Who is the antichrist? - part 2

"In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." -- Andy Warhol

What would the antichrist be if he could only squeeze fifteen minutes of fame from the attention-span challenged public? He wouldn't be the Robert Redford look-alike/demon possessed/hypnotist/all around world-beater of the Left Behind books, that's for sure. He couldn't be. The fact is that in a world like that the antichrists of the type that we saw in the last post would be small fish in a huge, swirling ocean of humanity. You would need something else to work your corruption on a society like that. Something more pervasive.

The third time -- If you are a Protestant you probably think that very little good ever came from the Catholic church. You could not be more wrong.

We love to read the book of Acts and talk about the zeal in the early church, but the early church had a dark side as well. Yes it was characterized by hospitality; it was also characterized by heresy and falling away from "sound doctrine" at the drop of travelling antichrist's hat. These are the ones John singles out when he says, "they came from us, but did not remain in us."

The word Catholic means "universal" and it created a standard that protected centuries of believers by making heresy clearly visible as heresy. It was a God-ordained institution. It's breakup was God-ordained as well. By the fifteenth century the Catholic church had become a cumbersome, worldly monster and reform from within was no longer possible. The reformers would have to break away and become something else, but make no mistake, even as necessary as it was it still had the side effect of reopening the Pandora's box of heresies.

For every Martin Luther there was a Jan Bockelson, cult leaders taking advantage of the sudden doctrinal void in order to tell people that they were the real truth and the life. All over Europe believers turned back to pure worship of the God of the Bible; unfortunately, at the same time, all over Europe, people turned to heretical movements like the Cathars and Anabaptists.

The third rise was directly created not only by the hardship of the times, but also because of the opportunity afforded by the collapse of the "universal" church.

The half a time -- In all three of the earlier times, surrounding circumstances provided an opening for men who possessed the inclination to travel the path of the antichrist. But the inclination wasn't enough, these men also had to posses certain abilities. Charisma was the main requirement: specifically the ability to communicate a passionate message of cosmic significance. Now rhetoric (the ability to persuade with words) was the end goal of centuries of Western educational curriculum. A good speech could influence the masses, and an influential person had to master the spoken and written word.

We still make a big deal out of our leader's speeches, but we are not greatly influenced by them anymore. Think about the last presidential election. You saw the speeches, and then what happened? If you were watching on most channels you saw a political commentator who then 'rated' the speech. They told the viewers whether or not it was a good speech, and what they thought the speech would accomplish. So, who then was more influential, the speech-giver or the people who reinterpreted the speaker's message.

And now we find ourselves at the heart of the matter: how is a modern-day antichrist different from the earlier versions and how is the "man of lawlessness" different from an antichrist. This is not easy to explain and I'm going need to name certain names to illustrate my points.

Point 1) Barak Obama is not "the antichrist".

There was a "prophet" who, prior to the last election, claimed that the next American president would be the antichrist and that he would have a woman for his VP. Now, with all due respect to any of you who heard this on Christian talk radio and gave it more than a second's consideration, unless you think that Joe Biden is a very advanced cross-dresser you have to admit that this so-called prophet was flat out wrong.

But again, saying that he was merely 'wrong' misses the point. The very notion that our current president could be an antichrist -- let alone "the antichrist" -- reveals a basic misunderstanding. First of all, remember that an antichrist is one who corrupts people by tricking them into worshipping him rather than God. It is not a person whose politics you don't approve of. Yes, some people 'idolize' Mr. Obama, but as far as I know he has never yet claimed divinity and that mistaken idol-worship must for now fall squarely on the heads of the worshipful masses.

Saying that he could be "the antichrist" is a different matter. When John warns his readers of "the antichrist" in 1 John 2 the differentiation between "antichrist" and "antichrists" is a simple one: antichrist (singular) is the one of the antichrists (plural) who you have to worry about because he is going to try and corrupt and destroy you. Let's be clear on this, "the antichrist" is only "the antichrist" because he is the one antichrist who shows up at your door. For John's readers there was one obvious candidate for "the antichrist", that being the Roman emperor who claimed divinity, hated Christians and first began turning Christian-killing into an art form -- ie: Nero. For you, if you hear about David Koresh on the news then he's an antichrist. If he is your next door neighbor then, for you, he is "the antichrist". What about someone like the fictional Nicolai Carepthia who merits the status of being everyone's next door neighbor due to his powers and abilities?

Sorry, no. You see, Warhol was right. But don't take his word for it. Besides, noticing a phenomenon after it has already started is marginally impressive, but predicting it two thousand years in advance... that takes real talent. Observe below: (the italics are mine)


The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. --Revelation 17:12

It says hour and not minutes, but then the unit of time known as a minute hadn't been invented yet. An hour was the smallest. Not only does the above verse prophesy a time when leaders will come and go like spring fashion, but another passage is going to do something else that Warhol couldn't do; it is going to explain why.

Next post, point 2) the antichrist's entourage.

Who is the antichrist? - part 1

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. -- 1 John 2:18


The word "antichrist" appears a grand total of five times in the scriptures; four times in 1 John, once in 2 John. It never appears in the book of Revelation. Most of what modern theologians think they know about the antichrist comes from Paul's description of "the man of lawlessness" found in 2 Thessalonians 2 and are based on the assumption that the man of lawlessness and the antichrist are one and the same. This is not quite true. But I can't simply tell you how it is false. It's a bit like Matthew 24, where I can't just give the answer because you don't yet understand the question. Let's look at the history of the antichrists, first remembering two things: 1) an antichrist is someone who denies that Jesus is the Christ (ie: the savior), they do this to prop themselves up as savior and take for themselves the worship that rightfully belongs to God. 2) a spike in "antichrist" activity is a sign of the "last hour".

The first time -- I've already told you that historians are aware of at least forty so called "messiahs" that went around claiming to be the chosen one, or at least not denying the title when it was foisted upon them, during the Roman occupation of Israel. That's an average of about one every four to five years. That's not how they came, of course -- spread out I mean. Most times a decade would pass and then three or four would pop up all at once.

What is interesting about this is the way these "messiahs" came and the way they were treated by the religious authorities. Now let me tell you up front, there's not a lot of information on any of the first century messiahs other than Jesus, so I'm having to make certain assumptions, but apparently the other "messiah" rarely if ever claimed to fulfill any of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the long awaited savior. Does that not strike you as odd? Remember that one of the knocks on Jesus was that He came from Galilee, which the religious authorities believed was a violation of prophecy. So Jesus was given a hard times because He fulfilled some, but in their eyes, not all of the Old Testament prophecies. Yet forty others gained followings (which sometimes included those same religious authority figures) without ever seriously attempting to defend their messianic claims. How?

The other "messiahs" were rebels, military leaders claiming to be the one who could cast off the yoke of Roman rule. If I'm understanding it right the Pharisees, Saducees, Herodians often treated these messiahs like modern day political candidates, backing the one who they believed could benefit them the most. Let me state that again: they treated God's plan of salvation like something they could control, like it was a contract, the terms of which they should rightfully be able to dictate.

So the first flood of antichrists occurred because of the messianic expectations built into the Old Testament prophecies as well as the peculiar aspects of the Roman occupation -- and by that I mean that not only were the Roman Pagan culture totally at odds with Jewish culture, but prior to the Roman invasion the Jews had recently thrown off another Pagan regime, the Seleucids. So for another Pagan regime to conquer you so soon after you believed that you had been "saved" from paganism, the Jews naturally turned to and took solace in those messianic prophecies as being the only things that could truly save them (ie: "it's going to take a miracle if we're ever going to be rid of these pagans forever").

In general terms, the first rise of the antichrists took place due to a preexisting set of expectations and a surrounding backdrop of worldly hardships.

The second time -- As I wrote in History isn't what you think it is it became quite fashionable in the 12th-14th centuries to foist messianic expectations on the kings and emperors of the age. Now understand something: a sense of longing, of something unfulfilled, is every bit as much a part of being human as awkward puberty years and opposable thumbs. We all have a sensation of need, although one person's belief on how the need can be remedied may be very different than another's. For medieval man, Christianity was something that you did (through recitations in Latin, giving of offerings, ceremonials performances, etc.) but it was not something that you understood, and certainly not something that, for most, shaped your identity or -- here's that word again -- your expectations.

During that age the kingdom of Heaven was just too remote, and I mean "kingdom of Heaven" in both the sense of a future place of promise as well as God's spirit reshaping your life and identity right here and now, the very same way that Jesus means it when He begins a parable with the phrase, "The kingdom of Heaven is like..." For the medievals who did not own a Bible, who did not have a "personal" savior, but rather subcontracted out their spiritual needs to a professional priest, those needs I mentioned earlier naturally focused on the one agent that they could conceive of as being both willing and able to deliver them from that needy state -- their worldly rulers. Because of this several generations of Kings like Frederick Barbarossa would be worshipped as gods.... and some of them liked it.

Again, the second rise of the antichrists was caused by a preexisting set of expectations (those being the messianic qualities placed on human rulers) and a surrounding backdrop of hardship (this time a complex mish-mash of economic decline, disease, and the encroaching Muslims).

