MY SCRIPTURE STUDIES

My Scripture Studies
Seek God. Engage with His voice in the Bible and start in the beginning.

November 28, 2008

Is the Pre-Trib Rapture Theory... a Golden Calf?


In my Scripture studies I've found it is time for a paradigm shift to truth and ask a question. If there's a rapture, who needs resurrection?

To answer, we need to study to show ourselves approved... rightly dividing the unchanging word of truth.

For me, that means separating theory from Biblical fact.

Before we look into one religious "theory" called the "pre-trib" rapture, let's take a look at Isaiah 1:18:
“Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD.
Let us reason together that The LORD knows the facts of HIS plan and He reveals it. 

Yet, people want to theorize on theology.

The also want to add in dispensational replacement theology not found anywhere in the Bible. 

But, in the end, we must all seek truth in Scripture. 

No matter how good a theory may sound, it always has a blind spot. That's why it's called a theory, it's not certain or proven. 

When theology theory thinking relies on one or two verse snippets out of context it will pull you in to the twilight zone. 

There is no need to take my word about this.

Instead, do your own fact checks. Open the Bible. 

Read and study the written Word of God and do something about the straight lines of truth you'll find there. 

Be a Berean, "for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day..." Acts 17:11.

So what is the pre-rapture theory?

In a nutshell, one version of the secret rapture theory I've heard has some twists and turns, but goes something like this: 

Jesus will make an unscheduled trip, a second coming like a thief in the night. It will be a big cloud maneuver to remove a "saved" church into quarantine off the planet. Whether living or dead, the theory says that church folk will vanish and fly away to be put into hiding in Heaven.
 
Then a global outbreak of chaos and persecution called the "great" tribulation will pour out on those remaining on a churchless planet where no one is "saved."

The people that remain on planet earth in this "end time" are the "lost."
 
The "lost" will be "left behind" to go through a one world government torture chamber governed by the anti-christ. A charismatic global leader who will rise to become head of the planet with evil and dark authority over everyone's life. 

Then everyone "left behind" by the Christian vanishing act will have God's wrath fall on them. Everyone will have to make a choice including the Jewish people who will have to be bought to violent repentance for staying in the synagogue and not joining the church.

Jews will have to believe in Jesus or choose the antichrist who will appear in Jerusalem and claim to be God in a rebuilt 3rd Temple.

If Jews choose Jesus, they will be killed on the spot, but their souls will be saved in a great revival of repentance and all Israel will be saved at the end of the time of the Gentiles.

At the end of seven-years of this tribulation, Jesus will return to earth for a third time.
 
On this third trip, Jesus will bring the raptured church army back with a mission to destroy the planet led by the antichrist and his mark branded followers that don't believe in Jesus despite billions of missing people and billions of empty open graves and mausoleum crypts open across the globe for years.
 
Jesus will then set up the kingdom of peace for a thousand years and the raptured church that missed out on all the tribulation will come back to earth to claim the winning score over evil like a touchdown at the Super Bowl despite the fact they did not play in the game. 

This vanish into thin air theory is not alone, there's another one like it called the "mid-trib" rapture. 

It comes from sermons extracting math gap theories out of the book of Daniel. 

Both pre and mid tribulation theories rely three sentences extracted out of context in three letters written by Paul. The snippets are preached without the context of Paul's letters. You can find the clippings in Ephesians 4:8-10,  1 Thessalonians 4.15-17 and 2 Thessalonians 2:1–10. 

I've heard them all on Sunday, but always wondered... what about the rest of the Bible? 

Bottomline, some of this Sunday sermons had variations on the timing of the rapture depending on the denomination sign or the membership roster. 

Most explain their escape hatch theories based on their interpretations of a missing week from a verse snippet found in the book of Daniel, but never mention the origin of the rapture theories, nor the fact that the word "rapture" is not found anywhere in the Bible Jesus taught.

The great escapes ignore what Jesus said to the disciples when they asked: “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”

The verse clipped theories popped up in some pulpits in the 1800's. 

All of them ignore Jesus' words: “Take heed that no one deceives you." 

They also take a pass on Peter's concern about being confused by Paul. Those are found in 2 Peter 3:15-17:
“And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. 
There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.”
Whether debating on pre-trib or mid-trib, it seems that each theory of a secret rapture that geared up in pulpits taught new doctrines from the dream of a little girl.

Her name was Margaret McDonald.

As far as I can tell, pre-trib promotion started with Darby. Interpretations of her dreams first arrived in the pulpit of John Nelson Darby and others that were known as the Plymouth Brethern movement in the 1820's in Dublin, Ireland.

In my view, a secret church rapture based on a nightmare scenario directly links to the Golden Calf with a bizarre twilight zone twist on anti-semitism.

The seeds of anti-semitism are rooted in replacement theology and they are watered in dispensational theory, not the Bible as it is written. Dispensation became a thing from the 1909 publisher's notes of the Scofield Reference Bible that was wildly popular in America just before World War I.

Dispensation quickly became a big part of the current pre-trib rapture picture. Popular preachers have made big bucks selling books and making movies about it. Virtually all of them use Cyrus Scofield's notes that promote a dispensation of Old vs. New. That blank page holds a misguided concept that Christians are a part of a new "church age" replacing the ancient promises given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 

Today, believers that listen to end-times doom and gloom and preachers who promote fear and
doubt against God’s covenantal promises with a rapture escape hatch unwittingly listen to false prophets. These false prophets are raising up a host of people waiting for a ethereal non-scriptum event in opposition to the promise of resurrection. 

By doing so, false prophets are not raising up people in faith or action.

Darby his cronies taught that the New Testament church will be raptured away from the planet at any time leaving the world devoid of saved souls so that Jerusalem and the Jewish people can ruled by the antichrist to force them into repentance. 

Ultimately, the rapture theory promotes anti-semitic punishment for all Jewish people that reject the Christian version of the Messiah. 

All other people left behind with the Jews, whether they be agnostic, atheists, Hindu, Buddhists, Muslim or Shinto and so on will suffer in grave tribulation with the Jews until they either believe in Jesus or die in annihilation.

If you believe in Jesus the Jew, think about that. 

A believer's assignment is to reach out to others with truth. Like Jesus said the first commandment is to love God, the second is to love others, not run and hide while others suffer. 

You may have never realized it, but the left behind version of the pre-trib rapture theory has a vortex focus on abandoning the Jewish people to let them suffer because they do not see Jesus as their Jewish Messiah. It teaches that Jesus will abandon them in a time of horrendous, mind bending tribulation while saved Christians hide out in their safe place saved by a pew prayer. 

That's anti-semitic in my view and believe it or not, Jewish tribulation has happened in near total Jewish annihilation? 

It happened just 70 years ago!

For those still reading, let me explain Adolf Hitler. He called it the "final solution." Today it's know as the Holocaust. If you're Jewish it's called the Shoah. 

It was conceived in prison and carried out by the Führer, an anti-Semitic Nazi Party leader of Germany. Hitler's solution kicked off in 1933 from SS planning stages. Most say the horrors started on November 9, 1938 with Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass" as the windows of Jewish family businesses were smashed and broken as synagogues burned on the 15th of Cheshvan that year. 

The horrors of that Jewish tribulation lasted seven years from 1938 to 1945. 

Hitler outlined the end goal of his extermination plan in his 1923 book “Mein Kampf.” He wrote it while jailed. Unfortunately he was released from prison.

If you take a step back and look at the pre-trib rapture theory, it smells like an endemic of strange fire  preached in a church that without knowing it has a hidden history of persecuting millions of Jewish people for the past 1,800 years. 

Jesus is Jewish. 

Why would those that call themselves followers of Jesus turn against Jews?

The answer is "replacement theology" the worthless inheritance of lies like the Golden Calf. 
O LORD, my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in the day of trouble, to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth and say: "Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit. Jeremiah 16:19
Replacement theology started after Polycarp died. 

Polycarp was the last known student of the disciple John. Polycarp stood firm in faith honoring the Sabbaths and Feasts of The LORD. He is recognized as one of the first to reject the heresies of a man named Marcion. Polycarp was burned alive in faith because he would not declare "Caesar is Lord" or offer incense in worship to Caesar's statue. 

A guy named Justin Martyr, showed up after Marcion around 160 AD. He is credited with introducing a new church doctrine now known as replacement theology. His new doctrine taught that God changed His mind, rejected the Jews and the surname title of "Israel" belongs only to the new "church." 

Later, Origen introduced the term “legalism” into the church Greek mindset and it has continued on 
throughout church history celebrating Constantine's councils with a Sunday replacement for the Sabbath and Ishtar's Easter rebranding Passover while re-inventing Saturnalia day as Christmas associating it with the winter solstice and the Greek festival of Kronia.

Since Constantine, many without knowing it have inherited lies as they have been misrepresenting the Jewish Messiah, His ministry of Torah teaching and the importance of the Feasts of The LORD. Many have been busy in a new religion based on misguided teachings about the "think not" warning embedded in the Sermon on the Mount that kicked into high gear: 
"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Matthew 5:17-18 
Oh, by the way, that word but is not there in the Greek text, that's why it's in italics in most Bibles. But it's an insert of religious opinion, not a translation of the Greek ἀλλά which means rather. Not only that, Marcion taught the word "fulfill" meant "to do away with." 

Marcion ignored the truth, to "fulfill" is the Greek word plēroō πληρόω which means to fill with meaning. So, what was said is more like this: I am not come to destroy Torah, rather to fill it up with meaning. 

Next on the church scene was Tertullian. He showed up around 165 AD. He wrote the "Dialogue with Trypho" at the time and some thirty five years later he put out his thesis: "Against the Jews." 

Then there was Augustine, another original big time anti-Semite. In his widely distributed shout outs from the pulpit called "A Sermon Against the Jews" Augustine accused all Jews of deicide, aka they killed Christ and many in the early church and beyond believed his thesis as they forgot the Bible Jesus read and taught.

People inherited lies and were blinded by vile, hateful, and dangerous anti-Jew rhetoric after Polycarp was torched at the stake.

The so-called church fathers all forgot Jesus was a Jew. They forgot His name too, it's Yeshua. They forgot He made the willing sacrifice and life offering for mankind's sin and that He lives in resurrection life, not a rapture ride. 

Everyone but a remnant shifted Jesus into a new religion, not a faith based relationship! 

Some churchmen at the time labeled Marcion a heretic because he rejected God. Marcion declared that the Torah of God was done away with and that the Old Testament was about a vengeful God and a new God of grace stood out in the New Testament.

It's a sad fact but secret pre-trib or mid-trib rapture theories all walk along a dangerous road adopting inherited lies because all rapture theories abandon the Jewish people. 

Not only that, they actually point toward a political storyline in America before itsengagement in the latter stages of World War II.

Truth is stranger than fiction!

The facts on the ground are that the United States of America, under its pre-war engagement leadership stood by ignoring the tribulation poison and fire of the Holocaust ovens. Government and political leaders in D.C. had to know of the mass murders of the Jews, but ignored the ruthless killing of millions of men, women and children in the Shoah. 

Much like today, the media kept us ignorant of truth. The media kept us in quarantine as the Jewish people were trampled underfoot by Hitler's SS soldiers of evil.

That is how it was until the good ol USA was attacked in our own paradise island.

That day of infamy was December 7, 1941. The Japanese suicide pilots fire bombed our Pacific fleet in Hawaii.

Yet, Almighty God had a plan for America and used Harry Truman. Truman was a whole Bible believer and as a man of faith he came to office in 1945 at the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It had been twelve years since Dachau became the first Jewish concentration camp to open its oven doors. 

Twelve years!!

Dachau's gate to hell was built ten miles from Munich in March 1933. America entered the war in December 1941, eight years after Dachau was established and turned on the ovens. 

The Germans surrendered in May 1945, a month after Truman took office, but war continued on with Japan.

For twelve years, the Jewish people had been rounded up worse than animals in pens. They were tortured, shot, gassed with poison and burned alive in the German concentration camps filled with hatred and body ash filled ovens just as Psalm 102 1:-28 declares. 

Precious children were killed like daily Molech sacrifices. 

All this came from the evil demonic prison mind of Führer Hitler and his legions of tribulation. 

Yet, America's government maintained radio silence with the American people as our political backs were turned away. For most, it's impossible to understand how that happened, it certainly is for me. 

Many hearts were numbed in fear by this, it's the October 5, 1937 Quarantine Speech given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. The speech was preached by Roosevelt in Chicago as the US President opened a new bridge to solve a traffic problem in Chicago's jubilee celebration. If you have not heard that speech you should. It was unwittingly delivered on the last day of Tishri, the 7th Biblical month.

That day, Chicago's Mayor, Edward Joseph Kelly introduced the President talking about a battle of bridges in Chicago that divided the city. Kelly now has a legacy, he is credited with building one of the most powerful and corrupt big city political organizations on the planet. 

That political corruption remains in many forms today, his legacy is not a bridge.

America's leaders and media hid the Holocaust, but on December 22, 1942 an article titled: "The Massacre of the Jews," was published about the atrocities recorded by journalist Varian Fry. It was published in "The New Republic" magazine. 

We unwittingly ignored the destruction of Europe's precious humanity in Jewish exile from Israel. Instead, we chose to celebrate building bridges in the name of civic improvement while remaining a distant non-observer. We all thought we were safe and sound ignoring Hitler's madness of murder across Europe. 

President Roosevelt's speech sounds a lot like the rapture theories I've heard and it points to a future problem that will be seen again. 

Roosevelt said this:

"Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.

To paraphrase a recent author "perhaps we foresee a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, will rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing will be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless—all will be lost or wrecked or utterly destroyed."

If those things come to pass in other parts of the world, let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization.

If those days come "there will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. The storm will rage till every flower of culture is trampled and all human beings are leveled in a vast chaos."

"How happy we are that the circumstances of the moment permit us to put our money into bridges and boulevards, dams and reforestation, the conservation of our soil and many other kinds of useful works rather than into huge standing armies and vast supplies of implements of war."

"It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.

It is my determination to pursue a policy of peace. It is my determination to adopt every practicable measure to avoid involvement in war."

"America hates war. America hopes for peace. Therefore, America actively engages in the search for peace."

Two words define what happened four years after the bridge was opened... Pearl Harbor

No further explanation is needed. The day was December 7, 1941. 

Believe it or not, the United States never declared war against Germany. 

Germany declared war on America in keeping with their "Axis Alliance" with Japan. We declared war against Japan, so Germany declared war against the United States.

Something beyond belief happened 2,350 days later, the sanctuary State of Israel was established and restored to its rightful place in a day. That day was May 14, 1948.

Oddly, Daniel 8 speaks of 2,300 days in a prophecy about grave persecution. That prophecy of 2,300 evenings and mornings is found in Daniel 8:13-14:
"Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to the one who spoke, “For how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot?” And he said to me, “For 2,300 evenings and mornings. 
Then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state.”" 
Israel was restored as a sanctuary for the Jewish people who are there whether they know it or not to prepare the land for the return of Messiah. 

Forty-nine years before Israel was reborn in a day, a Kansas born man by the name of Cyrus Scofield published his dispensation commentaries embedded in his own version of the Bible in 1909. Scofield was not the first to publish a commentary in a Bible, but he was the first person to make one man's opinions so popular.

The first Bible known to add in a commentary is called the Geneva Bible. It was first published in 1560, and it is the same Bible that the Pilgrims bought with them on board the Mayflower to America.

Three hundred years later, John Nelson Darby made several trips to America between 1862 and 1877 from England. He came across the pond to preach his rapture sermons because church leaders in the United Kingdom cast him out due to his bizarre eschatology. 

Darby's group were also known as the "Exclusive Brethren" and they were rejected as heretics by the leadership of the Church of England.

When Darby made his way to America, he discovered Cyrus Scofield's ideas and he soon met with Mr. Scofield. Later, Scofield thought it would be helpful for newby readers of the Bible to have some explanation, cross reference as well as dates, so he re-published his work in 1917 with James Ussher's dating of the Bible woven into the published commentary notes.

Because of that, Scofield is thought by some to be the man that started to spread the word if you will about "the rapture" with his comments on 1 Thessalonians 4. But that's not quite true from what I've read, Scofield never printed a Bible with the word "rapture" in any of his "study" Bibles.

Scofield only referred to the definition of "caught up" as in the ages old Biblical understanding of "resurrection."

