standard course, but when you get in front of a group of college graduates with their questions, you better start learning the answers. And sometimes I have to say, I'll answer the question tomorrow. But in the course of things, I worked out my own ideas to what prophecy teaches and what our expectation is, and have produced some books in that area, as you know. When the Gulf War broke out, This whole question came into focus immediately because the secular press had large articles on the question, is this the second coming, is this Armageddon, is this the end of the world, and similar articles. And I mean they were large articles. Sometimes they'd cover a whole page. And it was a little bit unexpected in my part. I didn't expect the secular press to get that much interested. And I asked myself, why? Well, the secular press, they may not believe what we believe about prophecy, but they know that the church creeds predict that Jesus Christ is coming again to judge the world. And that's true of the Roman Catholic creeds, that's true of the Greek Orthodox creeds, as well as Protestant creeds. In other words, this isn't an idea that's been dreamed up by some prophecy teachers that is questionable. This is standard church doctrine by anybody who accepts the Bible as the Word of God. Christ plainly says in the Bible he's coming again to judge the world. Now you think with that unanimity on that pivotal point that there'd be unanimity on prophecy, but there isn't. And on occasion I had to explain this to audiences and radio in other words, other places, and the difference is this, that while they accept the literalness of the second coming, they don't accept the literalness of what the Bible pictures before that. the events leading up to it. And they say you can't take that literally. And then when the Bible traces things that will happen after the second coming, such as the millennial kingdom, the new heaven, new earth, they say you can't take this literally. Why not? Well, it's because they don't want to. Prophecy and faith is a matter of choice. You choose what you believe. And the historical background is quite simple. Back in the beginning of the third century in our Christian era, a school of theology arose in Alexandria, Egypt, that tried to put together the Bible teachings and the pure idealism of Plato. Now, no one follows Plato today, but it was like trying to mix oil and water. They just didn't mix. So they came up with the idea that the Bible can't be interpreted literally any of it, that it's all one glorious allegory that has to be interpreted, and with that in mind, they could twist it around to fit their ideas in philosophy. Well, the church rose up and fought this, and the great leaders of the church, the fathers of the church, refuted it as best they could, and they succeeded pretty well, except in the field of prophecy, eschatology. And this dragged on, and finally in the third and fourth centuries, the Augustine, the great church father, bishop at Hippo in Northern Africa, came up the idea that while normally the Bible should be interpreted literally, that when it came to prophecy that you couldn't interpret literally. I think he was dead wrong, but that's what he held. But then he didn't take all prophecy non-literally because he believed in heaven and hell. He believed in resurrection. He believed in life after death. But he said, you can't interpret the millennial kingdom literally. And so that became more or less the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. And I'm sorry to say the Protestant reformers followed Augustine instead of the Scripture on this important point. So down to the present time, a prevailing idea in the church is that you can't take prophecy literally. And I personally believe that's absolutely false. It just isn't true. Prophecy is just as literal as the resurrection of Christ or the virgin birth or the deity of Christ. It's all Scripture. When God says something plainly, understandably, you must accept it. Now, I'm dealing with eschatology or prophecy. I had to follow this rule, and particularly when my publishers asked me to produce a book called, which I call Prophecy Knowledge Handbook, They wanted me to produce one book that covered all the prophecies of the Bible, and that's a big order. No one else has really achieved that or attempted to achieve it, but I sat in, I said, how in the world can I make any sense out of a complicated picture like this? You know, some pastors have many ideas. I checked out one verse in Revelation on occasion and found fifty different interpretations. Well, how are you going to handle that? Well, I did it very simply, and it's not a rule that I had devised. It's a long-time rule that where prophecy makes sense in its natural sense, don't seek any other sense. So I started in Genesis, moved on through the Scriptures, and in the year and a half, I had produced the book. Of course, I'd been studying it for fifty years, but I found I could just take the prophecy. I'd ask, what does it say? What does it mean sometimes? There are symbolic things that are used to present prophecy. You have to decide what they mean. But then they do mean ultimately something literal. And then you can devise exactly what the scheme is. And so I've come to some very solid conclusions that prophecy should be taken literally. In fact, when I got through the book, I itemized a thousand passages that I had produced. And I found