Godmindfamily, Part 2, Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter 9: The Solution – God’s Kingdom

The solution to the problem of politics is the Second Coming and the associated founding of the millennial kingdom of God. This cannot be brought about by anyone other than Jesus, under the precise conditions revealed in prophecy. After a roughly seven year period of tribulation, Jewish refugees in Jordan (the remnant) and Jews in Jerusalem will pray to Jesus to save them (Isaiah 26:16; Micah 2:12; Zechariah 12:10), and Jesus will come with the clouds to deliver them from their enemies (Isaiah 66), and gather his chosen saints together in the air (Matthew 24:30) to defeat the Antichrist’s armies outside Jerusalem (Zechariah 14), burn the Antichrist and his False Prophet in the lake of fire, execute or otherwise punish their followers (Revelation 19:20–21) and bind the devil for ‘one thousand years,’ (Revelation 20:4–6) ushering in the millennial Kingdom of God.

This section is not a detailed law code and policy document for the millennial kingdom, in the way that Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy provided the precise laws for the Israelites to follow. Scripture makes it plain that the law will go out from God once again on Mount Zion (Isaiah 2:3), at the outset of the millennial kingdom shortly after the Second Advent, in a typological repetition of Yahweh’s lawgiving appearance on Mt. Sinai in Exodus. It is at that time that detailed laws will be received from him. This book provides an outline of the millennial kingdom, the thousand years of peace, taken literally from Scripture, implied in it, or derived from it as reasonable conclusions backed by revelation. Firstly, having already established the legitimacy and predictive validity of the Bible, it is necessary to outline the prophecies of the millennium in the Bible.

Chapter 10: Bible Prophecies of The Tribulation, The Rapture, The Second Coming and God’s Kingdom

An eschatology is a system of religious prophecy about how the world ends. The End Times is a broad term for the final stages of human history. Muslim, Christian and Jewish eschatologies all profoundly shape world events, and will continue to do so, through the beliefs of religious leaders, financial and business elites (who are a lot more ‘spiritual’ than people think), religious populations, and world leaders, especially in the Middle East. For example, the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that he believes he is on a ‘historic and spiritual mission’ and that he is very attached to the idea of Greater Israel, which possibly includes parts of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt – in other words, some version of the Promised Land.[i] To an extent, eschatological prophecy is self-fulfilling when people believe in it, but only because that is God’s will. Sometimes misinterpretations of prophecy even help the prophecy to manifest. From experimental physics, we know that people’s observations and expectations of an event influence the outcome on the quantum level. The Bible is a living document that is currently shaping the world and religion is an active geopolitical force with worldwide ramifications.

The tribulation, or the Great Tribulation, is a future period, corresponding to Daniel’s 70^th week (Daniel 9) or most of it, and therefore approximately seven years, during which people will endure great suffering and tumult, including divinely ordained natural disasters, earthquakes, wars, famine, and the oppressive rule of a tyrannical Antichrist figure prophesied to persecute Judeo-Christian saints (Daniel 7:25), as well as everyone who will refuse to worship him and take his mark (Revelation 13). Although the seven years will be generally characterised by crisis, peril, strife and suffering, it is not true that every moment of the period will involve suffering for everyone everywhere.

The first thing Jesus said about the tribulation was ‘“be careful that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name saying, ‘I am the Christ’ and will lead many astray.’ (Matthew 24:4). It will be so incredibly difficult to avoid being misled during this time that even the ‘chosen ones’ (the elect), might be led astray, ‘if possible’ (Matthew 24:24).

A remnant of Israel will survive the coming tribulation (Jeremiah 50:20). The prophet Micah (2:12) wrote: ‘I will surely assemble all of you Jacob, I will surely gather the remnant of Israel. I will put them together as the sheep of Bozrah, as a flock in the middle of their pasture.’

