Do Not Fear the End Times Part 44: Do We still Have Time for Dreams?

If these are the End Times, and Jesus Christ is coming back soon, then should we give up on all the dreams we have? Should we forget about the goals we want to reach, but haven’t reached yet?

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Previous End Times Post

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Hello Readers, hope all’s well. Time for another Friday End Times post.

The knowledge that we’re in the final days, the end of the End Times is discouraging to many people. It’s especially discouraging to anyone who is focused only on the physical world and our lives in it. Oh by the way, that category includes some Christians!

But even with the promise of God’s new world, a new heaven and a new earth, the knowledge that this is the End can still be discouraging, even to Christians. And why is that?

It’s quite simple: Dreams we haven’t achieved yet, things we haven’t done and might never do now. We don’t want to die without doing this or that thing. We have this or that goal that we never achieved. We Hope to experience these things before this world ends. But the knowledge that we’re in the final days can make us sad, thinking that we’ll never have a chance now to do what it is we want.

Well that’s what today’s post is about. If these are the End Times, and Jesus Christ is coming back soon, then should we give up on all the dreams we have? Should we forget about the goals we want to reach, but haven’t reached yet?

Let’s talk about it.

What’s the Point now?

With the knowledge that these days are the end of the End Times, we may be asking ourselves tough questions about what to do with the rest of our lives. If Jesus Christ is soon to return, and the world is soon to be destroyed, should we even bother to plan a future?

Here are some common questions we might ask ourselves now:

• Should I bother to get married (or even get into a relationship)?
• Should we have children?
• Should I start a business (or other major life projects)?
• Should I bother to go to college (etc.)?
• And so on

I’ve asked myself most of these questions, so if you’ve wondered the same things you’re not alone.

For me the fear and concern revolves around Matthew 24:19. Matthew 24 of course is when Jesus describes to the Disciples what the End Times will be like. This is called the Great Suffering. In verse 19, Jesus says:

(19) How terrible it will be at that time for women who are pregnant and for women who are nursing their children.

Matthew 24:19 (CEB)

So this is the verse that makes me concerned. I don’t want to get married, and have a baby, only for my wife and child to then face death in the Great Suffering. It’s not right for me to do that, not right for me to help create life only for that child to face immediate death in the Great Suffering. And so it seems like the best thing to do is not get married, and not have children, right? It seems like the best thing to do is give up on that dream of mine.

Well after spending much time thinking about it, that answer seems a little too obvious for my taste. My thinking has changed, and I’ll tell you why.

Scripture Is Clear: No One Knows

Should I plan a life? Should I plan a future? I’ll be as clear as I can. My answer is: Yes!

Yes, we should plan our lives. Yes, we should plan for the future. Yes, we should hold on to our dreams if they’re Biblical and in line with God’s will (a marriage is one example of that). And yes, we should pursue those dreams and take steps toward them.

But how can I say that? Me, 99:9, a guy who writes a blog about the End Times and at least once a week reminds you that Jesus Christ is coming soon!?

Well there are a few passages in Scripture that make me think there’s still some time, as well as my own personal experiences of the last two years. Let’s start by looking at Scripture.

Staying in Matthew 24, in verse 36 Jesus spoke a famous line that we need to accept and understand. WE DON’T KNOW WHEN THE END WILL COME. NO ONE KNOWS. No one knows besides God.

(36) “But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows.

Matthew 24:36 (CEB)

False prophets trip and stumble on this concept. They make prophecies claiming the world will end on this or that day, only to be proven wrong when that day comes and goes. We know from Deuteronomy 18:21-22 that if a prophet makes a prophecy that doesn’t happen, the LORD did not give them that prophecy. If the LORD didn’t give them the prophecy, then it most likely came from Baal, the pagan god of divination and false prophecy.

(21) Now, you might be wondering, How will we know which word God hasn’t spoken? (22) Here’s the answer: The prophet who speaks in the LORD’s name and the thing doesn’t happen or come about—that’s the word the LORD hasn’t spoken. That prophet spoke arrogantly. Don’t be afraid of him.