that five hundred of them had already been literally fulfilled. Is there an intelligent reason for interpreting prophecy literally? Well, of course. If that's the pattern that's been uniformly used in the past, prophecies were interpreted and fulfilled literally, we have every reason to believe that prophecy about the future is just as literal. So you can come to passages about Jesus Christ. There's at least a hundred passages that were fulfilled. It said he would be born in Bethlehem. He was. It said he'd be God with us, God and man, Emmanuel. They'd said he'd be born of a virgin, that he would be a prophet, that he would be a priest, that he would be a miracle worker, perform miracles, that he would teach. He's the greatest teacher, and ultimately he would die, and the scripture's even pictured that his hands and his feet would be pierced. At the time they wrote that scripture, they didn't know anything about crucifixion as a method of execution. And then it predicted his resurrection. And of course his second coming, which is yet to be fulfilled. So prophecy, when it's fulfilled, is fulfilled literally. Now when the Gulf War broke out, because I had written a book on Armageddon back in seventy-four, when the oil crisis came about, I thought this was prophetically significant. And I wrote this book Armageddon, and some six hundred fifty thousand copies in English were sold. and about three hundred fifty thousand in twelve foreign languages which is very gratifying to me because I wanted to go to the mission field and never made it but here are twelve different languages hearing the gospel in their own language and it was published then after the Gulf War after the war in the seventy four the oil crisis fell back they decided there wasn't any crisis the book went out of print when the Gulf War broke out the publisher wanted the book right away he wanted to republish it of course well fortunately If a Bible, if a book is true in seventy-four, it's still true in ninety-one, you know, when I write a book on prophecy, I don't have to revise it every month like some do. I stay with what the Bible says and don't go beyond it. So all I had to do was to add a chapter on recent developments, such as the change in Europe, and then we published it and had to print a million copies in order to meet the demand in three months, something that never had to do before for any other book. So it attracted a lot of attention. In the process, I became aware of how abysmally ignorant the average Christian is about prophecy. They just don't know hardly anything. And the reason for this is that many churches, probably over half of them, never preach on prophecy. That is, don't preach it. In some cases, they believe it. In some cases, they don't. But the people are left in total ignorance. They just don't know what's going to happen. And that's why the book Armageddon Thrived has written... To explain end-time prophecy to a non-Christian is very simple, and people bought it and buy the thousands. In fact, a lot of people got saved through reading the book. And it explains end-time prophecy. Strange to say, it didn't discuss the Iraq and war at all. It dealt simply with what the Bible has to say about the future. Now, because when you sell a million copies of a book, it attracts attention. You get on the bestseller list and so forth. I began to be interviewed by radio stations before I got through. I think I was interviewed on a hundred of them in several big television programs. And they asked questions, is this Armageddon and so on. Now, Billy Graham and his association decided to buy three hundred thousand copies of Armageddon and give them away. And about that time they were producing a super television program that depicted evangelism in Europe for the last thirty years and while it had nothing to do with the television program, they put a little square there and showed a picture of the book big enough to see the title and my name. Then they gave their eight hundred telephone number and said if you phoned in you'd get a free copy. And they distributed three hundred thousand copies. And that of course helped the sale of it quite a bit. So people began to ask about it and some interesting things happened. Billy Graham announced this meeting in the USA Today, six million copies all across the United States and Canada, full-page ads. So it got a lot of publicity. And as a result of that, one of their reporters called up and wanted to ask some questions. So I answered, she was a woman, and they weren't particularly good questions I didn't think, but I did the best I could to answer them. What I didn't know was she is recording it. And then she put it on the teletype and went to every newspaper in the country. I started getting clippings about... what I had said and I didn't have any contact with the paper at all. I wondered how in the world they got it. I finally tracked it down. But what she asked me, and half a dozen other so-called scholars or people that are supposed to know something about prophecy, is this Armageddon? And of course, I said no. She asked another evangelical who wasn't too interested in prophecy. He said no. They asked a liberal theologian. He said no. They talked to a Jewish rabbi who happened to be a woman. She said, no. So we all said the same thing. No. But the others all dropped the ball. I said, no, it's not Armageddon, but I'll tell you what it is. Then I went on to explain a