Read Scofield's comments for yourself and take note, Mr. Scofield points to a resurrection promise, NOT A SECRET anytime escape hatch hideout in heaven while Jewish people and others die, left behind at the hand of an antichrist one-world leader:

"Chapter 4

4:17  Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Not church saints only, but all bodies of the saved, of whatever dispensation, are included in the first resurrection. (See Scofield "1 Corinthians 15:52") as here described, but it is peculiarly the "blessed hope" of the Church (cf) Matthew 24:42; 25:13; Luke 12:36-48; Acts 1:11; Philippians 3:20 Philippians 3:21; Titus 2:11-13."

Scofield pointed his readers to his notes on 1 Corinthians 15:52 where he provided further commentary on resurrection. You can read them here for yourself

Scofield states:

"1 Corinthians 15:52  In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
raised

Resurrection, Summary:

(1) The resurrection of the dead was believed by the patriarchs Genesis 22:5; Hebrews 11:19; Job 19:25-27 and revealed through the prophets; Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2 Daniel 12:13; Hosea 13:14 and miracles of the dead restored to life are recorded in the O.T.; 2 Kings 4:32-35; 13:21."

In 1917, Cyrus Scofield did not lead his readers into the levitated outer limits twilight zone rapture cloud theory about a church quarantine while others will be left behind to suffer and die in great tribulation.

Proverbs gives us the rapture advice we all need to know and understand.

If we will just look at it, we can see the wise proverb declares replacement theology with its pre-trib rapture escape theories are the truth in reverse:
The righteous shall never be removed the wicked shall not inhabit the earth.” Proverbs 10:30
This Proverb says God's big plan is restoration on earth. 

What's the source of that Proverb?

It's in the beginning in Genesis 18 and it's revealed by Abraham's question to The LORD:
The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since Abraham will certainly become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the nations of the earth will be blessed? 
For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of The LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that The LORD may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him.” 
And the LORD said, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is indeed great, and their sin is exceedingly grave. I will go down now and see whether they have done entirely as the outcry, which has come to Me indicates; and if not, I will know.”

Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, while Abraham was still standing before the LORD.  
Abraham approached and said, “Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?  Genesis 18:17-23 
If we read the Bible, we discover Almighty God's focus in on Israel and the Jewish people as a light to the world to reveal the Bible's location for Kingdom restoration. That's why Jesus the Jew healed people with faith there. Faith has the power to heal a broken world.

The "righteous" will gather alright, but the righteous will not be swept away off the planet on a cloud hidden in Heaven. The gathering place is the land promise on God's creation that He declared good.

That is what the Genesis questions are about. That plan was revealed to Abraham in the beginning.

In the end, the "first" resurrection described in Revelation 20 connects with the promise seen in Ezekiel 37, there's nothing new or hidden in theory there:
Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished. We are completely cut off.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, 
Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel. 
Then you will know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, My people
I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the LORD, have spoken and done it,” declares the LORD.’” Ezekiel 37 11-14
In the restoration of God's Kingdom, Israel is critical. Harry Truman knew that. It's the reason one of the most important events in American history was Harry Truman's recognition of Israel on May 14, 1948. 

In a way Israel was resurrected.

Resurrection is the key word, not rapture. Separated families that believe, both Jew and non-Jew will be restored as brothers and sisters in the life gift of the outpouring of the Ruach Spirit, the wind and life breath of our Creator. 

This restoration process has already begun in Israel and in repentance through brotherly love for one another as Christian and Jew. 

That fact is a big part of the restoration that will bring Heaven to Earth just as Yeshua proclaimed in the Lord's Prayer:

"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

The restoration of God's Kingdom is on earth is focused prophetically on the land of Israel and the blessing promise given Abraham. It is not an ethereal evacuation to a cloud, playing a harp while those left behind on earth are ruled by an antichrist with the goal to crush the Jewish people with plan to punish them into repentance in the land promised as a blessing to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Read Revelation, the book confirms a kingdom and a royal priesthood on earth that ties to the gospel of God given to Abraham:
"And they sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.” Revelation 5:9-10
Replacement theology theorists have preached a grave error.

That mistake is that a church dispensation "replaced" Israel as God's chosen people. It ignores restoration. Replacement theology led to a theory that the “church” will escape the planet in an imminent any time secret moment to a cloud hiding behind a pearly gate as the Jewish people and others left behind suffer in Jacob's trouble.

The conceited replacement theorists misread Paul who wrote about Gentiles grafting into the true faith of the Deliverer. Paul never described an antichrist whipping up on people to convert to a replacement religion:
I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you will not be conceited: A hardening in part has come to Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. 
And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: “The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove godlessness from Jacob. 
And this is My covenant with them when I take away their sins."" Romans 11:25- 27
Paul even named the day and says I told you so:
Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. 
Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction,  who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. 
Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? 2 Thessalonians  2:1-5
The implication for all dispensational pre-trib rapture theorists believing in a super secret hideout on a cloud by a rapture in Heaven is actually frightening. 

Why??

The rebellion has come already, the falling away has fallen. 

After the disciples died, a replacement theory church turned its back on the word of God Torah saying its done away with, let's change the Sabbath and forget the Feasts of The LORD, let's replace them, so like Rehoboam, they did. 

There's an even bigger problem. Think about it. If the unchanging Almighty God of Israel has changed His mind concerning His covenant blessing promise that includes His "land" promise to the children of Jacob and His one Torah constitution for life in His Kingdom given to both the native born and the sojourners (see Numbers 15:16-6 and Numbers 15:29-31), then how on earth can anyone be sure Almighty God hasn’t changed his mind about the gospel?

Praise God, He does not change! 

The Almighty God of Israel is the same yesterday, today and forever. The LORD God declares in Malachi 3:6-7 He NEVER changes. All of His covenant promises are irrevocable and build as foundations stone, one upon another. The unchanging God of Israel promised Isaac, the son of promise this commitment about the redeeming blessing of the Messiah to come, first trip or second:
"...And in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.” Genesis 25:4-5
The following passage from Jeremiah 33:25-26 shows us that a dispensational replacement theology that rejects God's restoration plan to be poured out in lovingkindness and mercy on the descendants of Jacob is replacement theology tradition fiction, NOT Biblical fact:
Thus says the LORD, “If My covenant for day and night stand not, and the fixed patterns of heaven and earth I have not established, then I would reject the descendants of Jacob and David My servant, not taking from his descendants rulers over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 
But I will restore their fortunes and I will have mercy on them.” Jeremiah 33:25-26
Since the restoration of the Jewish people in land of Israel began in 1948, we have all witnessed prophecy in real time that began after the Holocaust by the return of the Jewish people. Whether they know it or not, they are there to prepare the land for Messiah.

The Jewish people are there for a God purpose, to a God plan to restore the land for the return.

We all need to know that the nation reborn in a day on May 14, 1948, is linked to the nation that God promised 2,500 years ago in Isaiah 68:8. There's more to Isaiah's prophecy, but we'll dig into the big story on that in another post some day. It ties to Yeshua's teaching to Nicodemus about being reborn.

In Israel today, the facts on the ground are that the restoration of the Jewish people has now equaled the population of all the souls lost in the Holocaust. Whether we understand the importance of that census or not, if you are a non-Jew like me, that fact should give you great reason to rejoice in God's unchanging character and promise!

After Titus' destruction in Jerusalem, the Jewish people were scattered throughout Europe after the Legions attacked Jerusalem. Ever since they have suffered horrifically in church persecution and inquisition for nearly two millennium. Worse yet, the Shoah tribulation of Hitler during World War II was an attempt to wipe them off the map. 

Yet, Almighty God proved to be faithful to His covenants of blessing as Jewish people began to return to His Promised Land in Aliyah. 

The fact is that the Jewish people are there now. Like I said they are chosen by God to prepare the land for Messiah's return. Zion is being prepared for the Deliverer.

Are you prepared?

The Sodom story and the questions asked are very important. It's time to repent and turn back to God's way, we need to live in God's image as He intended from the beginning. Almighty God will be continue keeping His commitment and His faithfulness to the Jewish people as well as those who by faith like Abraham are grafted in as children, joined to The LORD into the House of God redeemed through the blood of Israel’s Messiah King Yeshua!

This is seen in the words recorded by Moses, Isaiah and confirmed by Paul:
The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? Genesis 18:17 
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to The LORD say,
“The LORD will surely separate me from His people.” Isaiah 56:3
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God... Ephesians 2:19
In the beginning, God's wind, His breath gave life to the man of clay. Adam, almost 6,000 years ago received God's Spirit breath, but he ignored what God had to say. Four thousand years late Almighty God poured His Spirit out on Jerusalem and gave the gift of many languages (tongues) so that the disciples could walk and talk to spread the gospel truth of the Kingdom of God and its Messiah to all nations, foreigners and strangers across the globe.

That work continues today, but in the end, tribulation will come on those that reject God's solution for our depravity. The nations, foreigners and strangers that reject Him will be swept away. The will not be around to receive the blessing promise given to Abraham, instead they will rise up against Israel and members of the household of God, but their end is near.

When you open the book of Revelation, we see the image of Messiah in the Holy Place. John describes that he sees a golden sash across a priestly garment – He is standing among seven lamps, like the menorah of gold that was placed in the Tabernacle. This gives a picture describing one like a son of man “saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.”

Later, in the vision, John describes a cry during the fifth seal. The cry comes after the four horses of tribulation have ridden across the Earth but wrath has not occurred.

We also see the priestly white robes of righteousness are worn by the multitudes, the martyrs of tribulation. This takes place before the first resurrection. How do we know this is before resurrection?

For they were to sleep (in death) a little longer.

Revelation shows us two groups of God's people — the martyr multitude who receive white robes and those living on Earth who will receive God’s priestly seal just before the censor’s hot coals of wrath fall on Earth. The scene describes a Yom Kippur judgment that comes into focus in  Revelation 11 after the 7th trumpet sounds before the Day of Judgment.

In Israel’s past, the shofar called the children of God to prepare. The Day of Trumpets blast was always give to prepare for the Day of Judgment. That shofar blast started the ten days of awe and repentance leading to Yom Kippur. So too, the seven trumpets of Revelation highlight coming “Judgment" and the urgent need to for the people to repent now!

Messiah will return to establish His Kingdom, people must first look to, not on Him as translated in the King James Bible. He is the pierced One and Israel will plead for His return and enjoy the blessings of the Messiah as the messenger man of God promised by Zechariah.

Look at Zechariah 12:10: And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplication; and they shall look unto me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.

In Hosea 5:15 we read:  I will go and return to my place, until they acknowledge their offense, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me earnestly.

Tribulation provides no escape hatch, so it is time to ready our lamps with the oil of the Spirit!

Revelation reveals tribulation and reveals wrath These two are not the same. Wrath is a terminal sentence.

After that, the elders declare: “The nations were angry and your wrath has come, The time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that You should reward Your servants...and destroy those who destroy the Earth." Revelation 11:18

THEN THE MOST HOLY PLACE OF GOD WAS OPENED IN HEAVEN AND THE ARK OF HIS COVENANT WAS SEEN IN HIS TEMPLE. (Revelation 11:19).

Let's look at this: "Then the temple of God was opened" and we see a door being shut which no man can open, and a door being opened which no man can shut, as a part of the Philadelphia assembly. What does this door before the Most Holy Place symbolize?

In Revelation’s sanctuary scene, the front door to the Sanctuary was opened, but there is another door in the Temple of God – it is in the door to the Most Holy Place and the shechinah majesty glory presence of Almighty God!

Yes, there is a second door; and it is opened only after the seventh trumpet sounds. When the first door was opened in Revelation 4, we saw the seven lamps and the incense, but now, near the end of Earth's sinful history, we hear the cry, "the time has come for you to judge, that you should give reward to the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear your name, small and great; and should destroy them which destroy the Earth."

THE TIME OF YOM KIPPUR’s FINAL JUDGMENT is introduced and the inner door is opened and the Ark of the Covenant is seen in Heaven. There will be a final Yom Kippur judgment.

For that reason, we must consider the early Jewish Believers. The early church was not aware of an escapist teaching. Instead, they taught the Biblical doctrine of Lordship – that the Jewish Messiah is Lord of all and “Ruler of the kings of the earth.”

The Kingdom restoration has begun: Christians are now seeking friendships across the world with brother Judah.

The enraged dragon goes to make war against those "who keep the commandments of God and the testimony of Yeshua. Revelation 14:12 “And those who are the sealed saints of God are "those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus."

Revelation 14:7 tells us judgment is against Satan’s deception and the false Harlot religious systems of the world that did not profit from the Gospel preached: "Come and see the judgment of the great whore" Revelation 17:1

Perhaps more important than tribulation, there will a great end time restoration to The Lord's ways.

Call it a revival if you like but before the King arrives, His court must be made ready by the outpouring of God's Spirit. The beginning of this process was seen with the rebirth of the Jewish nation some 60 years ago. Since 1948, the land has been restored and since 1967 the city of Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria have become the vortex of today's headlines.

The land is being restored by the Jewish people for Messiah's return and the people are next as the Creator is faithful to his word to the prophets like Ezekiel as The Father breathes and restores life in the clay of people's stony hearts as one new man.

In God's mystery, tribulation is part of this process of restoration. We don't understand this because we tend to ignore what's written in God's word. 

Tribulation is a part of the regathering before glory.

There is an assignment to return to the LORD your God and obey His voice:
"When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the LORD your God and obey His voice. For the LORD your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them." Deuteronomy 4:30-31
"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising." Isaiah 60:1-3 
“For I know their works and their thoughts, and the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. And they shall come and shall see my glory, and I will set a sign among them. And from them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, who draw the bow, to Tubal and Jeavan, to the coastlands far away, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory among the nations. And they shall bring all your brothers from all the nations as an offering to the LORD, on horses and in chariots and in litters and on mules and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the LORD, just as the Israelites bring their grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the LORD. And some of them also I will take for priests and for Levites, says the LORD. Isaiah 66:18-21
At that time I will bring you in, at the time when I gather you together; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes,” says the LORD. Zephaniah 3:20
Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you even Yeshua. Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets. Acts 3:19-21   
The return of Messiah will shake the earth in resurrection to restored life as it was intended from the beginning. That is the very teaching that Yeshua was giving Nicodemus. Resurrection is the born-again promise of the Spirit given in John 3:1-21. It will bring people from the dust of graves into the air, by the breath of life at King Messiah's return.

Regarding the new birth of resurrection Yeshua asked Nicodemus: “Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things?

That same question is before us today.

The reason Jesus asked this particular man is simple, Nicodemus was a Pharisee. According to Josephus, the Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees believed in the promise of resurrection:

"that every soul is imperishable, but that only those of the righteous pass into another body, while those of the wicked are, on the contrary, punished with eternal torment" -Josephus Wars 2.8.14

"they hold the belief that an immortal strength belongs to souls, and that there are beneath the earth punishments and rewards for those who in life devoted themselves to virtue or vileness, and that eternal imprisonment is appointed for the latter, but the possibility of returning to life for the former" -Josephus Ant. 18.1.3

That eternal torment Josephus noted is the dusty grave, aka separation from God's eternal life giving breath and Spirit.

If you insist on calling the promise of resurrection a rapture,
know this, Nicodemus would not know
what you are talking about. 

It is "resurrection", just like Messiah Yeshua's that will be mankind's ransomed existence just as it was intended and promised in Eden.

Just imagine walking with God by the ultimate glory power of Yeshua's first fruits resurrection power as the ransomed elect scattered around the globe will be meet with Him at the sounding of the great shofar announcing His return to the planet as King.
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4 
The former things have passed away include death, that why there are tears of joy. That big crowd gathering to Israel to meet King Yeshua at His return is the way to Zion and the Messianic Kingdom, it is the only rapture that Paul wrote of just like Isaiah:
"And the ransomed of the LORD shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away and the ransomed of the LORD shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." Isaiah 51:11
Take notice Paul warned of deception before Messiah returns bringing judgment in flaming fire and vengeance on them that know not God and arise against those God calls out as His people. The following words summarize the message: let no one in any way deceive you, for it [that day] will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, then [after the man of lawlessness is revealed] we which are alive and remain shall arise in resurrection:
"Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. 
Let no one in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God. 
Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things? 
And you know what restrains him now, so that in his time he will be revealed. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. 
For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness." 2Thessalonians 2:1-12 
"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: 
Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." 1Thessalonians 4:16-17

That man of lawlessness is seen again in Revelation 15 as John records the timestamp that the inner sanctuary of Heaven will be opened after this.

"Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels who had seven plagues, which are the last, because in them the wrath of God is finished. And I saw something like a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, holding harps of God. And they *sang the song of Moses, the bond-servant of God, and the song of the Lamb... After these things I looked, and the temple of the tabernacle of testimony in heaven was opened, and the seven angels who had the seven plagues came out...  And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from His power; and no one was able to enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished.


Through all of the writings of the prophets, God speaks of regathering and restoring His scattered people back to Jerusalem, His chosen city and the nations with them to the House of Prayer.

There's no promise of playing a harp on a vapor cloud. The destination is Heaven on Earth. King Messiah will reign in Jerusalem, the city of gold. Not only that, following the first resurrection there will be a celebration in Jerusalem. In the Bible its called the Feast of Ingathering for a reason. It's the final Feast, a week long harvest celebration and rejoicing called Sukkot aka Tabernacles.

You need to look forward to it and rehearse, you need to know how to build a sukkah, It will be crowded in Jerusalem with the sacred assembly when Heaven comes to Earth.

In Revelation John writes, "And I heard a loud voice from heaven, saying, "Look! The tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them. They shall be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God." Revelation 21:3

The conclusion to the Biblical story doesn't end with God scooping up Christians to live on a cloud hiding out with a harp while Jewish people suffer in tribulation greater than the Holocaust.

Reread "The Lord's Prayer" it reveals God coming down to mankind and it points to the Tabernacles celebration theme and this prayer:
"I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one." John 17:15.
Restoration has already begun. God is restoring the Jewish people to prepare the garden for Messiah and till the soil of the Promised Land. They were the last to be exiled and they are the first to return.

The end of the story is seen in the beginning... "God with us" breathing air and life into the dust and ash of the Holocaust graves.

I pray to be ready to be called out of the dirt into the air to join the greater exodus journey east to the Holy Land. It will be like a repeat of Genesis 2:7-8 and Exodus 13:17-22 but much bigger. The Promised Land at the end will be like Eden in the beginning. This is described in Revelation 22 but dirt is still dirt and the air is still giving life from our Creator.

The rapture is like a false idol. What dos it look like?

For most the storyline reads like a horror movie and goes something like this:

The rapture is the big trauma to hit the world. Imagine those left behind on earth and the fear they'll all have in the lost and doomed world they'll be living in governed by the one world leader antichrist that requires a cashless society and an embedded RFID chip in your hand for purchases and your head for identification.

After the rapture there will be world wide food shortages, pandemics and earthquakes as a comet or asteroid hurtling through space will sideswipe earth, turning one-third of the earth’s water into a deadly poison. Rivers, springs, and wells will all be affected.

Solar flares will turn the Sun dark as stars will fall out of the sky as asteroids pummel the earth and destroy ships and turn the oceans into blood.

War in the Middle East will punish people for not believing in Jesus in the time just prior to the return of Christ while only Christians escape the seven-year global nightmare. Yet, two witnesses and 144,000 Jews will accept Jesus and preach the gospel and if someone left behind becomes a Christian during the Tribulation, they will receive a special blessing.

For those that don't, it will be an awful experience.

For the first 3½ years, conditions will worsen; God’s anger will burn against those left on the planet. During the last 3½ years, the antichrist will be empowered to rule the world from Jerusalem as he personifies Satan while the Church will worship God protected in heaven because they will be transported to heaven before the Tribulation begins. Those left behind will endure countless demons from the pit of hell running unchecked throughout the earth torturing them.

The message from rapture pulpits is that best preparation for the Tribulation is to make sure you are not around for it. Their message is to use that fear as motivation to accept a promise of deliverance from tribulation by the rapture as the world races toward the worst seven years in history with its finish line at Armageddon.

That's the rapture... are you kidding me?

The truth is the Bible gives the promise of resurrection. Paul taught about that. many sermons point to      his letter to the former Gentile believers in Corinth as the rapture proof. What Paul was actually doing was teaching the former pagans about the Jewish Pharisee's understanding of the "Sod" or mystery meaning of the last shofar blast during the shofar service on Rosh Hashanah aka Trumpets Day. They are traditionally concluded with one long tekiah gedolah or “great tekiah.”
For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words. 1 Thessalonians  4:15-18
Here Paul was explaining the "Sod" meaning and ultimate purpose of the the shofar ram’s horn that is blown in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and every day during the month of Elul leading up to Rosh Hashanah on the first day of the seventh Biblical month of Tishrei that kicks off the Fall Feasts.

Paul explained the Pharisee's "Sod" (mystery) teaching to the Corinthians on the saying that is written about the first resurrection to those that perhaps like you and I are not Jewish, never grew up in a synagogue and likely did not own a Torah scroll or a shofar for that matter.
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up in victory." "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" 1Corinthians 15:51-55
Unlike the Sadducee's that rejected the Bible's teaching on resurrection the Pharisee teaching was about resurrection on the Day of The Lord. The mystery Paul was revealing in addition to the Fall Feast timing was that those that are alive at the last shofar will not have to die to receive the gift of eternal life.

Paul knew that the LORD God that formed man of dust from the ground will breathe the breath of life into mankind again one day just as he did in the beginning. Those that have passed away in death will in God's glory break out from the soil into the air again with death overcome by Messiah.

Here's something not so "Sod" or mysterious but you may have missed it. The LORD God has replanted a garden toward the east. In 1948, He broke ground again in Israel; and it is there Messiah will restore the planet and the tree of life that was Eden.

God told Isaiah that He declares the end from the beginning for a reason and the words of Revelation are a parable on the promise.
Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city. Revelation 22:14
Resurrection day and its connection to Trumpets Day is the sum of Paul's rapture teaching. It's likely not what you thought. it's an ancient Jewish teaching.

Resurrection will shake the planet, it is a global resurrection earthquake because the kingdom of heaven is not hidden on the corner of a cloud in a rapture theory afterlife. The kingdom of heaven is real, the Fall Feasts are real and they will be fulfilled in the renewal promise of resurrection and restoration of God's Kingdom on earth. That's the mystery of the good news message of the gospel and its about your preparation for a road trip to Israel to meet Messiah not on a cloud.

That is a purpose of the Torah, it's the kingdom constitution.

The end is not about the end of the world.
It's about the end of the exile of God's people from the land.
It's the end of sin and death outside the garden.
The end of separation from God's pillar of fire glory.
The end of family division under Messiah's kingship. 

The end is about the end of Messiah's exile from earth and the end of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites that choose to oppose and reject Almighty God YHVH.

The Lord's Prayer plainly tells us God's will (since the beginning) will be done 'on earth' as it is in Heaven, not in reverse. That's the clearest Genesis description of the future first resurrection in the Bible... there's not a great escape or a rapture fever.

The greater exodus is living parable of promise that God would remove our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). Te process includes Revelation 20:5-6:

"But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This [is] the first resurrection. Blessed and holy [is] he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Messiah, and shall reign with him a thousand years." Revelation 20:5-6

Messiah Yeshua is coming back and many mis-read the parable of John 14:2-3:
"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."
There's not a great escape to a mansion, Jesus is a Jew. He is using a Jewish wedding picture. The groom is giving a parable promise of what occurred on the Passover cross.

He wants His disciples to understand that through His resurrection He is in union with the Father i.e. "dwelling" with Him. He's returning, and it is important to know the promise of the mystery of His resurrection, that all disciples will also make their "abode" with God:
"If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.'" John 14:23
The ground work is underway in Israel right now. It started in earnest in 1948 and the Philistines and still throwing ricks and welding swords against Israel. This time, they are called Palestinians.

When Jesus declares that He is "going to prepare a place" the son of Man isn't talking about a secret rapture hang out. He is talking about a "union" that sincere believers can experience with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit on earth. He's talking about the Shavuot (Pentecost) that provides an active connection with Believers by pouring the water of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into our soul.

Remember, our flesh and bones in the end are just the dust of the earth. They require water, God's word and air (Spirit) to live and allow us to grow in the image of Messiah.

Rather than dying to a mansion, Jesus is telling us that you can actively abide with the Spirit of Father right now here on earth. Yeshua had to leave to send the Spirit at Shavout, accept the facts and the prophecies, He is the Messiah. He is alive in First Fruits resurrection yet He died as the Passover Lamb. He is returning as Messiah King. The shofar will sound on Trumpets Day, judgment wil come on Yom Kippur and celebration will rule on Tabernacles.

Everyone at His ascension to the realm of Heaven heard the two witnesses:
"Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven." Acts 1:11
We need to take the same advice: why do you stand here hoping (to go) into a hide away mansion in the sky?

Just check out the words of Ezekiel's scroll as he quotes God's sovereign end time promise:
"Therefore prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.' " Ezekiel 37:12-14
God promises and Ezekiel writes... "I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel."

The Sovereign LORD continues... "when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land."

That land is God's garden, is Israel. It is the vortex of Heaven and Earth.

The land of Israel is being tilled now, prepared for the harvest. For nearly 70 years, it has been in the process of restoration. The land comes first, then the people's souls will be refreshed. That's how it worked in the beginning. First the garden, then the breath of Almighty God in the man.

Garden are being restored and at the Savior's return when He will come back in the same way He was seen to go. In God's glory cloud.

Are you ready?

If not you need to dig deeper into the Scriptures and seek Messiah.

Forgetting is good sometimes, after all God promises to forget sin if we just ask.

Forget about the pre-trib "rapture" theory. Theologies like that rapture theory are based on what people want to believe, not the truth from the Word of God. After all, golden calf idols are only made by men. Consider the Israelites that used their own gold to make the the golden calf. Were they worshipping an old Egyptian idol-god or did they choose to worship God in their own way?

They chose their own theology, a learned doctrine not rooted in the Word of God they had just promised to follow but refused to hear.

The golden calf sin has to be understood in the context in which it occurred. Israel and the sojourners with them were afraid to hear the voice of YHVH at Mount Sinai so they chose not to continue to listen to and said to Moses: “You speak with us and we hear, but let not Elohim speak with us, lest we die.” (Exodus 20:19).

Had the elected to continue to listen to the Almighty, they would have heard the warninggiven to Moses in Exodus 20:23: “You do not make besides Me mighty ones of silver, and you do not make mighty ones of gold for yourselves.” Had they listened they may have not sinned by making the gold image. Nevertheless, it was a grievous sin becuase they did not wait to hear the word of The Lord from Moses.

We need to listen to God, we now know His words given to Moses and to the prophets because:
"Surely the Lord YHVH does nothing, unless he reveals his secret counsel to His servants the prophets." Amos 3:7.
What prophet in the Bible preaches a rapture exodus hideaway for a church that leaves Israel behind to suffer the final Pharaoh?

None of them.

Speaking of prophets, everybody seems to want to talk about the "sealed scroll" of Daniel 12.

Speaking of prophets, Jesus was teaching as "the" prophet when He taught in Matthew 24 and the book of Revelation:
"For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather. 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.

Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.

And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other." Matthew 24:27-31 NIV
Nothing is too secret about the sky lighting up with the glory of God. There is nothing secret about a Revelation trumpet blast and there is nothing secret about an earthquake resurrection:
"At that time Michael ["who is like God"], the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people -- everyone whose name is found written in the book--will be delivered." Daniel 12:1
There is nothing secret about signs in Heaven, they are there for the whole world to see. Both planetary and constellation alignments are described throughout the book of Revelation. Today, thanks to increased knowledge in the last days just as Daniel said, there are no surprise eclipses, no unknown earthquakes or hidden tsunami waves anyplace on earth. Knowledge has increased.

At the first coming, we read of the sign in Heaven now called the Star of Bethlehem. Perhaps this sign is potentially tied to the repeating retrograde alignment of Jupiter and Regulus in 2BC in the constellation Leo that began on September 14th 3 BC.

The day on the Hebrew calendar of the Bible was on Elul 24 during the countdown of 40 days of "teshuva" or repentance that began on Elul 1 leading up to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Jupiter moved in conjunction again on February 2nd in 3 BC on the Adar 4, a 3rd time on May 8th 2BC or Iyyar 25th which ties into the 40th day of counting the Omer following Passover on the 50 day countdown to Shavout (Pentecost).

Shavuot was the day The Lord spoke the Ten Commandments from the fire of Sinai and it was the day the Spirit of God descended on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem like tongues of firm on the disciples of Yeshua. The 4th and last conjunction tied to the retrograde motion occurred on June 17, 2BC Tammuz 6.

Yeshua told His disciples what would be seen before His return.
“And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken." Luke 21:25-27 
Just as Genesis 1:14 tells us in the beginning, God created lights in the expanse of heaven for signs, seasons, day and years, and in the end, Revelation 12:1-4 reveals that John records the signal of another sign in Heaven to be seen in the latter days as God declares the end from the beginning.
"And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth."
The description by Yeshua of another sign to appear in heaven warns that: 'the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

The warning is ominous but have faith, Daniel tells us the future holds a great promise too.

Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake.
Some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. But you, Daniel, roll up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge." Daniel 12:1-4 NIV
As you seen now the mystery of 1 Corinthians is a teaching on the Fall Feasts honored by thousands of years by the Jewish people. Paul was teaching it to the former Gentiles of Corinth. To those in Thessalonica he was teaching on the same message and that there is nothing secret about the voice of the archangel or the sound of the trumpet of God:
"Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 
According to the Lord's word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words." 1Thessalonians 4:13-18 NIV
Paul used the word 'mystery' to explain the Jewish concept of "Sod" Bible study. He used it to show that the ingathering of those who are alive at the moment of the resurrection of the dead at the last trumpet of the final Yom Teruah... Trumpets Day is not a rapture before tribulation, it's the day of resurrection, the day of rebirth Yeshua taught Nicodemus about.

Today, there is a ton of confusion because the so-called early church fathers turned their backs on the Sabbath and the Feast Days kept by the Jewish people.

Most recently John Darby came to America and taught his theory of a "top-secret" pre-trib rapture, but is it a religious disaster of Biblical proportion. Somehow, it oddly reminds me of the advent of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that people are not made in the image of God.

Yet neither Darwin or Darby developed their own theories, they were borrowed from others.

What seems so odd is that both theories came the attention of the public at the same time in the mid 1800's. Oddly, the two men died in England just ten days apart in April 1882. John Nelson Darby Darby the father of "dispensational" theory was born in Westminster and Charles Darwin the father of "evolution" theory was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Most people rightly call Darby's teaching a rapture "theory" while explaining it as a mystical event prior to a seven-year tribulation that is not found ANYWHERE in Scripture to allow a church to make a great escape.  Others reject Darby's secret pre-trib rapture thinking he simply got the timing wrong, believing his rapture theory occurs in the middle of a seven-year tribulation.

One thing is certain no one agrees. So, why all the timing confusion?

Pre-trib is called a "theory" for very good reason, it's unproven in Scripture... Remember, the Bible has no theory, no not one, like Joel 3:7 says... God declares everything by His prophets. Everything.

Paul never had in mind a secret rapture event when Christians would be evacuated off the planet. He believed the promise of resurrection from the grave. Think about the basics, you can't breathe under the ground, but just above it is life giving air. God’s goal is to resurrect and give life as He establishes the eternal kingdom of God on earth.

Isaiah tells us God declares the end from the beginning. In the beginning, He gave live to the dust of Adam by breathing into his nostrils.

The vision of the future that the Scriptures teach is what Yeshua taught. It the same message Paul preached and it is the promise of resurrection. This is the refreshing, it is the hope of the future:
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.  And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He *said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.”” Revelation 21:4-5
Tribulation is not a prophet's secret, it is plainly declared and includes the words of Moses, Daniel, John and Yeshua-Jesus. It's seen in the beginning and it is mysteriously tied to love and restoration:
"Thus you are to know in your heart that the LORD your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son." Deuteronomy 8:5
If we look closely, tribulation has purpose, like a blessing in disguise to bring people together with heartfelt focus on our Creator before death falls on those that choose to reject His salvation just as wrath fell on the Egyptians, the Hittites and the Girgashites, the Amorites and the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites,.

