Bottom Line
Not all Christians understand it or believe it, but the Bible teaches us that the Rapture is coming in the last days. And so it will.
The effect of the Rapture on the United States and other countries around the world will be far more devastating than the worst war or natural disaster in all of human history to date. With most of those wars came some degree of warning. Not so with the Rapture. The people who do not disappear will be stunned and horrified by the disappearance of so many others. What’s more, if the United States economy and society have not imploded prior to this cataclysmic event, the Rapture itself will likely trigger the implosion. America will be forever altered in the blink of an eye and from that moment forward will have no chance of recovering her former glory of freedom, peace, and prosperity.
The good news is that you don’t have to go through the Tribulation. That’s why it’s essential that you pray to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord immediately, without delay, lest the Rapture come and you miss it.
Moreover, you don’t want your family or friends or neighbors or colleagues to go through the Tribulation either. That’s why it’s essential that you begin sharing the gospel with them, answering their questions, and encouraging them to receive Christ right away.
Neither you nor I can stop the Rapture or the Tribulation or the traumas that are coming for America and the world. But we can be spiritually ready, and we can help others to be spiritually ready as well. What hope will we have if we do nothing while time is running out?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE LAST BEST HOPE
We don’t know which of the various scenarios we have explored will come to pass. Nor do we know when these events may occur. Perhaps a combination of scenarios will cause the United States to be unable or unwilling to engage in the major world events at the end of human history as described in the Bible. Only time will tell, but any of the possibilities we’ve discussed are plausible.
In the meantime, what should we do? How should we live? And how should we respond to the anxious cries of frightened people all around us?
As we have seen, the outlook in regard to our economic stability is bleak. Our national security is at risk. We have noted the ever more frequent and intense natural disasters in recent years. Are all these things the beginnings of the end? Or are they simply warnings? Is it possible that there may be another stretch of peace and strength for America? I certainly hope so.
I don’t want to see America implode. To the contrary, I want to see this country revived and transformed by Christ’s love and power and used by the Lord to bless other nations for many more years. I’m sure this is true of you as well. A country cannot recover or be revived, however, if her people are sleeping. And a nation is in even worse danger if the church is largely sleeping too. After all, the church is the institution ordained by God to be a light to the nations. While America isn’t mentioned as a key player in the last days, the church certainly is. While some have called America the “last best hope” of a turbulent world, the truth is that the church is the “last best hope” of America. It is the church who is supposed to be Christ’s instrument to bring hope and supernatural power and change to lost people and their nations. It is the church through whom Christ chooses to reveal that he alone has the ultimate answer for the ills that plague any nation. A weak church—one whose members give lip service to Jesus but are really spiritually asleep or intoxicated by the things of the world rather than walking in the light of God’s Word and the power of the Holy Spirit—can provide little help to a weak nation in danger of imploding.
Yet this, I’m afraid, is where the U.S. is now. Alarm bells are going off all around us. Lights on the dashboard are flashing, Warning! Warning! Yet America is sleeping through the alarms, blind to the warning lights. And tragically, for the most part, the church—God’s chosen instrument to bless individuals, families, communities, and nations—is asleep as well. I shudder to imagine where we are heading if we don’t wake up soon, plead for the Lord’s forgiveness, and ask him to use us to love our neighbors and revitalize our country.
The Wake-Up Call on 9/11
As I was working on this book, we as a nation marked the tenth anniversary of the horrific terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Clearly, 9/11 was a day that changed our country forever. I believe the Lord allowed evil to win a battle that day. Why? To shake us out of a stupor and open our eyes to realities we have long avoided.
Thousands of years ago, God told the prophet Haggai to write down these words: “For thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘Once more in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea also and the dry land. I will shake all the nations. . . . I am going to shake the heavens and the earth. I will overthrow the thrones of kingdoms and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the nations’” (Haggai 2:6-7, 21-22).
This is Bible prophecy. This is an intercept from the mind of the all-knowing, all-seeing God of the universe. It is a weather report from the future, if you will, a storm warning. It was given to us so that we would be awake and ready and faithful and walking close to Jesus when the tempests come. God told us well in advance that he was going to “shake all the nations.” That certainly includes the United States.
Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001? Do you remember how you felt when you saw the Pentagon burning, the smoldering wreckage in Pennsylvania, the Twin Towers imploding? I’m sure you do. Not since Pearl Harbor had so many Americans been killed in a single attack. None of us will ever forget that day—nor should we.
God didn’t cause the terrible events of 9/11 to happen. Radical Islamic jihadists caused the death and destruction of that day. Fanatics devoted to false teachings were responsible for what happened on 9/11. But the true and living God—the God of the Bible—let it happen to shake America, to get our attention. The tragedy of 9/11 was a wake-up call for America and particularly for the church.
On September 11, 2011—the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—I was invited to participate in a broadcast and webcast called A Wake-Up Call that was seen in all fifty states and in two hundred countries around the world and was heard live on more than five hundred radio stations throughout the U.S. The organizer was Anne Graham Lotz, the internationally renowned Bible teacher and daughter of the world-famous evangelist Billy Graham. Specifically, Anne asked me to shed some light on all the traumas that were going on in our country and around the world and to explain what they meant in the light of Bible prophecy. Given my wife’s and my own deep concerns about the future of our country and the church, we were honored to accept Anne’s invitation. You see, while the economic, political, and security failings of our country are deeply troubling, there is a much more insidious danger facing our country. It is a danger that threatens to make restoration and revival impossible. I am speaking of the spiritual blindness in America. This blindness is the cause of deep moral brokenness. And unfortunately, the church too often acts as though she either is blind herself or is unwilling to be the source of the only true light available to mankind.
I began my portion of the evening by asking some questions. “On this anniversary of 9/11, are you morally and spiritually better off than you were ten years ago? Is your family? Is your church? Now is an appropriate time to take a spiritual audit, to assess how you’re doing morally and spiritually, how your family is doing, how your congregation is doing. Ten years ago, God shook us. The question is: Were we listening?”
These questions are as relevant today as they were then. I would encourage you to take some time right now and really think about your answers to these questions.
• Are you morally and spiritually better off than you were on 9/11?
• Is your family morally and spiritually better off?
• Is your church morally and spiritually better off?
The writer of the book of Hebrews implored his readers, “See to it that you do not refuse Him [Christ] who is speaking. For if those did not e
scape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape who turn away from Him who warns from heaven. And His voice shook the earth then, but now He has promised, saying, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heaven’” (Hebrews 12:25-26).
Our Lord Jesus Christ, while sitting with his disciples on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, also warned in Matthew 24 that we would be shaken in the last days leading up to his return. “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the power of the heavens will be shaken,” Jesus said. And then he added that when people least expect it, “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” (Matthew 24:29-30).
When God tells us to wake up, it isn’t wise to hit the snooze button, much less to do so repeatedly. Yet isn’t it fair to say that overall that’s what America has done since 9/11?
The State of Our Culture
We need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. God is shaking us physically, with earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and fires and droughts and floods. Our own mistakes and failures are causing us to be shaken financially, with the severe current economic downturn, our skyrocketing debt, and the even more severe debt crisis that looms just around the corner. Yet as serious as this all is, there is more.
Consider the state of our culture.
In 2012, America became a country of more than 312 million people, of whom more than 234 million are 18 years of age or older.[309] What do we believe as a nation? What are our values? How are we living? Where are we heading? Sadly, it is not a pretty picture.
“Since 1960, our population has increased by 48 percent,” William Bennett wrote in his book The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century. “But since 1960, even taking into account recent improvements, we have seen a 467 percent increase in violent crime; a 463 percent increase in the number of state and federal prisoners; a 461 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; more than a 200 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a doubling in the teen suicide rate; a more than 150 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving welfare payments; an almost tenfold increase in the number of cohabiting couples; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a drop of almost 60 points on SAT scores.”[310]
Unfortunately, it gets worse. Consider abortion, for example. Only six in ten Americans (59 percent) believe that abortion ends a human life.[311] What’s more, only half of all Americans (between 51 percent and 55 percent, depending on the poll) believe abortion is “morally wrong.”[312] As a result, Americans have had more than 53 million abortions since 1973.[313] That means Americans have murdered more than 53 million of their own children in the past four decades, yet there is little remorse and no end of this holocaust in sight. True, many Americans are praying for the Lord to end this horrific practice. And many have been working tirelessly since abortion became legal in 1973 to change public opinion in favor of life, persuade pregnant women to bring their children to term and consider raising the children themselves or putting them up for adoption, create legal restrictions against abortion, and eventually support a constitutional amendment banning abortion. As a result, some progress has been made. Some important legislation has been passed. The number of annual abortions has declined somewhat. And this is good.