bit what I believe the future holds. And she gave me half the article because I gave her something to work on. What does the scripture hold? I found it's rather amazing that often in the teaching of prophecy, and I've been involved in many prophecy conferences, that is often a failure to paint a background, a background of the major events in prophecy. Sometimes people have been working in prophecy most of their life and still don't have it straight. What is going to happen in the future? Can you outline it? Well, I think the first thing that's going to happen is the rapture of the church. And I'm not going to deal with that so much in the evening as I do in the morning. It'll come on Thursday in our study of First Thessalonians, chapter four. But the rapture of the church, Christ coming to take his church out of the world, Christians who are dead, are going to be resurrected, living Christians instantly changed, are going to be caught up to be with the Lord, meet him in the air, and then go to heaven. As he promises his disciples in John, he'd take them to the Father's house. Now, that's an imminent event. And when it's presented in the Bible, it's always presented as the next event. You're never told to look for something before it. It's always looking for that blessed hope and glorious appearing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Now, what's going to happen if the rapture occurs? Well, it could happen today, I believe. I don't believe in setting dates, as I said this morning, because I don't know anybody that knows the dates. The Bible doesn't reveal that, but it could happen today. It could happen next year or next month or whenever. And the Bible's purpose, they left that obscure, even though he told the Thessalonians in chapter one, chapter four of the book of Thessalonians in the first century that they could look for the coming of the Lord as a comfort to them in the loss of their loved ones who had died. It was an imminent event from then on as far as our knowledge is concerned. Now God got us pegged somewhere but he hasn't told us and it could be very very soon. Now when that happens we believe that in the European and the Middle East the Mediterranean area something very dramatic is going to happen. After all If millions of Christians disappear, it's going to be a disruptive thing in the world. I personally think there's going to be a lot of excitement about it. There's going to be some fancy theories as to what happened that weren't the truth. But I think actually thousands of people after the rapture are going to wake up, especially among the people of Israel, and come to Christ in faith as they search the Scriptures to see what happened. And so there will be unbelief, but there will be also some that come to Christ. But the Bible doesn't comment much on that, but does comment on the political situation. And one of the things that it predicts is that there will be a revival of the Roman Empire. And this is depicted for us in Daniel chapter seven in the fourth beast, which is the Roman Empire. And it's pictured in the end time as having ten horns. And these ten horns are defined in verse twenty four of Daniel seven as ten kings or ten kingdoms. In other words, the Roman Empire, which at one time covered mostly Europe, southern Europe, at least, northern Africa, and western Asia, and even fortunately Great Britain, is eventually going to be revived, as it's dead now, but it's going to be revived, and in the form of these ten countries. And when that happens, these countries are going to come together voluntarily. Now, there's been conquests of Europe and constant warfare, but this is going to be a voluntary thing. And some of the things that have happened the last few years have made it obvious that this is something that could happen very soon. And if that's related to the rapture of the church, then the rapture could happen very soon. Now, when this happens, according to Scripture, another ruler is going to arise, described in Daniel seven, eight, as the little horn that uproots three of the ten horns. And the symbolism is very clear that he's going to conquer three of those ten countries. And then from then on, without explaining it, the Bible pictures them as the ruler over all ten. In other words, he achieves the status of the chief power person in the whole Southern Europe Mediterranean area. That's what Saddam Hussein wanted to have, but didn't succeed in getting. But this man's going to have that whole area under his political power. Now, when that happens, and I think it's going to happen very quickly once it starts, He's going to attempt to make a peace treaty with Israel. And this is described very briefly in Daniel nine, twenty seven as a seven-year treaty that's going to climax the history of Israel. And it's still future because it hasn't happened, though some people try to find it fulfilled in the past. And that seven years is very important because at the end of the seven years, Jesus Christ comes back in power and glory. So for the first time, there's a dating situation. where you can know the approximate time of the second coming. Now, for the first three and a half years, it's going to be observed. It's going to be a time of peace. This is described in Ezekiel thirty-eight and thirty-nine as Israel's relaxing. You see they're depending on this ruler to defend them, and it's going to be a peace treaty that apparently covers the major