Next post, we finish with the third rise of the antichrists and I begin attempting to explain how the man of lawlessness is certainly an antichrist, but an antichrist is not necessarily the man of lawlessness.

Matthew 24 - part 3

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left. -- Matthew 24: 36-41

Read the above. Now, tell me: who is it that is being "taken"? Are these servants of the Lord being raptured up to Heaven, or are these children of the devil being dragged to Hell?

The answer isn't so simple. For now just notice that there is nothing in the passage to tell you one way or the other. The whole thing is incredibly vague. Now let's back up.

So far in chapter 24 we have seen Jesus twice talk to the disciples in specific detail about the near-term events of the destruction of Jerusalem and the early church. Twice we have seen Him then broaden out and discuss the fall of man in a more general way. Now He does it one final time:

"Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door. I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. -- Matthew 24: 32-35

Jesus answers the disciple's question "When will this happen?" with a statement that says, "In this generation." in other words, "You guys better pay attention, some of you are going to see this."

But, but, but, I was told that "generation" could refer to the Jewish race. That would be an outlandish translation. Also, Jesus would have been something of a heel to answer the 'when?' question with the oh-so-informative "Some Jews will still be alive somewhere when it happens" answer. But Jesus, that doesn't tell us anything. "So?".... Can you really see Jesus doing that?

The reality is that some people with a particular translation feel the need to defend that translation by making certain passages say something that they never intended to say. The logic goes like this: Jesus can't mean both "this generation" and "all these things have happened" because he hasn't come back yet. So they have to try and play word games to get the meanings to square with observed reality.

Except that He has come back. In fact, for that generation alone, He came back twice!

The first time He came back to life three days after His death on the cross. The second time He came in the form of the Holy Spirit -- which He even refered to as "My spirit."

Question -- So which was Jesus talking about in 32-35? That generation or the final generation?

Answer -- Both.

Remember how vague 36-41 sounds? Now we get the reason why. Like I said in the last post, at this point the disciples are still very much confused about Jesus' future comings and goings. Not only does Jesus have maneuver around their misconceptions, but He is somewhat limited in what He can tell them. Face it, Jesus -- the living embodiment of love -- is not going to be one to tell people the date and time of their own deaths. Knowing that tends to suck the joy out of life. So what does He do? He gives them what they need: a few basic watch-signs to give a heads up when their end is near. He also leaves a few crumbs of information to help them understand that the end of Jerusalem is not going to be end of everything.

Once more to try and make this clear -- The preterist says that everything that Jesus told the disciples was fulfilled in the 1st century AD. I'm telling you that they are right. The futurist says that most of what Jesus told his disciples was meant for people in a later age. I'm saying that that is correct as well.

Yes it happened in the 1st century. Then it happened again in the 11th and 12th centuries, and another time in the 15th and 16th centuries. It will happen one final time. If that time does not take place in our current generation I will be utterly stunned.

Next, we look at the antichrist.

Matthew 24 - part 2

Anachronism -- an error in chronology; especially: a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regards to each other.

I used to be a part of a Science Fiction and Fantasy writers group. Most of the others in the group loved the creative bursts of actually putting pen to paper, but weren't so keen on studying their topics. For the fantasy writers, this meant anachronisms... a lot of them. No, your medieval hero does not yearn for the excitement of the big city (medieval cities were just as boring as medieval villages. They only smelled more exciting, and by exciting I mean disgusting.) No, he's not happy that he's losing weight while on his adventure (medieval folk were not sedentary and did not have all of our excess calories. Pudginess was a sign of health and considered attractive back then.) He doesn't put his gold in a bank (feudalism and banking don't coexist well), and seeing a dead body does not throw him into some introspective loop (he's seen one or two already... "bring out yer dead!").

Some of the examples above -- and I'm not even giving you the worst -- are pretty sad, but the reality is that keeping any sort of anachronism out of your historical musings is hard to do. The story doesn't even have to be in a historical setting. One quick example:

My all time favorite novel is Lucifer's Hammer. It's a wonderful romp through an America devastated by a meteor strike. Still, one of the main characters grabs pepper bottles by the armful when it's obvious that this is an apocalypse because he thinks it a smart thing to do. His rationale is that these will be valuable since pepper traded pound for pound with gold in Western Europe during the Renaissance. This is an anachronism. What the character (the writers really) don't understand is why pepper was so valuable back in the day. You see, Western European culture in the Renaissance was segregated between rich and poor. Rich people were considered noble, decent, sugar and spice and everything nice. Poor people were base and low and there were all sorts of laws to make sure that they knew their place. So for the Europeans, the most important thing for anyone well to do was to make sure that everyone else knew by God that you were well to do. When spices from the East were first introduced, they carried a status symbol and the rich would douse them on everything at their banquets as a sign of wealth. This was a fad, and like all fads it wore off. So no, pepper doesn't have the intrinsic value that would justify grabbing it by the armful before the starving hoards raid the grocery stores.

That was a tricky one. Matthew 24 has a tricky one too.

In the last post we saw Jesus give specific instructions for a near-term apocalypse then make these sorts of, "Oh, yeah, and later the world ends," statements that seem to gloss right over the most important details. Then it's almost as if he huddles the Jewish listeners back together and says, "Alright, back to the important stuff. Watch for fake messiahs."

In verse 27 He tells his listeners not to believe reports of His return since, as will be explained at length in the later New Testament books, you won't need a report when Jesus returns; you'll know.

24:28 Wherever there is a carcass, the vultures will gather.

Jesus uses vultures as a sign, or visible evidence, of an event. He uses it to say, "watch for the signs and you can prepare for the event."

24:29 Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

And here it is. C.S. Lewis looked at this and thought that Jesus must have been mistaken about the date of His own return. But it wasn't Jesus who made the mistake. It was Lewis.

1) The first thing to understand is what the disciples are really asking when they present the initial question: "Tell us," they said, "When will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age." Matthew -- 24:3. But this shouldn't even be a question, should it? They are using the exact same language as we would if we were asking about the rapture and final judgement. Don't those words mean the same thing to them?

Anachronism. No, the disciples meant something totally different.

In Matthew 16 Jesus tells His disciples that He will be killed. Peter tells Jesus he won't allow it. Jesus tells Peter what he can do with himself... or something. Whatever their understanding of what was happening during Jesus' final trip to Jerusalem, they still didn't understand that Jesus was going to: 1) die physically, 2)then return physically, 3)then ascend into Heaven, 4) then return in the form of the Holy Spirit, 5) then finally, return physically. Luke 21:36-49 recounts Jesus' appearance to His disciples after His crucifixion and resurrection. This was when the lightbulb came on:

Then He opened their minds so that they could understand the scriptures. He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name, to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." -- Luke 21:45-46.

Point 1 -- In Matthew 24 the disciples did not understand what they were asking or what Jesus was telling them.

2) So what did they mean?

Imagine that your church was the only church in the world. It's a big church. It has satellite buildings, still, it's the only game in town (or on planet Earth for that matter). Your fellow parishioners are the only other Christians in the world. Everyone else believes something totally different that what you and the others in your church believe. You don't associate with those people outside your church, and they think you're a freak. Now, Jesus tells you that your church, the church, is going to burn to the ground. Think for a moment. What's the one question you'd ask Him?

No, planet earth did not end when the temple was burned and torn to pieces by the Romans in 70 AD. The world didn't end. But their world -- the one that had so much meaning to the Jewish disciples -- did in fact end!

Point 2 -- to the disciples "sign of your coming" = when are you going to save us from what happens here (ie: the loss of the temple and the access to God and special status before God that it represented). For them "coming of the end of the age" = and when exactly is this horrible thing going to happen.

When Jesus focuses on the near-term events He is answering their questions. When He speaks more broadly He is placing those events in their overall context.

In the next post we finish the chapter and Jesus give us our first picture of the rapture... or does He?

Matthew 24 - part 1

C.S. Lewis was a brilliant man. Language is a primary human means of expression and understanding human thoughts; Lewis had a gift for languages. In other words, he had a gift for understanding things. He was fluent in something like seven or eight of them by the time he finished the English equivalent of high school. Like I said, a brilliant man.

But even the most brilliant men can be wrong. Lewis once wrote that Jesus was mistaken when He said that the events of Matthew 24 would happen in the lifetimes of the people within earshot. Now, Mr. Lewis meant this an example of how the Bible could be trusted, since it recorded even its own flaws, though most evangelicals (myself included) could have done without this little bit of corroborating "evidence".

Lewis was wrong. The Bible never records Jesus' mistakes. How could it. He never made any.

24:1-2 -- Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to Him to call His attention to the buildings. "Do you see all these things? He asked. "I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.


In the spring of 70 AD the city of Jerusalem fell to the Romans. A last group of defenders rallied inside of the temple, probably believing that God would protect them while they were inside. The Romans burned them out and in doing so, the gold leaf on the ceiling, as well as the golden nails that pointed up from the roof (to keep the birds off) melted into the stones. For days the Romans pulled the stones off of each other, one by one, in order to pry out the gold after it had cooled.

