In this enlightening episode, we examine the prophetic language in biblical texts, focusing on the terms ‘in the last days’ and ‘the day of the Lord.’ Through a thoughtful analysis, our host illustrates the distinctions between Hebrew and Greek usages and how they affect interpretation. We dive into Peter’s sermon from Acts, the prophecy of Joel, and explore how these ancient teachings point to a time of both peril and opportunity. Alongside examining a modern documentary’s depiction of cosmic events, listeners are encouraged to remain vigilant and proactive in their spiritual preparedness for the unpredictable future that awaits humanity.
If you run a standard concordance search on the expression in the last days, you’ll find six occasions where the term is used in the Old Testament. But if you run the Hebrew, which almost anyone can do anymore because of the computer programs we’ve got, with a couple of clicks of the mouse, you can determine what the Hebrew word is, and then you can tell it, go find that everywhere it is in the Old Testament. You’ll get 13 times that it shows up. Now, the reason for that is that in over half the occasions where it’s used, it’s rendered in the latter days, or I think in NIV it even has in days to come. I presume there are contextual reasons for choosing one phrase over the other, depending upon where it is found. We would sometimes like to insist that the expressions always mean the same thing everywhere we find them. It makes life a lot easier. But the problem is English isn’t that way, and I don’t know why we would expect Hebrew to be that way either. Words are used with different meanings depending upon syntax, upon structure, upon context, upon the near context and the larger context, and upon the—there’s a wonderful word for you—hermeneutics of the passage as to how we’re going to interpret this thing. So you do have that happen from time to time. We run afoul of some very bad interpretations sometimes because amateurs find a meaning of the Hebrew that in some context or other suits their assumptions, and then they attempt to apply it across the board in the Old Testament, and it just doesn’t work that way. I’m sorry. In fact, I have come to the conclusion down through the years that when I’m reading a paper, and people send me a lot of papers from time to time, doctrinal papers on this or that or the other thing, that whenever I’m reading along and they find out the word there is, and they give you a word and they say, that’s Strong’s number, and they give me the number from Strong’s concordance. That’s an infallible sign of an amateur. Infallible sign. Now, don’t get me wrong. Strong’s concordance is a very useful tool. It’s very helpful, but using it doesn’t make you an authority in Hebrew or Greek. Most of us would know that. I’m far more impressed when I’m reading a paper and the writer has found a translation or a commentary, you know, written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about, that supports his thought about what this particular word or expression means. So I’m telling you that to say that in the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, there is some… ambiguity in the use of the expression in the last days, in the latter days, as to exactly what it means. There seems to be less ambiguity in the Greek than there is in the Hebrew. We should try to keep that in mind when we study these things. I have the impression that God wants us to be a lot less dogmatic and much more inquiring, much more saying, well, I don’t know. This is the way it looks to me today, and I’m filing that away in my memory. But we’ll see what God reveals in the course of time. Now the last time I spoke here, I introduced the topic of the last days. The expression was in the last days. I pointed out that when Paul said in the last days perilous times shall come, The word he used suggests that the last days would be perilous, but perilous because they would be debilitating and weakening, which is what the word translated perilous actually means in the Greek. We should pull up our socks, Paul says, and struggle against this, not go along with the spirit of the age. It’s something that he warned Timothy about 2,000 years ago, and the warning is just as viable to us today. In these last days, the times, the circumstances, the spirit of the age will tend to want to just cut the heart right out of you, take away from you your understanding of God, your knowledge of God, your commitment to God, and weaken you in faith. Then there came Peter’s powerful admonition. where he said, Know this first. There shall come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lust and saying, Well, where is the promise of his coming? Since the fathers fell asleep, everything continues as it was from the beginning of the creation till now. Nothing new under the sun. Nothing has changed. Then Peter went on to tie the last days. to the day of the Lord, which is another one of those expressions that you find again and again in the Bible with some ambiguity. There is an express eschatological, another word for you, end times, last days interpretation of the day of the Lord. It also appears in the Old Testament to occasionally be used to express the day of God’s vengeance, the day of his wrath, the day of his anger, which has to do with this circumstance or that nation or so forth. There’s a day when the Lord is going to come down on you, and that is a day of the Lord. But having said that, there is also one time. Not like any day that has ever come before it, not like any day that will ever be again after it. That is the day of the Lord, not just a day of the