things that a peace treaty would have to cover, though the Bible doesn't itemize. It doesn't tell us what the ten countries are either. but it's going to be a peace treaty for three and a half years. And suddenly, overnight, this ruler has become so powerful that he proclaims himself dictator over the whole world, and the whole world isn't able to fight him. I don't know why the Bible isn't explained. Maybe partly satanic deception. Maybe partly because he controls the oil of the Middle East, which is very powerful weapon. But in any case, they accept him. And for the first time in history, There's a real world government. And that is going on according to Scripture for three and a half years. Now, the problem is that as assuming that power, he also claims to be God and he allies himself with Satan and demands that everybody worship him so that the final form of world religion is going to be Satanic, the worship of a man, and the worship of Satan. And he tries to put to death anybody who opposes him. And, of course, Christians and Jews particularly will oppose him in this. And apparently, multiplied thousands are going to be killed. Revelation seven describes a scene in heaven with the multitude which no man can number from every kindred tongue and people. And the question is raised, where did they come from? It says they came out of the great tribulation. Well, that's the term that Christ used. To describe that last three and a half years in Matthew twenty-four, Daniel uses the same expression, Revelation does too, the great tribulation, the time of trouble such as the world is never known. When you get into it, as we will this week occasionally, you'll see that Christ was not exaggerating, it's all that he said it would be. And so for three and a half years this world reels under the awful rule of this man. And at the same time, God begins to bear upon the world a terrible catastrophe as described in the book of Revelation from chapter six to chapter eighteen. And the world is decimated. Most of the world perishes. And then at the end, there's an outbreak as nations begin to rebel against him. And then Christ returns and establishes his kingdom and judges the world. Now, this is a well-ordered scheme of things. You see, one thing leads to another. First, the rapture. Then the ten nation group is formed. It could happen before the rapture, but the Bible indicates it will be active at the time of the rapture. And then this ruler emerges who gains control of three, and then all ten, and rules for three and a half years, the first half of that seven years as he makes this seven-year covenant with Israel. And then in the last three and a half, he becomes a world ruler, and it's the great tribulation, and the second coming of Christ. Now the question we naturally face as we trace this through the scriptures is how soon it's going to come. And that's a good question. Now the rapture is presented in the Bible as an event that could occur any time, but that doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion that it could happen soon. After all, nineteen hundred years have elapsed. I was talking to some radio station here in Florida, apparently a secular station, and he wasn't too happy about what I was telling him, but he said, how do we know that if Nineteen hundred years have passed since Christ made the predictions that another nineteen hundred years won't pass. In other words, how do we know that the rapture could be near? And that, I think, is a real good question. How do we know? We say, on the one hand, no signs. On the other hand, we say it's near. How can we say that? Well, the answer is relatively simple. The answer is that while we don't have signs for the rapture, The Bible, as I've already indicated, describes in great detail the events that will follow immediately after the rapture. The ten-nation group, this covenant with seven years, peace for three and a half, and then three and a half years of persecution, trial, great tribulation, then the second coming of Christ. In other words, it describes in detail these things. Now, what we're seeing in our world in our twentieth century is preparation for these events that will follow the rapture. Now, logically, if the world is getting all set for the events that will follow the rapture, then it's logical to believe the rapture is soon. We have an item in our Dallas papers about a man who did his Christmas shopping early. And his arms are full of Christmas presents, and he's walking down the street. He met a friend, and a friend saw the Christmas present. He said, my, Thanksgiving must be close. Now, what's the relevance of that? Well, you see, Thanksgiving is about a month before Christmas. And if people are getting ready for Christmas and Thanksgiving hasn't occurred, then it's logical to believe that Thanksgiving could be closed, you see. Now, it's that same type of reference we come to this subject of when the rapture is going to occur. No signs of the rapture, but signs of the events that will follow the rapture. And do you realize how these have come to pass in the last fifty years? There's been more movement towards fulfillment of prophecy in the last fifty years than in the previous five hundred. Things are moving faster and faster. And a lot of people realize this. It looks like something is about to happen. Some years ago now, I think six or seven, I attended a conference in Atlanta of people who invited