Deuteronomy 18:21-22 (CEB)

In Part 2 and Part 22, I wrote about Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. These two Mormon false prophets had a prophecy of the world ending sometime in July, 2020. Obviously that didn’t happen, and so these two were easily proven as false prophets. But if you read those two posts I linked, you’ll see that Vallow and Daybell fell deep into sin through the demonic deception they were following. They even killed Vallow’s own children for some reason. That’s a warning and an example of how following false prophecy and forgetting Matthew 24:36 can lead to horrible sin.

Attention: Everybody. Stop trying to predict a date for the Second Coming! Stop trying to predict the day or the hour! Scripture tells us that we simply don’t know, and we can’t know.

So this brings us back to the point of the post. If the world is ending, why should I plan a life, a future? Well one answer is that we don’t know when The End will come. We know it’s soon, but we don’t know it’s so soon that we shouldn’t plan a life and purse some Biblical dreams. Because God’s time is not the same as our time.

That brings us to the next Scripture verse. A single day for the LORD is like a thousand of our years, and a thousand years are like a single day for the LORD (2 Peter 3:8).

(8) Don’t let it escape your notice, dear friends, that with the Lord a single day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a single day. (9) The Lord isn’t slow to keep his promise, as some think of slowness, but he is patient toward you, not wanting anyone to perish but all to change their hearts and lives.

2 Peter 3:8-9 (CEB)

2 Peter 3 tells us how the Second Coming of Christ will seem delayed to the people of earth. This is one of the key things we know about The End: It will seem delayed. But 2 Peter 3 explains that it’s not slow or delayed, it’s coming in God’s time. And God’s time is different than ours. A single day for the LORD is like one thousand of our years.

God is seeming to delay it, but only for our sake. He wants us to change our hearts and lives! He wants us to turn to Him! He doesn’t want to damn us to hell! He wants to give us every last chance He can, for you and for me. He wants every last sinner possible to REPENT and come to Him. That’s why He appears to delay His return—because of His mercy.

So we can be on the world’s final day right now, and as long as Jesus returns by the year 3000 He would still be on time! Now to be honest, I don’t think that will be the case. I believe, like many other Christians, that the LORD is coming soon. Any year now … He’s coming back soon. Too many people are having rapture dreams, too many signs from Revelation are coming to pass, and so on. So I’m not serious when I say the year 3000. But all I’m saying is He might come much later than we’re expecting. Just something to keep in mind.

Anyway, to finish off with Scripture for today, let’s go back to Matthew 24. So we don’t know the day or the hour. OK, but that’s no problem. Because we already know what we need to do: We need to be ready at all times. All we need to worry about is following God’s commandments and REPENTING of our sins. That’s all we need to worry about because that’s all we can do. The good news for us is that’s enough. (Because doing these things for God’s sake implies we have Faith in Him. But we should profess our Faith too.)

So let’s not worry about how long we have left until the Second Coming. There’s no need for the anxiety. We already know what we need to do—Obey God’s commandments. So let’s focus on doing that all the time, and on REPENTING of our sins, and we’ll be ready. This message is also in Luke 12, and I wrote a post on this topic in Part 6.

(42) Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know what day the Lord is coming. (43) But you understand that if the head of the house knew at what time the thief would come, he would keep alert and wouldn’t allow the thief to break into his house. (44) Therefore, you also should be prepared, because the Human One will come at a time you don’t know.

Matthew 24:42-44 (CEB)

So look … all I’m saying is we might have some more time than we expect. Yes, I know and believe this is the final generation. We are in the End of the End Times—The End isn’t near, The End Is Now. And yet, I still think it’s OK for now to plan a future and plan a life. My own life the past two years speaks to that.

My Own Walk

My personal experiences the last two years, going through many ups and downs and coming back to Christ, has taught me beyond a doubt that Jesus loves me and He’s guiding me. He’s guiding me, protecting me, teaching me, and preparing me. I’ve told Him what I want, marriage and children, and He is preparing me for that.

I accepted Jesus in my life as my LORD and Savior, and since then, He has been educating me. He has given me a kind of education my earthly father never did. He has shown me weaknesses in my character, and the emotional wounds in my heart. He has shown me the source of those emotional wounds, going back to childhood. He has shown me how to heal from those wounds.

He has pointed me to Scripture, to see what He expects of me in a marriage. 1 Timothy 3:2-13 lays out the expectations for a Biblical man and father. Jesus pointed me there, so I can work on becoming that (it’s not easy, not at all). He pointed me to Proverbs 31:10-31, so I could see what a Biblical kind of woman is like. I learned a harsh lesson last year, 2019, on only looking at surface-level beauty and not judging people on their character (which is only shown through their actions). But now I know, from Proverbs 31, what to really look for.