Lord. And Peter says, The day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth and everything in them shall be burned up. He spoke, and then he spoke as Paul did. He said, seeing then that all these things shall be shattered, what kind of people should you be in all holy conduct and reverence? How should you be living your life? Watch out for it. Then his final admonition, he says, you therefore, bread beloved, seeing you know these things before, told you ahead of time, beware lest you also being led away with the error of the wicked. Fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in graciousness and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Now, all that is in 2 Timothy 3, if you want to look it up and see how it’s put. Just last night, I was watching a documentary. I had never seen it before. I hadn’t even heard of it. It was produced by the BBC called Hyperspace. And what it is, is a documentary about… about space, about the sun, about the earth, about the planets, and so forth. But it’s different from anything I think I’ve seen before because what it effectively does is it outlines for us and demonstrates the life of our solar system and the death of our solar system, which is a little bit discouraging when you think about the fact that, of course, it’s not anything you and I necessarily have to worry about because as far as we can tell in the next hundred years, nothing dramatic is going to happen, so you and I are okay. I don’t know what to say about your children and grandchildren. That’s another matter entirely. But even there, they’re probably okay. Because what this was talking about was something I had never seen before. And I was kind of shocked. I thought I knew about these things. But the problem, everybody knows the time is going to come when the sun will burn out. And the sun will finally explode, blow everything out of the solar system, then collapse in on itself. We all know that. What I did not know is that the sun is getting hotter all the time. It is continually hotter. It is hotter today than it was a thousand years ago or a million years ago. It just keeps on getting hotter. And they demonstrated graphically how that the earth sits in what I would call, in fact they presented it this way, kind of a green zone. that goes around the sun. There is a space out here where basically life is possible, where your planet can survive. Going beyond it, it’s just stone cold ice. The other way, it’s too hot for life to exist. And what they demonstrated was that in years to come, now don’t worry, it’s not going to happen anytime soon, But it is going to happen. Of a certainty it’s going to happen. There is no question. That green zone is going to start moving further and further out from the sun. And there comes a point, and it’s really striking what a narrow range this is that we sit in. And there’s so many times in that documentary, they didn’t say anything about God, but I sure thought about it. And we have been placed in the one place in all the solar system where we can survive and set in motion around the sun. But the time is coming. when this planet will be burned up, just like Peter said. And they actually had some good computer graphics and special effects to show just what it would look like. And the process of developing. And I was somewhat stunned by some of the things I saw. As a documentary, I didn’t think it was all that great. The dialogue was kind of hyper. It was a little bit overly dramatized. But in a way, how can you over-dramatize the end of the world? So anyway. The whole point of prophecy is to remind us of what we are, how small we are, and that we’re temporary. Neither we as individuals nor even the human race are destined to survive. Prophecy is not given to satisfy our curiosity about the future or to encourage us to play a game of ain’t it awful. Now, there was another occasion where Peter addressed the issues having to do with the last day. In some ways, it may even be more familiar because it is on that first Pentecost of the New Testament church when the Holy Spirit fell on them in power and started them out on the trek that has led to us today being where we are. Peter stands up in front of everybody with men all gathered around and says, Oh, these guys are just drunk. And Peter says, Oh, give us a break. This is the third hour of the day. These people aren’t drunk. This is that, he said, which was spoken by the prophet Joel. Find this in Acts 2, verse 16. And it shall come to pass in the last days, there’s that expression, says God, that I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh. And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see vision, and your old men shall dream dreams. You know something interesting about this? It says, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. not upon an elect, not a handful here and a handful there, a person here and nobody there. He says all flesh. How can that be? I got to thinking about that last night, and I began to realize something I hadn’t quite thought about, and that is if the Holy Spirit comes upon a man who is himself evil, it will make him worse. It will make him more miserable. It will create for him a private hell that arises right out of his own heart and out of his own mind. If it falls on a man who is not wicked or evil, it will transform his life. Of course, it transforms both lives. It transforms one life this way, the other life the other way. So the pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh, I take it, That’s what he means. And it’s a kind of sobering thing to consider what that might bring. Also notice that