Is Jesus about to return?
What are the prophetic signs saying? Welcome friends to the Line of Fire. This is Michael Brown here to equip you, here to empower you, help you to engage on the front lines as every single one of us these days we stand in the Line of Fire. But we're not alone. Jesus by his Spirit lives inside of us. We stand on a foundation of the Word of God and in him we are more than conquerors. We overcome. All this month we're going to be focusing on the end of time, the last days, the second coming of Jesus, Bible prophecy, opening up a lot of things you've really wanted to talk about and get into. We're going to do it right here on the Line of Fire this entire month.
Don't miss a single broadcast. And we'll be sharing a lot of content from the book I co-authored with Professor Craig Keener, one of the world's foremost New Testament scholars, but it's written on a level everyone can understand. It's called Not Afraid of the Antichrist, Why We Don't Believe in a Pretribulation Rapture. Now for those of you that are already like, wait, wait, wait, pretrib rapture is very important. And that's a fundamental biblical truth. Don't panic. We are going to lay out all the different perspectives.
We're going to make cases for different views of the end times and then help you sort things out for yourself. After all, the Bible, the Word of God, that's our authority. That's our teacher. That's what we live by. And not only will this series this month be informative, it'll also be inspirational. It'll also be practical. Speaking of practical, I want to make sure that you are getting everything that we are pouring out, pouring into you to infuse you with faith and truth and courage. So if you're not getting our monthly frontline newsletter, it is timely.
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So sign up if you're not getting our emails at thelineoffire.org. All right, before we dig into Scripture, and we're going to spend a lot of time in the Word, and then looking at headlines, looking at prophecy, and asking questions. What matters? What doesn't matter?
What's sensationalistic? What's biblical? Before we get into that, I just want to share some of my own background. Before I came to the Lord, many of you know I was a heavy drug user. I was using LSD, shooting speed, shooting heroin, playing drums in a rock band.
Heavy drug user from the ages of 14 to 16. It began gradually, became very intense, and got radically saved at the age of 16. My two best friends started going to a little gospel preaching church. They had been raised as completely nominal Christians.
I had been raised as a fairly nominal Jew, bar mitzvahed at the age of 13, but it didn't really have spiritual significance to me. Jesus had no role in any of our lives whatsoever, and they liked these two girls from their high school, from the high school we all went to. The girls were not raised in the Lord. Their mother was not a believer, but shortly after their marriage, their dad got saved, and their dad had been praying for them all their lives, but they weren't in the Lord. As teenagers, God started pulling on their hearts, and they started attending services at this church.
My two best friends, to hang out with the girls, went to the church services with them, and found them really interesting. Now on the one hand, it was a Pentecostal church, so they believed in praying for the sick. They believed in speaking in tongues, and so that was very different from my friends. They found that interesting, but what really got their attention was the pastor's preaching. He was preaching a lot out of the book of Revelation. He was talking about the end times. He was talking about the rapture, and the antichrist, and things like that. They began to talk to me about these things just because they found Bible prophecy fascinating. To be totally candid, as drug users, as people used to doing hallucinogenic drugs, especially the bass player John and myself, we found the visions really fascinating. Literally, I'm not exaggerating.
I'm not making this up. They would come home from a church service, and come over to my house to hang out at night. We couldn't play with our band late at night, loud, like we did during the day. They would take their amps and set them just real, real quiet, just a little volume so we could hear the bass and the guitar. I would take out a drum pad instead of my drum set, and I'd play along. We'd just quietly play and jam and stuff. They would tell me what they heard in church.
We'd be getting high. They weren't saved yet. They were just going to church services. They weren't saved yet. They would tell me, Mike, there's going to be a beast, seven heads, 10 horns. It's going to come out of a bottomless pit. At the end of the age, we're like, that's in the Bible?
Wow. We're sitting there getting high and hallucinating. Wow, that's in the Bible?