Revelation shows us God’s discipline purpose in tribulation is to get people out of the ancient idol worship ways of Egypt and Babylon, out of the deception of false religion and into God's way, the way of life.

While it might appear that tribulation is wrath, it is not the same. Discipline is a preparation just as it was in the 40 years of wandering when The Lord judged those that broke His covenant and ignored His power to protect them when they entered the Promised Land. Wrath comes on those that reject and hate Him in the end as seen in Deuteronomy 7:8-10:
"Know therefore that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love Him and keep His commandments; but repays those who hate Him to their faces, to destroy them; He will not delay with him who hates Him, He will repay him to his face."
Tribulation is discipline, wrath is destruction. They are very different.

Heed the call to repent, to come out, hear the call to return to God's ways.

For some it is a call out of harlotry and the false idol worship of a golden calf that originated in Babylon and ended up in Egypt. This is shown plain as day in Revelation 17-18 before the final, third woe when God's wrath judgment unfolds on those that choose to not heed discipline and repent. The same was true long ago in wilderness when they false report of the ten spies was believed.

The final woe of the last three plagues in Egypt was the death of the firstborn for any home whose door was not covered by the blood of a lamb.

Moses warned about the great tribulation and he also warned about wrath. Wrath comes because:
Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so you shall perish; because you would not listen to the voice of the LORD your God. Deuteronomy 8:20
According to the message of Revelation, God is going to do a repeat performance from the beginning, an encore of the plagues that came on unbelieving Egypt to deliver His people from the wrath of death. Like the Exodus story, the plagues described in Revelation include water turned to blood, boils, fire, hail, darkness, locust, and frogs.

What will become of those scattered among the nations and to the ends of the earth (four winds) when God’s judgment returns to earth? God will not only discipline, Messiah will finish the assignment given to His namesake Joshua and judge the wicked, yet at the same time, He will reward the just who have chosen to be a part of the people of the God of Abraham.  Psalm 47 declares this:
O clap your hands, all peoples;
Shout to God with the voice of joy.
For the LORD Most High is to be feared,
A great King over all the earth.
He subdues peoples under us
And nations under our feet.
He chooses our inheritance for us,
The glory of Jacob whom He loves. Selah. 
God has ascended with a shout,
The LORD, with the sound of a trumpet.
Sing praises to God, sing praises;
Sing praises to our King, sing praises.
For God is the King of all the earth;
Sing praises with a skillful psalm.
God reigns over the nations,
God sits on His holy throne. 
The princes of the people have assembled themselves
as the people of the God of Abraham,
For the shields of the earth belong to God;
He is highly exalted.
Those who choose to be in covenant with the God of Israel, atoned through the blood of the lamb of God Messiah and walk in His ways have nothing to fear just as Israel was saved in Egypt. Listen to God, He will deal graciously with those that repent and believe God. Earthly death is temporary, they will have eternal life thanks to the final Yom Kippur atonement described in Revelation, and they will hear the trumpet of resurrection promised in Isaiah 18:3:
All you inhabitants of the world and dwellers on earth,
As soon as a standard is raised on the mountains, you will see it,
And as soon as the trumpet is blown, you will hear it.
Just as it was 3,500 years ago in Egypt, those in covenant are called to do as God instructs, like those that believed Moses and did what was commanded in Egypt, families will be miraculously protected by the blood of "The Lamb of God" on the wood at the wrath plagues brought on this planet. We can know this as truth because as Malachi tells us: "For I, the LORD, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed." This unchanging promise begins with this:
“And when I see the blood I will pass over you.” Exodus 12:13
The prophecy of Revelation tells us that after the seventh angel sounds, the final wrath to come arrives with the time of the dead, that they should be judged by fire and brimstone in the great winepress of the wrath of God.

Pharaoh, refused to allow the Israelites to worship God at His Feast in the wilderness, so the ten plagues of judgment came only on the Egyptians that rejected the word of Almighty God. According to Exodus 9:27–35 the seventh plague of hail was so severe that Pharaoh begged Moses to end it, promising to let the Israelites go worship if he did. According to Revelation, the seven last plagues, the hail will return.

The final plague of hail will be another stoning, a judgment of out of heaven and every stone will be about the weight of a talent. An Egyptian talent was 60 pounds but the heavy common talent noted in the Newer Testament was over twice that weight. One weight or another, the hail stones will be a horrific judgment.

Malachi also summarizes the stoning:
"And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the LORD of hosts." Malachi 3:5
The Torah requires two witnesses before any judgment is valid, this is shown in the beginning in Deuteronomy 17:6 and Deuteronomy 19:5. This are seen again in the end as the two witnesses of Revelation 11 appear on the scene and prophesy for 1,260 days declaring the truth, the Word of God. A third witness of three angels (messengers) proclaims the gospel to all nations. Severe plagues follow for the un-repentant that will not hear the truth and follow.

The warning we all must heed then is this: either come out of our Babylonian ways of false idols and our own golden calf Egyptian worship or share in the plagues of the judgment of the great whore. "And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth."

This final warning is given:
"And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities." Revelation 18:4-5
It's about waking us up to the hear and obey the first commandment:
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me"
Forget the golden calf pre-trib rapture theories. Moses is the man that was first given the responsibility to tell us what tribulation is about at Mount Ebal, the bare mountain.

Tribulation is brought on by lack of repentance:
"See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse -- the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known." Deuteronomy 11:26-28 NIV
When people choose to turn away and worship other 'gods,' whether they are golden calves or ourselves through self pleasure, greed, money... the bottom line is: curses will come if "you have been rebellious against the LORD."

Its like the laws of physics, God is not vengeful, tribulation is a signpost to show us we must turn our hearts away from our own pleasure and bitter poison and back to the covering of God Almighty:
"Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the LORD our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison. When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, "I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way," they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry." Deuteronomy 29:18-19 NIV
Revelation declares that many tribulation saints will even lose their lives in persecution, just like Messiah during His great Passover distress. That has been happening across the planet for many years.

Hold on to that reality, if you ignore it, you will not see Daniel's vision. The reality is many good and wonderful people lose their lives, the world has already witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and today there are beheadings of Christians that flies in the face of any institutionalized theory of dispensational, replacement theology.

Pre-trib rapture is a catch 22.

The thing is, God tells us He declares all things through his prophets. Please write to me, I cannot find where the prophets of the Bible provide a narrative for the theory of a secret pre-trib rapture bus ride prior to or in the middle of the great tribulation described by Daniel, John or Jesus. If you find it show it to me.

One institutional golden calf has been to indulge in dispensation theory and replacement theology stealing Israel’s covenant promises without offering hope, faith or belief that God will faithfully keep His covenant with the Jewish people in His restoration promise.

A secret rapture escape ride to hide can't be found because God tells us He has declared everything to the prophets, but you will find there are blessings for those that are faithful and there will be restoration on earth.

One reason God is Almighty is because God is life and He alone has the power of resurrection over death. Daniel promises: "the great prince who protects your people, will arise" and that prince of protection is Messiah.

Who needs protection if you're sitting on a cloud playing a harp? Look at the words in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. Read the words of John 16:33...
"I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Help me understand, write me, explain, be open to discussion, exposition, exegesis, by clarifying the midrash of the Scriptures just like the Bereans. Protection is provided when we "Love the Lord your God with all your heart".

If I am missing something show me, show others, show the world, but be sure to use Scripture and the words of the prophets because we must believe the words of the prophets and Jesus the greatest prophet.

Amos has this to say, he declares:
"Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets." Amos 3:7
In any discussion, start with the words that Yeshua (Jesus) declared, they explain and validate (fulfill) the Scriptures. After all, He is the one with all authority on earth and in Heaven and He says this: "after the days of the tribulation when the Son of Man appears in the sky" (Matthew 24:29–31).

After the days of the tribulation...

We will have to look "up" to see Him there "above' the earth and out of His grave. If you escaped on a rapture ride in heaven, wouldn't you have to look down to see the "Son of Man" appear? Look for yourself at every angle of the Word of God to see and believe the words of Jesus. Matthew recorded them as: "Immediately after the tribulaton.

Grab your Bible and look, to make it easy here they are:
"Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other."
Don't be confused about the terms four winds and one end of heaven. These are Jewish idioms or common sayings. The meaning is the whole planet. When you stand outside and look from horizon to horizon, north to south and east to west you are looking at the four winds and from one end of heaven to the other.

The Bible is full of Hebrew idioms. That's because in every language and culture there are many common sayings. It's critical to remember the Bible is a Hebrew book written by Jewish people.

We all use idioms every day and we know what they mean without explanation, they are a reference point. Here are just a few examples:

A picture paints a thousand words: this does not mean a picture can paint or that every painting is described by 1,000 words. It means a visual presentation is far more descriptive than words. Others we use today include:

Add fuel to the fire: Whenever something is done to make a bad situation even worse than it is.

Running against the clock: Rushed and short on time.

It's Greek to me: Meaningless and incomprehensible like someone who cannot read, speak, or understand any of the Greek language would be.

Please know that I am NOT trying to be hyper-critical of anyone by the words in this commentary, just imploring that what we all need to do, seek the unchanging evidence found in Scripture including the words of the prophets and Jesus, the Master Rabbi and Prophet.

He was called Yeshua by His disciples and He plainly gave this promise of ingathering and redemption "after the tribulation." His words here are not a hidden saying. Sure He spoke and taught by parables, but His disciples asked Him to tell them and He carefully cautioned them to let no one deceive them about what He told them. Here's the record:
"And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? And Jesus answered and said unto them, "Take heed that no man deceive you."" Matthew 24:3-4
I came to reconsider my own golden calf rapture worship after 9/11 when I watched the two World Trade Center towers fall. The times and seasons changed forever for me and America. I was horrified by the terror witnessed that day as the jet engines aimed by screams of Jihad flew into those buildings.

Later I cried in grief as I read these Scriptures speaking of towers from the prophets:
Isaiah 30:25 And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall.

Isaiah 33:18 Thine heart shall meditate terror. Where is the scribe? Where is the receiver? Where is he that counted the towers?

Ezekiel 26:9 And he shall set engines of war against thy walls, and with his axes he shall break down thy towers.

Zephaniah 1:16 A day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high towers.
Matthew records a simple truth given to us by Jesus that I just knew I had to understand:
“For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left." Matthew 24:37-39
The people that were "taken away" from life on earth in the days of Noah were the unrighteous ones. Noah kept God's commandment to build and the ark saved the righteous to live on earth as the flood drowned the unrighteous away separating good from evil.

Have you ever considered your definition 
of "tribulation"?

Think about this. Today, over 2.7 billion people live in some 190 countries with average lifespans below 50.  That below 50 years of age!

And get this... in those nations, people in 100 of them live on $5,000 or less per year and in 37 nations people live on less than $1,000 per year. If you live in the US, how would you feel if you were trying to live on that meager amount of money, would you think that you were in tribulation?

According to GlobalIssues.org at least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death." Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted.

Today, diseased hearts seeking to rule the world by Jihad terrorize the planet just as infectious diseases blight the lives of the poor across the world. An estimated 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, with 3 million deaths in 2004. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities: Africa accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide. Africa is synonymous with disease. HIV/AIDS began there. Leading active killer diseases are pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, tetanus and meningitis. These horrific diseases kill 11,000,000 people per year or 30,000 a day. More people are killed by wildlife in Africa than all global areas combined. Even the African honey bee is deadly.

Water problems affect half of humanity.

In the United States, 80% of the census live east of the 100th Meridian. The reason: water.

Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day. More than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day, and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day. Access to piped water into the household averages about 85% for the wealthiest 20% of the population, compared with 25% for the poorest 20%.

In 2005, there were 2.2 billion children in the world and 1 billion (every second child) lived in poverty. Worldwide, 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy) and 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. Yet, for every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.

Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific but as Europe and America channel surf reality is far from us.

Now, from a global perspective, how do you feel about tribulation?

There are some 992,000,000 people or three times the population of the US barely surviving on $1,000 or less per year and that number will soon pass one billion!

There are only 34 nations on the planet with formal health care systems! That leaves 157 countries with no organized health system to meet medical need. And get this, there are 53 nations whose average lifespan is below 65 years of age, 40 are below 60 years of age and 18 nations have an average lifespan below 50 years of age.

Did you see that? Eighteen nations have average lifespans below age 50 and several are below age 40 for crying out loud!!

In 2006, a study conducted by The World Health Organization shows we have 136 million births every year, of those 70 million mothers and their babies are excluded from health care, 4 million babies die in the first month of life, 530,000 women die in pregnancy, childbirth or soon thereafter.

From the World Health Report 2006: Working Together for Health showed that about 30% of all 59 million health workers are in the USA and Canada and only 4% of health workers are in sub-Saharan Africa, which has 25% of the global disease burden and under 1% of the world’s financial resources.

In just the past ten years, 20 nations have been declared to be in famine. Not only that, the facts of World War II are enough to make one sick. During the war 60 million died. At the beginning of the war, the global population was 2.3 billion. That sobering fact tells us that nearly 3% of the population of the planet was killed in Europe and the Pacific. In today's numbers, that equates to the death of 216,000,000 or 2/3's of the U.S. population.

World War II began on September 1, 1939 when German forces invaded Poland. It ended on September 2, 1945 when Japanese officials signed the surrender documents aboard the battleship USS Missouri. It lasted six years and one day, some 27,000 people on average were killed each day of the conflict.

With these global facts, we have to reconsider that life in America cannot define a proper Biblical perspective on the truth of tribulation by our self-centered, egotistic interpretation of Scripture. Simply put, the Bible is not all about us here in the land of the free, the center of gravity of Scripture is in Jerusalem.

The book of Joel, the son of Pethuel reveals the reason for tribulation and Joel must be read and studied, but take some advice don't pick it apart with verse excerpts, read the prophet's scroll just as it is written, as a whole and you will see why the prophet declares God's purpose in a fast of tribulation is to prepare the world to cry out:
Consecrate a fast,
Proclaim a solemn assembly;
Gather the elders
And all the inhabitants of the land
To the house of the LORD your God,
And cry out to the LORD.
Alas for the day!
For the day of the LORD is near,
And it will come as destruction from the Almighty.
Has not food been cut off before our eyes,
Gladness and joy from the house of our God?
Joel the son of Pethuel. Petheule means "vision of God" so, with that sobering truth, let's get started knowing each of us has our own bias to be worked through and we must be willing to speak the truth while living in lovingkindness even if we disagree with others who have a different view.

God says He declares the end from the beginning and He means what He says. The key to understanding the end from the beginning is to understand God gives us His teaching and instruction for living because He loves us and He never changes His mind about that. He teaches us His guidelines about how we are to live near and in relationship with Him. It's the original message of the deceiver to fall for the idea that God does not mean what He says or that He changes His mind. Don't listen to that message any longer.

Take a look at what Moses wrote about God's teaching and instruction:
"And when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, "and return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you today, with all your heart and with all your soul, "then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. "If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will take you. "And the Lord your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed, that you may possess it. And he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. "And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live." Deuteronomy 30:1-6
Zephaniah has recorded some prophetic words of the fall festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, so let's look at that because it is the day of the LORD:
"Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O'Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away the judgments against you; he has cleared away your enemies. The King of Israel, the Lord , is in your midst; you shall never again fear evil. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: "Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak. "The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing."I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival, so that you will no longer suffer reproach. "Behold, at that time I will deal with all your oppressors. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth. "At that time I will bring you in, at the time when I gather you together; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes," says the Lord." Zephaniah 3:14-20
Unless we choose to reject His word, Messiah Yeshua tells us plainly that He will gather the saints together “immediately after the tribulation of those days” Matthew 24:29.

He will pull up the tares and prune the dead branches before the harvest just as Isaiah says:
For before the harvest, as soon as the bud blossoms
And the flower becomes a ripening grape,
Then He will cut off the sprigs with pruning knives
And remove and cut away the spreading branches.
They will be left together for mountain birds of prey,
And for the beasts of the earth;
And the birds of prey will spend the summer feeding on them,
And all the beasts of the earth will spend harvest time on them. Isaiah 18:5-6
Yeshua's great prayer in the book of John 17:14-19 is just as direct and straightforward:
"I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth."
Look again: "I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil."
“So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just." Matthew 13:49
Let's read Paul's summary of the teaching and instruction of God that are found throughout the whole of Scripture and consider what the Apostle actually says:
"The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." 2 Timothy 4:3-4
Now look at Paul's second letter to the assembly of the believing Thessalonians. Let's consider the term known to many as the "apostasy." Why? I am concerned for those that might put the faith into a "secret" rapture to "heaven" to save them from tribulation and the world from the blessing of discipline.

