Appendix 2

Secular Chronology Confirmation

How current trends corroborate the Bible’s revealed timeline

The premise of The End of the Beginning was to point out what Yahweh’s scriptures have to say about events that are yet to come—predictive prophecy, as yet unfulfilled. I was as surprised as anyone (having been taught the exact opposite all my life) to discover that God’s word reveals His timetable—His schedule of coming events—and not just in approximates, hypotheticals, or rough orders of events, but in actual concrete dates that we can circle on a calendar—or could, were it not for the fact that everyone who actually believes God’s word will be caught up to be with Him before these things happen, in the only major Last Days event for which a date isn’t indicated in scripture: the rapture of the church. This in turn leads me to the conclusion that all of the Last Days chronological data listed in scripture—which is considerable—is intended to be understood primarily by those who will come to faith after the rapture. Based on the Biblical clues, I expect there to be multitudes of them: the Church of Repentant Laodicea.

Those scripture-based chronological conclusions were collected in Appendix I. The bottom line: the Biblical evidence points toward an unprecedented paradigm shift in the way the world works—not just “someday,” but zeroing in on one decade, one year, one day to the exclusion of all others: Tishri 15 (that is, October 8 that year on the Gregorian calendar), 2033. That’s the definitive Feast of Tabernacles: it’s the beginning of Christ’s Millennial Kingdom—a date from which a plethora of other significant events can be timed, using nothing more than data presented in prophetic scripture.

Granted, we must make a few suppositions to get to that conclusion, but these are assumptions any believer should be able to draw without hesitation, if only we’d give it a moment’s thought. In general terms: (1) Yahweh doesn’t do or say anything on a pointless whim. The information He has left for us in His word is there for our edification—even if we don’t “get it” right away, even if the church as a whole has never recognized these truths. (2) Everything God has told us in His word has some bearing on either our well-being in this life or His ultimate plan for our redemption and reconciliation with Him—something that has eternal ramifications. (3) The things most crucial to our knowledge of His plan are repeated and restated several different ways in various places in scripture.

More specific assumptions (still scripturally based and doctrinally sound) take us the rest of the way. (4) The Biblical formula equating one day to a thousand years (II Peter 3:8, Psalm 90:4) is not merely a metaphor about God’s patience, but is an indication of Yahweh’s ordained structure for the time of man. (5) The often-repeated six-plus-one pattern (e.g. the Creation account, Sabbath days and years, Jubilee, the Feasts of Yahweh, etc.) reveals God’s plan: fallen man is to “work things out” for six thousand years (beginning at the fall of Adam into sin), and will “rest” in the Messiah’s finished work during the seventh Millennium. The total allotted time for the age of fallen man upon the earth (i.e., from Adam’s sin forward) will thus be seven thousand years, after which the eternal state will commence. (6) As confirmation, we have witnessed spiritually significant milestones at precise thousand-year increments ever since the fall of man, the most significant of which (not to mention the most obvious) was Yahshua’s crucifixion and resurrection in 33 A.D.

And finally (7), The seven “holy convocations,” or “Feasts of Yahweh,” mandated in the Torah commemorate what Yahweh considers the seven key events of His plan of redemption. In a nutshell, they predict God’s sacrifice in our stead; the removal of our sins; our acknowledgment and thanks for God’s provision of life—something proved by the resurrection of Christ; the indwelling of Yahweh’s Holy Spirit within our souls; the sudden transformation of God’s children from mortal creatures (whether living or dead) into immortal beings with bodies built for the eternal state—an event that will necessarily separate us (along with the Holy Spirit who indwells us) abruptly from the world; the belated awakening, repentance, and response of Israel to the reality of their Messiah and God; and the sojourning of God with men—this time as reigning King. The ones that have already been fulfilled in history (the first four) lead me to the conclusion that the last three will also come to pass on the precise anniversaries of their Levitical mandates: they are called the “Fall Feasts” because the Torah places them in our September or October—Tishri 1, 10, and 15. Thus the last of Yahweh’s appointments with us (the Feast of Tabernacles) will take place precisely on schedule, beginning on the appointed day (Tishri 15—October 8), exactly two thousand years after the passion of the Christ—in 2033. 

I don’t really care whether you believe me or not. I don’t get brownie points for being right. I’m merely reporting the conclusions to which my study of scripture has led me. I can’t help it if nobody else has noticed these things. If I’m wrong, I’ll be proven a fool soon enough—the date’s not that far off. But if I’m right, the world has a problem. They had better wake up soon—or risk dying in their sleep. The fact is, scripture isn’t the only source of information conspiring to warn us of a major paradigm shift on the near horizon.  

***  

All my life, Christians have been looking forward with eager anticipation to the second coming of Christ. One of my earliest childhood memories was of my parents (both devoted Christians) being all excited about something called “Israel,” and how the establishment of their country meant that the return of Jesus couldn’t be far off. I was only five or six years old, of course: I had no idea what that might mean. (Their prayers invariably included petitions for an end to the Korean War and God’s blessings upon Israel.) So here we are, over sixty years later, and Yahshua the Messiah (the One my folks called Jesus Christ) still hasn’t returned. Am I disappointed? No. (Well, maybe a little.) But I’m not surprised. Having cut my teeth (as it were) on Bible prophecy, I am more convinced than ever that they were absolutely right: the harbingers heralding The End of the Beginning had begun to show themselves in earnest.

What mom and dad saw was the “budding of the fig tree,” and the generation that witnessed this sign (of which I am now one of the “elders,” so to speak) was prophesied to endure until all of the things of which the Messiah spoke had come to pass. And as you know, the signs signaling the end are all here in profusion; all that remain to be seen (excuse the rapture) are the Tribulation’s actual woes. The “fig tree” (Israel) no longer just has buds on it; it is now heavy with ripe fruit. Summer is upon us: the harvest must come soon.

