End Times Prophesies
Bob Fraley of Christian Life Outreach is a minister very concerned with last days prophesies. He feels that God has given him an urgent outreach mission to prepare the world for the end times. The following video will explain Bob Fraley’s mission better than I am able.
Fraley is particularly concerned with America in Bible prophecy. I have to agree, America as a nation is abandoning its Christian morals, values and ethics. Our culture very much parallels the culture of Jerusalem whose downfall was prophesied by Jeremiah. That is a scary thought.
As a Christian I believe the apocalypse will come. I also believe that I should live my life as though Jesus were coming to claim his kingdom within the hour. That does not mean I live every moment in fear and expecting it to be my last. Jesus told his disciples that not even he knows when the world will end. That bit of information is privy to God alone.  For that reason we are to behave like the five wise virgins and keep our lamps well oiled and our wicks trimmed (keep our spiritual and prayer lives in order) so that when Jesus returns in all of his glory we are prepared.
Live your life as salt and light. Let your words and actions be your testimony, for how we live our lives speaks more eloquently of our beliefs than any preaching we might do.
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Let your words and actions be your testimony, for how we live our lives speaks more eloquently of our beliefs than any preaching we might do. —–VERY profound, this sentence! Too many times we forget about LIVING a testimony and don´t know why “non-believers” won´t take our word for granted.
Great post Quilly!
Betty — I try to live my life by that philosophy. It seems to work. I have more people asking me to share my faith because I’m “not like other Christians” then my friends who preach do.
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Amen, Quilly!
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As far as I am concerned, eschatology, as it is practiced today (and, for all I know, as it has been practiced in the past) has one main flaw.
It is far more concerned with the financial well-being of the prophet than with the spiritual well-being of those to whom the prophecy is being sold.
After all, as any operator of a haunted house, or of a theatre that shows horror flicks, will tell you, scaring people is a great way to get people to buy stuff.
Equally troubling is the obsession of eschatology with an elect (specifically, those who have elected to buy what the prophet is selling) – a concept that is difficult to reconcile with the one that declares God’s love to be universal and all-encompassing. Presumably, God is not running an animal farm, in which some animals are more equal than others.
The Biblical accounts of end times (apocalypses) with which I am more or less familiar all are responses by a community to desperate circumstances: the Neobabylonian sack of Jerusalem (Ezekiel); the attempted suppression of Judaism under the Greek-speaking Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great (Daniel); the Roman sack of Jerusalem (Matthew 24); the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Nero and some of his successors (Revelations).
The tales (for that’s what I see them to be) posit the destruction of ‘the enemy’ by an irrepressible power at some future date (cf. the overthrow of the Seleucids in Judea by the Maccabees), to help a community endure pressures over which it had, at the time of composition of the story, no power.
So I think that the principal usefulness of ‘end time stories’ to the human condition is as metaphors for ‘right relationships’ of communities of people, especially those communities under duress, not as attempts to forecast a ‘literal’ future.
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