evangelical, quote, scholars, end quote, to discuss the end time. And they didn't have agreement on theology, but they were concerned about the fuel crisis And they were concerned that there wouldn't be enough gasoline for people to drive to churches that were large. And so they pictured all the churches that after shriveled through small churches where people could walk. Of course, I think they were wrong, but that's what they were discussing. But the interesting thing was they invited to this conference of several days two futurologists. You know, there's a whole group of several hundred in our country who claim to be futurologists. Now, these are not Bible students. They are people who study trends in our day. And then say, on the base of these trends, this is what's going to happen. Now, it is very interesting. One of these was an evangelical Christian Ph.D. from a large university. I was a Roman Catholic scholar. They didn't bring in the Bible at all. They just analyzed the world situation. You know what they said? They said, the world is facing catastrophe. Well, we asked them what? They said, we don't know. All we can see is there are several trends that are leading in that direction. And then they pointed out, of course, the fuel shortage, how lack of fuel will hurt our whole world system. And then they pointed out the pollution problem, our air and our oceans and our waters are being polluted at an unparable rate. And you know that's going to be devastating eventually because oxygen is manufactured in the ocean by little microorganisms that are killed when there's too much pollution. And they picture shortage of oxygen for the whole world and This would lead to other things we couldn't make steel anymore because that takes a lot of oxygen. They made all sorts of dire predictions. Now they were wrong. They said it would happen within five years. This is more than five years ago, but it tells us the temper of our days. You notice how few people are predicting long-distance plans now? Nobody's telling us what's going to happen a hundred years from now. They don't hardly dare to tell you what's going to happen the next five years. You see, we're living in a world where there are so many uncertainties, and so many things have happened. Just think back over the last ten years, all the developments that were unpredictable, seemingly, like the things in Europe, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Russia, this whole Middle East crisis. You wouldn't have expected it, you know. Yet it's happened, and we don't know what's going to happen next. Now, there's all sorts of foreboding things. I've listened to people with a lot of dire predictions about the future. Do you know the Middle East is a powder keg? You see, when the Gulf War was fought, the United States and the others came in and drove them out of Kuwait. But in the process, they had to do certain things. They paid Syria a hundred million dollars to keep out of the war. Syria turned right around and went to Korea and bought a hundred million dollars worth of spud missiles that are new design that are very accurate. You know the spud missiles they had in the war? Were it accurate? But these are supposed to be very accurate, just landing within a few yards of where they're aimed. And they have those. And then Iraq and Iran are buying nuclear missiles from Russia. It's got a surplus of them, obviously. They're supposed to destroy them. They want hard cash, and these countries have hard cash. And so they're transferring these nuclear weapons to Iran and Iraq. They've got plenty of weapons right now. to blot Israel out of the world completely if they let loose their atomic weapons. Why aren't they? Well, the problem is that Israel has atomic weapons, too. And while it's different, they don't have missile warfare, they have planes. And these planes, it's a short distance, you know. If Israel was attacked, they could destroy the other countries, too. It's sort of a stalemate at the present time. How long will that last? I don't know. We experienced that same stalemate between the United States and Russia. And each country could have blown the other out of existence four or five times, but they knew that at one start the other would reply, and they didn't want their reply, you see, so it didn't happen. Now, I personally don't think it's ever going to happen, but it certainly is a powder keg because prophecy in the end time picture Middle East much like it is today. Israel in the land, a lot of antagonism, persecution of Israel, yes, but not destroyed. In fact, While some prophecy teachers picture atomic warfare in the end time, when fire comes from heaven, they think it's atomic, it isn't necessarily. But the Bible takes pictures that on the very day of the second coming, there's hostiles fighting in Jerusalem, Zechariah fourteen, one to three. Well, you can't have hostiles fighting in a nation that's been destroyed by nuclear weapons, you see. It seems rather that they revert back to ordinary weapons on the ground, such as have been used for many, many years, many centuries. And so we are living in a world that's is very uncertain from the secular point of view. And that's why prophecy becomes so very, very important. Now, not to leave this totally on my word, let's turn to Daniel chapter seven. We have just a few minutes so that you can see that what I've been talking about is in the Bible. Now, in Daniel, you remember Daniel