Many have their good reasons, pure motives, for teaching perspectives regarding the end times and the specific time factors that I believe shall prove to be wrong on the question of the church's and our place in the Great Tribulation conflict. Even those pure motives I see are but a part of the salesmanship of our day: what turns out to be the easy believism and cultural lack of relevance - lack of confrontation - of many evangelical and orthodox believing Christians that is part of this phenomenon. The salesmanship swelled the memberships of many churches in its heyday - numbers that were often hiked through "evangelically speaking" white lies. This is an aspect, however, of what I perceive may have paved the way for some poor unsuspecting souls to fall or to succumb to a life of condemnation or weakness without hope.
I say plainly! The mission of the church is to work on its anointed Great Commission, the end of which is AFTER the events Jesus describes as he opens our vision of these latter days and "the beginning of sorrows." The Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached unto all nations, and then - THEN - the end shall come. Plainly, in plenary reading, we, the commissioned church, present in seed form of those disciples gathered to this Olivet Discourse, are told:
"When ye therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken by Daniel the Prophet, stand in the holy place, (whosoever readeth, let him understand) then let them who are in Judea flee . . ."
Jesus' will for his church is for us to work as commissioned until the Abomination of Desolation -when an alteration comes to our marching orders: tactical retreat for an astounding regroup maneuver later on. In the tactical retreat, those in Judea flee to the mountains, those working on a project drop everything and run for it, those who are pregnant or hindered by Sabbath law or other social restrictions are in greater peril. We are to be praying that God will work things together for a more favorable, less dangerous set of circumstances. The season matters - I perceive we should pray for fall or springtime onslaught of this Great Tribulation, for global awareness causes me to remember it is winter south of the equator if it's summer up north. All indications are that the coming Great Tribulation is to be global.
I'll repeat my a-fratori argument against assuming Christians are being evacuated before the revelation of the Antichrist and the Great Tribulation: we should WANT to be here. It is cowardice to conjure up and foment this easy out from the greatest confrontation of the age that we name after God's unassailable providence of the church. It is sad of us to wile away these moments in lack of preparation except for the prayerful expectation as if to say, "uh, God, you're snatching us up before this Great Tribulation thing, right?"
I say, do we even pray at all that "our flight" might not be in winter and all that? No, we do hastily assume that such prayer is not relevant to us.
What a far cry from the military attitude of early generations who called those eased into their flowery-beds of a comfortable lifestyle "pagan" for being mere civilians in their aspirations of service. Being "pagan" was not a matter of worldliness, it was a matter of being less committed to doing hard things that brought on the spiritual warfare difficulties like poverty, persecution, imprisonment and possible death. Worldliness followed that breaking from the trenches first.
I'm shamefully ill-prepared for intense persecution here in America: I doubt a majority of my fellow American Christians are ready for that. A couple advantages I might have as the flight takes place, if it's in my lifetime: one, I may be there, where much of the regional fleeing could end up, or close to it, in the foothills of rural Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains; and two, there are good websites on establishing "bug-out routs" and other such preparations if I do take more precaution for having to take a bit of a hike further up and into the smoke.
"Except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved; but for the elect sake, those days shall be shortened."
Just ask yourself, do you really want this reference to the elect to refer categorically to others and not you?
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