your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. So can women preach? Apparently so. That’s going to happen at some point in time and under some circumstances because God says, I’ll pour my spirit out upon them and they’ll prophesy. Some look at this and conclude that the last days then began at Pentecost. That may be. On the other hand, Perhaps what Peter was describing on this day was a type of what Joel was talking about. You kind of have to go back and take a look at Joel before you get this quite right. But anyway, Peter went on to say, On my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my spirit and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in heaven above, signs in the earth beneath, blood, fire, vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before that great and notable day of the Lord come. There’s that expression again. In the last days, the day of the Lord. It’s as though what he’s saying is there is to come a time when the door is kicked wide open. And this is not going to be a religion of the Jews. It’s not going to be a religion of the Hebrews. It’s going to be a religion of all men. Whoever… shall call on the name of the Lord, shall be saved. Now, to call on, that is to invoke the name of Jesus, is to accept his name, to carry that name, to put that name upon your shoulders and bear it forward. It isn’t just to pronounce a formula at the end of your prayer. In Jesus’ name, amen, as though somehow that was supposed to give us whatever it is we asked for. You would think by now someone would have figured out that it didn’t work that way, wouldn’t you? How many prayers have we made in Jesus’ name that, as far as we can tell, have never been answered? The fact of the matter is, it’s not a formula. It is a condition, it is a relationship that exists between a man and Jesus Christ as he carries Jesus’ name forward into the world. Now, I don’t know what Peter thought about this. Because it’s pretty obvious when you read this that this didn’t happen. I don’t know whether he thought it was going to happen the next few weeks or months. I don’t know if he thought it was going to happen in his lifetime. I haven’t got a clue what he thought. All I know is what he said. And he was honest and straightforward about this. He didn’t just pull a scripture out of context and try to make a sermon out of it. He quoted the whole thing. So consequently, it’s very obvious that what he was trying to say on this occasion. When I got back and I looked at the context, though, of what Joel said that led him to come to this conclusion about Joel’s prophecy, it was pretty clear to me that what Peter was seeing was a type. Now, in prophecy, a type is a previous fulfillment that takes place before the final fulfillment. Some prophecies in the Bible are fulfilled twice. Some of them are fulfilled three and four times. Some of them are repeated over and over again because human beings keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. So consequently, what Peter is saying is, what I’m seeing here looks very much to me like what happened, what the prophet Joel was talking about. And so he cites the prophecy. Now, I want us to go back to Joel. It’s the second chapter of Joel where this comes down. And consider what of all the things that Peter said were going to happen are yet to come. “‘Blow you the trumpet in Zion,’ he says. “‘Sound an alarm in my holy mountain. “‘Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord comes its nigh at hand.'” Now, you know, when you hear the trumpet being blown, it calls to mind the Feast of Trumpets, the book of Revelation, and the seven trumpets that are blown there. And then you see the expression, the day of the Lord is at hand. You’ve got to realize we’re talking about stuff that’s in the last days, sure enough. The eschatological last days, not just times after the times we’re living in. He goes on to say, it’s going to be a day of darkness, of gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness like the morning spread upon the mountains. A great people and a strong. There has not ever been the like, neither shall there be any more after it to the years of many generations. So here we are. We’re coming down to a day unique in all of history. A day that there was nothing like it before, there will never be another day like it after this occasion. Then he describes this army coming in. I know we had a hymn once upon a time, the old hymnal that talked about God’s army, you know, and it is God’s army. The Assyrians that came in were the sword in his hand. They were the instrument that he was using to chastise Israel. He says, The fire devours before them, behind them a flame burns. The land is like the Garden of Eden in front of them, and behind them is a desolate wilderness. Nothing shall escape them. You’ve got scorched earth policy. Now, this seems to be talking about an army of what human beings might do. At the same time, it also sounds an awful lot like what was happening on planet Earth as that heat band manages to get out beyond our planet to where we can no longer survive here. He said, “…the appearance of them is like the appearance of horses, and as horsemen so shall they run.” It’s quite a description of this incredible army that’s coming down with all of their destruction. In verse 10 he says, “…the earth shall quake before them, the heavens shall tremble, the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars will withdraw their shining.” And the Lord shall utter his voice before his army, for his camp is very great. He is strong that executes his word, for the day of the Lord is great and very terrible. Who can abide