But it is not nearly enough. Abortion is a terrible stain on our nation. The Scriptures teach us that human life is precious, even before birth. King David once prayed to the Lord, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14, NIV). How long will the creator and sustainer of life bless the United States rather than judge and punish us when we take the lives of well over one million innocent children every year? Indeed, for this reason alone one has to wonder why God has not allowed the U.S. to implode already.
Consider, too, the pandemic of pornography in our country. Only two out of three American adults (66 percent) say they believe pornography is “morally wrong,” while fully 30 percent say it is morally acceptable.[314] In a country the size of ours, that means some 70 million Americans not only believe but will admit to pollsters that pornography is morally acceptable. How many more believe it is not acceptable yet indulge in it anyway? Today, pornography revenues in the United States from movies, videos, pay-per-view, magazines, the Internet, and other forms of media exceed the revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC—combined.[315] Indeed, the revenue of the pornography industry—which is largely, though not exclusively, based in the United States—is larger than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink—combined.[316]
If this weren’t bad enough, based on current trends, pornography sales will likely surge higher still in the decades to come as even more Americans become ensnared, addicted, and degraded. Why? Because polls show that younger Americans view pornography as far more acceptable than older Americans do. Nineteen percent of Americans age 55 and older say pornography is morally acceptable. But 29 percent of Americans 35 to 54 years old say pornography is acceptable. Worse, a stunning 42 percent of Americans 18 to 34 years old say it’s acceptable.[317] Unless hearts and minds are radically changed soon, as these young people get older and earn more disposable income, their ability to purchase pornography will increase—particularly as technology makes it easier to purchase in one’s home through fiber-optic television and broadband Internet connections.
Concurrent with this explosion in the availability, sales, and viewing of pornography has come a dramatic increase in sexual crimes, the number of sexual predators, sexual abuse of children, divorce, and related social pathologies. In 1960, approximately 17,000 forcible rapes occurred in the U.S., according to FBI statistics. Forty years later, the number of forcible rapes had more than quadrupled to some 90,000 in the year 2000 alone.[318] In 2011, there were more than 730,000 sexual predators registered online with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.[319][320] The number of sexual offense cases involving juvenile perpetrators has shot up 40 percent over the past two decades, climbing from 24,100 cases in 1985 to 33,800 in 2004.[321] A 2001 report by the U.S. Department of Justice found that 42 percent of juvenile sexual offenders had been “exposed to hardcore pornography.”[322]
Thirty-five times in the Bible, the Lord warns against the sin of lust. Dozens more times, the Scriptures warn us against sexual immorality. Jesus said in Matthew 5:27-29, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” The apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:2-3 (just before writing about the Rapture), “For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality.” How much longer, then, can we expect the Lord to show America grace and mercy when we are so flagrantly violating his commands to be holy?
Consider, too, the surge in support of homosexuality in the United States. The number of people declaring themselves to be homosexual is growing. The open discussion of homosexuality is expanding on television, in the movies, and throughout popular culture. Open support and approval for homosexual marriage is dramatically expanding as well. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans supported the legalization of homosexual marriages, while 68 percent were opposed. By 2011, a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriages; support had climbed to 53 percent, while opposition had fallen to 45 percent.[323]
And it’s not just attitudes; now it’s legislation. In 2011, New
York became the seventh state to formally legalize homosexual marriages (after Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire; though not a state, the District of Columbia has also legalized same-sex marriages).[324]
In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Bible is clear that homosexuality is not just a sin in God’s eyes but an “abomination.” In Leviticus 18:22, the Lord instructed, “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, the apostle Paul writes, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.”
It is becoming politically incorrect to accept the Bible’s teachings on these and other moral issues or to talk about them publicly. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of Heaven is not a democracy. The Lord is not running for political office. He’s not trying to cobble together a majority. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. What he says goes. How blessed is the man or woman who follows the Word of God, not his or her own desires.[325] And how blessed is the nation that follows the Word of God as well. As we read in Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.” That said, the Bible also teaches that a nation that loses its vision of the Lord and willfully and systematically disobeys the Word of God will not be blessed but will eventually perish.