The Earth Post Rapture
For some reason deeply embedded in
the mind of Almighty God planet earth was chosen as
the battle ground against Satan. Sin originated in
heaven when Satan attempted to take the throne of God
(Isaiah 14; Ezekiel 28), but that is not where it will
end. Of course, he was defeated in that battle, but
the war was far from being over. Though Satan was unable
to capture the Throne Room of Heaven he did not quit.
Rebellion had been born, and God could not stop until
it had been destroyed. The initial skirmish had been
won, but the war for complete and permanent sovereignty
was still to be fought. And it would be fought on earth.
I believe God created the world as
we know it as recorded in Genesis at some point after
Satan’s rebellion. No one has any idea regarding the
eras of time that were involved in these matters. Time
as we know it did not then exist, and God has chosen
to not give us information regarding these events.
However, we do know some things. In a manner of speaking
the great eye of God scanned the vast emptiness and,
for whatever reason, He chose to create a small planet
where this whole sin/rebellion/redemption thing would
be played out. Earth is just a speck of cosmic dust
in the grand panorama of things, but a speck of dust
more important than all others because of the battle
being waged here.
At the beginning the earth was pristine
in every way. Adam and Eve were perfect and did not
ask for, nor even think of anything that might be lacking.
Until, that is, one day when the evil one approached
Eve while she was alone and put an idea into her mind
that had heretofore never been considered. In essence,
he suggested to her that if she would simply act in
rebellion against God she would become a goddess herself.
After all, it was not a big deal — just eating some
fruit, and besides, the benefit would overshadow any
retribution God might deal out to her. So she did it,
and so did Adam. Satan won that battle, and the rest
is history.
Fast forward to this present moment.
Judging from what we see when we place current events
over the template of the Bible, it looks like the grand
finale is nearly here. The next event on the schedule
is the rapture of the church when every Christian (in
the true sense of the word) will be taken from this
planet so quickly the time sequence will be impossible
to measure. And then it will happen. The events associated
with the last great battle will begin. (Yes, about
1007 years later another, and perhaps less significant,
skirmish will take place, but it will not last long.)
However, the big one will begin soon after the rapture,
and the earth as billions have know it for millennia
will be forever changed. This is called the tribulation,
and Jesus said nobody would survive if the time would
not be limited.
The tribulation period, also known
as the 70th week of Daniel chapter 9, will be a time
of unprecedented horror for those left behind. Anti-Christ
will appear, catastrophic geological changes will occur,
oceans and seas will be ruined, the world economy will
collapse, God’s righteous judgment will be poured out
and untold multitudes will die from war, famine, disease
and an animal world gone berserk. Revelation 6-19 describes
these events.
The disappearance of the church in
itself will throw this planet into a level of chaos
that is impossible to imagine at this point. Nobody
knows how many will be taken. Millions? Hundreds of
millions, or billions? We simply do not know. But,
this we do know: it will put this world on its head
in more ways than one.
The disappearance of multitudes will
impact different countries in different ways, but the
net result will be felt worldwide. In countries where
relatively few people are Christians the infrastructure
will see little immediate change. Saudi Arabia and
other Moslem countries are strongly anti-God by official
policy. That means there are few Christians there,
and hardly any of those are in critical government,
military and industrial positions. The same can be
said about China, North Korea, etc. Again, this is
a relative evaluation, and the principle is broadly
applied.
Though America is basically in the
toilet spiritually speaking, yet there are many Christians
scattered about in most every field, even possibly some
in Congress (tongue-in-cheek). Our military has many
believers, and at least some of those are in the senior
NCO and general officer ranks. When the rapture occurs
it is quite possible our Armed Forces will go to a very
high state of readiness, not knowing what happened and
what to expect. If a number of commanders in critical
positions are taken several things will happen.
First, the chain of command will be
broken. To civilians that means little, but to those
familiar with threat-response-protocol it means a lot.
Intelligence-gathering will be affected, and the loss
of some top-level analysts will seriously hinder the
government’s ability to accurately sort out what has
happened. This will cause panic, and panicky people
are apt to go off half-cocked. Strategic and tactical
communications will probably be affected. Whatever
information that will be available will go up and down
the chain of command with a lot of distortion. Indecision,
doubt and a whole lot of second-guessing will most probably
be running amuck — a dangerous thing at any time, and
especially so then.
The stock markets of the world will
probably drop like a rock with investors pulling out
of everything while they try to figure out what has
become valuable or worthless in a matter of just a few
hours or less. Even when drastic swings in the global
markets can be explained logically, financial panic
still has a way of making everything go to pieces.
