Suppose that when I was yet a teenager, someone asked me if I planned on finding a girlfriend, getting married, and having children. My answer to all three would have been yes, but the individual who asked the question would have intuited that they would happen at different times throughout my life.
Even though my answer could have been that I hoped to have
children, but no more than four, I hoped to find a wife and have a girlfriend,
it would have been clear that there would be a natural order, a natural flow to
the sequence in which they were done, because I needed to have a girlfriend
before I could make her my wife, and have children with her.
There was a twenty-year span between the first of these,
getting a girlfriend, and the last, having children. I met my future wife in
the early nineties, courted her for a few years, married in 2000, and had our
first daughter in 2014. Even though my answer as to whether I planned on a
girlfriend, wife, and children was no longer than a sentence, the completion
thereof took twenty years.
Since we are temporal creatures, we view the span of human
history in small, easily digestible chunks of time. It’s difficult to
understand why it took seven hundred years for Isaiah’s prophecy about the
birth of Jesus to come to pass or that, for the most part, prophecies of future
events saw their fulfillment long after those who prophesied them returned to
the dust of the earth.
True prophecy is not constrained by time unless a timetable
is expressly given. If a word is from the Lord, it will come to pass because He
has spoken it, and because He has spoken it, it will come to pass in His time.
The man of God's duty is to relay God's message to those who would hear. It is
not his job to attempt and interpret it or decipher when it will come to pass.
Neither Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, nor any of the prophets of old gave a word
and then went on to explain what they thought it meant or why they thought it
would come to pass on such and such a day. They did not expound, expand,
hypothesize, or otherwise conjecture. They just relayed what God had spoken to
them.
God gave the word, they spoke it, and that was the end of
their duty.
We’ve stopped differentiating between opinion and revelation,
mistaking the former for the latter, and are gobsmacked when what is
‘prophesied’ doesn’t come to pass. Modern-day prophecy, prophets, and
prophetesses have come under ridicule because it’s deserved. They’re not being
persecuted; their error is being exposed. We cannot conflate the two lest we
make martyrs of people who never heard from God in the first place.
They went without being sent, and they spoke without being
given a word. Their words were so ludicrous and antithetical to scripture that
even the godless were rolling their eyes and snickering under their breath. Pet
dinosaurs and body part rooms in heaven, you say?
The troubling trend of late is that the modern-day church
would rather receive these foolish machinations than go into the Word of God
and see what it has to say regarding the last days of the world and what they
will look like before the return of Christ. Anyone who says they heard from the
Lord, yet what they say is contrary to His word, is a liar from the start.
There need be no further investigation, study, or introspection regarding what
they spoke. They contradicted the Bible; therefore, what they said is
demonstrably false.
It’s not as though the Bible doesn’t paint a picture of what
the last days will look like; it’s that we don’t like the picture it paints. We
would rather find reasons and excuses not to believe the words of Jesus because
His words are troubling to our flesh and dismantle our preconceived notions
regarding the days we’re living in than humble ourselves and prepare our hearts
for what He says will be.
The most remarkable prophecy regarding the last days has been
dismissed by the modern-day church because they fail to give it more than a
superficial reading and understand that Jesus foretells of two separate events
during two separate time periods: one concerning the destruction of the temple
and the other concerning the end of the age and His return.
Context matters. Without context, we will misinterpret simple
truths and dismiss wisdom and revelation we ought to take to heart and
remember.
It is essential to know what the future holds, if not in
full, then in part, because knowing what is to be will keep us from being
anxious and fearful and prevent the enemy from sowing doubt in our hearts. If I
know all the cities I’m going to drive through before I reach my destination, I
don’t have to wonder whether I’m on the right highway, if I missed a turn, or
if I failed to take the right exit along the way. I’m seeing what I expected to
see on my way to where I was heading, and so I rest easy, secure in the
knowledge that this is the way.
There has been much debate about Christ’s prophecy in
Matthew, commonly known as the Olivet Discourse, which is likewise echoed in
Luke. Much of the controversy stems from men’s inability to see what is clearly
there. The key to understanding lies in the questions the disciples asked Jesus
as they sat on the Mount of Olives because they centered on two events at
different times.
Why is this relevant? In short, we have a generation of believers thinking that utopia is just around the corner when the opposite is about to be unleashed upon the world. While we are rubbing our hands in expectation of mass revivals, Jesus warns of persecution and betrayal. While we wait for the world to get better, it’s only getting worse, just as Jesus said it would.
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
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