it? Now, this explains why Peter invokes the expression, the day of the Lord, in connection with his phrase, in the last days. This is something which they saw at the very end of days. Therefore, God continues in Joel, Turn to me even with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments, and turn to the Lord, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness, and repents him of the evil. I mean, turn your life around. That’s reminiscent of ye people rend your hearts, rend your hearts and not your garments. Isn’t that from Mendelssohn’s Elijah? It’s a gorgeous song that was sung. Who knows? How can you tell that God will not return and repent and leave a blessing behind him? Now blow a trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, those that suck the breast, let the bridegroom get out of his chamber, the bride out of her closet. This is no time for that. What’s he saying to us here? What is he describing? Now can you think of a day in Israel’s annual cycle of stuff that they do that this fits? The day of atonement. The trumpet has been blown at the beginning of the month. Now we have sanctified a fast. Everybody is called there. Man, woman, child, suckling. Nobody is exempt on this day from coming to appear before God in humility. That an atonement can be made for them before God. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar. Let them say, Spare your people, O Lord. Give not your heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them. But it continues on through here with this really powerful description of the terrible things that are coming and the call for Israel’s repentance. And then he comes to the section in verse 28 where Peter’s citation, from which Peter’s citation is drawn. It says, It shall come to pass afterward, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams. Your young men shall see visions. And upon the servants, you know, the household servants, and upon the handmaids in those days, I’ll pour out my Spirit. Not just the priesthood, it’s on everybody. And I will show wonders in the heavens and the earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before… the great and terrible day of the Lord. And it shall come to pass that whoever will call on the name of the Lord, not just pronounce it, call upon it, invoke his name, carry his name, he shall be delivered. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord has said, in the remnant whom the Lord shall call. Now it seems to me that Joel and Peter See Pentecost symbolically as the opening of the door of salvation to anyone and everyone who will come, who will accept. There is, in my mind, a serious problem with the perceived doctrine of election. It means that God elects these people, doesn’t elect these people. He calls these people. He doesn’t call these and rejects these people. This does not seem to be the message of Pentecost. It does not seem to be the message of Joel that there comes a point in time in this world, in this age, when the door is thrown open to everybody. It’s not really new, by the way, on Pentecost. I don’t know how we overlook this. But strangers could always call on God. There has never been a time in history when the stranger, the Gentile, the person who’s not an Israelite, could not, should he choose to do so, call on God and receive a blessing from him. The picture you see with Peter and some of them in the New Testament has to do with Jewish law, not God’s law. Because when you actually take the word stranger and look it up right straight through the Old Testament, you will find that the stranger had every right, every privilege, and every responsibility living in the land that any Israelite had. He had to obey the same laws. You’re going to live here, God said. You live our way. You adopt the culture. You assimilate. You become one of us. And the Israelites were forbidden to vex the stranger. They were forbidden to take advantage of him. They were forbidden to mistreat him. Because God said, you were a stranger in the land of Egypt, and you know what the Egyptians did to your forefathers. I don’t want you doing the same thing that they did. So, there are those who think that the door was not open wide on Pentecost, but that this will only happen in the last days, and I think they’re stumbling over the ambiguity of the expression, because it seems clear to me in Acts 2, it seems clear to me in Paul’s epistles, that the apostles and all of them were making great personal sacrifices in order to get the gospel to as many as they possibly could, so that… as many as possible could be saved, and that what they did made a difference, and what they did not. So anyway, I think the door is open. I think the door has always been open. Another prophet uses this term. His name is Micah. Micah 4, verse 1. Now, I’ve mentioned this before. Forgive me if I plow a little the same ground again. We’re all now in the 21st century becoming quite familiar with the idea of an icon. I was sat down one day when I was writing, and my screen had my word processor open, and I forget how many icons I counted on that screen. It must have been 30 or 40 of them or more at the same time sprinkled around this screen. Every one of them stood for something. Some of them I knew what they were. Some of them I did not know what they were. I knew that if I clicked on it, I’d probably find out, and I might not want to find out, so I was careful about that. But every one of these is just a single little icon. You click on it, and it stands for a function. The most common one is a little tiny printer. You click on it, it opens up the screen that controls your printer, and you tell