This, however, will be compounded at the rapture for
at least two reasons. Multitudes will suddenly disappear
before the very eyes of throngs of people, some of whom
will be big cogs in big wheels in big industry. Piles
of clothes along with jewelry, dental fillings, pace-makers,
etc. will lie rumpled in the exact place where just
a nano-second before an associate was standing. In
less than a eye-blink they will be gone. And secondly,
99% of those who see it will not have a clue as to what
and why this has happened. The suddenness of this inexplicable
event will be further complicated by those religious
leaders left behind who will lie and use deception to
answer the questions multitudes will ask.
Civil authority and emergency response
systems will be in shambles. Several days ago a disgruntled
customer at a fast-food place called 911 because the
burger-joint had run out of their favorite meal—chicken
nuggets! We are amused at this person whom we might
label as an absolute, pedigreed and full-blown idiot,
but we must not miss the lesson to be learned here.
What do you think that same person, and tens of millions
of others, will do when the rapture happens? Put into
the equation the number of Christians that are in public
safety professions and you have chaos at warp speed.
And we cannot leave out the criminal
element. They, of course, will be left behind and it
won’t take them very long to see this situation can
be used to their advantage. They will not care about
what happened or why. They will only see opportunity,
and with emergency response agencies operating at minimum
at best the sewer-dregs of society will embark on a
campaign of civil terror few alive today have seen.
It will come down to survival of the strongest and smartest.
And with socialistic programs in place that disarm the
populace it will be like shooting fish in a barrel for
the criminal element.
It could be that burglary will become
less common because criminals will not even try to avoid
personal contact with their victims with the net result
being an increase in armed robbery and aggravated battery.
Murder will probably be committed with an air of casualness
(as is often the case presently), and sexual assault
could be on the scale of that which happened in chaotic
eastern Germany as the Red Army swept through in the
spring of 1945.
And, we must not forget what will happen
to the Jews. The Holocaust will be just a little second-string
warm-up compared to the post-rapture situation. The
anti-Christ will hate Jews with a seething passion that
would be the envy of Hitler and Ahmadinejad. Anti-Semitism
will eventually become public policy, and people will
jump on the band-wagon with vim and vigor. Why? Because
all anti-Semitism is satanic in nature. Second, it
will be to everyone’s economic, social and professional
advantage to cooperate with the a/c in his program of
genocide. Third, the a/c will use the same tactic Hitler
used in 1933 — point the finger of blame at the Jews
for everybody’s pain and suffering. Everybody, except
those sheep nations of Matthew 25, will be quite pleased
to involve themselves in the new world fuhrer’s brilliant
plan to finally rid the planet of the real reason for
the world’s problems. “If we could just get rid of
all Jews”, they will think, “then everything will be
ok.”
In Nazi Europe synagogues were burned,
and at times scores of Jews were herded into the buildings
to be burned alive as the flaming structures fell upon
them. Multitudes were shot while standing at the edge
of open pits so their bodies would fall into the hole
— that way there was no valuable time wasted dragging
corpses, you see.
Diseases will take their toll. Today
a simple infection can be simply treated by a simple
anti-biotic with little time lost and no real inconvenience.
However, when the drug is not available due to disasters
like earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tornadoes, civil
chaos, etc., then those simple infections can result
in death. That which is today very simple will then
become both complex and deadly.
And one other thing about the post-rapture
earth — consider the mark of the beast. This mark must
be taken by everyone in order to buy or sell. When
people take his mark they automatically sign their own
admission papers to a burning hell for eternity (Revelation
14:9-11). And they will do so with full knowledge of
what they are doing, for the gospel will be declared
to the post-rapture earth by the two witnesses, the
144,000 Jewish evangelists and an angelic herald. Put
simply, what this means is people who need to buy anything
for health and survival — anything at all!!! — must
have the mark. How many will be willing to allow themselves
or their loved ones to die for lack of food, medicine,
etc., in order to not take the mark? What about a parent
with a dying child that is born in that time? Further,
the head of the apostate church will force everyone
to take the mark or have their heads cut off, like it
or not (Revelation 13:16).
We must understand something very clearly:
the post-rapture earth will not be different simply
because Christians will be gone. It will be more than
just a missing-persons kind of thing. People will suffer
in unspeakable ways and will die horrible deaths from
natural disasters, disease, war, starvation, aggressive
animals and crime. While in college years ago a friend
told me he wanted to stay behind at the rapture in order
to preserve law and order “down here”. I could not
decide which word best described him, ignorant or foolish
— or both.
Let there be no misunderstanding.
The church has always experienced tribulation, and will
continue to do so until Jesus returns for her. However,
she will not be given over to the situation above.
Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus! DLM
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