The concern is simple: what if Messiah's words are the plain truth?

Yeshua's prayer was that we would remain in the world, but that we would be separate from the world that does not seek truth, being set apart by the truth of God’s Word, not hiding away on a cloud. With this Scriptural truth from the Son of God, consider what Paul really said in his warning about the return of the Messiah:
"Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God." 2Thessalonians 2:3-4
That is why I am writing this today we need to get back-to-the-Bible not a Darby-like Cyrus Scofield sermon remake. To get right to it, if one puts their faith on John Darby's "secret" pre-trib imminent hide-away-rapture — they may lose their faith and fall away when they see a escape hatch is not a part of God's eternal plan so we are to preach the word… reprove, rebuke, and exhort!

For starters, Messiah said he will return to earth and resurrect the dead by the shout of a trumpet on the "last day"not in a super secret "pre-trib" moment. It's time to reconsider what you may have learned about the trumpet, the same one mentioned in Matthew 24:31. The answer is found on a Sabbath day of The Lord.

On Yom Teruah, the last trumpet is the last shofar blown in the celebration, but Yom Kippur is also a major big-time trumpet day. It's the Sabbath day that the "great trumpet" is blown.

There are three traditional trumpets blown in most any synagogue for thousands of years... the first trump, is blown on Shavuot (Pentecost). Check out Exodus 19:19 and it was sounded in Jerusalem as the wind arrived on Pentecost. You will not recognize it in Acts 2 but the sound was there: "And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind..."

The last trump is blown on Yom Teruah and take note it is the 7th Rosh Kodesh day of shofar blowing in the 7 month countdown of the Feasts of The Lord from Nisan 1 to Tishri 1 (see Leviticus 25:1 and Revelation 11:15). This trumpet will herald the mystery of the holiest day miracle of the resurrection of the dead and alive, called from the four winds to the Jerusalem court of Messiah Yeshua. Is will be blown at the end of the Feast of Atonement (Yom Kippur) to announce that the Jubilee Year has commenced (see Matthew 24:31, 1Corinthians 15:52, 1Thessalonians 4:16 and Revelation 10:7).

The great trumpet is the mega shofar Yeshua spoke of to His disciples to be blown on the Day of The Lord, which will herald the mystery of the holiest day miracle of the atonement of the dead and alive, announced from the four winds on Trumpets Day to attend the Jerusalem court of King Messiah Yeshua. That great shofar will be the one that is blown in "THE" Jubilee Year of the King of the Universe announcing "it is finished." That great shofar will signal that all slaves to sin are free once and for all and the Promised Land will return to those that belong there with The King fulfilling God's many nations promise given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (see Leviticus 25:9, Revelation 7:9 and Revelation 20).

Get ready now, get a shofar so you can join in, because when you know that Matthew 24:29-31 tells us Jesus said they will see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory and hear the sound of a trumpet, it is clear there is nothing secret about His return… after tribulation and it should be obvious that this last day — is the big day of judgment. Isn't that what Revelation 15:1 tells us?
And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the wrath of God.
As noted earlier, Zephaniah also speaks of the day of The Lord:
The great day of the LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the LORD: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, A day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high towers. Zephaniah 1:14-16
If you are still with me, consider how the current "pre-trib" doctrine is related to the hard lesson of the "golden calf" story and I'd like to show you why that is possible because darkness is coming and a lamp is needed when its dark...

First of all, we might to consider something radical in many circles — that the Israelites, still in the mindset of slavery and hundreds of years in pagan infested Egypt may have "thought" that they were worshiping God in a proper manner when they made the "Golden Calf" so they endured a threshing board they brought on themselves as 3,000 died in their grave sin.

Their frame of mind was like that a pre-trib rapture "theory" escape to a cloud as a proper understanding of prophecy.  The golden calf proves that many are infected by religious practice that does not follow God's Word. Yesterday and today people refuse to let go of the the golden calf, but the time has come.

In Hebrew, Egypt is Mitzrayim and it means the place of restriction. Restricted by slavery they grew up with an Egyptian idol influenced religious world view.

Although they all heard the voice of God give the Ten Commandments and agreed to the covenant, they were not focused on the message:
"You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold." Exodus 20:23
They were gravely mistaken thinking that they were somehow honoring God when in fact they were dishonoring Him. We do the same today, not trusting the ten words God's voice gave to us all from the fire atop Mount Sinai:
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath... Exodus 20:4
Many lost faith because when they could not see Moses, do Christian's lose faith because they do see Messiah?

Many Christians follow the voice of a Darby theory from a pastor instead of the unchanging truth of the words of Jesus who like Moses is not seen among us, yet like Moses, He will return in glory for all the world to see no matter how many have believe the new tradition of a super secret rapture ride to hide from trouble that will come on the world.

Remember this, Jesus suffered.

Instead of listening to the voice of truth, most it seems want to rely on their traditions and the doctrines of men despite the fact that the pre-trib rapture theory, can never be found in God's Word. The thing is, despite the fact God had just commanded all Israel to NOT make an image for worship, like Adam and Eve, they chose to deliberately not follow God's thunderous voice of instruction from the cloud of fire on the mountain top.

While recently discussing the words of Scripture and Messiah's words in Matthew 24:29-30 and Mark 13:24-26 on the sequence of events before his return in power and glory to Jerusalem, I was told this by a local church leader: "then I'd rather believe Paul than Jesus."

I was not sure what that mean't for that person, but it reminded me of Peter's deep concern:
"...His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." 2 Peter 3:16 NIV
We need to listen to Peter: "Ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction."

After all, Jesus plainly tells us the undistorted truth: "after the tribulation of those days shall the sign of the son of Man appear." In my heart of hearts, I pray this person did not mean what was said. I pray the feelings expressed were perhaps only... I hope for a pre-trib rapture because I just want to be able to escape trouble in a great escape.

Our Messiah and Savior plainly said that our hope is in resurrection life with Him as He leads the planet to Jerusalem, not a rapture bus ride off the planet. Read His words for yourself:
"And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day." John 6:39-40
Messiah Yeshua was required to suffer before He could enter into His glory in the Tabernacle of Heaven as the High Priest in the order Melchizedek. So too, many will experience tribulation just as He did. In fact, we are told by the Apostle Paul when he wrote to Timothy that those who follow Messiah will suffer as He did, yet be rescued:
You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings--what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 2Timothy 3:10-15

Was Paul just making stuff up when he said: "everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted"?

No, he was admonishing the disciple Timothy that God tells us over and over what we are to do before He returns: "return to me and I will return to you." Simply put, God gives us our assignment and job #1 once we meet Messiah in our own life journey: REPENT and demonstrate love for God by following His teaching and instruction that is found in the Torah and explained in the Gospels!

Don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

Jeremiah quotes The Lord God:
"I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the LORD; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart." Jeremiah 24:7
Zechariah confirms this about our Heavenly Father:
"Therefore say to them, 'Thus says the LORD of hosts, "Return to Me," declares the LORD of hosts, "that I may return to you," says the LORD of hosts. Zechariah 1:3
Malachi gives a third witness to this prophetic instruction:
"From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from My statutes and have not kept {them.} Return to Me, and I will return to you," says the LORD of hosts." Malachi 3:7
But you might say, "How shall we return?" Malachi writes the answer that God gives him:
"Remember the Torah of Moses My servant, {even the} statutes and ordinances which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel.

Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to {their} children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse." Malachi 4:4-6
Matthew records the words of Messiah that we do not hear today. Messiah speaks of the refining fire of coming tribulation, the refining that is hard to accept when He tells us:
For the gate is "narrow" and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Matthew 7:14
How do we know this? Just look at the Greek language from which this was translated. Strong's Concordance tells us the word "narrow" here is actually "thlibō" and it means "to trouble, afflict, distress," it means "tribulation."

For the gate is tribulation and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

That's the way of life message in the book of Acts:
"Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God." Acts 14:22
Let's reconsider the words of Yeshua. Hosea prophesied of His delayed return from the unseen dimension of heaven and the purpose of tribulation is so that many will walk into the gate of Jerusalem:
"I will go away {and} return to My place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me." Hosea 5:15
In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me, the rod has a purpose and believe it or not Hosea records the time frame for His return as two thousand years when he writes:
"Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn {us}, but He will heal us; He has wounded {us}, but He will bandage us. "He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, That we may live before Him. Hosea 6:1-2
Folks, in prophetic Biblical time, two days is 2,000 years.

Matthew recorded Yeshua's words as The Lord described the time and season of His return as the lion of the tribe of Judah:
Matthew 24:7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
"But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. "And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. "And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other." Matthew 24:29-31
Revelation tells us about seven trumpets, so if the elect are to be restored and gathered into the Kingdom at the last Trumpet, don't you think they will have to be around for the first six?

Jeremiah also recorded the words he heard from The Lord on the regathering of His people before Messiah's return:
"Behold, I am bringing them from the north country, And I will gather them from the remote parts of the earth, Among them the blind and the lame, The woman with child and she who is in labor with child, together; A great company, they will return here." Jeremiah 31:8
Both of Jeremiah 30 and Jeremiah 31 give an amazing story that The Lord told the prophet to write down. I encourage you to read it and study it as you do remember this promise:
...for I am with you
to save you and deliver you,
declares the LORD.
I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked,
and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.” Jeremiah 15:20-21
The writer of the book of Acts quotes the same Scriptures Jesus read telling us The Lord will return and restore:
"And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, After these things I will return, and I will rebuild the tabernacle of David which has fallen, and I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, so that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from long ago." Acts 15:16-18
Zechariah gives us an amazing look into the future that has not been fulfilled, in Zechariah 8, the prophet describes the return:
"Thus says the LORD, 'I will return to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem will be called the City of Truth, and the mountain of the LORD of hosts {will be called} the Holy Mountain.' 
"Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'Old men and old women will again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each man with his staff in his hand because of age. 'And the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets.'... "'So many peoples and mighty nations will come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem and to entreat the favor of the LORD.'" Zechariah 8:3-5
Job concurs with this promise:
For I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. Job 19:25
Now, back to the golden calf story... Remember God "declares the End from the Beginning". Isaiah 41:22.

The entire Exodus story, from the plagues to the grievous golden calf sin a few weeks after they left Egypt can really seem bizarre if we don't look back at Egyptian pagan history and its mythology. 

Remember when Pharaoh told Moses he did not know his God and then Pharaoh consulted his mystics?

He did this because they had so many gods, perhaps the Pharaoh could not keep up with all of their names!

As a sidenote on this, in case you ever wondered where Darth Vader's costume concept came from, it remarkably looks like the back of Padiiset's Statue found in 1894 in Egypt by Henry Walters. 

As to the golden calf, we must consider the fire that they used. This is because Aaron was the one that performed the deed at the request of many. The Scripture portion points out he built the fire. Who knows, perhaps his two sons Nadab and Abihu may have helped him or they may have been standing nearby watching their father build the fire used to melt the gold jewelry to cast the golden calf idol.

Do you remember what happened to them immediately after the golden calf sin?

Nadab and Abihu were both burned up by the glory fire of God because they offered "strange" fire. Have you ever wondered why it was so strange? The Hebrew word used here for "strange" means loathsome.  Where did they find that loathsome fire? Was it the fire that was used to melt the gold?

I don't know, but let's look closer at the account given in the Bible:
And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD. Leviticus 10:1-2
This we do know, Aaron made a strange [loathsome] fire to melt the Egyptian jewelry intended as a gift to God for His Tabernacle. Instead, some of it was used to make a golden calf directly opposing Almighty God's first and second word of instruction to never have other gods before me or make any graven image to worship whether bird, fish or other animal.

Could it have been that the origin of the fire that the two sons of Aaron brought up to God's altar was made from the remaining embers Aaron used to make that golden calf?

If you think about it, perhaps that may be what Nadab and Abihu borrowed from the loathsome fire used to melt the gold.

Whether that's what happened or not is not the point, the strange fire they brought before The Lord was loathsome. In fact, in ancient times even fire itself was known to be a false god. Moloch was an ancient loathsome god of the Canaanites, the false god of fire. 

Did Nadab and Abihu bring the fire of Molech before God?

They may have.

I'm not sure, but if they did consider this: that fire may have looked the same but it wasn't. Like the rapture, it may look like a resurrection destined for the last day, but it isn't.

Yeshua gave some hard words that reminds me of the rapture theory debates:
"I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!  I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." Luke 12:49-53
The Egyptian people worshiped a fake god,  a counterfeit by the name of Hathor. 

And get this... Hathor was a cow for crying out loud!

The Egyptians had rubbed off on some of the descendants of Jacob, after all in Egypt animals were venerated as Egyptian gods.  

We all need to know the deceiver is real and like a snake in the grass, satan lies for a living.

The Golden Calf was a false god, a deceptive theory from Egypt. 

Satan takes YHVH's voice, twists it and corrupts it with adds and deletes that tickles our eyes and ears so that we believe the lie and become unclean by our own choice to fall for the lies. 

The result is we cannot draw near to God in our disobedience because we are in a sinful state, doing our own ting just like Nadab and Abihu.

Have you ever noticed what Aaron had to do to atone for his Golden Calf sin?

It's described in Leviticus 9.

"And Moses said, "This is the thing that the LORD commanded you to do, that the glory of the LORD may appear to you." 
... "Draw near to the altar and offer your sin offering and your burnt offering and make atonement for yourself and for the people, and bring the offering of the people and make atonement for them, as the LORD has commanded." 

So Aaron drew near to the altar and killed the calf of the sin offering, which was for himself... The flesh and the skin he burned up with fire outside the camp." Leviticus 9:6-8; 11
The book of Hebrews ties the High Priest scene to our own golden calves... 
"For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood." Hebrews 13:11-12 
Corruption of truth is how the ancient Egyptian pagans ended up with so many false-gods including that golden cow idol Hathor that still lingers on the planet in the religion called Hinduism where the so-called "sacred cow" remains a remnant symbol of Egypt's paganism today.

Hathor the cow's counterfeit counterpart was a bull known as Apis the bull god. 

My view on this is... Moses' brother Aaron went with the crowd in false belief. 

I could be way off the path here, but if you ask me it seems he fell for the Golden Calf because like the others in the crown he too had lived his life under the influence of Egyptian false-god idols. 

The crowd was confused by a misguided theory about a cow god from Egypt and it cost them dearly. 

But we must know that "God is not [the author] of confusion..." 1 Corinthians 14:33

We might also consider why Aaron, like his brother Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land. 

Some Biblical scholars say in part that it may have been due to the golden calf sin. I think those scholars have a good point. Both Moses and Aaron’s lack of faith and action in the word of God prevented them from entering the Promised Land.
“And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because you believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.” Numbers 20:12
Aaron's idol mistake was far from God's instruction just days earlier atop the mountain. 

Everyone heard the Ten Commandments, yet Aaron built the golden calf and judgment came:
“And the LORD plagued the people, because they made the calf, which Aaron made” Exodus 32:35
Aaron did the deeds despite the voice he heard and the words that everyone agreed to from the smoke and fire...
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments." Exodus 20:4-6
I do not think that the Aaron and the Exodus family was trying to worship Hathor or that Christians worship Easter bunnies or Santa, BUT both are a twisted way of "trying" to honor Almighty God and not doing what He declares. 

The problem started in Eden.

Many fall the wrong way today in deception much like Adam, Eve, Aaron and the crowd that ignored the basic instruction Almighty God had just given to them: "make no idols or graven image." 

Aaron and the gang were not "doing" God's word, they were "doing" their way.

Rather than drawing closer to The Creator, like Adam and Eve, Aaron and the 3,000 Israelites brought their own penalty for sin on themselves and the result was the same... separation from God's Glory and eventually death. 

Do we do the same if we ignore the words of Messiah Yeshua about His return?

They are recorded plain as day by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John:
Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: 
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Matthew 24:29-30

"But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory." Mark 13:24-26  
"Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences." Luke 21:10-11

"These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." John 16:33
The assembly of people gathered at Mount Sinai certainly knew that God was real and that He had indeed saved them, but despite the miracles that all witnessed, they were deceived by a misguided opinion, a theory that led to the disaster of breaking their "we will do" promise to God with His covenant!

