You have just witnessed what Christians call “The Rapture”, and whilst that title won’t be found anywhere in the actual text of the Bible, this event is described, foreshadowed, directly prophesied in the Old and New Testaments, and taught as a literal event by Jesus and the Apostle Paul.

The Rapture is basically God taking His church – those who have believed and trusted in Him alone for their personal forgiveness and salvation – out of the world prior to the last seven years of human history as we know it. We have not died, and neither have we been hidden somewhere else on this planet; we’re in heaven! It’s what is spoken about/sung about in the last section of Handel’s Messiah, quoting 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 and 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18. We are the generation that has not tasted death but rather has gone straight to be with the Lord.

Now, this is not to be confused with the Second Coming. In the Church of England, where I have been singing for the past few years, the wonderful declaration made every Sunday is this:

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

This has always been true, and it still is! You are living in the time period between the second and the last statement – between the resurrection and the coming again of Jesus, literally, physically, to set up His Kingdom on earth, with Jerusalem at the centre. This event is due to happen in about seven years’ time (I do believe we can pin-point the very day of His return, but more on that in another post). He will reign in power and glory and peace and justice, and the entire planet will be put right; environment, societies, nations and governments…it will be a literal Millennium of unrivalled beauty, prosperity, equity, and peace, and just to emphasise how sure this promise is, there are more prophecies about this time in the Bible than there are about Jesus’ first coming! Even just in Isaiah, chapters 11, 12, 35, 40, 55, 60, 61, 62 deal primarily with this incredible time.

“They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.”

Isaiah 11:9

How did we know when the Rapture was going to happen??

Well, there were many, many different layers to this answer, which is exactly why I love the Bible so much. It has layer upon beautiful layer of meaning, depth, wisdom, and power, and there isn’t a single word that wasn’t put there for a reason. There are types/pictures of future events and people (for example, many types/foreshadowings of Messiah in the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures), and the Rapture is no exception. I will go into more of this in subsequent posts, but here are just a few basic pointers that led many believers to the conclusion that the Rapture would be on the 8th September, 2021, or at least somewhere between the 8th September and the 8th of October. See my post entitled “Two Weeks Later…” for more info.

• The Parable of the Fig Tree – Jesus taught His disciples very clearly when they asked Him what the signs of the end of the age would be, and to give a timescale of the very end, He used the fig tree as an example. The fig tree was commonly used in prophetic and cultural references to be a symbol of the national life of Israel, and having already predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Jewish people, which happened in 70 AD, and the terrible persecutions to come, He then said that when the fig tree budded again – ie, when the national life of Israel was restored – that the generation to witness that would by no means pass away until these things took place. We know from Psalm 90:10 that the biblical estimation for a generation is 80 years, and Israel’s glorious and miraculous restoration took place in 1948. A little basic maths says that 1948 plus 80 brings us to 2028. We have been beginning to see these things take place for several decades now, but much of what Jesus was describing specifically takes place in the last seven years before His return, a time called the Great Tribulation. We know from other passages of Scripture that the Rapture precedes the Tribulation, so take 7 years off our total to find the year of the Rapture and it brings you to…2021.

• “A day is as a thousand years” – this is a saying from 2 Peter 3:8, where in the context of the end times the apostle says that God’s timing is completely exact, and not to be judged as slow by us. He says that with the Lord “one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.” This is both an indication that God is outside of time and therefore not constrained by it, but also it points to a literal pattern based on the days of creation in Genesis and the subsequent ordaining of the 6 days of work followed by a Sabbath of rest, which Jewish people observe to this day. Following that pattern of a day being equal to 1,000 years, we can expect to see 6,000 years of human history marred by pain, strife, hard labour, and sin, followed by a final, seventh millennium of peace and rest and restoration. We are very, very near the end of that 6,000 years, bringing us remarkably close to the final 1,000 as described above, when the Lord will reign on the earth from Jerusalem. See the next point for an expansion on this idea.

• The 2,000 year Dispensations – the literal, historical view of Biblical history can be divided into three 2,000 year time-periods, known to theologians as dispensations. God is a God of order and structure and pattern, and nothing is random, least of all the numbers on His calendar! Without going into too much detail here, biblical scholars have worked out that there are 2,000 years from the creation and the first man, Adam, to the giving of the Law at Sinai. Then, from the giving of the Law (approx. 2,000 BC) to the death and resurrection of Jesus is another 2,000 years. And, depending when you place the birth of Jesus (there is a compelling case for it being as 6 BC according to some scholars’ research), He died around 28 AD, thus bringing us, here in 2021, very close to a third period of 2,000 years completed since that event. We know from Scripture that the last 7 years of this age are reserved for the Great Tribulation, so again, take off 7 from 2028 and it brings you to 2021 as the earliest date the Rapture could take place.

