End Times and the Reign of Christ

Panoramic The Story of God as seen through The Great Christian Doctrines Eschatology - The Doctrine of the End The Reign of Christ, the Book of Life, and the Second Death! 1

~The end times, as foretold in the Bible especially in Johns apocalypse, the book of Revelations, the last book of the Bible John tells us that, according to his vision in which an angel gives him a guided tour of these future events the end is filled with Satan s last ditch, all-in-all-out effort to grab the world away from God. John tells how a charismatic leader rises up among the nations and does something that has only been done once before in the history of the world. That was the great hunter/warrior Nimrod, who unified the people of the world, not too long after the great flood, and together they tried to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. It was undoubtedly to be a place of worship, and was intended to unify humanity and keep it together. But there was a sinister undercurrent to the effort probably that it s underlying goal was self- worship the earliest form of humanism an effort to show just how great humanity could become if they put their minds to it and combined their efforts! But the Creator/God saw it for what it was and put an end to it by creating different languages, so that different communities faced a language barrier and couldn t communicate verbally with each other! Thus, all cooperation ended. Humans seeking more power were disempowered, and the whole effort to build that vast tower ended in chaos and confusion! It was in this way that humans became wired to instinctively belong to teams. Families became a team. Then most families formed alliances with other families that spoke the same language, and thus combined they became a bigger team usually centered around a bit of territory that they sought to keep and defend as their own! With these bigger alliances/ tribes/ teams, they also attacked and overpowered smaller alliances, and stole their things, and made them their slaves. Sometimes a particularly large alliance of families would grow into a nation! But while the nations of this world have always formed alliances together for offensive or defensive wars, or for the mutual benefits of economic cooperation - they have never ALL been together, unified or all cooperating - on anything! ~But in the last day of these last days that we have been talking about for the last couple of months -- with this man, the anti- Christ/Beast, to lead them - by economic gain, or else by the threat of economic ruin all the nations of the world will join in a single world government under this powerful man s leadership! ~The secret of his success in pulling this off is Satan! Satan is backing him with everything he has in this effort. But God sees through it of course! This is Satan s last ditch effort to wrest ownership of the world from its own Creator! This is an attempted theft a heist! But God puts a stop to it and will use it to judge, condemn, and wreak a wrathful judgment upon a world that has been lost to Him in another final, abject rebellion! The Bible says that The earth is the Lord s and everything in it . Ultimately, He will not be stolen from! It is a great crime to steal from God in fact the worst crime! It is the ultimate reason for the existence of Hell, so it MUST be a terrible crime in God s lawbook! People that believe their life is their own to do with as they please, are committing this great crime of theft, because the reality is that they actually do belong to God! We all do! So, as we saw, God crushes the nations of the earth that join with Satan s war, and and He brings in a new government one where His Son, Jesus, rules, and where, evidently, Christ s martyrs form the different levels of government! [Rev. 20:4] 2

There is a thousand years where the Deceiver is incarcerated falling endlessly in a bottomless pit! That means that the thousand year reign of Christ and His saints is going to be established and perpetuated on the foundation of truth! No one trusts the truth anymore! The online trolls of social/mainstream media have imbedded so much misinformation online- false pictures to false stories, false news, everyday, that it is only a guessing game as to which ones are playing us and which ones are actually factual! I was reading a quote from a woman from the last century, I think, (I don t remember her name, and I honestly can t verify that she s even real, (but what she is purported to have said IS REAL), who was saying that the game behind all the misinformation on the net is to further the agenda of a cabal of powerful and organized radicals that there be NO truth that all real truth is suspect in the end, because it is so much easier to manipulate people, and steer them into alternative truths that are not truths at all! This will be the anti-Christ s political technique deceive, deceive, deceive! Never tell the truth unless you absolutely have to. *You can t have helped but notice that this manipulation technique is being practiced on the American populace during this political cycle like it has never been tried before NEVER! Both sides do it but one party does it far worse than the other. You really should know which one by now, and I hope you know which party has made this their standard practice their go-to playbook! They are pushing the boundaries into the completely absurd, expecting the American public to be as ignorant and clueless as they think we are! But in the day that Jesus establishes His rule on earth, the first thing that will change is that there will be one absolute truth and not many conflicting ones! Lying, deceiving post-modernism the idea that there is no truth the idea that we make up our own truth as we go, and that, therefore, your truth is as valid as mine (and this is the philosophy that dominates academia and the media trained by them, and the internet, and society in general today) all that will be gone, abandoned on the tall rubbish heapof humanity s bad ideas! The Truth will establish the rule of Christ! Without the Deceiver s influence pushing people to jump over the edge into the truth-less abyss, people will chose the good, the right, the correct, and the true in that day! Peace will prevail! The nations will cooperate with each other and with God! Earth will catch a glimpse of heaven! Salvation history will be just about consummated the goals of God from the beginning, to rule what is His, will have almost been achieved! Remember, I said that God s plan has always been to re-establish His rule on earth! In that day, after His judgment and wrath have swept the earth clean of its incorrigible rebels and, especially, the killers of His followers the earth will have rest from its own turmoil and universal suffering! Instead of the freedom to be as bad as we want to be, it will be the freedom to be as good as we want to be! People will not have to keep so many secrets hidden, because they aren t doing as many shameful things! People will not be perfect/sinless but, they will not be selfish and mean-spirited, deceptive, cunning and conniving, obsessed, deranged! No with healthy minds, they will be heavily inclined to choose well! Why? Well because they will not be influenced by Satan and deceived by his lies! 3