For reasons we will discuss in the next post, the disciples were a tad disconcerted by the prophecy. They asked Jesus about this, his coming and "the end of the age".

24:4-5 -- Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name claiming, ' I am the Christ,' and will deceive many.


Jesus wasn't kidding. During the Roman occupation (63 BC to 135 AD) historians have identified forty different 'Christs'. These were Jewish military leaders who promised 'salvation' from the Romans. And yes, they deceived many, which is why the Romans kept bringing legions in to put down the rebellions.

After this Jesus says the end is still to come and gives a vague, ominous statement of wars and famine.

24:9 -- Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death...

Eleven of the twelve disciples were martyred. Only John lived out his natural life, dying somewhere toward the end of the first century.

After this, Jesus covers the next nineteen centuries in the span of two sentences:

24:12-14 -- Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm till the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

You could preach a sermon on verse 12. Probably fill a book with all the pregnant meanings in those three verses. For now, just notice that Jesus has spent most of his time so far addressing the specific, near-term future of the people to whom He is speaking. After that He gives a brief, "Then a bunch of stuff happens and the world ends" summary.

Now He goes back to the near future of the disciples and early church members:

24:15-16 -- So when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation, spoken of through the prophet Daniel -- let the reader understand -- then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

According to early church records, when the Romans under Titus were approaching Jerusalem the church located in the city did just what this passage told them to do: they ran for it. The record doesn't say exactly why, but apparently they took this passage to mean that just like Antiochus' approach in 168 BC the next approach will mean a repeat of death and mayhem at the hands of the pagans. And this turned out to be the wise interpretation since nearly all the people who stays were killed after a long, horrific siege. Josephus lays out the gory details in his history, The Jewish Wars, I won't go into the carnage except to say that Jesus' statement in verse 21 "for there will be a great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now, and never to be equaled again," was certainly true for His people, the Jews. This was the worst they ever had it.

Time to play with the kids. I'll start with "...wherever there is a carcass" next.

Another religious nut saying the end is nigh... so what?

"There is no sanctuary." -- from the movie 'Logan's Run' (1976)

In Logan's Run, the world's surviving population lives in a dome city long after whatever calamity drove them permanently indoors. The rules of bubble-city life are simple: no one leaves and at thirty you get "renewed" -- an elaborate ceremony where everyone gets to watch you die. Logan is a Sandman, a bubble-city policeman, and gets assigned to find out where the "runners" are going when they try to escape the domed slice of Heaven. His mission is to find this place (called sanctuary) and destroy it.

But there is no sanctuary. The runners were all getting turned into salad by an unfriendly android named Box. Sanctuary was a mass delusion that people wanted to believe so badly that for them, it became real.

Sounds hokey, you say? Maybe a few idiots would believe in some totally fictional place, but never a whole city.

I think it's perfectly plausible. In fact I think the vast majority of people have their own version of sanctuary and they hold to it even in light of the most damning of contrary evidence.

Question: Aren't Christians always saying that the world is ending?

Answer: Yes and no.

Yes, no matter how far back in history one goes, you can always find a few disaffected individuals proclaiming the imminent destruction of the world. Jesus and the apostles actually get accused of this, although as we will see, mostly that's owes to confusion over the whole 'times' concept. Historically, the people walking around with sandwich boards telling us that we are doomed are people who have decided that civilization would be better off gone. For them, sanctuary is the apocalypse. Strange, I know. And yes, this is always a small fringe group. But they can be noisy nonetheless. After all, when you want the world to die then the end times becomes your moment of vindication (we talked about vindicating moments in Why doesn't my life make sense and What are the trumpets) and if you're off your rocker you may want everyone in earshot to know that you're about to be vindicated.

Now for the 'no'.

Most Christians do not take solace in the idea that the world is going to be burned to a cinder... and they never have. But that doesn't mean that sanctuary for this group is the place that Jesus has gone ahead and prepared for them. If you are reading this now you likely fall into this category. Don't beat yourself up over it. There is a simple reason for this; Heaven is a difficult concept to wrap one's brain around. So most of us create a kind of pleasant metaphor for Heaven. It's our sanctuary.

In History isn't what you think it is - part 1, I talked about Emperor Frederick the Second and the poor saps who accepted his fraudulent replacement. Those "sleeping emperor" myths fell out of a belief system called millenarianism -- the idea that God was going to bring about a 1,000 year long party for Christians on this world and that someone like Frederick the Second could usher those good times in. That 1,000 year long holiday was sanctuary for generations of Christians. Life was hard and a 1,000 year long party sounded so good it just had to be the true interpretation.

Millenarianism is virtually gone today. These days, the average Christian makes sanctuary out of the end times prophecies by convincing themselves that the likely time for fulfillment is at the end of their own lives. So, the typical fifty year old Christian with an optimistic outlook will say that the world will end in thirty years, whereas the twenty year old thinks it's more likely that God will come back sixty years from now. Etc. etc.

At the other end of the spectrum there is Michael Schermer, skeptic poster-child, who often mocks Christian eschatology (the notion that the world can any time in the next billion years). They're all deluded, he says. They don't realize the power of science and human ingenuity. But that's his sanctuary. It's a pleasant delusion, nothing else.

A good example of the reality came last week. Last Thursday the UK Guardian ran a story on insiders in the IEA (International Energy Agency) calling attention to the fact that they have been pressured by governments (like ours) to underreport the rate at which oil supplies are dropping. A couple of days later it ran a follow up story lamenting that the news -- which they seemed to think was a blockbuster -- had hardly caused a ripple in the worldwide press. After all, if the IEA is exaggerating the supply numbers for oil, and if our modern civilization and our lives for that matter depend on that oil supply....

But that's the thing about sanctuaries of all stripes; they can seem so believable that anything that intrudes into the fantasy is viewed as craziness. The people at the UK Guardian may have just as well been walking the streets with a sandwich board.

Now, on to Matthew 24.

The end times investment portfolio - part 2

Gold -- We're getting into the better asset classes, but things like gold and silver are still not without their problems. I think gold values will definitely increase over the next few years, especially compared to our dead-in-the-water currency. Gold is a safe haven when times get bad. Unfortunately, it's not that much of a safe haven when times get really bad. Desperate countries tend to seize the gold assets of their citizens. Can't happen here, you say? Actually it already has.

On April 5, 1933 during the Great Depression the new President, Franklin D Roosevelt, demanded that everyone surrender their gold assets to the government. Any US citizen found in possession of more than $100 worth of gold coins/bullion was subject to arrest. If and when that happens again gold will only be useful as a trading instrument on the black market. And there you run into another problem. You see, it's difficult to tell gold's karat weight just by looking at it, so black marketeers tend to value pure gold no differently than they do cheaper gold alloys. This means that in the tribulation a handful of pawnshop jewelry will likely be just as valuable as a handful of pure gold coins.

Repayment of debts -- this one will never go out of style. If you are looking for a safe place to put your money, put it into the debts hanging over your head -- car payment, house mortgage, whatever. The current bankruptcy laws in this country are all predicated on the notion that lenders won't go out of business if a few of their creditor are not able to repay. In circumstances where that is not the case the government allows lenders to compel creditor repayment with things like debtors prisons. Trust me on this one, being out of debt will be better than being in debt in the near future.

On a related note. I don't feel knowledgeable enough to try and give a countdown to a US financial collapse, however I caught Peter Costa (a financial analyst) on CNBC Thursday giving his prediction; he think the US government will be in bankruptcy 18 months from now.

Food -- This one is tricky. The US currently produces about 50% more food than it consumes. Even if our currency became worthless tomorrow there is no reason to think that our government couldn't cobble together some sort of voucher program by the end of the week. The problem of empty store shelves wouldn't happen here overnight. It would take a year or so. But famine is one of the hallmarks of a "time" and the tribulation will be the worst of the lot... and you can't eat gold.

The US has a spread-out infrastructure that assumes we will be able to transport all that food across the hundreds of miles of state highway. Unfortunately, we import most of our fuel. If Mr. Costa is right and the US begins defaulting on its debts in 18 months then we will have a very difficult time buying foreign oil which will make it awfully tempting for our military to simply take it since we are already there and this will likely cause other nations to.... sorry, this line of thinking is the sort of thing that makes me curl up in a fetal ball and watch Entertainment Tonight until I can convince myself that the biggest problem facing this nation has something to do with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.... Ahh. I feel better already. Man that Kanye West is a jerk.... What were we talking about again?

Buy cans, buy dry foods, buy peanut butter. You want high calories and long shelf life. Yes, I said high calories and I don't care what your BMI is. Don't worry, we may all be going on a diet together before too long.

Firearms -- The Biblical prescription to "turn the other cheek" is not a call to pacifism. For the ancient Jews a slap on the cheek was an act of provocation. Jesus was telling his listeners not to be provoked into a fight. When it came to the fights themselves, they didn't settle matters with their fists (hardly anyone did back when a broken hand could mean a permanent disability). No, the Jews settled fights the same way everyone did in the ancient middle east: with knives. We usually translate the word as "sword" and Jesus actually has his disciples take stock of how many weapons they are carrying (Luke 22 36:38). They had enough to fight off bandits and that seemed to be the emphasis.