The sojourners, strangers along with the descendants of Israel had just walked out of Egypt following Almighty God's pillar of fire for crying out loud! His glory led them out of Mitzrayim's slavery, oppression and plagues to the holy mountain of God's glory presence to hear His voice!

Exodus 19:6 tells us that they had just received a great promise and blessing that they could become Kingdom priests serving near God and witnessing to the nations as light to a pagan world. 

Yet, because of their disobedience and breaking the covenant in which they all just promised to do, the firstborn sons of all the families of Israel lost their priestly blessing, so the assignment was given to the tribe of Levi to serve as priests.

All of Israel, every one had played a big part in the first three of the ten plagues of Egypt and they all witnessed seven more plagues directed against their idol worshipping Egyptian oppressors. Likely, just seven days after the Passover salvation of the firstborn, they went through a mighty baptism (in Hebrew - mikveh) through the miracle parting of the sea.

Then, just moments after they crossed over, the great bowl of wrath called the Red Sea was poured out on the Pharaoh and his Egyptian armies that pursued them. The Egyptians all drowned in the same water that saved Israel and those with them. 

Do you see the connection of tribulation to salvation?

A few weeks later, some 50 days after they had been saved from the death of the firstborn in Egypt by the blood of the lamb, as Shavuot arrived, they saw the smoke, lightning and the fire on the mountain top as they heard God's trumpet and the thunder of His mighty voice as the ground shook beneath them.

Yet, they persisted in the traditions of oppression from Egypt. 

Do you remember what the people were doing when Moses returned from the mountain with the two stones of the ten words inscribed in them? They were dancing and celebrating to the image of a cow without a voice!

After this abomination of the Golden Calf, God taught Moses how He deals with sin when there's repentance. God's answer is known as His "Attributes of Mercy." This is seen in Exodus 34:6–7 and the event happened when Moses arrived with the second set of stone tablets and if we return to Sinai after the Golden Calf we see Moses pleading with God to save the sinners.

Many rabbis believe it was the first day of Elul when Moses again ascended Mount Sinai, and then 40 days later on the day of atonements, Yom Kippurim, Moses returned to the people, with a renewed covenant, a second set of stone tablets in his hands that represented God's lovingkindness, mercy and forgiveness. The sinners were missing, not the righteous. Those that remained did not make another golden calf, they were faithful. 

Still today, the month of Elul initiates a 40-day period of repentance that is honored by the Jewish people and it culminates on Yom Kippur, the 10th of Tishrei that God designated as a day of atonements for all generations. Many Christians miss it ignoring the Fall Feasts of The Lord, but this Holy day, is infused and woven within the book of Revelation.

Forty is a Biblical number of trial and testing of faith.

It rained on Noah's world for 40 days and 40 nights when God cleansed the world; the Israelites and sojourners with them spent 40 years in the wilderness; Goliath threatened the army of Israel for forty days before David's stone arrived; Jonah warned Nineveh and they repented in 40 days as God spared the city; Yeshua fasted and was tested for 40 days in the wilderness and He remained 40 days after His Passover trial, cross, burial and resurrection in glory.

Following the revealing of God's "Attributes of Mercy," Moses remained 40 days atop the mountain with God. In all, Moses spent 120 days atop Sinai and that points back to the words God gave Noah about striving with man 120 years in Genesis 6:3.

Atonement is as critical today as it was then, some still carry strange fire and rely on a golden calf.

The Israelites celebration around the golden calf was a remnant of the Egyptian false-goddess "Hathor" which was the idol of music and "dance" in ancient Egypt. Depictions of the false gods are found everywhere in the Egyptian writings and inscriptions that are still around for as an ancient witness. Just "Google" the name Hathor and click on the "Images" link to see this for yourself. Hathor was the queen of Horus, she was the false mother-goddess of the world in Egyptian mythology.

"Horus" is also seen in many Egyptian inscriptions in the form of a falcon-headed man, Hathor is also shown in other depictions as a lion with the head of a falcon, or you may have guessed — a sphinx! The eye of Horus is found on every U.S. treasury note, they say it's the eye above the pyramid, I know this is really weird but just take a look for yourself at the dollar bill sitting in your wallet or purse. So much for ancient history.

God sent hail and destroyed the crops and cattle of Egypt and the other plagues to show the Egyptian people that He alone is GOD and greater than any false god or idol made by man. By this plague, their false god Seth, "the protector of crops" was shown to be nothing and have no protective powers at all.

It seems crazy but if you will just dig deep into Egyptian mythology for a moment. you will find that there were many other false gods our Creator destroyed in Egypt. The last destroyed was Pharaoh, in the sea. The Pharaoh was considered a living god by the Egyptians, the son of Ra the sun-god.

God will do it again, plagues will return, God will knock out our false gods and He will use plagues and pestilence once again. The reason, tribulation gets our attention.

If you just think about it, the United States is truly one nation under debt as is the world. Over the past near 50 years we have systematically moved away from The Almighty. We have abandoned pubic prayer, in our public schools we made it a crime and replaced prayer with false teachings of evolution. We have ripped the Ten Commandments off the walls of courthouses and we have legalized murder in the womb calling it family planning. We have false beliefs that we are our own god choosing homosexuality and celebrating a LGBT lifestyle with dancing and defiling rainbows in gay parades. 

Meanwhile, families have disintegrated.

Stock markets and economies reign supreme as our measure of success. They will be put in their proper place to get our attention on God's way. The green line of prosperity will become blood red like the Nile and we will fight against the impending flood loading up our national debt with the eye of Horus. 

Almighty God will bring the household family of God back to its proper place just like He did when He called them out of Egypt with an assignment.

The book of Revelation is real, so is Luke 21. The God of Hosts will bring plague, pestilence, famine, devastation and tribulation again in the nation kingdoms of men. The Father of Heaven and Earth does this when a land sins against Him by acting faithlessly because we do not hear and do the words of The LORD, but in our affliction, God will hear and act, but we must respond to Him. God can save and deliver you and I from all of our uncleanness. 

The world will shout 'ekah אֵיכֹה "How... !" This is the first word in the book of Lamentations. The prophet Jeremiah opens his lament on slavery to sin with these words:
"How lonely sits the city
that was full of people!
How like a widow has she become,
she who was great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the provinces
has become a slave."
How can we know trouble is headed our way not rapture, after all I am no prophet, but today we worhip our false gods. We can know trouble is headed our way because Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is at its center and the mountain of God has been a widow, a slave to Islam's control with false god worship and prayer in the very place Almighty God chose to place His name.

We can know too, because in slavery to sin, the world has turned its back not only on the desolation at the Temple Mount, but on the Bible as we seek our own false gods.

Yet, our Heavenly Father that is unseen by the world loves us all and He wants to get our attention to redeem and save us from our self-imposed slavery. God will do it, He will give us all a wakeup call:
"If disaster comes upon us, the sword, judgment, or pestilence, or famine, we will stand before this house and before you—for your name is in this house—and cry out to you in our affliction, and you will hear and save." 2Chronicles 20:9  
“For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts." Malachi 3:6-7
We must remember, that before the plagues of Egypt...

God provided a simple wooden staff to Moses so that it could devour Pharaoh's snakes. That seems very odd when you think about it. Why did The Almighty do this? The reason, two of the snake gods of Egypt were Denwen and Wadjet. Yes, in Egypt snakes had names, they still do.

If you are familiar with the Exodus story, you may have wondered, what's the big deal with all the frogs? God sent the frog plague to prove that Heqet the Egyptian frog goddess was a joke.

There was no bug repellent in Egypt 3,500 years ago. The Nile River mosquitoes were everywhere and bigger than a South Texas gulf mosquito. Perhaps now you might understand why frogs were sacred to the Egyptians... they ate the mosquitoes! Think about malaria for a moment. If anyone in Egypt killed a frog, the penalty for that crime was a death sentence. Could it be the ancient Egyptians knew malaria was spread by mosquitoes? Yet in the end, the slavery and imprisonment of the Hebrew people of Israel was not a crime in Egypt. Frogs were more important.

The plague of gnats was an attack on Geb, the Egyptian gnat god of earth and vegetation. The plague of flies was against Khepfi, the god of insects. Almighty God YHVH sent the locusts to prove that Renenutet the goddess of the harvest was a goddess of nothing. This plague mocked Isis the protector against locusts, and Seth the protector of crops.

God soured the Nile River water and turned it to blood to prove that Hapi and Khnum the false-god source of the Nile were nothing but idols at the Nile. Naunet the water god, Heryshef the riverbank goddess and Hatmehyt the fish goddess simply did not exist except in the minds of men. In fact, the Nile waters were believed to be full of different gods, there was even an Egyptian crocodile god named Sobek. They were all destroyed literally, that's why most of them are forgotten today, yet they have remained and morphed into other forms in the hearts and minds of people across the planet.

The hail storm was an attack on Nut the sky goddess, it takes a nut to believe in that goddess. The boils were an attack on Imhotep the god of medicine and wisdom.

The Most Holy One of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob covered Egypt in darkness to show everyone that the so-call supreme god Amun-Ra the sun-god was a fake. Montu and Aten the solar gods and Nefertem the god of sunrise had no power whatsoever over that plague of darkness.

Believe it or not, the lamb was an Egyptian false god too.

One of the most important deities of ancient Egypt was Amun. He took on many forms, and as the god of Thebes known to the ancient Egyptians as Waset (now called Luxor) was depicted with a ram's head. You have seen hieroglyphic images if you have ever watched a history channel on TV. Another ram-headed Egyptian god was Banebdjed. Perhaps in mockery, the God of Jacob saved the first born sons of Israel with the blood of a lamb.

There real lamb that matters if the lamb of God.

At the end of the plagues, God sent the angel destroyer who killed the firstborn of Egypt to prove beyond a doubt in any person's mind including the Israelites that Osiris the god of the dead and Apep the destroyer god were nothing but false gods, idols created by men.

It is very important to understand that many of these same false gods "morphed" over time into the pagan gods in the mythologies of Greece and Rome. 

It all began in ancient Babylon and they existed in Assyria too.

All of this is critically important to the question, is the Pre-Trib Rapture... a Golden Calf? Can you see God's purpose in the plagues of Egypt? The plagues and pestilence destroyed the false gods to show the Israelites that the Egyptian false idols they had come to know, did not exist!

This is very significant and important to understand because the ancient idols have morphed and one of them is now a theory in the pew called the pre-trib rapture.

Pharaoh told Moses he did not know Elohim YHVH, so God told Moses:
"The Egyptians shall know that I am YHVH, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them." Exodus 18:11
Turning from false worship was front and center when God voice was heard at the mountain in the wilderness at Sinai. When He spoke, His voice shook the mountain and it was covered with fire and smoke as He declared His words to the families of Jacob and the sojourners among them. They all became very afraid when they heard His voice as He said:

"You shall have no other gods before Me."

They knew their past. They understood the words meant no false gods, no idols... in other words, we must all rely on The Almighty Lord God of Israel for our redemption and salvation.

Our Creator the one God. He provides life and deliverance. Everyone made a promise in covenant with God but broke it with a golden calf.

Moses' father-in-law, a man among the idol-nations came to understand this deliverance after he heard of all that had happened to the Israelites. Why else would he say this as recorded by Moses in Exodus 18:10-11:
"Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh and has delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people." 
This is the big message for today.

We all need to know that God will again deal with our false gods including the pre-trib rapture. Prayer and forgiveness is critical because fear in pestilence will come to get our attention as will locusts and famine:
“If there is famine in the land, if there is pestilence or blight or mildew or locust or caterpillar, if their enemies besiege them in the land at their gates, whatever plague, whatever sickness there is, whatever prayer, whatever plea is made by any man or by all your people Israel, each knowing his own affliction and his own sorrow and stretching out his hands toward this house, then hear from heaven your dwelling place and forgive and render to each whose heart you know, according to all his ways, for you, you only, know the hearts of the children of mankind, that they may fear you and walk in your ways all the days that they live in the land that you gave to our fathers. 2Chronicles 6:28-31
Today, many false gods are still around, they just have new names. In America, we worship money and the stock market as supreme sacred cows. Like the Nile, our treasury will turn to a river of debt in red ink as we worship sports heroes, horror movies and vulgar entertainment. 

In high schools and colleges we teach about the false god of evolution turning a lie into science. The false gods of racial prejudice and anti-Semitism are seen in the headlines everyday. We have to know that God Most High will undo our sacred cows and religious false gods we called Allah, Buda and so on. Many in the church have turned away from the God of Israel calling God's word old and done away with as we decided to worship under a steeple without a foundation looking for an any moment escape hatch.

Today, we must all repent and follow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob out of Egypt and Babylon.

We must turn and put our faith and walk in the footsteps of the Messiah of Israel. Let's not remain in deception and confusion, instead let's look again at Yeshua's words to see what He says:
But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. Mark 13:24-27
Many fine and wonderful people claim the rapture with a "pre-trib" view. It may be distressing to learn, but if we throw out this false-god tradition and look at the Bible it tells us plainly that Jesus-Yeshua teaches His coming as a post-trib regathering of His elect to return to meet Him in Jerusalem.

Many Christians do not understand prophecy because they ignore its foundation. The Torah has everything to do with prophecy an redemption. The stories are not old, they are prophetic and tie to the Messiah and the Exodus to come.

For example, chapter five in the Book of Numbers describes the trial of a suspected adulterous bride with no witness. It describes the law of jealousies where the bride can suffer if she was unfaithful.

Sometimes the truth is tough, but we all must know it is always best to know truth.

The elect living in the time of the final generation already face great persecution and hardship like a fire refining silver and gold. Christians saw tribulation with the Armenian Genocide in 1915 that ended with World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Just thirty years later, one-third of the global family of Judah was systematically massacred in Hitler's tribulation as six million Jews lost their lives in the Holocaust. All in all, some 37 million civilians and military lost their lives in the First World War and over 70-85 million souls were lost in the Second World War. So many died no one even knows the number, but historians estimate the figure to be 3% of the total global population of 1940.

My concern is that it seems no one today looks at these mind bending numbers in the bright light of Biblical prophecy and many are content to rely on a rapture bus ride discounting these horrors. 

Where was the rapture bus in the 1940's?

The Bible teaches that tribulation, travail and pain work like a refining fire and causes many with discernment to return to God's teaching and instruction, His Torah. This amazing repentance is happening right now, a great awakening if you will as the lessons taught by Messiah Yeshua almost 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem are restored in the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Thank God, the birthing process of this latter-day remnant returning to the word of God that Micah proclaimed has begun, but it goes un-noticed by most. Over the last few years, a worldwide remnant of people are rediscovering that every word of the Bible stands unchanged as God's Spirit has begun His work writing His word on people's hearts. Unlike the mixed faith of so many denominations today that push a belief that the Hebrew Bible was hung on the cross, a remnant people are being called to return to the Torah knowing it is "the way" of Messiah Yeshua and The Father.

Remember the Torah is prophetic and people are rediscovering God's sign post given in Exodus 31:13-17. 

Where's the evidence?

Everywhere. People are feeling a tug at their heart strings to support Israel and the Jewish people in some way. They even return to the Sabbath and seek to celebrate the Feast Days of the Lord as best they can.
"And in the latter days it shall be that the mountain of the House of YHVH is established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills. And peoples shall flow to it. And many nations shall come and say, "Come and let us go up to the mountain of YHVH, to the House of the God of Jacob, and let Him teach us His ways, and let us walk in His paths. For out of Zion comes forth the Torah and the word of YHVH from Jerusalem." Micah 4: 1-2
The events of great tribulation are clearly the result of men’s hatred from those that oppose the people of God and seek to destroy. Like a parable, this has been lived out in horrific wars but it continues to emanate from the Middle East as radical Islamic jihad rages across the planet.

Since 9/11, terrorism and fanatic horror crimes against humanity have arisen in this generation as it once was with the World War II generation and the World War I generation. The stage is the same, the acts have changed. War in the form of terrorism can arrive at any place and any time as jihadist attacks are reported each day as religious hated intensifies.

After 9/11 I realized when I learned the terrorists were declaring Allah is greater while screaming Allah Akbar that radical Islam asking the original deception, did God really say??