had the... not only to deal with the future of the Gentile nations, as he did with the four nations, you know, the Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greek, and Rome, but he also had the seventy-seven of Israel, Israel's future prophetic picture, and he pictures both of them. In chapter two, you remember how the image pictured these four empires for Nebuchadnezzar? Then many days later, after Nebuchadnezzar had reigned a long time and finally died, And a new ruler had come in that meets in the Persians. It's happened in five thirty-nine. Daniel had a series of four visions himself. And these are recorded beginning in chapter seven. And in chapter seven, he pictures these same four empires as beasts. Babylon being the lion and Medo-Persia being a bear, it's not Russia, it's Medo-Persia. And then Greece represented by the leopard. Then the fourth beast is not named. It obviously is the Roman Empire. The greatest empire of all time that gathered power beginning in the second century BC and went on for many centuries later, finally drifted away and the last ruler wasn't killed till, fourteen fifty-three, more than fifteen hundred years after it started. So there's a long history and a lot of influence in the world. But here in the Bible it pictures it as having in the last stage seven horns. Notice verse seven of chapter seven of Daniel. After this I saw in the night vision, behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, exceeding strong. It had huge iron teeth. It was devouring, breaking in pieces, and trampling the residue with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it. That is an apt picture of the Roman Empire that came in power several hundred years after Daniel wrote this. They would come into a country with their disciplined soldiers, conquer it, and quick order. Then they'd carry off the able-bodied men as slaves. All their work was done by slaves. They I understand there's a hundred fifty thousand Jews alone in Egypt who were slaves and they're all over the empire and others. And then they'd leave a garrison of soldiers there to help collect taxes and move on to another country. They literally tore country after country apart, just like this beast is pictured. But then it goes on to say, and it had ten horns. Now there never was anything in the Roman Empire that corresponded with those ten horns. And, of course, the empire, though it had a long history, is dead. There's no Roman empire today. How can you explain those ten horns being attached to this fourth beast? Well, the answer is that the Old Testament, uniformly in its prophetic picture of the future, will picture in detail events up to and including the life of Christ. That's all described in hundreds of prophecies. Then the prophecies just leap from the first coming of Christ to the second coming and a few years before the second coming. in their prophetic picture. In other words, it is skipped what we call the Church Age or the Age of Grace from Pentecost to the Raptors, not in the Bible, not in the Old Testament, that is. In other words, that is skipped. Well, that's the way the prophecy is. In fact, in some passages like Isaiah sixty-one, you have the first coming of Christ, the second coming of Christ, the same verse, as if it was all the same event. And as you read the scriptures on this in the Old Testament and in the Gospels, nobody understood that there were two comings, a first coming and a second coming. In fact, the disciples were following Christ, thinking he was going to fulfill the glorious promises of his glorious reign. And, of course, that wasn't true. He came the first time to suffer and die. And they never really understood that there was a space between these two comings until they saw him ascend into heaven. Then it became where, yes, he came once and suffered and died, fulfilled that. Now, his future kingdom is still future. And still future today. You and I don't have any trouble with that because you're living in the middle of it. Now, there's some confusion also about the second coming in the rapture. And there are people that try to put that together. I think that's wrong also. But the first and second coming are separated. So the Bible predicts that what appears to be a continuation of the Roman Empire in the Old Testament prophecy is actually lapsed, you see, for these nineteen hundred years. But will be resumed at the end time because the final empire follows the pattern of the Roman Empire. It starts out with those ten countries, and then, of course, eventually becomes a worldwide empire. And so that ten horns, as we learn in verse twenty-four, the ten horns are ten kings. In other words, we're not guessing at it. The Bible so often, when it has a symbol, will define it. Now, that was very interesting because I participated in some of the prophecy conferences in the Calvary Baptist Church in New York, fifty-seven streets. They had some big conferences there in forty-two and forty-three during the World War II. And since then they've had a number of others. Some of you have said you were there. And we'd have eight days, thirty speakers, and they'd have six hours a day of messages. And during World War II, the church was just packed. They couldn't get them in, even in the morning. They'd have to run a loudspeaker off into another room in order to accommodate the crowds. Everybody wanted to know what the future held. Now, what they were teaching was essentially what I'm teaching now. is there's going to be a revival Roman Empire. And the secular press, as well as the religious press, spoke fun of that. They said it can never happen. Hasn't Europe been fighting each other for centuries? Yes, that's true. Weren't they fighting each other right now? World War II? Yes. The history has been for centuries that they no sooner get through one war and they start arming for the next. That happened after World War I. Then we have World War II. And something very strange happened after World War II. Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, stopped preparing to fight each other. That was absolutely new. Why not? Because now they had the atomic bomb. And other countries had it too. And if they started a war, both sides could obliterate the other. Again, it was a stalemate. And so instead of having preparation for war, what did they do? They established the common market. Now, I'm sometimes quoted as saying that that's the Roman Empire. It's not, but it's a preparation for it. For the first time in history, Europe is on a friendly basis between nations. They're exchanging their products without paying custom. They're sharing a lot of things. They're talking to the secular press about a United States of Europe. And they even mentioned ten countries, very interestingly. And apparently that corresponds to what the Bible predicts. I know they ridiculed the idea, but you know it wasn't more than a year or two after World War II that the common market was announced. Then along with this, there was the United Nations. We predicted that there would be a world government in the end time, the Great Tribulation. So that will never happen. The League of Nations started in World War I and fell apart. So they never will have a world government that can't get together. What happened? Just a few years after World War II, we have the United Nations. Now that's a former world government, it's weak to be sure, but it's built on the concept that it's better to settle accounts on a conference table than on the battlefield. And so far we haven't had another war. We've had minor scourges, a lot of wars going on in the world right now, but not a world war in Europe. And so for the first time in history, we have precisely the situation in Europe with the, now that the Cold War is over and the Berlin Wall had come down and Russia has been discredited as far as a powerful nation. Now, for the first time, there can be relaxing. And President Bush, you remember, said we have a new world order. What did he mean? He didn't mean a millennial kingdom. I don't think he knows anything about it, but he did predict that there would be peace in Europe. I couldn't help but thinking when he said that, what about Christ's prediction of wars and rumors of war to the end because he only got the words out of his mouth before the Gulf War erupted, you know. No, there's going to be war to the end, but nevertheless, the situation is totally different than it was before World War II. So we're living in a day when we have expectancy of the rapture occurring. And I'll be talking about that more in the future because there are those that don't believe that. I want to point out some of the reasons for it because there's good solid reasons for believing the rapture is first. But you know what I'm saying is true. We're confronted with something. You see, if the rapture is closed, it confronts us with the picture of, are we born again? Are we ready for the rapture? And only those that are born again are going to be raptured. Now, a lot of good church members are not born again, I'm sorry to say. I counted these even in evangelical churches, where people have been going to church all their life and going through all the motions of the Christian life, but not born again. And as I mentioned this morning, you must be born again, or you'll be left behind. Then there's the secondary challenge. If you're a Christian and you are ready for the rapture in that sense, what are you doing about it? Because after the rapture, the question is going to be, what have you done with the time and life of given you? You see, that's going to be the issue. Is our life being really lived in the light of eternity? And I believe God has left the rapture time. purposely vague. We don't know when it's going to occur except we should be expecting it because he wants us to be ready every day until Jesus comes. I find it a great spur to me to preach and to keep on teaching these things. You know I've reached the stage where a rocking chair might overtake me. I don't own one, but you know you get to the point where you want to let down. I'm spurred on by this. I may not have many more times because a rapture may occur, you see. And let's pour out our lives as individuals, regardless of age or energy, and make our life really count for God every day until He comes. That's what I'm trying to say this week, and we'll continue our study in the evening hours on some of these great prophecies that are still subject to fulfillment, but could be fulfilled very soon. Shall we pray? Our Father, how grateful we are for the prophecies of Scripture that alert us in things to come so that we can get ready for the events before it happens. May we respond, may we listen, may we believe, and do the things that are required of faith and commitment as we face our eternal future from the hands of Christ. For we ask it in His name. Amen.