Bandit attacks and general lawlessness are endemic in countries during economic collapse. If you have anyone that you do not want to see kidnapped (the big thing in post-collapse Argentina) then I would recommend you own a firearm and a substantial amount of ammunition. Learn how to use it. Also buy a cleaning kit.

The tribulation is going to be a gun fight. I wouldn't recommend bringing a knife to it.

Miscellaneous -- Camping equipment, a stock of any medicines you might need, wine keeps forever and hard liquors become useful as medicinals and trading goods.

Yourself -- skills, abilities, and areas of knowledge. Learn to forage (yes, there are edible plants where you live). Learn to knit. Anything that could make you less reliant on civilization.

Property -- In each of the last three "times" the best predictor of survival was the ability to pack up, leave civilization such as it was, and flee to the countryside until the hardest of the hard times had passed. This is the one ace that a Bill Gates might have up his sleeve that still wouldn't put him at an advantage over the average Amish person, but would probably make him more prepared for the hard times than you and me.

If you are in the financial position to buy land in the countryside, preferably with a stand of fruit and nut trees nearby, as well as access to clean water, then I envy you.

Seek ye first -- I saved the best for last, and this one we can all do: invest in relationships with others and with your creator. Not only is it the only investment that pays dividends in the life to come, but it also pays off in this one as well. Others) Whatever you know, whatever you have, we are still -- all of us -- going to find ourselves lacking something when the times get truly difficult. It would be nice then if a few other people could still stand the sight of you. God) in my opinion the most important attribute in a survival situation, right above 'high pain threshold' and 'flexible mindset' is the all-important 'reason to go on living'. God gives purpose, don't forget Him and don't succumb to bitterness just because your life suddenly isn't going the way you planned it.

Next post: but aren't people always saying that the world is ending? Why is now different?

The end times investment portfolio - part 1

The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful. -- Matthew 13:22.

We tend to think of wealth as a panacea, a genie in a bottle that can give us our every desire upon command. But when you think about it, wealth is really only good at providing two things -- comfort and status. If you're wealthy enough, you can hire others to do all the things you don't want to do, you can get the best health care, and always be warm and comfortable. You can also buy the sorts of things that have no real value except to set you apart from the masses. For example, a Bentley automobile hardly does anything that a Honda can't, but it provides the status that comes with being a person that can afford a Bentley.

Here's my "deceitfulness of wealth" blog quiz:

Question: who is richer, Bill Gates or some random Amish person riding around in a horse drawn carriage, tilling a field by hand, and living in a house heated only with a fireplace and wood-burning stove?

Think about it....

It's Bill Gates of course. Come on. That was easy. Okay now, what if the power goes out? Now who's richer? Still Bill Gates you say? Still easy?

Not this time.

This is the deceitfulness of wealth. Your mind tricks you into thinking that money equals power, true control over one's environment, but it doesn't. What we commonly think of as wealth is really only useful under a narrow set of optimal conditions. Here in America, we have lived at the top of the world's food chain for the last century or so, and have therefore lived our entire lives in that narrow set of optimal summer. We think that's how it's always going to be because we've never known anything else. We are -- I'm sorry to say -- tragically wrong.

Here's the answer to our earlier question: if the power goes out (and it's when, not if, but I'm not in an especially dark mood today so I'll stick with if) Bill Gates will have nothing left but his name. Seriously. His only hope would be that people considered him special enough due to his success in the old world that they would protect him from the new one.

But he would still have money, wouldn't he? No, like everyone else, his "wealth" is largely bound up in cash/stock/etc. Things that have no intrinsic value. But what if he stockpiled food and water and such? Then he would have to have the skills and abilities necessary to keep others from coming and taking those. Couldn't he get other people to protect it for him? Probably not. In a world of order all it takes is cash to gather a following. In a world of disorder it takes something else entirely. Bill Gates doesn't strike me as the sort of person who could muster a following through sheer force of personality.

So what was the point of that maudlin exercise?

Just this: the things that you have been taught to believe are worthwhile goals -- a big house in the suburbs, a bank account flush with cash, "financial freedom", are just the sort of things that will have little or no value in our future. Let's take them one at a time. Starting with the worst....


Bonds -- NO!


Cash -- keep a few hundred in your house somewhere and a few thousand in a bank account. The money in the house is in case the government declares a "bank holiday" and shuts down financial institutions for a few days or even weeks. The money in the bank will give you a little buffer in case you lose your job. Beyond that, cash is probably the second worst place you can store your assets. I can't think of a single historical example where a debt-riddled nation defended the value of its own currency. The governments use inflation to pay off those debts. The inflation helps them, but hurts you. But then you didn't really think they had your best interest at heart, did you? The dollar will continue to lose value. One day, possibly soon, it will collapse.

Oh, and while we are on the subject, FDIC insured will become a meaningless term in the future. The account the FDIC used to pay bank clients for money they lost when their banks went belly up was virtually empty at the end of 2008. At the moment the US is using all sorts of shenanigans to keep repaying clients of the ever-increasing number of bank failures. It's working so far. It won't last forever. That's why if you are going to put your money in bonds you may as well throw it all into a blender and hit the 'puree' switch.

Stocks -- If you are more than ten years away from retirement the odds that you will ever see a single penny of your IRA or 401K approaches zero. As early as last spring congress was already considering a proposal to seize retirement accounts and replace them with government IOU's. The sticking point was how to do it without crashing the stock market. If it happens it will cause riots, but we're still in the early stages of this thing and there's no telling what will happen when our legislators get desperate enough.

Stocks may actually be a good investment in the short term. The problem is that they every bit as doomed as cash over the long haul. Short term, all the cash that the US and other debt-strapped countries are printing has to go somewhere. Even government backed bonds return a negative number against inflation, meaning that stocks may be viewed as a better investment vehicle... and could have a nice run over the next few years. The trick is like winning at black jack table in a casino; when do you cash in your chips? You know the house is going to win in the end and you're going to go home wearing a barrel with suspenders. So what do you do?

One thing to realize: stocks are very much like cash in that they have virtually no intrinsic value. In theory, a "shareholder" is supposed to have a say in the running of the company. In reality, companies are run by a board of trustees who could care less what happens to the poor saps holding the company's stock. You need look no further than to the high profile bankruptcies of the last two years for proof. When Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch died (oh, I'm sorry, I'm suppose to say, "were restructured") just to name two, even though the companies continued on in different forms the shareholders were always hung out to dry.

My personal choice here has been to play a group of alternative energy stocks, hoping for a vain attempt to get off of the fossil stuff before the things get really bad. At some point I will have to sell out and turn whatever cash is left into something that has real value. I'm not kidding about the black jack example; this is gambling, pure and simple. And just like every smart gambler knows, you don't play with anything you can't afford to lose.

Next post I'll go on to the better asset classes.

Damascus - the city of the future

See, Damascus will no longer be a city, but will become a heap of ruins. -- Isaiah 17:1

Skeptics point this out as exhibit A when attempting to disprove Biblical prophecy. This has never happened. There is no event in world history that even comes close to woe Isaiah pronounced upon Damascus around 700 BC. And that's a problem.

You see, the total number of Old Testament prophecies comes to around 2,000. Virtually every one has been fulfilled. But it only takes one. The Bible holds itself to the standard of perfection. Scribes may have goofed in a few typos and an ancient word or two may make translate tricky, but if a prophecy is just flat wrong than the whole edifice of Biblical teaching comes crashing down. Seriously. And this prophecy was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong....

Well, it would wrong be if you accepted one little precondition as being true. You have to say that the prophecy must come true in "ancient times" for it to be wrong. Why shouldn't you say that since pretty much all the other prophecies were fulfilled way back when? Let's look at another prophecy that illustrates the point.

In Jeremiah 50 we are told that the mighty walls of Babylon (three hundred feet tall, two hundred feet thick, the largest wall ever constructed around a city) were going to be completely destroyed. He wrote that around 500 BC. It didn't come to pass until 850 years later, when the Roman Emperor Julian had his men disassemble the wall so rebels could no longer use it as a stronghold.

Now, we still consider the 4th century AD as "ancient times" so skeptics leave this one alone. And they sort of have to since it really is quite a coincidence. But I personally can't think of any reason why Isaiah would have considered himself to be living in "ancient time" or why somebody like Jeremiah would have considered 850 years in the future to be any different than 2850 years in the future. We are the ones who slapped on the label "ancient times". Not them.

No, the destruction of Damascus did not take place in "ancient time". It's still to come. It's going to happen soon. And you seriously do not want to be in the area when this one takes place.

A few observations:

1) verse 1 -- "heap of ruins" is pretty self-explanatory.

2) verse 6 -- "yet some gleanings will remain", gleanings were the crops that were overlooked by the crop pickers. This says that their will be a few survivors living in the ruins.