They say Ishmael was God's choice, but although Abraham asked God to extend His covenant to the descendants of Ishmael, that wasn't the plan. Almighty God had another one He gave His covenant promises to Isaac's descendants.

God somehow, someway will use terrorist evils for good.

This was seen if just for a brief moment immediately after 9/11.  The sudden tribulation of 9/11 stunned everyone, but sadly only a couple of weeks later, the pews that were full of people praying vanished like a vapor trail.

Revelation promises that the righteous will persevere from the hour of trial, see Revelation 7:14, Revelation 12:11, Revelation 14:12-13 and Revelation 20:4. In the end, God's judgment will oppose those that are unrepentant, just read Revelation 9:4, Revelation 16:2 and Revelation 16:10-11.

Bottomline, we must trust God's word and return to the ways of the Bible not hope for a pre-trib rapture ride never found in the Bible. God wants to shine His light on a dark world and those with His light need to shine walking in God's instruction and follow Him.

Consider this, the Israelites were there in Egypt among the Egyptians along with all the plagues against their false gods, yet because they believed and followed the instructions given to Moses, they were saved from the angel of death. In fact, they were saved by the blood of a Passover Lamb! This story will repeat.

Once again: they followed the instruction of God and they came out of the slavery of tribulation and witnessed the terrible plagues against the Egyptian false gods. You may be asking, are you nuts, what does this have to do with a "pre-trib" rapture?

Please don't take this wrong... it is not meant as an insult or to offend anyone, but you are here now reading this for a reason, but if you are still looking to a "secret rapture" as your "blessed" hope or looking for an "escape hatch" angel flight for your salvation, then you will want to ask yourself an tough question:

Has your anytime, secret rapture ride become like the Golden Calf in your life??

Perhaps it has if you have put your faith, your theology and your worship into a pre-trib rapture rather than Almighty God. We must be very careful and not allow a "pre-trib rapture" to unwittingly morph into a false hope, a golden parachute... or "idol". Listen to God: 
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven... Exodus 20:4
I am very concerned about a "secret rapture" in heaven, an event and time when planes and trains crash because people, are whisked away like a vapor. It seems there is more conversation and more sermons on this "top secret," not shown in Scripture doctrine than there are sermons about what God instructs us plainly on what WE MUST DO BEFORE He will return to rule as King on earth from Jerusalem. 

We are to repent and return to "doing" His word.

Do the words of Jeremiah reflect on today's book selling “dispensationalist” pastors preaching the dreams of Margaret MacDonald in the 1830's with their interpretations by John Nelson Darby?
This is what you keep saying to a prophet: ‘What is the LORD’s answer to you?’ or ‘What has the LORD spoken?’

Although you claim, ‘This is a message from the LORD,’ this is what the LORD says: You used the words, ‘This is a message from the LORD,’ even though I told you that you must not claim, ‘This is a message from the LORD.’ Jeremiah 23:37-38  
Behold, I am against the prophets, declares the LORD, who use their tongues and declare, ‘declares the LORD.’ 32 Behold, I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, declares the LORD, and who tell them and lead my people astray by their lies and their recklessness, when I did not send them or charge them. So they do not profit this people at all, declares the LORD. Jeremiah 23:31-32

 John warned about teaching from dreams and visions:

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” 1 John 4:1
Paul gave a warning as well:
“Now the Spirit speaks expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.” 1 Timothy 4:1
Darby's adopted dispensational teaching was that "the church" replaced the Jewish people and that the law was done away with. His views were tainted in the bitter root of anti-semitism completely ignoring Paul's teaching in Romans 9-11 that former Gentiles were grafted into the faith of Israel.

Those that followed Darby and so-called church fathers before him taught that God turned His back on the Jewish people because God had changed His mind. Many still unwittingly believe this. They reject God's word about His Sabbath believing it went through a time shift from the 7th to the 1st day of the week declared by Constantine's councils. They ignore the appointed Feast Days of The LORD honored by the Jewish people over the millennia as if they have been done away with.

If that were the case, then the Sabbath rest known as the millennium is doomed and so is the Feast of Tabernacles celebration promised in Zechariah 14:16.

Darby's words trained many in a golden calf deception that "the church" will be raptured away in a cloud before tribulation and that a punishment against the Jewish people.

Yet, Jesus, a Jew and a Rabbi born in Bethlehem and circumcised on the 8th day in obedience to the covenant given to Abraham never taught this. He taught the OPPOSITE:
“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." Matthew 24:29-31
Yeshua taught Torah, He expounded on its light of truth as well as The Prophets and said nothing in the Torah would never be done away with:
"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law [Torah], till all be fulfilled. 
Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach [them], the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 5:16-19
When asked, Jesus taught that loving God and one another are the greatest commands, the mitzvah of the Torah that sum up the whole of Scripture:
"This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' The entire law [Torah] and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments." Matthew 22:38-40
Do you want a great place in The Kingdom?

Yeshua taught of resurrection and the restoration of God's will on earth, not a hide away rapture cloud escape:
"Jesus replied, "Your mistake is that you don't know the Scriptures, and you don't know the power of God. For when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In this respect they will be like the angels in heaven. "But now, as to whether there will be a resurrection of the dead -- haven't you ever read about this in the Scriptures? Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, God said, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' So he is the God of the living, not the dead." When the crowds heard him, they were astounded at his teaching." Matthew 22:29-33 NLT
Yeshua taught that the role of the disciple that walks in the way of Yeshua is to embrace brother Judah not pray for a get away while they suffer again like Hitler's Holocaust. Yeshua knew the words of Zechariah 12:7 that says:
"The LORD also shall save the tents of Judah first, that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem do not magnify themselves against Judah."
If you have a hardened heart and believe in Darby's golden calf deception, put on your Bible glasses and re-read the order of the instruction in Acts 1:8:
"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Words are important. One of the key words in the so-called rapture debate are the "clouds" noted by Paul:
"For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." 1Thessalonians 4:16-17
Since so many put their faith in John Darby instead of Jesus and the "clouds" Paul wrote of, let's look closer.

At Sinai, a "cloud" of fire was seen before the exodus "crowd." The Hebrew people of the tribes of Israel and the sojourners and strangers joined with them saw that cloud. That pillar of fire led them to the mountain "after" tribulation in Egypt. If you have not heard this before, you can do your own research. Just open you Bible, read the so-called Old and Newer Testament verses for yourself and grab a good concordance. 

As you reread Paul's letter you will find the Greek word translated as "clouds" is "nephelē" which according to the Strong's Greek Lexicon means "used of the cloud which led the Israelites in the wilderness".

That's not just any cloud and once again, do not take my word, look it up for yourself!

Remember - God declares the end from the beginning. So let's look at the beginning when Scripture tells us of this shechinah glory "cloud." It is the Hebrew word `anan עָנָן.
And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night: He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, [from] before the people. Exodus 13:21-22
Le's review the new theory of the so-called "secret" anytime pre-trib rapture.

Except to those that ignore God's word or add or take away from it, there was certainly nothing secret about the "great exodus" from Egypt as the people named Israel followed God's shechinah glory. Everyone saw it, even the Egyptians. We need to learn from this as we consider the future greater exodus. God's word is clear as He declared the end from the beginning:
Let them bring [them] forth, and show us what shall happen: let them show the former things, what they [be], that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come. Isaiah 46:10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times [the things] that are not [yet] done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure Isaiah 41:22
There is nothing secret about the second coming of Messiah King Yeshua that will look like Sinai. Since you're counting on the words of Paul, take note, he said so himself. Just reread his words with some bold emphasis:
"For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, 1) with a loud command, 2) with the voice of the archangel and 3) with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, 4) we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." 1Thessalonians 4:16-17
Does the numbering help you see the truth? We who are still alive and are left... Oops, did you see that? "we who are still alive and left..." whoa Paul must not have read the popular pre-trib "left behind" books. If he did, he certainly would have never said "we who are still alive and left..."

If you want to understand the end, you have to know the beginning. We have to understand the Fall Feasts to possess wisdom of God's future plans, otherwise it is easy to become confused by the doctrines of men. And if you confused about the air, think about the opposite of a dirt filled grave.

Yeshua says there are two resurrections:
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. "Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. John 5:24-29
1) The first resurrection is of the just after "tribulation" and 2) the second resurrection judgement. It occurs at the close of the millennium before the final Yom Kippur and the restoration of the new Heaven and earth on Shemini Azereth. The timing is noted in the book of Revelation.

Yeshua never spoke of a practice session, no pre-game warm-up. 

Revelation describes:

# 1 - Resurrection after tribulation for those killed for the witness of Messiah and His word during that time of tribulation.
And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and [I saw] the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Yeshua (Jesus), and for the word of God (Bible), and which had not worshiped the beast, neither his image, neither had received [his] mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Messiah a thousand years. Revelation 20:4
#2 - A second resurrection occurs a thousand years later at the day of God's wrath and His Yom Kippur white throne judgment of those that willfully reject and oppose Him when Satan is loosed just as he was in Eden to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth. Gog and Magog will be the final battle... and the second death will be like the expulsion from Eden due to sin.
"But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This [is] the first resurrection. Blessed and holy [is] he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Messiah, and shall reign with him a thousand years." Revelation 20:5-6
When evil and sin passes away in the second death, God promises to restore His creation and mankind to the original image of God state of glory that existed in Eden...
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God [is] with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, [and be] their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. Revelation 21:1-7
It is at this restored beginning... after the days of the old earth with death from sin, Almighty God will do a new thing as He promised to Jeremiah, a day when each person will personally know God and sin will be forgotten, a thing of the past...
But this [shall be] the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Jeremiah 31:33-34
Can we play a part in this? God gives us a simple instruction, we are to return to Him just as He told Malachi and other prophets. That returns mean repent - not rapture. We should never define our faith as one based on a "secret" rapture cloud escape to let the Jewish people suffer again in tribulation like the Holocaust. 

Think about it, that version of the rapture theory smells with the rotten stench of antisemitism.

Paul described the "falling away" of a generation that would lose faith "during tribulation." This is possible because many rely on a replacement theology focus unwittingly called a  "pre-trib rapture" instead of witnessing for God through tribulation. 

Many say that the "falling away" is supposed to take place after the "rapture." Well, let's think about that one... if the apostasy is supposed to take place after the pre-trib rapture, then who in the world are those left here on earth that will "fall away" from faith if the people of "faith" got raptured away in the first place?

Think about that. It ties to Paul's second letter admonition to Timothy:
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. 2 Timothy 3-5
That sound teaching is the Torah and the Prophets that Jesus taught every Sabbath (Luke 4:16). Think about this, the New Testament didn't even exist when Paul wrote that letter.

May God open you eyes to the truth of the Torah. That includes the plagues of Egypt and then the Exodus. And, never forget our Creator's first command from Mt. Sinai: We are to have NO other gods before Him!  

There is no secret side trip to the promised land, our body will be bruised like Messiahs's, but because He did, we can win the battle over the enemy and the ultimate enemy is death. The blood of the lamb will prevail over sin and death. 

Many are to go through the trial following Him. It was the same on the 40 year exodus journey. That was not walk in the park.

The fearful attitude of those who want to be raptured out on a cloud, its like the men of Israel that were afraid to go in and possess the Promised Land and wanted to turn back because the giants might oppose them. Back then they were afraid of tribulation too (see Exodus 13:17). Today the fear is much the same.

We need to remember the sin of the spies because nothing has really changed, the Promised Land will be seen only after a period of testing, battles and endurance following Almighty God. There's resistance but the Kingdom will be seen through endurance in faith despite the conflict of great tribulation on earth. The dragon hates the Word of God and those that have the testimony of Messiah. The snake is at war with the remnant that keep the commandments of God and wait on Messiah.

There is no easy way to the Promised Land as haSatan wants to stand in the way like the giants in Canaan.

The only option is to follow God, walk His the commandments and possess the land or die in the wilderness inheriting another lie. Israel had to fight many enemies who were greater they they were, so in the same way, the last generation will be fight the ultimate enemy!

At the end of the day, you must base your faith on God's word, search these matters out for yourself in the Scriptures and as you do heed the advice of the Jewish Apostle called Peter:
"Beloved, don't be astonished at the fiery trial which has come upon you, to test you, as though a strange thing happened to you. But because you are partakers of Messiah's sufferings, rejoice; that at the revelation of his glory also you may rejoice with exceeding joy. If you are insulted for the name of Messiah, blessed are you; because the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. On their part he is blasphemed, but on your part he is glorified." 1Peter 4:12-14 HNV
Re-consider Paul's words:
"Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and [by] our gathering together unto him, That you be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. 
Let no man deceive you by any means: for [that day shall not come], except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. 
Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. Or the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth [will let], until he be taken out of the way. 
And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: [Even him], whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." 2Thessalonians 2:1-12
Also Peter's:
"Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Messiah, keep on rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with exultation. If you are reviled for the name of Messiah, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you." 1 Peter 4:12-14
And Hosea's:
I will go [and] return to my place, till they acknowledge their offense, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early. Hosea 5:15
God declares the end from the beginning... The "latter days" tribulation was prophesied by Moses and it has a purpose:
"But from there you will seek YHVH your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to YHVH your God and obey his voice." Deuteronomy 4:29-30
It is very difficult to understand but tribulation has its role in the plan of God in the future its about repentance, turning to God just as Moses says.

Our Creator God knows our human nature, our reactions and responses. We have stony hearts so He will get our attention so that we will turn around to our Holy God. As already noted we saw this after 9/11. That day was one week before Trumpets Day (Rosh Hashanah). Do you remember the response in 2001? Exactly one year after the horrific event, these excerpts from a Fox News gives us the report: 
"A surge of spirituality occurred as Americans examined just how fragile life was and evaluated what was really important. Answers were hard to come by in the months that followed the attacks, and many sought solace in a higher power.

After 9/11 we had 20-some odd thousand people show up," said Senior Pastor Ed Young. "The largest crowd in the history of Fellowship Church and when I walked on stage I looked around and said, 'Where have you guys been? It takes something like this for you to show up to church?'

Young attributes the initial attendance spike to human nature. "I think when we are riddled with fear, when things fall apart around us especially when we are struck at the heart of who we are, people suddenly respond and they're turning to God and asking those deep questions in an even deeper way," he said.

"When things are going bad we want to turn to God and want to get right with him and we want to attend to church," Young said. "When things level out we tend to forget the most important things and drift away.""
There is an eternal promise:
"For YHVH your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore Deuteronomy 4:31
As to understanding the timing of Messiah's coming, we need to be a watchman and not fall asleep. If we do He will come as a thief in the night. He only comes in that manner to those that are asleep, not watching and not paying attention to His word.

Did you know why Paul used the thief in the night idiom in 1 Thessalonians 5:1-2? 

There were 24 watch stations at the Temple. 

The captain of the watch would make his rounds each night. The watchmen were to rise up before him. The captain would call out, “Shalom be on you!” If the watchman did not rise, the captain knew the watchman at the station was obviously asleep. He would then rap the sleeping watchman with his rod or even light his coverings on fire. This captain of the Temple watch was called the "thief in the night"!! It's a Bible basic, an ancient Hebrew idiom.

Paul’s words give us the Jewish context of the night watch in the Temple and it presents a deeper meaning about the time and season of the Fall Feasts of The Lord:
"But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. For when they say, "Peace and safety!" then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this Day should overtake you as a thief. You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober." 1Thessalonians 5:1-6
The captain of the priestly guard came as a "thief" in the night to those watchmen who had fallen asleep in the House of God. The Lord’s coming will come as a thief in the night to those who have fallen asleep on their watch today and ignore the appointments of God. But to those who are standing vigilant in their watch, that day will not come as the thief in the night. 

Yeshua’s words of warning to the assembly in Sardis is that that are ignorant of God's Feasts, For them, He will come as a thief in the night because that have not stood in their watch.
"Remember therefore how you have received and heard; hold fast and repent. Therefore if you will not watch, I will come upon you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come upon you." Revelation 3:3
We are to be watchmen so that His arrival does not come upon us as the thief in the night.
"Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you." Revelation 3:3

"Behold, I am coming as a thief. Blessed is he who watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame." Revelation 16:15
Beware of preconceived ideas, the earth is not flat. There is an appointed time for the trumpet, it's no secret. Open your Bible to Numbers 29, Leviticus 23, Matthew 24 and Revelation 11.