it how you want to print this. You click on print, and away we go. So these are what icons are. Now, in prophecy, prophecy is absolutely salted with icons. And sometimes you have to spend some time sorting the thing out, saying, well, wait a minute. I don’t think he’s talking about a high hill here when he speaks of a mountain. I don’t think he’s talking about Mount Zion, except symbolically. This is an icon. And in truth, as you work your way through these, you’ll find that a mountain in prophecy is an icon for a nation or a government. A political structure, as it were. And you also come across this, it is the mountain of the house of the Lord. He goes on to say that many nations shall come and say, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. Again, you’re apt to think of that solely in terms of the temple. But the word the house of, as it’s used in the Bible, has to do with the governmental structure, the administration. The house of David was, in a sense, David’s dynasty. David had a government. He had soldiers. He had a chief of staff. He had an army. He had all sorts of people who combined together to carry out his government. It was his house. Abraham had a house, probably close to a thousand human beings, who would be considered in Abraham’s house, based upon my reading of what I find there. And this is basically his span of control. It is that group of people who owed him loyalty and who owed him fees. Not fees, that’s not the word I’m looking for, whatever. But in other words, it was his thing. So when you see the house of the God of Jacob, you’re talking about his structured administration. as you are with the house of Judah, which is a structured administration, the house of Israel, another structured administration, which went on for many, many, for some 200 some odd years, as two separate kingdoms, as it were. And so we see these patterns that develop, and it’s important when you read them to kind of stop and think, what does this mean, rather than just trying to take the words, oh, I guess they’re talking about the temple. I don’t think so. I think they’re talking about rather more than that. Let’s go up to him. He will teach us his ways. We will walk in his paths. For the law shall go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. So there it is. In the last days, this is something that’s coming. So it’s pretty obvious that in the last days will probably span some little period of time because you have those events that start before the great and terrible day of the Lord. transition through the terrible day of the Lord, and then go on into this particular time when it appears this is what we would call millennial. It’s the kingdom of God time, when all the kingdoms of the earth now are beginning to show fealty, that’s the word I was looking for, to the kingdom of God. So this is coming. Then there’s Isaiah, Isaiah 2, verse 1. The word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains. In other words, it will be the supreme world ruling government over all other governmental structures that exist. It should be exalted above the hills, small governmental structures. Nations shall flow into it, and many people shall say, Come on, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways. We will walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge among the nations, rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. Oh, God hastened that day. Now, obviously, in the last days spans a broad period of time from, what shall we say… 50 years, 20 years, 30 years, who knows, before the return of Christ. And it also reaches into the kingdom of God when the whole world now is under the authority of Jesus Christ. Kind of an interesting thought. So what is the word to all of us from this? What can we take away from this? Well, Matthew 24 is that prophecy where Jesus gave us the broadest possible view. When his disciples came to him, he told them the temple was going to be torn down, not one stone left on top of another. And they came and says, when is this going to happen? And what are the signs of your coming and of the end of the age? That’s what they wanted to know as a result. Now, this whole prophecy of Matthew 24 and 25 says, All were given in response to that question. Having told him all kinds of stuff that would take place, he comes back to this in verse 44. Matthew 24, verse 44. Therefore, I say now learn a parable of, I’m sorry, verse 32. Learn a parable of the fig tree. When its branch is yet tender and it puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. Now around here, if you were doing that, you’d say, now when you start seeing the red buds come out, you know that summer is not that far away. So check your air conditioning out. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it’s near even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away. My word shall never pass away. But of that day and hour knows no man, not the angels in heaven, but my Father only. Now if I understand Jesus correctly on this occasion, he had no idea. And it’s obvious to me that his disciples had no idea. You will read in Peter, you’ll hear in Peter’s words on Pentecost, you will read in Paul implications that they thought it was possible for Christ to come in their day. I think, you know, some people are troubled by that because they think they wrote this in the Bible and it’s infallible and they should know exactly when Christ is coming, but he said he didn’t know. So they couldn’t know. It was utterly impossible and they knew that, but that didn’t keep them from saying, we’ve got to be ready because for all we know it is. We need to live our