Amazingly, after a thousand years like this, John simply says that Satan must be released, and we cannot be sure why! We can speculate that perhaps there needs to be one more final demonstration of human hopelessness and abject need for the rule of God in their lives, and over the whole planet! One more and then God will bring this part of the history of the world to a complete and final end! The old rebellious world order with all its deception,corruption, injustice, imbalance, excess, chaos, suffering, and death will forever and always be over and done with, for good! Satan will lead the nations of the world once again, by giving them strong delusions! God did that to Egypt, if you remember, when He wanted to prolong their judgments/plagues of misery and sorrow upon them for their great crimes against His people Israel! So God Himself hardened Pharaoh s heart and made him believe things that were not true, because he and his people deserved a few more waves of God s wrathful judgment! Well, at the end of this last part of earth s history, Satan is loosed, and instead of laying low for awhile, he quickly deceives the nations of the world and their kings in the way that he first deceived Eve God has been holding out on you / He doesn t love you! I love and understand you! / You are victims of God and He is holding you back from everything I could give you! / Come! If we fight together, we can throw off His yoke of slavery and be our own bosses / We don t need God! We ARE gods! [Rev. 20:7-10] So God does not mess around this time! He sees the armies of the earth gathering to make war against Christ on His throne, and Satan is caught - probably by another powerful angel, and without any further delay, thrown into the Lake of fire, no more temporary incarceration! This is IT for Satan - the end for him! He s been around for a long time making trouble, spreading chaos, destroying, bringing suffering and death upon everyone and everything he touched, and opposing God and bringing down God s righteous condemnation and wrath! The earth and (from the evidence in chapter 21, which we will talk about next week), even the universe itself, undergoes a great purge of fire! Again, no details, but the One who created it, will destroy it! But, we ll talk more about that next time. 4

Then, if this is a real timeline, and not figurative for indicating something else this is when there is a 2nd and final resurrection of the dead. The first has already occurred at the rapture of the church. Christ s resurrection and the church s resurrection are considered one complete first resurrection ! This 2nd resurrection is completely different! The 1st resurrection is for the dead in Christ , and the 2nd resurrection, referred to here in chap. 20 well, that is the resurrection of the dead outside of Christ! The great Book of Life is hauled out, but it is only a formality! The book will be searched for the names of these who stands waiting to be judged at the Great White Throne Judgment, but it is a tragic foregone conclusion! No onein this massive crowd of recently resurrected and embodied souls will have their names found in the great book! They will all, one by one, be tried in God s court, and because they were part of the rebellion that defied God or ignored Him, they will follow Satan into the lake of fire , and there they will remain forever! Now, I hope I am reading that wrong, but I don t think there I am, and I don t think that there is any way out of it! It s what it clearly says! This, according to John, is called the second death . It is the loss of everything, and especially the loss of any and all hope! Now, it s unthinkably terrible, but remember that it didn t have to be that way! God had offered them Himself, and He offered them Jesus to pay for their sins, but He was rejected by most people, and now at this point, they have to pay for their own sins! Now they will have eternity to nurse their regrets, because the 2nd death is not the end of existence, but the beginning of a never-ending existence in torment! They will know and remember that it didn t have to be that way! And so, the 2nd death revealed here is far, far worse than the 1st death! But if you are here this morning within the sound of my voice, I implore you to give your heart and life to Jesus while you can! Ask Him, and He will hear, and He will not reject you if you are serious about it! And He will activate His provision of salvation in His Son Jesus, apply Christs sacrifice of Himself to your sins, and those sins will never condemn you again! Your name will be entered into the ledgers of heaven, and when you die, you will be ushered straight into eternal life with God, and neverhave to enter into this horrible White Throne scenario at the very end of things as we know them! 5