3) verse 7 -- "in that day men will look to their maker", their are no atheists in foxholes. Not many pagans either. Remember that the key difference between paganism and Christianity is that paganism is an attempt to control, or harness the power of the metaphysical world whereas Christianity is a release of control to the metaphysical Creator. Why no pagans? Because you release control when you're desperate.

4) verse 11 -- "yet the harvest will be as nothing in the day of disease and incurable pain." This is a bizarre construction to find in an ancient manuscript. There was nothing in Isaiah's day that ruined crops as well as cities, that caused "disease and incurable pain". That's a product of our modern age. And there is only one thing that will do it -- a nuclear warhead.

Now fast forward to the modern day. Damascus is the capital and chief city of modern day Syria. Syria is currently working on developing nuclear weapons so that it can be the military equal of its mortal enemy, Israel. And at some point -- probably not too far in the future -- Damascus is going to be reduced to rubble; a city populated by a few heavily radiated survivors. The world will end by fire, but this prophecy tells us that selected areas will have fire dropped on them even before the final barrage. There will be partial destruction before there is complete destruction.

Next post, I hit a few miscellaneous topics before looking at Matthew 24. The first topic: finances, where should I invest my money in a world where time is running out?

The prohecies of Daniel - part 7

My favorite historian is a Frenchman by the name of Fernand Braudel. At the end of his magnum opus Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 which was published in 1979, he made a series of predictions as to where he thought the European economy was headed. Every single one of them were wrong.

More recently, my November '09 copy of Scientific American came in the mail with a cover that reads: "A plan for a Sustainable Future, How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030." In the article, the authors give a lightly detailed description of a zero fossil fuel world. The kick off date for this little utopia is next month when world leaders meet in Copenhagen for an energy summit.

I give the above examples to illustrate a point: if you are going to make predictions about the future and, unlike Daniel, you don't have angels feeding you inside information, then you need to at least be conversant in two areas -- history and science.

Braudel's knowledge of human behavior was good, but his science was lacking, particularly in the area of geology. he didn't know that Western Europe lacked the geological resources to compete in an expanding, global economy. First, Soviet Russia collapsed because its most valuable export (oil) became historically cheap when the Saudi's glutted the market in the late 80's. Then the North Sea started running short of a lot sooner than many thought and now Western Europe is becoming an energy slave to a suddenly resurgent (but no longer Soviet)Russia. Still, Braudel's predictions were the definition of steely eyed perfection compared to the Sci Am article. Mr. Braudel died in 1985, but if he hadn't, the laughter brought on by a pair of scientists telling him that there was any chance of a binding resolution coming out of Copenhagen -- and of the participant nations actually abiding by said resolution -- probably would have killed him.

Science is necessary because one needs to know how all this material stuff in the observable world around us interacts. History comes in handy because human beings tend not to obey all the obvious laws of cause and effect and just because it's in our long term best interests to cut our fossil fuel usage doesn't mean that it's going to happen. History draws a rather nasty trend line on that one.

The reason I bring this up now is that we have come to the "half a time", the period of decline in church influence from which there is no rebound -- not on this earth anyway. Let's sum up:

The first time involved a genocidal campaign or three from pagan Rome, but the more significant decline came when the pagans were forced to call themselves Christians and Christianity's identity was watered down with pagan beliefs. The second and third "times" are so close to each other in chronology that if you drew them out on a time line the two circles would actually overlap. Christians get a little too cosy with Celtic paganism, kill each other, kill pagans, kill each other some more. At the end of the third time Christianity sees itself as two separate entities(Catholic and Protestant) and both of these entities looked to increase their number of followers. Now, if you think that competition between the two sides had nothing to do with following push to send missionaries out over the entire world and that it was purely agape love that drove the process, well... God bless your tender heart. The good news is that the worldwide mission movement was still fairly early in the process when Catholics and Protestants called off their hostilities and stopped fighting each other in every city not named Belfast. By the 1800's the politics were on the back burner, and missions because people just really need Jesus became something of a reality.

Then came Darwin.

It's not like he created materialism, of course. But when you convert two thousand years of history into a few blog posts you have to make do with broad brush strokes; Darwin was the icon. By the mid 1800's, when worldwide missions were just beginning to hit their stride, another movement was hitting something else. They usually don't call themselves materialists -- sounds too negative -- but the stated belief that there is nothing outside of the material world, no Heaven, no hell, no spirits, no nothing except what you can see and taste and touch and measure is properly called "materialism".

The last hundred and fifty years in a nutshell: materialism seems to flourish in materially wealthy societies. No surprise there. When you have it in abundance, you tend to focus on it. Just in the last decade, the materialist community in the United States is taking on an ugly tone towards us religious folk. Go to a bookstore and you will likely find an entire section of books devoted to "debunking" Christianity. Many of these books do not look at us kindly. We get compared to Nazis, parasites, anything and everything unintelligent. Turn on the tube and you can watch Christians painted as weirdo-freaks on just about every major station. Materialism and Christianity have been staring each other down for the four hundred years -- staring without blinking for the century and a half -- and now, snarling for the last decade. The only thing left is for Christianity to absorb materialist thinking the same way it did Greco-Roman and Celtic Paganism. And yes, it has already started.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine railed against our church's decision to change to name of its Bible study classes to "lifegroups", thus removing anything from the name that sounds religiously kooky (it's on the linked site, downtoJesus.com). Now this is a fairly harmless if somewhat annoying example of just what happened in earlier times. The church tried to appeal to the dominant culture. It did... and managed to water itself down to such a degree that it the result was a whole flock of people, now affiliated as "Christians" who were still subservient to the dominant cultural belief system. You can probably think of a hundred ways that the current church is pandering to the materialists, and maybe a few ways in which it has incorporated materialist thinking.

It won't end well.

As for the next spat of Christians dying in mass? That's already started too. As to when it goes global, that's where the science comes in. In the next post we leave Daniel and let Isaiah show us what the city of the future looks like.

The prohecies of Daniel - part 6

Now, back to church history.

When we last left our believing forefathers they were mixing Greco-Roman paganism in with their Judeo-Christianity. As they spread throughout Europe they came into contact with another pervasive religious system -- that of the Celts. We think of 'Celt' as something Irish... or is it Scottish... you know, one of those. In reality, "Celtic" religion was a hodge-podge of nature religions that dominated all Europe at the time that Rome was becoming Christianized. We think of it as Irish because some pockets of it survived their long after it was largely gone from the European mainland, and because there was a 'going back to our cultural roots' movement that started in the British Isles a couple centuries ago.

These nature religions had their sky-god legends, just like Greco-Roman paganism. In some of these traditions the sky-god had already been shrunk down the same way as Zeus, but in others the sky-god was still viewed as a big G god, and Christian missionaries could easily have used this as a point of contact, the same way that modern missionaries often do, the same way that Paul did in Athens when he used the "unknown God" legend to introduce Jesus.

The Christians could have let adapted most of the Celtic traditions to Christian teaching. They could have let them dance around the May pole all they wanted, could have kept the natural medicine, the general love of the land. All they had to do -- literally, ALL they had to do -- was refute the Celtic teaching of "Dualism": the belief that good and evil are evenly matched and either one could defeat the other in the end.

So what did they do? They fought May poles and nature medicine with a passion... and absorbed dualism.

Do you know why you say "bless you" when someone sneezes? It's goes back to the medieval church belief that when you sneezed a demon could fly up into the open nasal passages. Saying "bless you" was supposed to prevent possession. The blessing at the meal? Yes, the Jews had a thankfulness tradition with their meals, but our tradition comes from the notion that demons could live on food, and that everything had to be blessed before it could be eaten lest a demon get into your stomach.

When Christianity took on dualist qualities it became a monster. The abomination of shrinking God down into a being that was no more potent than a fallen angel had the effect of turning individual Christians into agents of this weakened god. A battle was being waged, and it was up to Christians to help their god to win it. Desolation was the result.

Witch hunts = In the Mosaic law mediums were not allowed within Israel's border under pain of death. The Medieval/Renaissance witch hunts were a totally different animal, done for a totally different reason. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people were executed because the general populace was terrified that a squadron of witches were flying over their towns at night, poisoning the water, and generally causing every unpleasant circumstance in their lives.

The Inquisition = Not technically a church institution, but that's quibbling. The Inquisition was run by churchmen with church sanctioning, the fact that it was technically under the jurisdiction of the states in which it resided gave it authority to execute wrongdoers. A neurotic, pedantic organization that deserves every bit of mockery that Monte Python can heap on it. The inquisition wrote the book on informants, torture, and censorship. A book that would get dusted off by the 20th century totalitarian regimes.

The Hundred Years War = it's time to depopulate the world again.

The period of time from 1000 AD to about 1500 AD is usually thought of a time of revival in the church. The "reforms" in question were a series of pushbacks against the facets of Greco-Roman paganism that were wholly incompatible with Christian teaching. One of these was the basic form of worship; in 1000 AD when a Christian went into a church, they would sing songs in Latin, hear scriptures read out in Latin, have a prayer given in Latin and leave. The problem being: almost no one besides the priests actually understood Latin. The average Christian knew virtually nothing about the Bible's contents in medieval times, and much of what they thought they knew came from these cultural baggage trains that we've already discussed.

