous
cataclysms the Bible predicts, but not because
humankind is on the verge of revival and is ready to
repent and change its ways.
Would that this about-face were imminent.
To the contrary, our culture in America is
heading down a path to destruction and singing a merry
tune along the way.
Can our fate be avoided?
This conviction of perilous times ahead is why
I begin the book asking the question, “Is the
Apocalypse Avoidable?”
My answer is a stern “NO.”
It’s time to recognize that, as Christians,
our hope is not in improving our government though we
should always strive for its betterment until the day
Christ returns. Nor
is it in achieving a new level of “higher
consciousness” as the mystics of the new age and
authors of 2012 books proclaim will soon happen.
Nor is it the case that as a nation, if we
repent, God will heal our land. We should hope that
such a change occurs.
But whether or not attitudes and actions adjust
such that we see some improvement in morality and the
economy, we are now firmly locked onto a course that
can’t be altered.
Doomsday lies in our near-term future.
The May 21st prediction of Harold
Camping was most unfortunate. It blackened the eye of
all Christians who believe that Jesus Christ will
return one day to this planet in the same manner as
His disciples saw him leave. (See Acts, Chapter One).
Camping’s rationales for why Jesus should
have returned on May 21st were not just
unbiblical, they were irrational.
His approach was a mixture of numerology,
mathematics, and wishful thinking.
His method for assembling these factors
together was convoluted at best; at worst, it was
blatantly random.
How awful that so many followed him and so much
money was spent to advertise “the end” with
nothing to show for it.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve done many radio
interviews on the subject of “Harold Camping and the
Coming of Doomsday on May 21st.” Throughout these
interviews, this was a common question:
“If he is wrong, can any good come of
this?” Beyond
causing people to be reminded that Christianity has
historically believed its founder would one day return
to earth, the failure to rightly predict this outcome,
much less make so much of it in the media, is hardly a
good way to impress the unbelieving.
It’s never good to commit your biggest
blunders in front of a national audience.
It’s even worse when your audience hopes and
expects you to fail.
Sir Isaac Newton sought to decode the date of
the apocalypse precisely because he felt it harmed the
gospel when its preachers tried to vainly predict
exactly when the day of doom would come. He provided a
range for doomsday’s culmination – he speculated
it would happen sometime between the years 2060 and
2280. What
motivated Newton to take up this task at that time?
He had just lived through many terrors (like
the plague and The Great Fire of London) in the
ominous year 1666.
Is Newton likely to be right?
Probably not; but at least his methods were far
more biblical than Camping’s.[1]
In contrast, good Bible scholarship suggests
that there is precedent to believe that great dates in
salvation history repeat themselves.
Just as Jesus was crucified on Passover, the
Jewish holiday that pre-figured the crucifixion, so
the hidden Rapture of the Church and the physical
return of Jesus Christ at the Battle of Armageddon are
most likely to occur on specific feast days of the
Jewish calendar. Many
believe that Rosh Hashanah or Pentecost
will be the day of the Rapture.
Likewise, Yom Kippur, aka the Day of Atonement may well be Judgment Day, when
Christ returns for “All the world to see.”
At this time, according to John’s testimony,
the Antichrist is thrown into the Lake of Fire and the
Devil into the bottomless pit.
So begins the millennial reign of Christ.
However, just because we might have strong
biblical precedent for why these events will likely
happen during the “fall rain” just as the
salvation events associated with Jesus Christ’s
first coming transpired in the time of the “spring
rain,” that doesn’t mean we can assert the exact
day in history when these events must come to pass. “No
man knows the day or the hour.”
Nevertheless, I am thoroughly convinced, as are
many evangelical prophecy scholars that sometime in
this century, perhaps within the next decade or two,
Jesus Christ will physically return to earth.
We are very close.
Study the fulfillment of many Bible prophecies
in our day and you can hardly conclude otherwise.
Remember: Jesus
scolded the Pharisees and Sadducees for their failure
to see the obvious signs of the times.
Are the signs of the times any less obvious in
our day?
Doomsday is hardly a new topic.
For 2,000 years, those in the Christian
tradition have learned to live with the tension of
knowing that someday Christ will return.
However, we’ve never known the exact day or
hour when this ultimate event will occur.
That’s why Jesus told his followers to “Watch
therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour
wherein the Son of man cometh” (Matthew 25:13).
Jesus even used a weather analogy to talk about
the inevitability of doomsday and our need to pay
attention to what is going on in our world.
“[Jesus]
answered and said unto them, “When it is evening, ye
say, ‘It will be fair weather: for the sky is
red.’ And
in the morning, ‘It will be foul weather today: for
the sky is red and lowering.’ O ye hypocrites, ye
can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not
discern the signs of the times?” (Matthew 16:2, 3)
There
is an old saying, “Red sky at night – sailors
delight. Red
sky in the morning – sailors take warning!
The weatherman says this rule of thumb applies
only to the middle latitudes of our planet.
The evening sky of red represents an abundance
of tiny particles in the atmosphere, typical of a high
pressure system. It yields clear skies overhead. On
the other hand, a red sky in the morning bears bad
tidings because it implies a storm is approaching,
particularly if the sky is lowering at the same time. Today,
those who fail to heed tornado warnings are beyond
foolish – they are reckless.
Jesus’ adage was the equivalent Hebrew
aphorism. The point Jesus made was how paradoxical
that the religious leaders of the day could tell the
weather (not their expertise) while failing to foresee
how the religious and political climate would affect
their nation – matters about which they were
supposed experts. It was a giant case of not seeing
the forest for the trees. The Jewish leadership should
have recognized that cataclysm was inevitable. All the
ingredients were there, like chemicals ready to
combust. From
the moment that the Jews and the Romans synchronized
their efforts to crucify Jesus, there was no rolling
back the clock. The
fate of the Jewish nation was settled.
Their actions sealed their fate.
True, their apocalypse was still almost a
generation of 40 years away.
But Jesus insisted that His prediction about
the destruction of Jerusalem’s and its sacred temple
were surer than the continuance of the physical
universe. “Heaven
and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass
away.” The
apocalypse associated with the Jewish nation – its
dissolution and the worldwide diaspora of the Jewish
people – was not avoidable.
Do the terrors of our times suggest we live in
the last days? In
the next article, I will delve deeper into the issue
of whether or not the Apocalypse can be avoided.
If you want to peek ahead, do consider buying
my latest book, Black
Sun, Blood Moon, available at Survivor Mall.
* * * * * *
S. Douglas Woodward
has authored three books:
Are We Living
in the Last Days?
Decoding
Doomsday, and
Black
Sun, Blood Moon, the latter two published by
Defender Publishing Group.
See also his web sites:
Decodingdoomsday.com and
Blacksunbloodmoonbook.com.