Jesus, through His Holy Spirit, has given me the education I never got. He has healed me, shown me my weaknesses and wounds, and set me to work on them. He has guided me and directed me so I can build myself up, through His power. He has shown me the world of spiritual warfare and demons, and how to fight through prayer. He has been with me all the way. He has been building me up.

So I have one very simple question. Why would He do that for me, if He wasn’t getting me ready to handle the blessing of a Christian marriage? Why would He bother going through the process of educating me and building me up, if He wasn’t getting me ready to handle that blessing?

That question tells me that I’m not wrong to keep pursuing my dream. I don’t know for sure that I’ll receive that blessing before the Second Coming—I can’t know anything like that for sure. But I truly and honestly believe that this blessing is coming, because I so strongly feel the LORD preparing me for it. So until then I’m staying focused on what I’m doing, this blog being one of those things.

And if He’s preparing me for it, I can only assume there will be some time for enjoying it. Surely not as much as I’d like, but perhaps a little longer than I’m expecting. Who knows? Only God the Father, and no one else.

I know from a personal prophetic dream given to me by the Holy Spirit that this world will last until at least 2022. The details of the dream are irrelevant for now (it was personal). But I know from the dream that this world will still exist in 2022. But that knowledge doesn’t give me any clue to when the Second Coming will be and this world will end. All it tells me is that this world will not end before 2022. That Jesus won’t come before 2022. So let’s be honest … that doesn’t tell me anything!

If all I can say is the Second Coming won’t happen before 2022, that doesn’t narrow things down one bit. The future is wide open in that case, and the possibilities are endless. No one knows the day or the hour. So if we have a dream, let’s pray on it to the LORD, follow His guidance, take the steps toward making it happen, and see how it goes!

How do we know we won’t have time for it?

The Bottom Line: Have Hope

You may have seen my newest series on this blog, Victory in Virtue, in which I write about Virtues and Vices. In Part 2: Hope, which discusses the Virtue of Hope, I explained the importance of holding on to Hope at all costs. I said that “Once Hope is gone, the joy of life soon follows.” And I also said that:

[…] despair is a temptation of the devil, and despair is of the devil. Discouragement is a temptation of the devil as well. Despair and discouragement go against the Virtue of Hope. The devil wants us to despair, he wants us to be discouraged. He wants us to think that what we’re doing isn’t working, he wants us to think our dreams will never be achieved. He wants us to give up.

Hope is a vital theological Virtue, and Hope is the bottom-line message of today’s post. We have to Hope, and hold on to Hope.

Don’t get fooled by false prophets—remember Matthew 24:36! WE SIMPLY DON’T KNOW WHEN JESUS WILL RETURN. And that’s it. So how do we know that we won’t have time to achieve our dreams? How do we know we won’t have time to get married, start a business, or whatever it is? We have our suspicions and our warnings and our signs. But in the end, the message of Scripture is clear: We don’t know. No one does.

What we know is that we need to obey God’s commandments, and be ready for Him to return at all times. That means reading the Word, living by God’s laws, and REPENTING of our sins. If we’re doing that, we’ve done all that we can to prepare. So once we’ve taken care of being “rapture ready,” obeying God’s commandments at all times like Luke 12 says to, then why shouldn’t we start some life projects we want to take on?

These are the End Times, so if we’re going to go for any of our dreams, we’d better do it now! We won’t get another chance. And if the Great Suffering happens and Jesus returns while we’re in the middle of doing this, then hey, we’ll suffer and die and what will it matter in the end? At least we tried to get that dream. And once we die our true life begins. So what’s there to worry about?

Until that day comes, and no one knows when, let’s dare to have Hope, pray to the LORD about our dreams, follow His guidance, and go for them with all our energy.

Should I plan a life in these End Times? Should I plan a future at all? Should I start this or that life project?

You know my answer now. It’s a clear “Yes!”

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Until next time, be strong and do good!

Your new best friend in Christ,

99:9

<<<EXALT THE LORD OUR GOD AND WORSHIP AT HIS HOLY HILL; FOR THE LORD OUR GOD IS HOLY>>>

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