Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 10080. Date setting has a long and embarrassing history in the church, and it keeps coming back because the longing underneath it is real. We want the Lord to come. We read the prophetic Scriptures, we glance at the news, and something in us wants to close the gap between promise and fulfilment by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10076. The role of Israel during the tribulation is central rather than incidental. That seven-year period is not primarily about the nations, the beast or even the judgements. Jeremiah calls it “a time of distress for Jacob,” and Daniel says the seventy sevens were decreed about “your people and your holy city.” Once the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10075. Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy is, to my mind, the single most remarkable predictive passage in the Old Testament. In four verses Gabriel gives Daniel a measured period of 490 years for the nation of Israel, sets out what it will accomplish, divides it into three unequal portions, and pins its starting point to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10069. Will a third temple be rebuilt in Jerusalem? I believe the answer is yes, and not because of anything in the newspapers. Several prophecies about the last days assume a functioning sanctuary standing on that site, with sacrifices being offered in it and a man of appalling arrogance eventually desecrating it. That said,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10065. Is modern Israel prophetically significant? My answer is a carefully qualified yes. I believe the return of Jewish people to the land, and the existence of a Jewish state there since 1948, sits squarely within the pattern of what the prophets said would happen before God finishes His programme with that nation. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10046. The Antichrist is a coming world ruler who will oppose God, deceive the nations, persecute the saints, and set himself up as an object of worship during the tribulation. When people ask me who he is, they usually want a name, and that is exactly the one thing I cannot and will not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10039. The time of Jacob’s trouble is a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah that describes the coming Tribulation as it falls upon the nation of Israel, and it is one of the clearest windows we have into the purpose of that terrible period. When I speak of Jacob’s trouble I mean the seven-year Tribulation…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10036. The times of the Gentiles and the fullness of the Gentiles sound almost identical, and they are constantly confused, yet they describe two quite different things in Scripture. When I speak of the times of the Gentiles I mean a period of Gentile political domination over Jerusalem and Israel, while the fullness of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10034. The bowl judgements in Revelation, sometimes called the vial judgements in older translations, are the last and most severe of the three great series of judgements in the Tribulation. Where the seal judgements and the trumpet judgements struck in part, the bowl judgements fall in full, for in them the wrath of God…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10033. The trumpet judgements in Revelation are the second great series of judgements that fall on the earth during the Tribulation, following the seal judgements and exceeding them in severity. When seven angels sound seven trumpets, one after another, the natural world is struck with devastating blows, and I want to take the trumpet…