My Rapture 2017 post and thoughts...

Jeff, first of all, I am your friend. So, I am glad that you feel very mentally stable. This was a very long but well written post. I am just struck by how intellectually disjointed it reads. The first portion basically summarizes a lot of problems with the fundamentalist views of the Scriptures, to which you imply consent if I am reading you correctly. Then your second portion is all about how amazingly accurate the eschatological predictions and frameworks are about the return of Christ and the preceding events which come first, despite having many problems in the earlier material which would serve as a necessary foundation for the assertions presented in your second portion. So as I am reading, I am left with the disjointed feeling which prompts me to ask, which is it? However, like you I have left atheism and I am very pleased that you have done the same. I consider myself to be an agnostic theist with Deist hiccups, leaning toward liberal/progressive Christianity. Though I must admit, I have not got a clue as to what eschatology I would fall under, though it would most likely be some flavor of partial preterism. I simply do not put much stock in excitable predictions and what I would term as Scripture-wrangling (along with magical mystical number crunching). Christ promised to return in the generation of his hearers, according to the synoptic Gospels, and I believe he did, at least in some spiritual sense. I believe the final end is yet to occur but is on God’s timetable, probably hidden from our understanding. FWIW and YMMV, of course.

Hey Byron! Wow, someone actually left a comment on my blog! 😀



This post started out as simply a list of links to material I find compelling that MAY indicate that the return of Christ is near. I then decided to make a post of it and I also added in my PM to my friend Cliff. Remember that I was deep in atheistic skeptic mode not that long ago! But when I decided to visit www.unsealed.org, my mind began to change. It wasn’t an instant thing like flipping a light switch, but it did happen pretty rapidly. Yes, I’m very impressed by how well world events seem to be lining up exactly the way the Bible said they would during the Last Days and its prediction, by Jesus, of the shape the world would be in just before His return. TO ME, it all fits like a glove! But do I have PROOF that God is real and that Jesus is God and that He is returning soon? No, of course I don’t. But the more I read and the more I research this stuff, the more convinced I become.



As for the difficulties with the Bible I mentioned? I don’t know. But I am increasingly just not that worried about them, and I’ll tell you why. There are a whole bunch of atheist sites on the Internet, some large and some small. What do every single one of them have in common? A strong desire to debunk the Bible and a strong desire to lead Christians away from faith in Christ and a lesser but still strong desire to convince others who are not Christians that the faith is not worth their consideration. While I’m sure there are sites out there focused on criticizing other faiths, the vast majority of anti-religious sites focus on the Bible and the Christian faith. And if you visit YouTube and look for atheist channels, I believe the same would hold true. Why all of this hatred and vitriol aimed at the Bible and the Christian faith and at the Lord Jesus Christ Himself? Because…. if the Bible is true and Jesus Christ is indeed GOD, then atheists have a huge problem. And the only way they can, at least in their own minds, escape the judgment that they know awaits them as it does all unrepentant sinners, is to try to prove the Judge false. And what better way than to try to prove that He doesn’t actually exist? Why do they do exactly what I spent years doing — raging not against ALL gods, but just the Christian God? Because they hate Him. It really is just that simple. Nobody on this planet wastes a moment of their time hating Krishna or Hanuman or any of the other thousands of gods mankind has dreamed up over the centuries. But the God of the Bible? He gets blasted with hatred from sinful men on a daily basis. WHY? Because HE is REAL! And men know that because they are made in His image. Yet they SUPPRESS THE TRUTH (Romans 1:18). Anyway… that digression aside, what I was getting at is that atheists have a vested interest in trying to prove that the Bible isn’t true, so of course they are going to try to find problems with it. Sinful men have been trying to disprove and discredit the Bible for many years, yet it has stood the test of time and it continues to bring people to saving faith in Jesus Christ.



If it sounds like I have returned more to the fundamentalist side of things, yes, I guess I have. But the more I read and the more I consider things, the more sense it makes to me. But am I totally at peace about things? Are my beliefs settled? No. I still hear the skeptical and cautious voices in my head. And I think that is because I don’t KNOW if there is REALLY anything to all of this stuff. IS it all really true? IS the case for return of Christ REALLY as compelling as it seems? Is the alignment of stars and planets etc. that is going to occur on September 23rd REALLY the sign mentioned in Revelation 12? I DO NOT KNOW, and no amount of reading or thought can provide the assurance I wish I had. All I can do is wait and see what, if anything, happens… But I do know that world events are lining up EXACTLY the way the Bible said they would during the Last Days, and the world is in the EXACT condition that Jesus said it would be just before His return. So yeah, normal human doubting aside, the case seems extremely compelling to the point of being almost airtight. *shrugs*