lives as though we were heading into the last days. This is what Paul’s trying to say. It’s what Peter’s trying to say. Take care. Look to your life. Look to the way you live it. So, we need to understand then that we don’t know the time. We just have to live it as though this is it. Later he says in verse 44, Therefore be you also ready, for in such an hour as you think not… The Son of Man comes. So we’ve got to look around amongst all the prophets who get out there setting dates for the return of Christ. We know a certain set of dates when it’s not going to be. Those dates. God will have to, I suppose, find a notch somewhere where he can fit his return into in order to prove everybody wrong. And I wouldn’t doubt that he will do that at all. What do we have to do to prove the biggest number of false prophets wrong? So be ready. Who is a faithful and wise servant whom his Lord has made ruler over his household to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, when he comes, shall find so doing. What he expects of us as we think about these things and look forward to them is not to be looking for a time when we can lay down our tools. Not looking for a time when we can stop work. Not looking for a time when we can start now. Oh, well, we’ve got plenty of time. It’s not going to happen. He says… You need to be working. You need to have Jesus, when he comes, take you away from his work that you are in an ongoing state of doing. He said, I say unto you, he’ll make him ruler over all his goods. But if that evil servant shall say in his heart, my Lord delays his coming and shall begin to smite his fellow servants and eat and drink with the drunken, the Lord of that servant will come in a day when he doesn’t look for him in an hour he’s not aware of and will cut him asunder and upon him his portion with the hypocrites be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So what does all this mean to us? It really means you need to settle in to a way of life, a way of doing, of service to Christ that you can maintain until he takes you away from it. You know, it’s not a good idea, well, I’m on the gun lap and I’m going to sprint now on the way out to the end. No, no, you need to have something that you can maintain because you don’t know. A level of alertness, a level of work that you can keep up day after day, day after day without getting burnt out. Because you have no way of knowing whether Christ will come. I started to say you have no way of knowing whether he’ll come when you’re 30. A lot of us know that’s not going to happen. We passed that a long time ago. We have no way of knowing when Christ is coming. Then on into Matthew 25. Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins which took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were wise, five of them were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them. The wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. Now, I have heard sermons and sermonettes over the years trying to explain every nuance, every detail, every little icon that’s in this particular thing. The oil is the Holy Spirit and all this kind of stuff. It’s not really the point. The point is you had five of these virgins. Five of them were prepared and five of them were not. We’re not looking for ratios. We’re not looking for one-thirds and two-thirds. The point is there are two categories of people. People who look ahead, people who plan ahead, people who stay ready, and people who just don’t. Okay, that’s what we’re dealing with. Now, while the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. At midnight, there was a cry made, behold, the bridegroom comes, go meet him. All those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, give us some of your oil, our lamps are going out. But the wise answered saying, no, we can’t do that. There wouldn’t be enough for all of us. You go quickly and buy to some of them and sell and buy for yourselves. Go buy some oil, what you should have done a long time ago. And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came. They that were ready went in with him to the marriage and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgin saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. And he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I don’t know you. Watch, therefore, for you know not the day or the hour when the Son of Man comes. And don’t make the silly mistake of saying, oh, well, he’s not going to come for another hundred years. You don’t know. You can’t know. I had a friend I was talking to not that long ago who’d had a terrible, terrible nightmare. He had dreamed that Christ had come. And then he was standing and knocking at the door, and the door opened, and whoever was behind the door says, I’m sorry, I don’t know you, and then slammed the door in his face. Now, he woke up in a cold sweat. What he saw in vision, and I don’t really think he’s in this condition, but he saw in vision what could happen. And if only we could all understand this, but there are some people who will, and there are many who will not. But the bottom line is there are coming dreadful days ahead of us. There are coming wonderful days ahead of us. In the middle of it all, Christ will return. And those who are ready, those who have prepared, will go in with him. And the rest of us, even though we thought we were virgins and even though we thought we belonged to him, who are not ready, will find ourselves unrecognized at the door. So, The bottom line of all the stuff I’m trying to say to you today is, in the last days, perilous, debilitating, weakening times will come. Don’t let them take you down.