When vernacular Bibles began to proliferate the results were explosive. It was like Christianity was being introduced for the first time which, in a way, it was. This brought reform within the church... to a point. But eventually two factions became distinct from one another, those who held largely to the statis quo (the Roman Catholics), and those who felt it was time to separate (the protesters, or "Protestants"). Many historian will say that The Hundred Years war was more about politics than religion. I personally think the distinction is a tad silly since both politics and religion owe their existence to a common source -- people's belief systems. Whatever the case, from the middle of the 1500's to the late 1600's those calling themselves Catholics and those calling themselves something else (Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicians, Baptists, Anabaptists, etc.) went to war.

Oh, and around 1600 the plague came back... in force.

In the next post I'll wrap this up with a summary.

The prophecies of Daniel - part 5

We are going to have to digress for a while. You see, I need a metaphor to make the next "time" make sense. Fortunately, the book of Daniel provides the just the thing. It is called "the abomination that causes desolation". Let's take a look-see.

Daniel chapter 11 prophecies the troop movements and general going-ons of one Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Antiochus was the ruler of the Seleucid (Greek influenced regime of Syria) kingdom around 170 BC. In 167 BC Antiochus' army captured Jerusalem, and they immediately put an end to all the Mosaic rites of worship. Antiochus then set up an alter to Zeus in the holy temple. This is what Jesus references in Matthew 24:15 (so when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation...) except that Jesus -- speaking 200 years after the Jews went berserk and got rid of the Seleucids and their Zeus shrine -- sites it as a future event. So what gives?

This one is easy.

First off, you need to understand that virtually every culture around the world has a legend that represents God (big God, Jehovah-God). For a long time scholars tried to tell us that Monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, evolved from Polytheism, ie: lots of gods. Then scholars began to document something called the sky-god phenomenon. It turns out that these primitive peoples with their many gods also have a legend for another God, a big G God, and that this God is all-powerful, but for some reason they can't reach out to Him so they have to settle for the little g gods. Except that in some cultures, the big G God has already been reimagined as a little g light weight who has lost his "sky-god" traits.

The word Zeus is closely related to two other Greek words, Deus and Theos, both of which simply mean "God", and words that simply mean "God" are one of the hallmarks of a sky-god legend. But Zeus isn't all powerful and he certainly isn't out of reach. If you think of God as a father figure, then Zeus would be Al Bundy. He gets drunk, he throws temper tantrums, he gets it on with women, boys, livestock. He's not like Jehovah-God. He's like you or me if we could throw lightning bolts and shapechange.

In 167 BC Antiochus' men went into the place of the mysterious God, the place where there were no visible representation for God, and they set up an image of a predictable god, a little god that doesn't deserve worship; a god you only sacrifice to when you want something. The abomination that causes desolation is the replacing of the almighty God of the universe with a dumbed-down replica. It's taking big God and shrinking Him down into something that you can control.

Yes, it happened in 167 AD, and yes, when Jesus spoke it was going to happen once again. Shrinking God is an abomination, and in the next post I'll show you how it causes desolation.

The prohecies of Daniel - part 4

At the same time that the church around the Mediterranean was suddenly inundated with "weeds", Christianity was rapidly expanding in new territories to the north. For a time in Northern and Eastern Europe Christianity was still a new faith, and it had the same effect in these regions that it originally had in the more Romanized Mediterranean -- which is to say that it displayed Biblical truth to an unbelieving population without trying to force them to join the faith. It's not that Rome didn't want to coerce them. It's just that in the 4th century, in the outlining areas of the empire, it wasn't really possible. So, for a time, Christians in places like England and Ireland, Poland and Russia, were more missionaries than overlords. Christian influence there blossomed while those conditions lasted.

But eventually it was the same. Christianity became established. Then it became the 'establishment'. Once Christianity had a firm grip on the power and prestige weeds (people who look like Christians outwardly, but do not accept Jesus as lord of their life in any real way) began to infiltrate. When they became the majority, the influence of real Christianity diminished.

Meanwhile, back in the Mediterranean, Popes were toasting Satan, falling dead committing adultery in the holy palace, and becoming intertwined with the Medici family (Italy's first Godfathers). In 1095 AD the political power of Rome was centered in Byzantium (largely modern day Turkey), while the spiritual authority was mostly rooted in old Rome. At that time the Muslims were expanding into Europe and both of these entities agreed that something had to be done about it. The answer was something called the crusades. The Pope at the time declared everyone who went to war against the heathens would be forgiven their sins and off they went.

The word "crusade" means "going to the cross" or "taking the cross" and the soldiers who took up the call literally painted a cross onto their shields and banners, but the meaning goes a little deeper. Taking the cross was seen to signify something very similar to what this badge I'm wearing right now is meant to symbolize(as I sit at the motor pool, waiting for my squadcar to get serviced) -- that being the authority to enforce the laws and dispense justice on behalf of a higher power (in my case the state of Texas may it be hallowed forever and ever amen).

For those of you unfamiliar with the history, the results of the crusades were... shall we say... a little unchrist-like. The crusaders had this nasty habit of killing everyone wherever they went. Over the 10 or so crusades, covering two or so centuries, they killed Muslims who were not hostile to them as often as the ones who were, killed women and children, wiped out the Christian populations still living and worshipping in the Middle East because, hey, they all kind of looked alike with the turbans and such, and at one point, even turned on Byzantium and went on a rape/kill spree in the Empire's capital city Constantinople.

It was not one of Christianity's finer hours.

But revival was on its way to the Mediterranean (our next upturn) and, unfortunately, on it's way to being needed over all of Europe (our next downturn).

And one other point of interest. A bit off topic for the Daniel prophecies, but something we are going to need for later: the plague arrived, and in the mid 1300's around a third of the population of the known world died off.

The prophecies of Daniel - part 3

Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared." -- Matthew 13: 24-26

A great many church historians view the fifth century as a kind of high water mark. Rome covered most of the civilized world at the time and when it imposed Christianity on it's people that meant that the majority of the people in the civilized world became "Christians". The percentage of "Christians" would never again be so high. You may have already noticed the problem. It wasn't Christians that suddenly populated the world. It was "Christians" with the somewhat sarcastic quotation marks surrouding them.

The reality is that during the fifth century AD the church lost more of its influence, more quickly, than at any other time in history. The reason for this is simple: you can not impose Christianity. It can't be done. For every other world religion the methods of worship are designed to allow people to gain a measure of control over god/gods. Take the Greco-Roman paganism for example. When a person sacrificed to the goddess Demeter, they were making an investment that they expected would return a bountiful harvest, since Demeter was the goddess of agriculture. Their worship was like a series of chemistry experiments where a certain formula of prayer and sacrifice would yield a predictable result.

There are no predictable results from the human perspective in Christianity. Even the promises of God that we know to be true play out in ways that constantly surprise us. The God of Heaven is not predictable, he is mysterious -- meaning that His knowledge and moral virtue are so much greater than our own that we can never render anything He does in Chemistry experiment terms. God does what He does because it is His nature. Not because He owes us for our sacrifices and prayers.

When Christianity became the established religion of Rome the total number of so-called "believers" increased ten fold. Churches that had a hundred, now had a thousand. A thousand became ten thousand. I think most of the bishops of this time truly meant well, but they were given an impossible task; their job was to integrate an overwhelming number of unwilling pagans into the Christian faith.

The results did not turn out well. Christianity became what you and I know today as Roman Catholicism. The church leaders introduced bits of pagan methodology in an attempt to connect with their new flock, but the indoctrination process was never complete; so worship of local gods became veneration of the saints, prayer to a feminine deity became prayer to Mary, sacrificial atonement became simony (paying for sins with money), and on and on.

But the most important change was that participation within the churches went from an expectation to an exception. The Biblical model for churches was that everyone was expected to contribute their gifts and abilities for the good of the group. The Roman Catholic model was that a few professional priests would do the work of God, everyone else was simply expected to show up and do as they were told. This will have major repercussions for our later 'times'.

For now, just notice part of the pattern. An upswing in the cycle of the church occurs when Christianity acts out its faith in the presence of non-believing world. The first of these upswings turned down when the non-believing world was coerced into pretending to be Christians.

For the next upswing, we will see that Christianity wasn't established everywhere, all at once. We will also look at the next downturn -- the crusades.

The prophecies of Daniel - part 2

In the latter stages of the first century AD, the most powerful empire the world has ever known began to take notice of a small religious sect originating in one of its smallest provinces. Pagan Rome decided that this new faith was nuisance and waged a war against it. It was an absolute impossibility that mighty Rome would 'lose' this battle. Yet that is exactly what happened.

To put this into a modern context consider the American campaign against the Al Qaida forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. Not the campaign against the country itself -- then the analogy wouldn't fit -- just the small pockets of Al Qaida and her sympathizers. Then imagine that thirty years after the campaign began (converting centuries into decades here to represent the faster flow of events these days) America lost. No, I don't mean that they failed to meet their initial objectives, I mean lost. As in -- Al Qaida sitting in the white house, Sharia law is the law of the land, every woman has to wear a burka... lost. Doesn't seem possible, does it?