There are several reasons for identifying Petra as the biblical Bozrah, where the remnant will be rescued by Jesus. Bozrah meant sheepfold in Hebrew, Petra was shaped like a sheepfold with its narrow passes, it therefore satisfied Isaiah’s (33:16) criterion of defensibility, it was in Edom (modern-day southwestern Jordan), where the saviour was prophesied to come from, and was close to places called Butseira and Busaira, which sounded a lot like Bozrah. The many tombs, buildings and cliffs of Petra will provide shelter from various tribulation hazards, such as the massive demonic army (Revelation 9:16), the fire from heaven (Revelation 16:8), the lightning and the large hailstones (Revelation 16:21). And the prophet Daniel (11:41) had predicted that Edom, Moab and Ammon’s children would be outside the Antichrist’s dominion; Moab corresponded to western Jordan and the name of Jordan’s capital Amman is derived from Ammon and the Ammonites.

This remnant will follow Jesus’ advice to ‘flee to the mountains’ (Matthew 24:16) of Petra from the Antichrist’s persecution following the ‘abomination of desolation’ (Matthew 24:15) in the Third Temple.[ii] The Bible advises the Bozrah remnant to pray to Jesus for salvation; at that moment, they will all be saved, physically and spiritually by Jesus, and the tribulation will end. This is backed up by multiple Scriptures (Jeremiah 30:7; Isaiah 26:12; Zechariah 13:8; Zechariah 12:10). For example, the saviour comes from ‘Bozrah and Edom’ soaked in blood, having fought the peoples there in Isaiah 66. Joel (2:13) stated that the way out of their End Times predicament will be for the Jewish remnant to ‘turn to Yahweh, your God’, who will respond graciously.‘It will happen afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; and your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions. And also on the servants and on the handmaids in those days. I will pour out my spirit.’ (Joel 2: 28–29). ‘It will happen that whoever will call on Yahweh’s name will be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape, as Yahweh has said, and among the remnant, those whom Yahweh calls’ (Joel 2:32). Zechariah (13:8) prophesied that two thirds of the people will be ‘cut off and die, but the third will be left in it.’ The prophet Jeremiah further confirmed the fate of the remnant: ‘I will pardon those whom I leave as a remnant’ (Jeremiah 50:20). This also makes it plain that not all Jews will recognise Jesus as the Messiah, but only this ‘remnant.’

Then the Jerusalemites will follow suit, as it was written in Zechariah (10:12): ‘I will pour on David’s house and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look to me whom they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for his only son.’ Jesus was ‘pierced’ on the cross, as Isaiah (53:5) prophesied of the Messiah, and they will mourn for this Messiah because he was killed. The Romans are the ones who crucified and pierced Jesus, with the governor Pontius Pilate passing the sentence, but Judas, the chief priests (Matthew 26:14–16), some Pharisees and some Jerusalemites – notably, the members of the mob who insisted that Jesus be killed instead of Barabbas – obviously had a hand in his murder. ‘For I tell you, you will not see me from now until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”’ (Matthew 23:39). In the foregoing, Jesus was addressing Jerusalem, and he meant that he won’t return to the Holy City until a certain amount of Jerusalemites have recognised him as the Messiah.The Lord will return to save the Bozrah remnant from the Antichrist’s armies (Isaiah 66), before proceeding to Jerusalem with his raptured saints in their immortal glory bodies, where they will relieve the Holy City from the Antichrist’s main force (Zechariah 14), and kill him, and burn him alive (Revelation 19:20), and shackle the devil (Revelation 20:3), and set up God’s Kingdom for ‘one thousand years’ (Revelation 20:6), in preparation for the mass resurrection, the Last Judgement and finally the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:22).

