Considering Emerging End-Time Signs: Part 2 :: By Gene Lawley

There is a unique passage of Scripture that has displayed openly for centuries the outline of God’s plan for major events of the Christian gospel’s duration. It is the presentation of the seven feasts of the Lord, which God told Moses to put on the Jewish calendar, recorded in Leviticus 23. The world has basically ignored those seven days as something the Jews do, but others have no interest in them.

As outlined in Leviticus 23 and again in Numbers 28, they are spread across the annual calendar, starting with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the first three feasts or festivals. They start on the fourteenth day of their first month, Nisan, the Passover feast; the fifteenth day, Unleavened Bread for seven days; and a third holy day. These are Passover, Unleavened Bread, and the third one not named. They parallel the historical events of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. They occur on the Gentile calendar about the middle of March.

These feasts, called convocations (meaning rehearsals), picture the highlights of a farmer’s annual growing and harvest seasons—planting, cultivation, early harvest, and late harvest for the first five of the seven festivals. Those first three festivals picture the planting of the seed. Jesus related Himself to that in John 12:24: “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” Jesus died (was planted), and the seed of His gospel has been reproduced in millions of believers in the world over the centuries since.

Some Bible Prophecy experts believe the fifth feast represents Jesus’ return in the clouds to receive those in resurrected form who have believed in Him. This year, it occurs on September 16-17. It is followed this year by the UN Security Council meeting on September 18-19 in New York to establish a seven-year Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) plan. “It will mark the beginning of a new phase of accelerated progress towards the SDG high-level political guidance on transformation and accelerated actions leading up to 2030,” so says the plan.

In other words, the New World Order advocates intend to transform the world’s population into submissive slaves of that elite, self-appointed, and “more equal” leadership.

In Daniel 9:26-27, the prince of Roman heritage will take over and will (no doubt with many UN members) provide a seven-year peace covenant with Israel. (It was the UN Security Council that established the new state of Israel in 1948, and it appears that it could be those again who will set up the peace agreement.) Why would they do that? The goal of the SDG above is to bring unity to the world under a one-world government. Peace in the Middle East would likely be the first item on the list. Entry into the mix shortly thereafter will come the Gog-Magog invasion of Israel, to be discussed later.

It is my understanding that the lawless one who is coming will not be one now in an obscure European country but one who is well known and readily acceptable by those left behind when the Rapture occurs. Back in 1954, the UN leadership was desperate for “a man, be he god or devil, who will lead us out of these difficulties, and we will accept him.” Waiting in the wings is that man, waiting until the falling away leaves the world ready for his brand of law and order and acceptable living principles. We know what that will be like as we observe the rapidly dwindling moral integrity in the world. Jesus said, in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”

Another sign is the consistency of God’s method of allowing the evil leaders to pronounce and activate the death of children and then people of all ages as His plan heads toward a major change in its forward movement. As He was ready to move the children of Israel out of Egypt, and an evil pharaoh demanded the Israeli midwives to kill any male child at the birthing as they assisted in it. They reported to Pharoah that the Hebrew women were so able with birthing that the babies were already born when the midwives arrived.

Moses, as you know, was saved by his mother when she left him in a basket in the river where Pharoah’s daughter found him and claimed him for her own son. It did take eighty years for the Jews to be willing to leave Egypt’s slavery and hardship.

Then, when Jesus was born and the wise men from the East came two years later to worship Him, Herod learned of their timing and ordered that all Jewish boys under two years were to be killed, lest this new “King of the Jews” could rise up and take over his domain. God told Joseph to take Mary and the Child to Egypt for safety. After Herod died, he was told to return to Judea. The great change in God’s operative plan was to introduce the New Covenant in Christ’s blood, leaving the Old Covenant of obedience to the law for acceptance by God. Israel had vowed to keep that Covenant, but it never worked, for their works were never sufficient. Faith through grace was, and is, and always has been the way to God’s acceptance.

The next major change in God’s operative came as a result of His promise to “scatter them into all the countries of the world” as punishment for their rejection of Him in constant disobedience over the Old Testament period of Jewish history. As the Prophets declared that punishment, they also told of God’s plan to restore the Jews to their own land that was promised to Abraham.

The scattering into all the world took place when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 A.D., taking 65 years until the city was left empty of Jewish people. It remained a totally desolate province for 1,800 years. The Turks tried to homestead the land for 300 years but could not because annual rainfall was practically absent. Mark Twain, visiting there in 1853, called it “the most desolate place on earth.” It was God’s method of keeping the land intact for His promised restoration of His Jewish people there.

During the First World War, Jewish people befriended the British, who were engaged in warfare in that region, and they were rewarded by the British with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that set aside the land of Palestine as the land of the Jews. It was not until May 14, 1948, that the UN Security Council voted to establish a sovereign nation known as Israel, the permanent home of the Jews. But this is where that method of God’s operative again came into action. How was God going to arouse Jewish people in all of those scattered nations to want to return to their new nation? They would have become deeply embedded into the cultures, even the political fabric of those different countries.

Just as God had allowed Satan to test Job’s faith integrity, He allowed a man to rise up with a hatred of the Jews, Adolf Hitler, who would create a Holocaust of death to six million or more Jews wherever they could be found in the European countries the Nazis had conquered. I suspect that many do not put the two issues together in this way, but God knew by foreknowledge that the new nation would soon be available for their return. It was a horrible time for Jewish people and those Gentiles who helped them hide from the Nazis. All during those years of disobedience in Old Testament times, when the Jews turned away from the Lord, He allowed others to conquer them with bloodshed and resulting slavery. It was God’s method to turn their hearts to Him.

So now you ask, “What is the current possible sign?” What is the next great movement of God in His plan for the ages? It seems to be that the bigger the coming movement, the greater the “awakening method” turns out to be. The incessant cry for total abortion rights without any restrictions, billed as “a woman’s reproductive health” issues, has reached a level of about 62 million deaths in America, the supposed citadel of liberty and justice for all.

No one in that movement of pro-abortion wants to accept the basic truth that a child is begun at conception. It is living a lie and perhaps is the sign of a change in God’s ongoing plan when millions more will be taken to meet the Lord in the air when the Rapture occurs. That event will include all who have been saved in Christ since His resurrection, all who are still alive, and, by God’s great mercy and justness, all those who have been aborted in the womb or have died before they could have known to acknowledge the Lord.

His promise to that end is in Matthew 18:14, as He said in precise words: “Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”

Jesus said, “You do not know the day or the hour of His coming, neither the angels nor the Son of Man.” After He rose from the grave, He was given all judgment by the Father, so He, Jesus, knows what day He will come “as a thief in the night.” When Paul was writing to the Thessalonians in his first epistle, he finished his thoughts on the manner of the Rapture in verse 18 of chapter 4, then went on with this: “But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you.” Why not? Perhaps it’s because the evidence of telling events will show in their own timing, as Jesus said in Luke 21:28, “When these things begin to happen, look up, for your redemption draws near.”

Then he writes, “For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night,” and there seems to be a break in the continuity of events. His attention is switched to those who can only be the Jews who have been looking for peace for years, especially since May 14, 1948.

But there is another major sign to be explored before looking further into the Jewish people’s coming events, in Part 3.

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