And yet that's a fair symbol for what actually happened in Rome. But you say, "It wasn't a military conquest. It was cultural." That's true. But that doesn't make it any less implausible. Consider what a empire is:

A monarchy is a political unit that basically serves as a means of trying to keep its people alive. Every one has their place, whether noble, soldier, or peasant, and is expected to perform their function within the overall realm. But an empire is different (I talked about this in What does 666 mean). An empire moves wealth from the periphery to the center. It exploits the labor and resources of others for the benefit of its own. In doing this, an empire creates an apparatus that surrounds its citizens in a kind of protective bubble. That apparatus is meant to keep the citizens alive without forcing the citizens to spend all their time doing the ugly business themselves, thus allowing those same citizens things like leisure time and social mobility.

When you add that onto the nature of the Roman pagan religion you are left with a culture that existed primarily to satisfy the wants of its people. You can try and fight that statement all you want. You'll fail. But the Caesars took the power away from the Senate -- yes, with popular support from a people who wanted and single liable entity rather than the complexity of broad representation in precisely the same way that modern Americans place undo credit/blame on their sitting president. But the Plebeians were an oppressed class -- more like a less fortunate class, which every empire has, but also a class that their rulers took great pains to placate.

First century Rome was a land of free love and dramatic entertainments (gladiators, chariot races, etc.), of opulent wealth and unmatched prosperity. Within three hundred years from the first contact, the decadent people of Rome would cast away the supposed charms of all their good fortune (their idols) and bow down to worship the son of a Jewish laborer whom their forefathers had executed on a wooden cross.

Here's how it happened:

When the emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration for Christianity in 313 AD, Christians were still a small minority of the overall population -- maybe 10%. That number, however, misses an important detail; by 313 Christianity was already extremely popular. There's several reasons for this. Two of the big ones had to do with martyrdom and the early church hospitality ministries.

I have no doubt that a great many Christians plead for their lives, begged, cried, soiled themselves, etc, before becoming lion food, but a great many didn't. These died the kind of noble, no-fear deaths that demanded a grudging respect from their audiences. In Greco-Roman paganism there is no Heaven, only Hades. Even the heroes had a nasty afterlife (just not as bad). Seeing people unafraid of dying was a real eye-opener in a world that taught you to fear the end of life.

But even more important was the Christian concept of hospitality. The early church did not spread through door to door "cold calls". It was spread by caring for the poor and needy. Some of the stories boggle the mind. For example, a group of early Christians sold themselves into slavery, then took the proceeds and purchased the freedom of another group of slaves. Materialism found itself looking face to face with lives lived for a higher calling, and the materialists felt dirty by comparison. Because of this, even before Christianity became the established religion it had a whole slew of 't-shirt' fans, people who wanted to change but couldn't quite give up their old ways. In other words, its influence was growing.

After Constantine's death Christianity fell in and back out of favor, twice being the subject of eradication campaigns. But it was never enough, and about a century after the first edict of toleration Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Paganism was outlawed. Every knee bowed. Every tongue confessed. They had to, it was the law.

And the moment that happened Christianity's influence began to diminish.

(to be cont.)

The prophecies of Daniel - part 1

Then Jesus entered a house and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." Mark 3: 20-21

Later in the same chapter of the book of Mark, Mary and Jesus' brothers come to put a stop to His ministry. The strangest thing about this scene is that this is Mary we are talking about. The same woman who wrote a song (Luke 1: 47-55) when an angel told her she was going to give miraculous birth to the messiah. Now she thinks he's gone mad. What happened?

Apparently, the same thing that happened to John the Baptist. John baptised Jesus and witnessed the miraculous infilling of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Later, when he was imprisoned by the Roman authorities, John sent a messenger to Jesus who essentially asked, 'are you really who you say you are?' (who I thought you were?).

Here, now, I want to reiterate my point about misconceptions and make it specific to our examination of Daniel: just like Mary and John and the Baptist, if you have a preconceived notion of how God's revelation should look -- and I'm talking literally about His 'revealings' here, not just the book of Revelation -- then it is likely that you will disbelieve the events when they actually occur.

Case in point -- In Daniel chapter 12 Daniel is told when the world will end. He answers the way that modern theologians still answer to this day, "I heard, but I did not understand," (Daniel 12: 8). There is a good reason why Daniel could not puzzle it out; today's theologians have a much flimsier excuse.

Before I explain further, how about a little backstory on our boy Daniel.

And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, that will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. -- 2 Kings 20:18.

Daniel was one of the young men of Judah who fulfilled this prophecy when Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 586 BC. Castration of certain public servants was common in societies where the Rulers possessed harems. It wasn't just a matter of vanity. Sleeping with the harem girls was one of the basic symbols of a King's office, which is why Absalom takes time out of his takeover of Israel to sleep with King David's concubines in 2 Samuel 16:21-22. For this reason, operations like this were often performed on foreign servants... and I do mean foreign.

You see, there was no such thing as a 'minor' surgery in ancient times. This and some of the other not-so-pleasant aspects of Palace servitude meant that these positions were ideal for foreigners... people not yours... who could not easily rebel or incite rebellion....

Now, a point that needs to be made here is that eunuchs were not typically known as humanitarians. Unmarried men are often harsher by nature than family men anyways, marriage and parenthood having a softening effect of sorts. Eunuchs did not only lack families, they lacked much of anything that would inspire compassion and thoughts of a peaceful future for one's legacy. The stereotypical eunuch of the ancient near east was a stone-faced servant, lurking off to the King's left, always ready with the advice of who should be killed and how.


Then there was Daniel.

he seems to have had no bitterness toward his masters, the men who mutilated him. Not only that, but the prophecies of the Israelites overwhelmed him at times, as if he has adopted every one of them as an enormous extended family over which he felt a deeply protective love. This is the man God chose to give the first of the clearly apocalyptic visions: a man of limited temptations, a man of sympathetic character who never grew hardened in spite of living his entire adult life under the specter of possible death from a capricious ruler and jealous rivals.

And in chapter 12, verse 7 he asks when the world will end and is told-- The man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the river, lifted his right hand and his left hand toward heaven, and I heard him swear by Him who lives forever, saying, "It will be for a time, times, and half a time. When the power of the Holy people has finally been broken, all these things will be completed."

The typical translation of this phrase 'time, times, and half a time', is a year, two years, and half a year. It's not taken totally out of the blue either, since in verse eleven we are given two time periods (1,290 days/ 1,335 days) that roughly equal 3 1/2 years. But if we take this as a veiled reference to 3 1/2 years we have two problems: 1) why didn't the angel just say "3 1/2 years? and 2) the angel didn't actually answer his question since, without any contextual clues for when to begin the 3 1/2 years he hasn't actually told him anything. 3 1/2 years from when? Starting when?

But that's not what it means. We are given all the context we need for interpretation when the angel says, "when the power of the Holy people has finally been broken."

In the next post, a brief history of the church, and three times in history that it came close to collapsing.

History isn't what you think it is - part 2

It's been a running joke in the law enforcement world for the fourteen years that I've been associated with it: "Why didn't you just try to shoot the gun out of his hand?"

The department's legal liason will read the incident report while the grand jury listens. Then queries... and before long, without fail, one of the jurors -- typically an older woman or man -- will fire off the question that make the fields of reality spin, twist, and do little jerking motions. The juror has no idea, mind you, that they may have well have just asked, "why didn't you just throw the tree nymph at him?" or "why didn't you just ram him with the unicorn?" or that the question wouldn't have made any less sense even if it had only been a random collection of words, "bacon crispy sally port?" The question is asked and it has to be answered, preferably without making the juror feel like a moron... which is tricky.

Now there's a reason for this line of questioning, and it has to do with cowboys who save the day, dress in clothes that look like they are trying to wave passing motorists into a new steak house and occasionally break out into song. You see, there is a generation in this country that grew up watching cereal westerns on this new-fangled contraption called the television set. These people watched their dapper heroes shoot a few hundred guns out of the hands of a few hundred bearded badguys' hands and, at some point, came to believe that this kind of trick shot was really possibly.

"Hah", you say, "silly old people." Except that the same thing is happening today, and it's making it hard for prosecutors to convict defendants of murder, rape, and just about anything else. It's sometimes called 'The CSI effect' and it involves the disappointment that jurors experience upon finding out that their is no good computer reconstruction of the event, no biochemical evidence taken by equipment that only NASA possesses, and only a few so-called eye witness statements given by average looking people who are really kind of boring.

The point is that we all have our misconceptions. We all have those little tidbits of knowledge that we heard or saw and accepted as truth without ever considering if the thing had a valid reason or matched those aspects of reality that we could observe and verify. There's a big one of these in the world of end times interpretation.