In the Bible, God’s kingdom has three meanings: 1) the Kingdom of Heaven, a kingdom ‘not of this world’ (John 18:36) that believers go to upon death and visit in rebirth experiences; 2) the millennial kingdom, a thousand year reign of Jesus and the saints (Revelation 20:4) ‘on earth’ (Revelation 5:10; Daniel 2:35); 3) the New Jerusalem, an eternal state on a ‘new earth’ (Revelation 21:1–2) made of a new substance derived from the sacred marriage of spirit and matter. The worldwide events of the End Times will be a macrocosm of what happens to an individual who is saved following a time of suffering: the person appeals to Christ, the demonic is kicked out on its ear and Jesus is welcomed into the body as the master, since the body is the new temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). People who have taken the spirit and visited the heavenly kingdom are in one sense subjects of God’s kingdom on earth, Augustine’s Civitas Dei, emissaries of a foreign land, but it is a kingdom that has yet to appear on earth as an official government. That time is coming soon.

Just as Jesus gained an immortal body and ascended to heaven after his resurrection, all true Christians, whether dead or alive, will sooner or later have their flesh transformed into new spiritualised bodies that cannot die or suffer hunger and thirst. They are glorified bodies, both physical and spiritual. The word rapture comes from the Latin verb rapio (‘I seize’), equivalent to the Greek verb harpazō (‘I seize, I snatch away’) used by Saint Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. ‘For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with God’s trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, we who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17).

In other words, certain dead saints (those who have ‘fallen asleep’) will be resurrected first and rise to be with Jesus in the sky. Shortly after the dead, the chosen who are still alive on that day – ‘we who are alive, who remain’ – will also be translated into eternal bodies and join the resurrected saints ‘in the air’. This is corroborated by 1 Corinthians 15:51–52, ‘we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed.’ Paul’s original ancient Greek phrase eis apantesin tou kyriou, translated ‘To meet the Lord’ (1 Thessalonians 14:16–17), denoted a delegation coming out of a city to welcome a visiting dignitary.[iii] Then of course, they come back into the city with him. Raptured Christians will rise to be with Christ in the sky, and then descend with him to help establish his kingdom on the earth.

The elect, 144,000 eschatological persons descended from the 12 tribes of Israel (Revelation 7), whose mission is to preach the gospel in the End Times, are the main group participating in the rapture, though there will also be some long dead saints. They will be given the bodies that the other saved Christians will be given at the end of the thousand years. The elect are the vineyard workers who were hired last but paid first, while the workers hired earlier will also get paid, just at a later date (Matthew 20:1–16). “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). The wages of service is eternal life in the immortal body. That’s why the elect are called ‘first fruits to God and to the Lamb’ (Revelation 14:4). The first fruits are the first parts of the wheat harvest, picked out of the field earlier than the rest. Revelation also differentiates between a “first resurrection” (Revelation 20:5) for tribulation martyrs and a later, second resurrection for the Last Judgement before the ‘great white throne’ (Revelation 20:11–15).

The Olivet Discourse was an End Times prophecy delivered by Jesus on the Mount of Olives. ‘After the suffering of those days’ – after or toward the end of the tribulation, the time of deception, earthquakes, wars, persecution and false prophets, which Jesus outlined in the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24:4–29) – ‘…they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. He will send out his angels with a sound of the trumpet, and they will gather together his chosen ones from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other.’ Jesus described the rapture and the tribulation, the trumpet Paul mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:52 – as occurring at the same time as the Second Coming (Matthew 24:30).

‘For as the lightning flashes from the east, and is seen even to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be. For wherever the carcass is, that is where the vultures gather together.’ (Matthew 24:26). Jesus suggested by his lightning metaphor that his return will be visible in the sky from anywhere on the earth or in the region because it is associated with the great event in the heavens.

In some Bibles, the Greek word ‘aetoi’ in Matthew 24:26 is translated as ‘vultures’. In others, the word chosen is ‘eagles’, which may be more accurate.[iv] Carcass is a translation of a Greek word ptôma meaning a corpse or a fallen body, which fits the contextual birds of prey that are drawn to it.[v] By speaking of eagles or vultures, Jesus was referencing Isaiah 34:16, in the context of the eschatological desolation of Edom by divine judgement: ‘Yes, the kites will be gathered there, every one with her mate.’