I kid you not. We'd say, what were they smoking back then? What was Moses smoking on Mount Sinai?
What did he see? We were unsaved. We were facetious, but the Bible started to become more interesting to us. Then God started to change my friends' hearts. Then they got serious about the Lord. They got born again.
They couldn't party and hang out with me the way I used to. Then God began to convict me of sin and then radically saved me by the end of 1971. I tell you that story to tell you that I heard about the second coming. I heard about this rapture that was going to take place and take us all out before I really even heard the gospel. This to me was as fundamental when I got saved as the basics of the gospel. Then, as a new believer, I'd hear more and more teaching about this. Some of you, if you're old enough to remember this, there was a best-selling book back then, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey.
I don't remember actually reading the book for myself back then, just little excerpts. But it was the talk of the day. What basically people were saying was, look, Bible prophecy is lining up. The things that were spoken of explicitly in scripture, they are all lining up today in front of our eyes. Look at it.
Wow. Jerusalem is back in Jewish hands. Remember, this is momentous. The Six-Day War in 1967, when the surrounding nations are about to attack Israel and it could be a war of annihilation. And Israel is able to strike first and basically in a day take out the entire air force of Egypt. And in six days, win this war, it was clear that God was with Israel. And now, Jerusalem back in Jewish hands, it seemed to be fulfillment of prophecy. But let's add to it.
Let's go a little further. Do you remember what was happening in the 60s? There is an old saying, if you remember the 60s, you weren't there.
Why? Because there was so much drug use and craziness that your mind was in a fog. So, I lived during that. Some of you listening to me now, you lived during it. Some of you listening, your parents or maybe your grandparents did. But it was a time of rebellion.
It was known as the counterculture revolution. And it was a time where suddenly the complexion of America changed. I mean, one day you've got kids who are patriotic and happy to serve in the military as their parents did so proudly in World War II. And now, you've got young generation, they're burning their draft cards. They're fleeing to Canada. There's a war in Vietnam.
Nobody wants to fight. The parents are saying, America, love it or leave it. The kids are saying, make love, not war. For the first time, there's this very significant generation gap and the youth kind of take on an identity of their own in a way beyond what the culture had known before. The 60s marked by sex, drugs, rock and roll, Eastern religion.
It was a counterculture revolution. Psychologist David Myers pointed out about 20 plus years ago that if you fell asleep in the year 1960 and woke up in the year 2000, you would see that the divorce rate had doubled. You would see the teen suicide had gone up three times. Prison population had gone up four times. Reported violent crime had gone up five times. Children born out of wedlock had gone up six times. People living together out of wedlock had gone up seven times. And most of the shift happened quite suddenly in the 60s and then began to work its way out in the decades that followed.
Well, why do I share all this with you? Because many Christians felt then that this is it. It's all over. This is the final apostasy that the Bible speaks about. This is the end of the age. Bible prophecy is falling into place and it's clear that things are only getting worse. We're out of here any minute. How many of you remember that if you're old enough to remember? That's the feeling I had when I got saved.
There is not much time left on the prophetic clock and we'll be out of here soon. In fact, our church being Pentecostal, where I got saved in 1971, we also believed that God would speak to people, prophecy, dreams. And this wasn't a major thing.
I never heard it from the pulpit. But there was one brother in the congregation named Ray. And let's just say he was probably in his mid 40s, maybe close to 50 at that point. And his mother was in her 80s. And we were told that Jesus told her, this is what we were told, that Jesus told her she wouldn't die without seeing the coming of the Lord. So, we would calculate, well, if she's like 80 something now, how old could she live?
I mean, if she lived to be 100, that's like 20 years from now. So, Jesus would be coming within 20 years. Now, we understood this was not Bible prophecy.
And like I said, it was never ever taught from the pulpit. But this was kind of in the back of your mind, like how much time is left. We come back. I want to tell you about something that happened to me. Maybe you can relate to it, but something that happened to me as a new believer that had to do with missing the rapture.