You could call it, "The Late Great Planet Earth Effect" and it owes its force to the '71 novel and the influence it had over a Christian populace that was already traumatized by cold war nuclear tensions and knew next to nothing about what the scriptures actually teach on the issue. Now, plenty of theologians have challenged individual aspects of the book, but they seem blind to one of the basic assumptions that led the authors down such an exotic collection of rabbit holes in the first place: the assumption that the end times prophecies will all be fulfilled during a brief period of clearly supernatural happenings.

For the moment, let me simply put the question this way -- what if it's not so simple? In the next post I will go to what I believe is the key to understanding the end times prophecies. And I think that if you simply remove the preconception of a seven year period of supernatural bloodletting, the answer to what Daniel is saying become crystal clear.

History isn't what you think it is - part 1

Don't feel bad, it isn't what Hank Hanegraaff thinks it is either.

For years the Bible answer man gave answers about every part of the Bible except one. When callers on his radio show asked about end times prophecies he would simply say that he was still researching it. Then, one day he said that his research was complete and that he had concluded that end times prophecies should be viewed through a system called preterism (the belief that most or all of the so-called 'end times' prophecies actually refer to the end of the early church and were fulfilled in the 1st century AD). Now Mr. Hanagraaff doesn't explain whether he's a partial or full-blown preterist. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he still hasn't explained much of anything about his views, instead opting for a kind of French indie film thing of claiming poignancy while really just being vague. In his recent book, The Apocalypse Code, he is clear on one thing though; he doesn't think very highly of Tim Lehaye.

For those of you living under rocks (or just reading better books), Tim Lehaye is the driving force behind the Left Behind series. You know the one -- really popular, really bad movie adaptations. In his book, Hanagraaff spends a few hundred pages comparing Lehaye to a Nazi sympathizer, a Social Darwinist and... I don't know, my eyes started glazing over at one point, but he might have compared him to Rosie O'Donnell a time or two. Not only was it really bad form, but not even all of it was particularly accurate.

One of the things Mr. Hanagraaff railed against was Lehaye's idea of the Antichrist being physically killed, then coming back to life. Lehaye interpreted this from Revelation 13:3, where we are told that one of the heads of the Beast has a fatal wound that has been healed (much to the people's astonishment). Impossible, says Hanagraaff. Resurrecting yourself from the dead is an attribute of Christ, and Christ alone. It was the ultimate proof of His divinity. It can't happen with anyone else. It's a good point, but he's wrong about the Revelation passage. They both are.

It already has happened, and it bore no similarity to Christ's resurrection.

To understand how it happened, you need to know a little something about the mindset of people during medieval times. Life was hard in those days. Starvation and disease were rampant, and the Christians of that age knew very little about the Bible (I'll explain why in later posts). In this setting it had become quite fashionable to pitch superhuman, Christlike powers onto popular kings of that era.... and even some not so popular ones. Every region of Europe had its own 'sleeping emperor' legend. You know at least one of these -- King Arthur -- Camelot; once upon a very misguided group of people there really was a king of the Britains (too long ago to call them English) and there really was a legend that this king would return to usher in a utopian age. To us, now, those legends seem harmless. But one of the problems with legends like this, and the powerful delusion they created, was that if a person came along and told everyone, "Hey, I'm the guy," the people would, from time to time, actually believe him.

It had already happened before Frederick the Second. In 1225 AD an eccentric hermit claimed to be the reincarnation of Count Baldwin of Flanders, was promptly given the recently deceased Count's sovereign powers, and was actually spewing out royal edicts until that whole "recently deceased" thing became a problem and some of the people who knew the Count exposed the impostor as a peasant/con man.

But Frederick the Second took the cake. The real Frederick the Second (let's call him Frederick 1.0) was one of the most tyrannical rulers of the middle ages. He's was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at a time when 'Roman' was supposed to mean Roman Catholic, but mostly just meant modern day France and Germany, and he was excommunicated at a time when getting excommunicated while being an Emperor was akin to getting kicked out of Guns and Roses; in other words, it could happen, but... wow.... If you disagreed with Frederick 1.0, you died... badly. Murderer, blasphemer, as cruel as he was brilliant, Frederick 1.0 was certainly a beast in Biblical sense of the word. And in 1250 AD he died.

Then, 34 years later, he came back.

He first appeared in the town of Cologne, where he was viewed as a lunatic and driven out. But the return of Frederick 1.0 legend was a strong one and this impostor wasn't any simple con man. He seems to have genuinely believed that he was Frederick the second returned from the grave. Eventually others believed as well. Before long other countries were sending delegates to find out of this man was the long awaited harbinger of the millennial reign (more on this later as well) or if he were the Antichrist; there were legends for both. And before it was over an absurdly large portion of the empire accepted him as their Emperor. It took an army and a siege to depose him. Even under torture he refused to recant, saying that if they killed him he would return in a few days. Finally, they burned him at the stake, and no, he didn't return. Although another legend popped up that one day he would. I'll explain the beast and it's heads when we get to the Daniel prophecies. For now, I want to finish with the Hanagraaff/Lehaye tiff, and how it relates to the common misinterpretations of end times prophecies.

Why doesn't Mr. Hanagraaff seem to know that there is a perfectly logical explanation, and event, for Revelation 13:3 that satisfies the requirement that the "head" in question not actually conquer death (and I certainly see that as being a valid requirement). My guess is that he has never heard of it. I don't fault him for this.

You see, this is one of those historical events that you almost have to go looking for in order to find. I myself had been a medieval history buff for years and never came across it. It wasn't until I tried to write a fiction story set in the era, and had to do some serious research on medieval messianic expectations that I came across it. Now, years later, having come across a number of similarly interesting yet underreported historical events that I think I understand a bit about what is going on.

First, there is a bona fide anti-supernatural bias among mainstream historical scholars. This is convenient, since it allows them to discard the Biblical claims out of hand, but I don't think it is intentional so much as just a natural product of their worldview -- a worldview that looks at anything smacking of the "miraculous" as some sort of mistake, and then expunges it from the record.

Secondly, I think it owes something to the natural tendency of most mentally healthy persons to shy away from conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories are bunk, of course. They assume too much intelligence on the part of the shadow agents and far much more ability to keep secrets than what we see in real life. Yet, the more I look at history, the more it looks like one grand conspiracy to me.

I think I already mentioned the little dittie about the Babylonian captivity: that a nation of people supposed to separate from other nations failed to do so, and was ultimately carried off to a nation whose name literally means 'land of confusion'. How does several centuries of a country's history boil so easily down to a single Biblical moral (that being that denial of truth leads to slavery in the 'land of confusion')? It's almost as if some great 'conspirator' were guiding the action.

And I don't think it is Biblical history alone that does this. As we look at the prophecies of Daniel I will attempt to demonstrate how all of human history has this feeling of overriding control. I don't think we see it in modern history books simply because modern historians leave out the ironic events which reveal it. The result of this is like a Polaroid where one color has been left out. There is a faded, washed out feel, that gives modern historians the freedom to try and foist materialist causes onto anything and everything, but which fails to show the true reality.

And so Biblical scholars like Mr. Hanagraaff fall into the preterism trap when the real answer is right under their noses.... If only they knew where to look. And why don't they?

In the next, and mercifully shorter post, I look a little more into the reasons why preterism and a fully futuristic interpretation of end times prophecies miss the mark, also -- and suprisingly related -- I give my answer to that question asked by grand juries of every police involved shooting for the last six decades, "why didn't you try to shoot the gun out of his hand"?

What are the trumpets - the seventh trumpet

For four hundred years the Hebrews lived as slaves in Egypt. During that time they took on the Egyptian culture, including its pagan religion. When God freed them He used a series of plagues. Each one of these plagues was aimed at one of the Egyptian religion's major deities. So when God turned the Nile river red it was as if He was saying, "Your god of the Nile, Hopi, has no power. I have power. There is no God but me."

The last of these plagues was special. You see, Pharaohs claimed the kind of divinity we talked about with the Nephilim (see: What does Babylon mean). Pharaohs claimed to be the incarnate son of the high sun god, Ra. When God struck down the firstborn not only was He displaying His power over Pharaoh, He was also prefiguring the death of His own incarnate son, Jesus.

With the first five trumpet calls we saw challenges that serve as warnings, "Your modern 'gods' have no power," says the Lord. "They are figments, just like the Egyptian gods." But the final two trumpets are different. These are events that are going to be described elsewhere in scripture. The sixth trumpet announces a war that inevitably leads to mankind's destruction. The seventh trumpet is the cataclysmic event itself. And the challenge requires little description, because it's answer is actually written out in the text.

The seventh challenge -- mankind can change. No matter what we've done so far, if circumstances required it, we could adapt, we could overcome.

That's the figment of our collective imaginations. Here's the reality:

The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts. -- Revelation 9:20-21

The answer to the seventh challenge -- Individuals change, but mankind as a whole will never change. The majority of people will always choose to try and fashion themselves into gods, then deny that that's what they are doing. This path leads to death -- always.

The seventh trumpet is an event that burns our planet to a cinder, and is also the moment of the so-called 'rapture', as we will see in other passages.

But for now I'm going to go in a different direction. I want to talk about the end times prophecies in the book of Daniel; one in particular.

Next up: History isn't what you think it is.