Don't just read the Bible, study it in prayer and let the Spirit of God speak to you as He declares the end from the beginning and you will see the truth in His Word.
Deuteronomy 11:16 Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them...
In the beginning, the first lie was spoken to mankind by the great deceiver. Don't fall for it again: "You Shall Not Surely Die." Instead, may our knowledge increase:
"But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end; Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Daniel 12:2-4
Perhaps, like me you too have had a "Holy Cow!" moment just like I did during my Scripture studies. That's the kind of moment when the basic assumptions that form the cornerstones of our faith suddenly crumble and the words of Jeremiah come alive:
An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes? Jeremiah 5:31
I've shared my parable of the golden calf because I know that it was written for our teaching and instruction today. In fact, the entire story of the first Exodus is a shadow picture of the Greater Exodus in the latter days in our journey to return to the Kingdom. All the themes of Exodus match those we see in Revelation because the Torah is its foundation. If you want to really understand Revelation you have to study and know the details in the story of the Exodus.

Human nature has not changed. We must be careful. We must know that false teachings, false hopes, false worship and division can make us stumble just before the second Coming of the Messiah of Israel. The mistake made 3,500 years ago at Sinai was repeated by some religious men 2,000 years ago.

The Pharisees made a mistake not unlike the one made at Sinai. They were the religious leaders and teachers that taught their own doctrines, traditions and interpretations concerning the coming of the Messiah and His purpose. They knew He was coming, they knew the time was right and they were all waiting for His appearance. But when He came, they did not recognize His teaching or His mission so they could not see Him for "Who" He really was. The Sadducees were mistaken too. Although they did  not agree with adding traditions not in Scripture, they rejected Yeshua's Bible teaching about the promise of resurrection.

The modern false prophet teaching of a pre-trib rapture is a parallel to the golden calf and the traditions of the Pharisees. Both use insert religious doctrine calling it faith. Yeshua opposed the teaching of the Pharisees that "added to" the teaching and instruction of God. That was ta part of the conflict that led to the Passover trial. We need to beware, if we put our trust in a pre-trib rapture and believe we will disappear from the earth and escape to the clouds of an ethereal heaven while Jews suffer we will miss out on the purpose in God's plan. We will miss our chance to help people return to Him in true worship and faith. We will miss the time when God's people will participate in God's victory battle to crush haSatan's dominion here on earth. We are not to despise His chastening:
Hebrews 12:5 And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord...
You see, the problem is...

Those who say they are a part of the Kingdom of heaven, but have removed the testimony witness from heaven, the teaching (Torah) of the Lord God from their religious doctrine (belief), then according to Scripture, they are deemed false prophets with false doctrines. These are those that follow destructive words saying the Torah was hung on the cross and that God replaced Israel with a dispensational invention that misleads those weak in Scripture with ethereal anti-Semitic rapture escape theories.

The Bible calls these false doctrines.

There are many deceptions, all with the goal to change the Word of God and to confuse people that God does not mean what He says. A result of deception can be seen in the thousands of different denominations of churches as well as subgroups or sects within Judaism that are like the Pharisees, Sadducees and the Essenes all with differing views and religious options.

There are also many false-god religions like Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism all confusing people on who is right and who is wrong ignoring these words from Deuteronomy 6:4:
“Shema, Yisra’el! YHVH Eloheinu, YHVH echad.”
“Hear, O Israel: YHVH our God/Elohim, YHVH is one.
Throughout the Scriptures, God's people are prepared through a time of testing and God believers today are not any different from yesteryear shown by those leaving Egypt and crossing the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land. 

Many want to escape the wilderness experience and go straight to the Promised Land without the trials in the journey. But God's pattern of salvation and victory does not work that way.

Without question, the last generation that is in exile from the Kingdom, like the first will undergo great testing, trial and tribulation. There is no other way to enter into the Kingdom.

It may be difficult to understand, but the purpose of the fruit of the olive tree in Scripture brings to focus the explanation for suffering and for tribulation. A lamp only fives light after the fruit is crushed. I agree this is very hard to grasp, understand and accept, but the olive must be beaten first to obtain oil for light. The oil of every olive tree is used for two purposes in God's Word: the oil is used for “anointing” and for “light," to the Menorah.

Every washing machine has an agitation cycle to get the grime out. Silver must be heated for the dross to be removed.

In the end, to bear light the fruit has to be "crushed" and “beaten.”
“And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always.” Exodus 27:20
The words pure and beaten here are transliterated as “kathiyth.” It is the Hebrew word God chose to use in Exodus 27 while speaking to Moses and it prophetically speaks of the days to come.

In Hebrew, it is כָּתִית and is found in 1) Exodus 27:20; 2) Exodus 29:40; 3) Leviticus 24:2; 4) Numbers 28:5 and 5) 1Kings 5.

The Torah specifies that olives are pounded before the oil comes forth from them. No other means of extracting the oil for light is available. Soon, this will become reality. When it does, the Menorah shown in Revelation 1:20 and its virgin oil must be ready.

Perhaps it is no coincidence the word “beaten” occurs in the KJV translation forty times. After all forty represents trial and testing.

Paul wrote to those "scattered" from the Promised Land in Rome about suffering:
"The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: If we indeed are to be used for His purposes, like Him we must also suffer… And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Messiah; if so be that we suffer with [him], that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time [are] not worthy [to be compared] with the glory which shall be revealed in us." Romans 8:16-18
It's our servant's duty in the end to battle darkness with light, and the light of the Menorah of God requires oil that comes from a beating.

Paul implored that we must keep alert and wear the whole "Armor of God" in the day of battle to come and prayer is critical:
"Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.
Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints." Ephesians 6:10-18
Don't be afraid to go up and do battle on your journey to the Promised Land or you may be left behind to die in the wilderness as a fearful false witness. 

The spiritual battles of good and evil are a reality — so put on your armor and keep His commandments and let us pray with an alert mind that we may come to greater wisdom of God's book of life so that we will be prepared to shine in the darkness to come:
“At that time, Michael shall stand up, the great prince who stands watch over the sons of your people: And there shall be a Time of Trouble, such as never was since there was a nation, even to that time. And at that time your people shall be delivered everyone who is found written in the book of Life." Daniel 12:1
After this time of trouble, just as Israel and the sojourners heard the Ten Words from fire atop Sinai and the disciples received the Spirit at Shavuot at Moriah, we too can receive a greater promise, the New Covenant, a promise from God that we will ALL learn His teaching and instruction intimately, inscribed on our hearts. Yeshua will teach God's Torah as He did in the Galilee and Jerusalem again in the millennium Kingdom as those in the first resurrecton tabernacle with Him and learn face to face just as Moses, the disciples and the men on the seven mile road to Emmaus did:
“The time is coming, declares The Lord, when I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares The Lord.

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares The Lord. I will put my Torah in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know The Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares The Lord. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares The Lord. I will put my Torah in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know The Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares The Lord. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Jeremiah 31:31-34

"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the city shall be built to the LORD from the tower of Hananeel unto the gate of the corner." Jeremiah 31:38
It is a difficult book, but read and study Revelation and study Exodus. Be like the noble Bereans, search the Scriptures for truth.
These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. Acts 17:11
I pray you will study the Scriptures. It is often about unlearning things that are not correct, not in line with God's unchanging word the truth of God's word.

At the end of the day it is critical to rely on the voice of God and not false doctrines. Study God's Word and do it and understand it is Messiah's Bible, the same Hebrew Scriptures that Jesus taught.

This great Proverb is well worth understanding:
The fear of the LORD prolongeth days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened. The hope of the righteous [shall be] gladness: but the expectation of the wicked shall perish. The way of the LORD [is] strength to the upright: but destruction [shall be] to the workers of iniquity. The righteous shall never be removed: but the wicked shall not inhabit the earth. Proverbs 10:27-30
There are many other resources on this difficult message. One is from Tony Robinson of "Restoration of Torah Ministries." Tony teaches from the Hebraic understanding of the Scriptures as to why we want to be "left behind" in his excellent studies: Check out Left Behind!!The Torah and the Rapture? and A Pre-Trib Rapture?

Whatever the future holds, get ready for the pestilence of the hard times in front of us by returning to the faith of the disciples and the Covenant established by Word of God instruction.

And remember, there is no anytime Trumpet. The shofar of God will be heard across the planet on the day appointed so don't be ignorant of the times and season of The Lord.

Peter told us the time of testing and refinement begins at the House of God, His people:
For the time [is come] that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if [it] first [begin] at us, what shall the end [be] of them that obey not the gospel of God? 1Peter 4:17
Walking in covenant is the mark of endurance of God's people and that mark distinguishes them as a priest, a bond servant set apart and holy from the rest of the world through a life walk in God's word.

Don't be fooled by those that think the instruction and teaching of God (the law) was hung on the cross and fooled by the cheap grace of a secret escape. If you are, I am not saying your salvation is at risk, but the honor and blessing of serving in the priesthood of the first resurrection may be lost if you choose not to walk in God's ways, thinking the purpose of the Levitical priesthood to teach, exhort and be caretakers in the proper worship of God is a thing of the past:
"Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Messiah, and they will reign with him for a thousand years." Revelation 20:6
Just read Micah or Isaiah, they both say the same thing about God's ways and walking in his paths. This promise is written twice by two witnesses in God's word because it is important to God, so the purpose of the millennium is important for you!
"In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law {Torah} will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem." Micah 4:1-2

"In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. Many peoples will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law {Torah} will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem." Isaiah 2:2-3
During the millennium, the Torah will go out to the world from the Temple Mount, the "tent of meeting" in Jerusalem as Messiah teaches us God's ways so we may walk in them as He did, but there's no need to wait for the return! You can start now because you want to please The Lord like the Levites that stayed faithful at Sinai during the Golden Calf sin. Don't listen to those that say His law [Torah] is bondage, it's the way of life, walking like Messiah.

If bondage in legalism is your view, then the opportunity of serving Messiah as people learn from the word of the Lord that pours out from Israel for a thousand years may be missed. After all, even the offerings will return to Jerusalem with Messiah as the High Priest and King. Just read the evidence found in scriptures like Ezekiel 40-48, Isaiah 56:6-8, Zechariah 14:16 and Jeremiah 33:15-18.

The heavenly gift, the reward of the first resurrection priesthood described in Revelation 20:5-6 is depicted within the shadow picture of Numbers 8:19 and Exodus 13:2:
“I have given the Levites as a gift to Aaron and to his sons from among the sons of Israel, to perform the service of the sons of Israel at the tent of meeting...”  
“Sanctify to Me every firstborn, the first offspring of every womb among the sons of Israel, both of man and beast; it belongs to Me.” 
It's not too late to change your heart if you want to choose to do the word of God and have faith in Messiah.

If you believe the word of God is done away -- re-read Revelation 14:12-13 to see how steadfast saints of the first resurrection are described. They will be honored in resurrection as the firstborn who:

1) Keep the commandments of God and
2) Faith in Jesus.

Messiah Yeshua suffered as the "Son of Man" and His suffering and death were known before the foundation of the world was established. Only by temptation and suffering while maintaining in complete obedience to the Word of God through the teaching and instruction of His Torah, did Messiah truly demonstrate love to The Father. Through death He was resurrected and quickened into the eternal life as He overcame death's grip by God's power over it.

So too, many are tested as to whether we will choose to be like Him and walk in God's path of faithful obedience while some endure suffering for His name.

It is really simple. If we choose God's ways we will be following in the faith of Messiah.

The trials, tribulation and endurance of the elect are all shown to us in the so-called Old Testament, otherwise known as the TaNak which includes "the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms." Many of the writings are the Psalms are dedicated to tribulation and repentance.

Just read Psalms 44 as well as Psalms 37, Psalms 69, Psalms 71, Psalms 109, Psalms 119, Psalms 142 and Psalms 102 in which we can see within the ancient words the ovens of the Holocaust of World War II:
"Hear my prayer, O LORD, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily. For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as a hearth." Psalm 102:1-3
A walk in obedience to God's Torah is NOT our salvation. Personal salvation has never been dependent on the works of the law — whether Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Moses. Salvation is by the grace and mercy of God, it God's work that saves, not ours. Only Messiah Yeshua (Jesus) has been able to abide perfectly in the teaching and instruction commandments of The Lord YHVH.

Yeshua meets all requirements for anyone that seeks to have their transgressions atoned and covered by His blood and taken away by the pardon of debt that only He can give. Mercy and grace from Messiah who came in the authority and name of God YHVH can give redemption from sin's penalty just as all Scriptures show, both old and new.

Walking in faith through trial demonstrates and proves our love for YHVH, the One that gives eternal life and brings us nearer to Him as we walk in His path.
Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the LORD. Isaiah 2:5
Take a closer look at 1 Thessalonians, it is the elect, those like the martyr Stephen that follow Yeshua even through tribulation. Yeshua told us, “In this life you will have tribulation.” He did not say we could see trouble. He did not say if we were good and prayerful we would escape. Nope, what He said was we would have trouble.

It is time to trust and believe Yeshua. It is time to repent and ask for personal pardon so that we may receive God's eternal covenant promises. It is time to walk in His instruction in thanksgiving and demonstration of love.

In that walk, people will see that you are set apart, called out by God to join the family of the children of the God of Israel that have received the gift of salvation by The Father's grace.

The information about tribulation in the Bible is given not to scare us but to prepare us to not be blindsided:
Matthew 24:29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken...
There is nothing secret about this...
Luke 21:7 They asked him, "Teacher, so when will these things be? What is the sign that these things are about to happen?

Luke 21:20 But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is at hand.

Luke 21:25-28 There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars; and on the land anxiety of nations, in perplexity for the roaring of the sea and the waves; men fainting for fear, and for expectation of the things which are coming on the world: for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 
Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these things begin to happen, look up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption is near.
Redemption is near... when you see these things begin to happen:
1. Jerusalem surrounded by armies
2. Signs in the sun, moon, and stars
3. Perplexity for the roaring of the sea
4. Powers of the heavens shaken
So we must trust of God's love and desire to care for us so that we may depend on Him as we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us in all that we should do for God's purposes in preparation for the Kingdom that is coming to earth and not seek to escape and retreat in fear of trial.

The tribulation, the discipline, correction, testing and difficult times that will serve as a call to draw all people to make the choice to seek Messiah in repentance and transformation is not the wrath from God's presence that will fall suddenly on those that hate, reject and close the door of the blessed hope and redemption of the God of all Israel.

Our job is to deal with our sin with God's Torah written on our hearts and choose to walk in victory and in the Spirit of new life loving The Lord our God and others proclaiming repentance.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Updates

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update May 28, 2014: I recently reviewed two videos on the pre-trib rapture theory that provide Biblical perspectives you may find helpful.

One is from 119 Ministries titled "The End of Days: Testing the Pre-Trib Rapture". I do encourage you take the time to view and test the message, or you can read the transcript here.

The second is from documentary film-maker Paul Wittenberger, Pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona and Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento California.


If you need more on the origin of the modern pre-trib rapture theory you may want to check out this historical compilation: But What About the Pre-trib Rapture Theory?


What does this all mean? 

It's time for you to repent and return to God's voice, return to hear and do His word and walk in the faith of His Kingdom path so that you can ready your lamp for your coming assignment. 

It means we need to know "Who is the One Called Jesus.

Consider a prayer: Please, God guide me by your Spirit as to what I should hear and do.

It's time to repent and return to God's voice, return to hear and do His words and walk in the faith of His Kingdom path so that you can ready your lamp for your assignment. 

Stretch out your hand, and take from the tree of life, and live forever.

Open a Bible, read it, listen to God's voice and do Yeshua's teaching about the forever jots and tittles. 

You can learn how the things which are written in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Psalms are concerning Messiah and you can teach others to live life like Jesus, it's love in God's way:
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." John 3:16-17
Today is the time, open your eyes if you're dead in your own valley of dry bones.

Look up and you'll recognize Messiah from Abraham's promise passed on to Isaac and Jacob as written by Moses in the Torah. You can see Him too in the Prophets and the Writings.

Repent and walk your Emmaus Road with Messiah. 

The road ahead will be difficult.

So, study the Scriptures He taught every Sabbath that are filled with doing life God's way in the Kingdom, and tell others about Him. Be a gatekeeper until the house is complete.

Shalom.