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Call 1-800-771-5584, 1-800-771-5584 or online at trivita.com. Thanks for joining us friends on the Line of Fire. This entire month, we're focusing on Bible prophecy. We're talking about the Second Coming.
We're talking about the end of the age. What does the Bible actually say? Are we believing popular myths just created by some Christian teacher? Are we really following scripture? Are we sure that there's a rapture before the Second Coming? Are we sure that the restoration of Israel is connected to prophecy? Are we sure that he's going to set up his kingdom on the earth? Are these biblical historic teachings?
Are they more fictional modern day teachings? We're going to unpack all of this. But I want to do it in a way that's fair to all. I want to do it in a way that's edifying to all. I want to do it in a way that even if you differ, will give you food for thought. And we'll be referring a lot to the book that Professor Craig Keener and I wrote, Not Afraid of the Antichrist.
At the end of the broadcast, I'll let you know how you can get your own copy of the book. So, I'm a new believer, now 1971, 1972. And one of the fundamentals that I've been taught just as much as I believe the Bible is the Word of God, just as much as I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose from the dead. I also believe that there's going to be a pre-trib rapture that we're going to be suddenly taken out.
And it could literally happen at any moment. And there were movies then before the Left Behind series of novels by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, before those were written and before some of the other Armageddon type movies came out. I remember Thief in the Night. And we watched this in our church. I remember in the six years I was in that congregation, we had many, many services, multiple services a week. But to my memory, I remember seeing two movies that we showed in the church. One was the cross and the switchblade story of the birth of David Wilkerson's ministry in New York City with Don Wilkerson, the birth of Teen Challenge, the conversion of Nikki Cruz.
Very, very powerful movie. And then, yeah, Pat Boone played David Wilkerson, right? And then the other movie I remember seeing in the church was Thief in the Night. If there were any others, I don't recall. And Thief in the Night, some of you saw it way back when.
Maybe it impacted you. I've met people that are solid in the Lord today. A seminary professor, among others, that got saved reading Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. And there was that excitement that he's coming, it's near, it's any moment. The prophecies are coming to pass, the handwriting is on the wall. And Thief in the Night, in the movie, there's a woman left behind. She wakes up and realizes her husband's been raptured, just disappeared. She wakes up screaming. And I remember a friend of mine that led to the Lord in high school, his mother was there that night. And she came up, responded to the altar call.
She didn't want to be left behind. And it was terrifying, this notion that, you know, here you're going to be just going about the middle of a day because it's suddenly, it's without any signs. It's out of the blue. And we'll look at that. We'll look at the scriptures supporting a preacher of rapture. We'll look at verses that say, that don't support it. We'll analyze it together.
We'll work through these verses and concepts together. But the concept was that there's no warning to it. So literally, it could just be in the middle of a radio broadcast. But suddenly, suddenly, everything just seems to be going on, normal life. Suddenly, the pilot in your plane has disappeared. And 20 people on the plane disappeared. And here's a baseball game going on. And half the players on one team, there's a lot of Christians on the team, they just disappeared.
One of the umps disappeared. And people, thousands of the stands disappear. Cars are crashing because people are just being pulled out of cars and we're being raptured. Suddenly, we disappear. And that's when the people left behind realized this was this rapture thing these Christians were talking about. So we heard a lot about that. And it kind of, kind of hung over you. You didn't want to miss the rapture. Some of you have lived like that for 50 years. I'm not mocking it.
I'm just saying this is something that hung over us as new believers. So somewhere along the way, I'm saved a year, maybe at this point. And it's time to switch the clocks. And I forget to do it. So now, it's just automatic. You know, your cell phone is automatically going to switch when you jump ahead an hour or fall back an hour.
Right? So this is, this is when the clocks changed. And I, I forgot to reset my clock. So that meant this particular time, because we gained an hour, right? We fell back.