The Olivet Discourse in the Gospel of Luke 17:30–37 sheds further light on the symbolism of the vultures, kites and eagles: ‘“It will be the same in the day that the Son of Man is revealed. In that day, he who will be on the housetop and his goods in the house, let him not go down to take them away. Let him who is in the field likewise not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever seeks to save his life, loses it, and whoever loses his life preserves it. I tell you, in that night there will be two people in one bed. One will be taken and the other will be left.” They answered, asking him, “Where, Lord?” He said to them, “Where the body is, there the vultures will be gathered together.”’

The day the Son of Man is revealed means the day Jesus is revealed to the world upon his return. Lot’s wife turned back to watch as Sodom was annihilated, against God’s counsel. She was thereby changed into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26). By saying “remember Lot’s wife”, Jesus is warning us against shrinking from him in fear and hesitating when he returns, unwilling to leave possessions and old lives behind. Those who do so will not join him in the air. Those who are saved and ready to be taken, on the other hand, will be changed into immortal bodies and ascend.

Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question (“Where, Lord?”), “where the body is, there the vultures will be gathered together” has multiple meanings. The vultures, which can also be translated “eagles”, and the “kites” of Isaiah (34:16), are all different words for the saved Christians who will be gathered together in the air, flying like birds of prey to be with Jesus, “the fallen body” they will rally around, in that he will descend in his glorified flesh body at Bozrah, Edom; he must have descended from the “clouds” (Revelation 1:7) to ground level in Isaiah 63, in order to be covered in others’ blood. The battlefield imagery of these Olivet passages, the desolation of Edom in Isaiah 34, the mentions of vultures and other birds of prey, and the use of the words “fallen body” and “carcass” suggests that there will be corpses, plural. These are the enemies of God that Jesus will slay to save the remnant at Bozrah. Those adversaries will already be dead by the time the raptured saints have flown to Edom. Again, the Messiah is described as being covered in blood, having “trodden” his enemies alone in Edom (Isaiah 63:3), for he says: “no one was with me”.

The prophet Isaiah described an army of “consecrated ones” and nations being mustered for an eschatological battle (Isaiah 13:3). Angels were always sacred, but the word consecration usually applies to something that was once not sacred, but has been made holy. This must therefore be the saints, who are part of the heavenly host after they are gathered together “from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other” (Matthew 24:31) for that very purpose. Since Paul described Jesus as returning with his “mighty angels in flaming fire, punishing those who don’t know God” (2 Thessalonians 1:60), angels will also be part of that heavenly host.

“Yahweh also will save the tents of Judah first, that the glory of David’s house and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem not be magnified above Judah.” (Zechariah 12:7). The “tents of Judah” are the tents that the exiled Judeans will use when they are at Bozrah. What Zechariah means is that God (Jesus) will relieve the remnant at Bozrah first, in response to their prayer for help, before proceeding to “defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (Zechariah 12:8) from the armies of the Antichrist. In chapter 14, Zechariah describes that Battle for Jerusalem, promising that “Yahweh will be king of the whole earth” (Zechariah 14:9) and once the battle is over, “Jerusalem will dwell safely.” (Zechariah 14:11).

[i] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-hes-on-a-historic-and-spiritual-mission-endorses-vision-of-greater-israel/

[ii] For more on the temple, see Godmindbody, Chapter 6: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindbody-part-3-chapter-6-daniel

[iii] Hultberg, Alan. Blasing, Craig, Moo, Douglas. 2018. Three Views on The Rapture: Pretribulation, Prewrath or Posttribulation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic; Second edition.

[iv] Broussard, Carlo. 2022. You Want To Be Left Behind. Catholic.com. Link: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/you-want-to-be-left-behind

[v] https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/ptoma

Read more: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindfamily-chapter-11