Buzsaw writes:
[i][b]This is when the 2nd advent of Jesus occurs and the Armageddon happens with the Jerusalem defended but not before the city is invaded and with part of the city ravished and many killed or taken captive.
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The Savior's timing is not very merciful in this scenario, is it? He would prevent a lot of suffering by arriving earlier.
[i][b]a huge army from the East, likely including China will move into the war.
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You did not always say 'China' here, and you know it.
It used to be the Soviet Union that filled this role in Armageddon prophecies. Opinion was unanimous on this point. Fundamentalists used to hand me maps showing Soviet Army troop movements. They told me I would live to see it all happen.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, talk of it stopped. The Hal Lindsays of the world quickly developed a fascination with everything Chinese. They pretended they'd had this interest all along.
If you've been in the Armageddon prophecy business as long as you say, you know what I am saying is true. You saw the cast change happen. You participated in it.
This raises the question of how people with a divine gift for predicting world events can go so spectacularly wrong. Why were they blindsided by the fall of the Soviet Union and every communist regime in Europe? Doesn't God tell them anything?
[i][b] The enemies of Israel will become all be competing for dominance with them turing against one another. The slaughter will be greater of all these armies than anything in human history with the region littered with the dead of many nations.
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The plain of Megiddo is too small for this. You are predicting a body count, not to mention troop levels, in multiple millions.
[i][b]There you have it and likely the non-Christian younger folks here who survive all the terrible latter day catastrophies will live to see the end.
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Oh, yes. The ritual warning to the young that they will live to witness the reality of these nightmares.
No end-times prediction would be complete without this flourish. It adds a touch of veracity to a narrative that, well, could use some.
What's interesting is that when I was in my teens and twenties I was the one being told this. I would surely live to see these things happen, said the fundamentalist prophets (as they handed me a pamphlet showing charts of Soviet troop movements).
Lately they jump less often at the chance to say this to me. But they always say it to someone. Now they prefer to deliver the line to people who weren't born at the time I first heard it.
Funny how that rapture date keeps moving away.
I'm going to make a prediction of my own. On the record. Results are guaranteed.
Young adults: you are now being told that you are likely to witness the fulfillment of end-time prophecies. The would-be prophets will eventually lose interest in saying this to you. But they will always predict this for someone. They will always predict this of listeners who are in their twenties or younger at the time their predictions are made... whoever those individuals happen to be.
The show never closes. It just changes cast.
Archer
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