So it's probably the fall of 72. So we gained an hour. I got up an hour early and headed to church on Sunday morning, an hour early. Now, normally we had Sunday school.
Then we had, then we had service, right? That was the Sunday schedule. So maybe you maybe you'd have a hundred people on a Sunday morning. Maybe that'd be max what you'd have about a hundred people on a Sunday morning. And for Sunday school, maybe you have about 15 people, something like that for the adult Sunday school class, maybe 10, but I show up and no one is there.
There is not a car at the building. So what's the very first thought I had? I missed the rapture. Well, I hadn't been in sin. It's not like I was carousing and drinking or, or doing drugs the night before, but maybe something happened. Maybe I wasn't ready enough and that your heart pounds for a second.
And then, you know, I just sat and waited and then finally realized what had happened. But many of you remember living like that. Why? Because he's coming any moment. And that's how you live right now. He could be coming any moment and suddenly we're out of here. I want to ask questions biblically and ask, is that what scripture teaches? We absolutely should live in readiness of the return of the Lord. Let me say this again. We absolutely should live in readiness of the return of the Lord with expectation because of his return, but should we live thinking he could come any moment? That's a question we're going to address biblically.
Let me say this though. None of us know the moment of our death. None of us know that as we're sitting here, that five minutes later we could die of a heart attack or a plane could crash down on our building, or there could be a sinkhole or some crazy worker in the building starts shooting people.
None of us know the moment of our death. So in that sense, we always live ready. We always live ready to meet the Lord. We never think, well, I'm not going to die for at least a month so I can party and sit. No, we love the Lord.
We want to please him and honor him. We're not looking for an opportunity to sin. And we always want to be ready to meet the Lord. So whether you believe in a preacher, a rapture or not, we should be ready to meet the Lord. But we're going to ask biblically, does the Bible teach in any minute rapture? Are there signs before the coming of the Lord? What about those who teach that much biblical prophecy is already fulfilled, that Matthew 24 has already been completely fulfilled, what we call the Olivet Discourse, Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21. It's been completely fulfilled already. And many of the verses we look to in Matthew 24 about the second coming, they have already taken place.
What do we do with that? What about Israel today? Is modern Israel really connected to biblical prophecy? Is that really what the Bible says?
Or is that also a more modern teaching that has no historical precedence to it? What should we make of signs about rebuilding a temple? Is there going to be a third temple or any of these things going to come to pass?
Should we even care? And what about the state of the world? There's some who teach that the gospel will continue to spread all around the world, that little by little by little, the world is actually becoming more Christian, and that Jesus will not return until the entire world becomes Christian. A position that is known as post-millennialism, that the reign of God will come on the earth first, the rule of God will come on the earth first, and then after that, the Lord will return.
A post-millennial position. Is that biblical? What about those who say there will be no kingdom on earth?
Don't you get it? Jesus is ruling and reigning already. His kingdom is here among us spiritually, and when he returns, we go straight into the eternal age, into the new heavens and the new earth. There is no earthly millennium. There is only a spiritual millennium, a spiritual kingdom. That is the amillennial position.
Is that true? So we're going to open these things up. It's going to be educational, but as I said, it's also going to be practical. We're going to talk about how should we then live and what are God's promises to believers in the midst of tribulation and difficulty. How can we take hold of those promises for ourselves today? So we want to make available to you all this month my book co-authored with Professor Craig Keener, our book, Not Afraid of the Antichrist, Why We Don't Believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture. If you're really searching, trying to find out what the end times are about, this book will help you.
If you want to sharpen your pre-trib arguments against ours where we differ, you can do it or learn what we understand the Bible is saying. This is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for tuning in. Just a reminder that we are listener supported. If we have been a blessing to you, if you're being enriched in the word and prayer and your own walk with God through this broadcast, then stand with us so that we can reach many, many more and bless many, many more. Together, friends, we're making a difference. So go to thelineoffire.org, thelineoffire.org, and click donate.