If you’ll recall, we discussed all these signs at length in Volume I. But what we didn’t discuss was the fact that in instance after instance, these harbingers of the Last Days—like the prophecies themselves—seem to have a timeframe attached to them, an expiration date. In example after example, there appears to be a crisis brewing, an event horizon before which problems must be solved, and issues resolved, or the world as we know it will cease to be. And time after time, the “deadline” for resolution—the date when critical mass will be reached—appears to be sometime during the third or fourth decade of the twenty-first century (2020-2040): precisely when the Bible indicates its Last Days prophecies will all come to pass.

In other words, you don’t need to be a Bible scholar or prophecy expert to perceive that the world is on the cusp of a fundamental paradigm shift of “biblical” proportions. You merely need to be awake and informed—aware of what’s really going on in the world around you. It’s not just one or two things, either, it’s dozens of them—all converging on a single narrow timeframe in our not-too-distant future, like the Bolivian army surrounding Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The world has seen crises before—pandemics, weather and seismic events, world wars, geo-political disasters, etc.—but the things in our future promise to affect not just one region or people, but the whole world and everyone who lives here. And the death toll promises to be astronomical.

To put this in perspective, the most disruptive and lethal single “event” the world has ever seen (not counting Noah’s flood, for which we have no statistics) was World War II, which directly or indirectly affected perhaps a third of the world’s populations (though their nations occupied seventy or eighty percent of the earth’s land area), and was fought over maybe five percent of the world’s surface. The world’s total population when the war began in the late 1930s was about 2.2 billion people. During the war, fifty-five million souls were lost—unspeakable carnage to be sure, but “only” about one person in forty, worldwide. (And need I remind you that we abort that many innocent lives every fifteen months in this present world?)

The world’s population (as I write these words) is just north of seven billion. The Bible (as we have seen) predicts two specific “causes” that will, between them, kill half of us—over three and a half billion souls (first a quarter of us, and then a third of what’s left). And there will be a hundred ways to die during the Tribulation that are not directly attributable to either of these causes. All of this has led me to speculate that roughly six sevenths of the earth’s population—six billion people—will die (or be raptured) between now and the beginning of Christ’s Millennial Kingdom—or more as the planet’s population grows (as it’s currently doing at the rate of a billion every twelve years). And the herd will be further thinned out (drastically, I’m guessing) during the “separation of the sheep from the goats,” described in Matthew 25.

I realize there’s a fair bit of guesswork there, but if the prophecies are true, I can’t be terribly far off. (And if the prophecies aren’t true—if the Bible is a lie and Yahweh doesn’t really exist—then I’ll be proven a fool for believing in Him. But that doesn’t let the world off the hook, as we’ll soon see.) Any way you slice it, humanity is about to become an endangered species. If World War II was “bad,” taking 25 people out of 1,000 (i.e., one life in forty), how would you characterize the Last Days, which will witness the deaths of 900 people (+/-) out of every 1,000? Calling it “really bad” doesn’t quite do it justice. But as I said, it is not my intention here to hash over what the prophets of Yahweh had to say. Been there, done that. It is, rather, my purpose to explore things of which the prophets didn’t speak, but that nevertheless reveal a great deal about the real peril of the times in which we are living.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend of late. There seems to be a growing dichotomy between informed citizens and the “low-information” segment of society—at least here in America. We’re up to our ears in the “information age,” and yet many people remain blithely ignorant—by their own choosing—of what’s going on in the world, and why. Oh, they’ll follow celebrities or sports, and if a crime is alleged to have happened that the mainstream media finds particularly “interesting,” they’ll form an unshakable opinion about it so fast it’ll make selecting a responsible, unbiased jury next to impossible. These opinions aren’t based on evidence or law, you understand, but on emotion, demographic identity, and wishful thinking. So these days, the only truly unbiased juries are composed of people too ignorant or apathetic to remain informed. They say justice is blind. I would contend that these days she’s also deaf and stupid, and has been bound and gagged as well, and that’s not a good thing.

Willful ignorance and apathy are nothing new, of course, but these attributes make people vulnerable to the inexorable disintegration of their world—something that, at this late hour, has the potential to destroy them—all of them. It doesn’t really have much to do with native intelligence, but rather with the will and courage to use it. I realize that relative awareness is a sliding scale, ranging from a drug-enhanced couch-potato coma on one end to raving paranoid schizophrenia on the other. But the “happy medium” can be wrong as well if we are relying on our own strength and strategies to solve the world’s problems. Time after time in scripture—and especially in the New Testament—we’re admonished to remain vigilant, not only having a healthy wariness of the wiles of our adversary, but also remaining watchful for the return of the One in whose hands the only real solutions rest.

That being said, healthy skepticism can be a handy tool to have in these last days. It’s like the old joke: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. But our “paranoia” should lead us not to fear but to faith, not to violence but to vigilance, to a heightened awareness of our situation. Our reliance (if we’re smart) must always rest with Yahweh, but it never hurts to be well informed about what to pray for.

With that in mind, I should also point out that these shifting sands beneath our feet—these contemporary trends that conspire to tell us that the prophets of Yah were right all along—are not in themselves things we should waste much time trying to fix. They are merely symptoms of a much larger problem: indicators that the world has abandoned Yahweh in favor of counterfeits, substitutes, and distractions. Our job as believers in these Last Days is the same as it has always been—to love. We are to seek the lost, nurture the saved, and honor the God who gave us life.  

(First published 2013)