Foreword

Congratulations. You have now begun to read the second most important book in the world.

That is a bold statement, but it would be false modesty for me to proceed without making it. God has given me a profound insight: I have deciphered the End Times prophecies and related them to the sweep of human history; I have related them to the very meaning of life. The only thing that is more important than that is the Bible itself.

An ancient Persian apothegm instructs:

He who knows not, and knows not he knows not—
he is a fool, shun him;
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not—
he is a pupil, teach him;
He who knows and knows not he knows—
he is asleep, wake him;
He who knows and knows he knows—
he is wise, follow him.

I know that what I know about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is the truth. You will do well to heed the apothegm and show due deference to he who has been granted wisdom.

It is the Holy Spirit that has given me this undeserved word of knowledge. And the Holy Spirit has guided me as I presented the information according to my literary style. One of my proof-readers observed that most pastoral anecdotes involve innocuous and transparent tales, such as stealing from the cookie jar. But, he said, my anecdotes are coarser, my language is saltier, and my methodology is not-at-first discernable. So be it. I am not a prude, and I have never been one to sacrifice one word that God has given me to say for the sake of propriety or convention.

The revelation has been given to me—it has not been given to you except through me. With that revelation has come responsibility and prerogative. In this book I say what needs to be said about what is going on in the world, and I say it from my heart.

You cannot critique Michelangelo with, “Why did you paint God the Father as an old bearded Caucasian touching the finger of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? The Heavenly Father is a Spirit and has no human form. You have misrepresented Him for the sake of your art.” Nor can you goad the Renaissance master with, “It was really very wrong of you to paint your own face into the flayed skin of the Apostle Bartholomew. There is no way to be certain that he looked like you. This shows that you are vain and have a martyr’s complex.”

These are the comments of a self-righteous imbecile, not of a Christian.

So, likewise, do not complain of my prose, nor cast dispersions upon my dialog. This book is a work of truth in the form of art. If you cannot appreciate the art—if you view it as simply a series of polemical invectives—then you are not worthy of the truth that it conveys.

But beware because Christ cautioned us not to be taken by surprise when He returns.

Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. [Revelation 3:3, TNIV]

Therefore, wake up and hold fast to what you receive through my writing. It is the truth about the Second Coming, and it is all-of-a-piece. If you end up accepting the title, then you will be bound to accept every major concept. There can be no common-cause between the idea that the world shall end in less than three decades and the idea that the world is billions of years old. You must choose between the two. Similarly, you cannot force any marriage of ideas between my teachings and those, say, of the late Dispensationalist, Dr. J. Vernon McGee (AD 1904–AD 1988). The only thing that he and I agree upon is that the Lord Jesus is coming back in the very near-term—on the particulars, either he is dead wrong, or I am dead wrong. You’ll see the truth of the matter as you read through my book: the Word of God vindicates me beautifully, and it indicts the Dispensationalists (see Appendix II for a detailed definition of Dispensationalism).

The ideas that I present herein are entirely new to eschatological publishing, and they are inarguable for anyone that maintains that the Bible is inerrant. I have proven my case through the perfect harmony of the biblical timelines (Appendix III). That necessarily means that everyone that has previously written about the Second Coming has been in error—though some have been much more erroneous than others. And I may, in fact, be wrong about this-or-that inconsequential detail. That would be embarrassing, but not the end of the world (pardon the pun). Nevertheless, in terms of the outline and the timeline and the paradigm, I pledge to you before God that what I have written is the truth about the Second Coming of Christ and the meaning of life. I am not claiming infallibility, but I am claiming that God has favored me above all other post–apostolic authors.

I tell you all of this as preparation for what follows. Most books about the Second Coming of Christ are myopic—even obsessive—with talk of:

• the establishment and expansion of the modern State of Israel;
• the appearance of a spotless and pampered red heifer within Palestine;
• the Rapture of naked Born-Again Christians seven years before the end of the world;
• a European Union despot that will arise from the Israelite Tribe of Dan, and the brief and terrible reign of his one-world government;
• a new universal currency that will be implanted into the right hand;
• the construction of a new Jewish temple;
• the bodily, thousand-year, reign of Christ from this earth’s Jerusalem;
• and a horrendous seven-year Tribulation, and Armageddon.

Many American Evangelicals adhere to these myths as closely as they adhere to the Gospel itself. Some even commingle their false End Times interpretations with Christ’s Gospel—declaring that a Christian that does not particularly care about modern-day Jews living in modern-day Israel (at least ‘not care’ in the spiritual-sense) is an apostate to the Christian faith and is under God’s wrath. They tend to be the type of people that frown when one enjoys a cold, tall, beer, or that close their eyes when they see snakes coming out of a skull in a special effects movie.

I maintain the radical position that it is only those that do not particularly care about the Lordship of Jesus Christ that are under God’s wrath.

No one who has faith in God’s Son will be condemned. But everyone who doesn’t have faith
in him has already been condemned… [John 3:18, CEV]

And how did the Lord Jesus describe those that embrace lies about the Way to salvation, and yet nitpick about the behavior of others?

Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel! [Matthew 23:24, NKJV]

You will, therefore, not find me writing about the Dispensationalist topics itemized above except in a manner that mocks the goofballs that espouse them. When I am not debunking, I expend my pages trying to convince you that the entire reality of planet Earth is akin to a movie, or a dream, that will abruptly end one day. I explain that the only surety for what lies afterward is to be found in entrusting your soul to the God–man, Jesus Christ. I relate biographical episodes from my personal walk with Jesus, and lore that has been handed down to me from other Christians about God’s keen interest in our souls. I go into some detail about world history and Church history. I describe the various christological formulations, and expose the disastrous results of deviation from the Bible’s teaching about Jesus Christ. I unmask the Antichrist religion, the cultural Great Harlot, and the scientific False Prophet. And, as a man of science, I cannot refrain from expounding upon the latter argument to include a short treatise on the inanity of evolutionary theory.

What does any of this have to do with the Second Coming of Christ? A great deal. What has been going on in the world is God’s history. He is in control, and He has a plan. His Second Coming is contextual to all other affairs. It is not an aberration, but a promised derivative of the mess that we have made of things, for,

…where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death,
even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.
[Romans 5:20–21, KJV]

Now read! Read with fervor! This is about what God has done for you, and what God is going to do for you within this generation.

It is God’s history. Trust in Christ and make God’s history into your hope.

Christian T. Jacobsen, Ph.D.
December 2007

return to previous page