Nearing Midnight
16 June 2025
Published on: June 14, 2025 by RR10
A Time to Comfort
We’re living in a time of prophetic dichotomy. That is, we’re in a moment very similar to a time Bible prophecy says things will be like when humanity experiences the end of this Age of Grace.
This dichotomy—a significant difference between two things that otherwise should match up—is that things on the economic front seem headed in a positive direction. All the while, things tending toward nuclear war and global cataclysm seem to be surging into the most terrible time of human history.
Despite reports of developing economic collapse and shortages amounting to famine-like conditions, reports to the contrary tell of ports full of shipments and shelves full of products here in America. At the same time, there’s no getting around it: The rumors of war—and war itself—seemingly can’t be avoided. That war would, the experts say, quickly make the leap to the nuclear variety. Life on earth will, if this happens, mean the end of humankind at some point.
Jesus Himself has told of such a scenario. He said if He didn’t return to put an end to the destruction, no “flesh” would “be saved” (Matthew 24:22). The Lord also said people will be buying, selling, marrying, planting, and building when He is next revealed and intervenes into the affairs of wicked humankind. He said it will be business as usual—not all-out nuclear war or world-rending famine—at the moment of that intervention (Luke 17:28-30).
While this president is, I believe, about to be instrumental in producing an economic boom in business like the conditions the cultural immorality-vexed Lot was experiencing in his days in Sodom, at the same time. we seem to be poised for nuclear extinction. We indeed face a genuine dichotomy!
In regard to the building movement toward war, a recent news item adds enlightenment to the predicament:
[British Labour PM Sir Keir] Starmer, Macron, new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, plus the unelected EU apparatus under Ursula von der Leyen all seem to be avid for war with Russia. They are insane, of course, and not just because their combined militaries are a joke. They stirred the pot badly over the weekend, helping Ukraine carry out drone attacks against Russian air defense bases as far afield as Siberia and outside Murmansk, way up north on the Barents Sea. The bold attack was apparently carried out after a year-and-a-half of planning, using tractor-trailer trucks to transport concealed drones in on-board shipping containers deep into Russia. The drones took out Russian aircraft enabled to launch cruise missiles and long-range radar detection planes, all tolled estimated at $7-billion damage. The gambit would have required NATO satellite targeting assistance.
You might recall a week ago, Chancellor Merz declared that Germany gave Ukraine “permission” to carry out long-range strikes into Russia. Smooth move, Friedrich. He is, apparently, unaware that in so doing, he automatically gave Russia permission to strike deep into Germany as well, which Russia has not yet done. Instead, it replied with missile strikes against Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv, little more than a routine smack-back, but perhaps an ominous prelude to worse in the offing…
Russia wants to conclude this war. Mr. Trump wants to end it, too. Mr. Zelenskyy, maybe not so much, since his fate is only secure as long as the war keeps going and he is not overthrown by his own wingmen.
Neither the US nor the NATO / EU axis will participate in the Istanbul peace talks directly, but you can suppose that Merz, Macron, Starmer, and von der Leyen are looking to stir the pot in the background. You might conclude that war is all they’ve got left as summer draws near and each of them face a European population primed to explode at its feckless, noxious, incompetent leadership. I would expect much more fighting in the streets of the European capitals going forward, and falling governments. It could prove hard to put these Humpty Dumpties back together, with years of political chaos following. (“Bedlam Is in The Air,” Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, authored by James Howard Kunstler, The Widening Gyre, June 2, 2025)
So, it looks as if believers during this Age of Grace (Church Age) are confronted by what would, by the secular world of unregenerate minds, be considered a biblical contradiction. But since God cannot lie, and Jesus Christ is God, there can be no contradiction. There is an answer to the seeming prophetic dichotomy.
The explanation for this seeming division of Bible prophecy—on the one hand, business as usual, and on the other, world-rending catastrophism—is given by Jesus in His “days of Lot” prophecy.
The division—the prophetic dichotomy—is foretold and explained by Jesus in, again, what I believe is the most relevant of all prophecies for this exact moment.
“Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed” (Luke 17:28-30).
Here is Jesus’ explanation: “But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.”
The impending, world-rending war—the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads at present—is on heavenly hold until a certain condition is met. All believers in Jesus Christ—the only righteousness God sees on this fallen planet—must be, as was righteous Lot, removed before all-out war and destruction can begin falling in judgment.
God’s Word—which is Jesus’ Word, because He is the Word (John 1:1)—tells us, through the Apostle Paul, the truth wrapped up in this moment of removal. They are the words of our Lord when He presented a mystery to His immediate disciples while sitting atop the Mount of Olives:
“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:1-3).
The Holy Spirit commissioned the Apostle Paul to reveal that “mystery” Jesus told His immediate disciples that day.
Paul, saying, “Behold, I show you a mystery” (1 Corinthians 15:5), thus prophesied the following:
“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
There can be little doubt in the spiritual hearts and minds of believers who truly study God’s prophetic word and genuinely observe these times in which we live that our removal, our rescue—like Lot’s from Sodom—as Jesus and Paul said, must be at any moment.
Paul’s final word upon describing that Rapture promise was:
“Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:18).
Let us “look up and lift up our heads, for our redemption draws near” (Luke 21:28). Thus, we can find, and offer to others, great comfort in these exciting days of anticipation of Christ’s Words: “Come up here!”