Introduction to End-Times Study

Many of us (myself included) grew up in churches that appeared to be reasonably faithful to the truths of the Bible. As time has progressed we may have found ourselves growing increasingly uneasy about the state of the church as a whole. We've known for a while there’s a problem because it has become commonplace for churches to tolerate divorce, sexual immorality, and wrong doctrines. We may also be seeing the church organization become increasingly interested in entertainment to attract new members (or hold on to current ones). We may see the church start catering its messages on Sunday morning to the visitors rather than diving deep into the Word of God to edify its members.

The Bible clarifies for us what is going on and we will examine this, among other things, as we study the end-times prophecies.

God has crafted the Bible very carefully to hide much of the information concerning the end. Oh sure, throughout time we have been able to put together bits and pieces of what to expect in the end but largely God has kept that information hidden. In their efforts to understand the events of the end, theologians have arrived at some accurate conclusions and many inaccurate ones. This is not due to lack of careful study. It just wasn’t God’s plan to reveal that information at that time.

God could have written the Bible so that any child could pick it up, read it, and easily understand everything He wanted mankind to know. However, He did not do that because, as we will soon examine, it was His plan that certain things be concealed until the time arrived when He wanted mankind to know. In order to conceal information God had to intentionally use difficult language and write the Bible in such a way that it is not easy to understand. This is especially true of the information God has given us regarding the end times.

We are living in a day when God is finally revealing the spiritual truths of the end times to diligent students of the Bible around the world. We are going to carefully examine the end-times information and piece it together. We will not develop truths from just a verse or two. We are going to examine numerous passages, and even whole chapters, and tie them all together. If we are going to learn truth in our day, we have to approach the Bible with an open heart because we are now seeing that much of what we’ve been taught in the past was wrong. Again, this is not because we are smarter now than the theologians of the past. They did their best to piece together the information in a time when God had not removed the seal from it.

We now know that the New Testament era is broken up into two periods of spiritual rain: the Early Rain and the Latter Rain. Periods of spiritual rain identify with times of spiritual harvest. The Early Rain is the period from 33 AD to the beginning of the Great Tribulation. Following the Early Rain is a period of silence, or spiritual famine, in which very few people become saved around the world. Then once the spiritual famine has ended the Latter Rain begins and continues up until the Rapture.

We also now know that the Great Tribulation is broken up into two parts. The first part is the spiritual famine mentioned above. The second part is the Latter Rain. The Great Tribulation is a period in which God is bringing judgment upon the churches for their apostasy through the use of Satan as he rules within the churches. The Latter Rain is taking place outside of the churches, but the spiritual famine that began the Great Tribulation continues within the churches until the end. The Great Tribulation ends the same day the Latter Rain ends: on the day of the Rapture. Following the Rapture will be a five-month period when God will pour out His wrath on the unsaved left behind. After the five-month period the world will be completely destroyed.

A diagram of the above looks like this:


This looks very different from the way many of us, myself included, have believed the end times would play out. We will, of course, develop this piece-by-piece in these studies. We will discover that we are now living in the Latter Rain period. Sadly, this means we are living in the time when Satan is ruling in the churches.

As we examine the end-times information in the Bible (and there is a lot more of it than we ever thought before) we discover that it all harmonizes with the above timeline. We also discover that we can even know something about when all of this is going to happen.