As happens at least once a week, I get involved in a discussion concerning eschatology. What’s happening in Afghanistan and the push for a global reset is bringing out the prophecy pundits.
The following comment caught my attention:
Do you also blame the Roman empire on the present-day rush towards globalism, a global digital currency, and a global government? how does Nero factor into what you are seeing with your own eyes today? I know you gotta brand your trying to protect, but that brand is as useless as a Weimar deutchmark.
Here’s my response.
I suggest you read Frank Gumerlock’s book The Day and the Hour for a detailed study of nearly 2000 years of failed prophetic speculation. Where does the Bible talk about “global digital currency”? In what way is the “buy and sell language” of Revelation 13 about digital currency? How would the first readers of Revelation have understood that a digital currency was being prophesied?
When we let the Bible define buying and selling, we come away with a different meaning. Jesus mentions buying and selling in Matthew 21:12. There is certainly a literary connection. Revelation 13 is not describing a modern-day technological society because, in Revelation 6, the earth would have been destroyed by “the stars” that fell from the heavens “to the earth” (21:13). And if that didn’t mess things up, in Revelation 12, we read about a “great red dragon” whose “tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth” (12:3–4). How could the earth survive let alone keep track of people implanted with microchips or Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) implants after such devastation? If stars hit the earth, the earth would not exist. If these stars are meteorites, the destruction they would bring would wipe out civilization as we know it.
If stars are symbols, then so is what we read in Revelation 13. So are beasts and buying and selling. I’ve written on the meaning of “buying and selling” in “The Mark of the Beast and Buying and Selling.” It’s an eye-opener if you stick with the Bible and not engage in “Internet Exegesis.” If James Jordan is right (and I believe he is), then everything you’ve heard or read about buying and selling is most likely incorrect.
Even though the book of Revelation is fulfilled prophecy, it does not mean there are not principles that can be applied to our lives. Tyranny is tyranny, whether it was ecclesiastical tyranny in the first century when the religious leaders in Jesus’ day wanted Him (John 8:59) and His disciples dead (Acts 7–8) or maimed (2 Cor. 11:28) or political tyranny during the time of Nero and the lead up to the destruction of Jerusalem that took place in AD 70.
While we’re dithering about the “rapture,” Islamists are making plans for world domination. Taliban commander Muhammed Arif Mustafa told CNN: “It’s our belief that one day, mujahedin will have victory, and Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world.”
Eschatology and law matter. Also, our elected officials have been downplaying Islamic ascendancy since 9-11. “Islamaphobia” became the new watchword while white conservatives (including Christians) became the supposed real terrorist threat to the US and the world. So while this is going on, prophecy pundits are still preaching the “rapture of the church.” No worries, “since,” according to the late Jimmy DeYoung, “all Christians leave earth at the Rapture three and a half years before the mark comes into play.”
Some might ask, “But isn’t this all evidence that Jesus is coming soon?” No, it’s an indictment of a crippled biblical worldview and an escapist eschatology that is not taught in the Bible.
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