• The Feast of Trumpets – I’m going to do a whole post on the feasts of the Jewish calendar, but I have to mention here that the reason we expected the Rapture on or around the 8th September this year, is based way back in the feasts instituted by God in Leviticus for the Israelites; a calendar of observances to remind them of their awesome God, His works in saving them (such as Passover), and to point them to their Messiah. The Feast of Trumpets, or Rosh Hashanah, is Jewish New Year and it is an awe-filled, holy, expectant festival, associated with the return of the King, the sounding of trumpets, and of God coming to gather His people. The month preceding Trumpets is the month of Elul, traditionally associated with ‘teshuvah’ or repentance – introspection and prayerfulness, preparing for the King to come – and on each day for 30 days a ram’s horn trumpet, a shofar, is sounded as a call to repentance and readiness. The Last Trumpet is only sounded when the first sliver of the moon can be sighted, beginning Tishri, the seventh month, and the new year. It’s THIS trumpet which Paul is referring to when he says in 1 Corinthians 15:52 “…the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed…” – this is the moment of the Rapture, when the King comes to gather His people to Himself. This is also what Jesus was referring to when He said to His disciples that “no man will know the day or the hour” in Matthew 24:26 – it sounds vague, but He was actually being incredibly specific. That particular phrase was commonly used in the ancient Jewish culture to refer to the start of Rosh Hashanah because you had to see that sliver of the new moon before the festival could be declared, and that meant that it wasn’t tied to a particular day of the month; it had to be looked for. Jesus was saying clearly that the season of the Rapture was at this feast.

There are many, many, more proofs from Scripture to point us to the Rapture – in prophecy, in typology, and in numerology (ancient Hebrew is a numeric language and contains far more meaning than our modern languages could ever convey), and they would be too many to list or go through here. But many teachers – Robert Breaker, CJ Lovik, Jonathan Cahn, Phil Richardson, David Kull, and others have all come to remarkably similar conclusions concerning the timing and possible dates for the Rapture using completely different methodologies, and there is a strong case for each of them independently. Look them up on the resources tab on the home page.

One final thing that I will mention here is watching the world around us. Even a superficial reading of Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21 and other similar passages that deal with teachings specifically about the end times are like reading descriptions of real events in the daily newspapers during the twentieth century, and even more so during the first two decades of the twenty-first. We see wars, rumours of wars, earthquakes, famines, nation rising up against nation, the sea and the waves roaring, ‘distress of nations with perplexity’ (the Greek word used for perplexity here in Luke 21:25 is ‘aporia‘, meaning ‘with no way out’), and people’s hearts failing them for fear of what was coming on the earth. All those words and phrases are direct quotes from one or more of the chapters I just mentioned, and though there have always been things like wars and natural disasters throughout history, never before have so many of them occurred in a globally interconnected way, and never before have they converged and intensified in the way that we have witnessed in the past few decades. Ask any historian or environmental scientist, and they will tell you that turbulence and turmoil in every area has only intensified over the past century, despite efforts to slow it or stop it happening -“the war to end all wars” for example.

Jesus specifically instructed His followers that when these things begin to happen like this, we were to expect Him:

“…look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.”

Luke 21:28

So we did. And our redemption came.

Hey friend!

If you’ve got this far, it’s because you received an email or e-card from me, or from a member of my family, with the link to this blog. I have been working on this since August 2021, wanting to put something together that would collect all my thoughts and all the things I’ve always wanted to tell you, but perhaps never had the chance. Now I’m gone, albeit temporarily, but I wanted to leave you something that might give you some answers to the questions you have in your heart and mind; something that will enable you to follow me, and to ensure that we can be reunited someday very soon.

You probably know that I am a Christian. (Notice I used the present tense; I AM a Christian – because although I’m no longer with you, I am more alive than ever before, and I am safe and well, so please don’t worry about me!) My faith is the centre of my life and makes me who I am. That’s not to say I’m some sort of perfect, goody-two-shoes who is somehow better than anyone else – nope! If anything, being a Christian means that I have faced up to being imperfect, selfish, sinful, full of faults, foibles, and a maker of mistakes big and small…just like everyone else. But the difference about being a Christian is that I have accepted Jesus as my Saviour and Lord, and by faith I know I have been forgiven for everything I have ever done wrong, not through my own merit, but through the everlasting LOVE of God, hence the name of this blog.

So why am I writing this?

• Because I want to share with you how I see the world, through the incredible, 4D+ lens of the Bible
• Because it will impact directly on what you, the reader, my friend and loved one, will experience in the coming days, weeks, months and years

You have just experienced the most frightening and otherworldly event ever to have taken place since darkness covered the earth and the veil of the temple was torn in two on the day that Jesus died. Millions of people have suddenly gone missing, vanished into thin air, among them me and my immediate family.

Let’s get a few things straight right away:

• This is NOT aliens (yes, I believe UFOs are a genuine phenomenon, but not alien life; more on that later)
• The Bible has been prophesying and speaking about this event for literally thousands of years
• It brings both bad news, and good news (mostly good, if you know and believe what I believe!)
• It requires you to make a personal decision, calmly and with an open mind

You’re about to read about some pretty amazing stuff and you will need to allow yourself to consider things that you had perhaps never even thought about before. But, as a disclaimer, I have simply put down what was on my heart as it occurred to me, like a diary entry or a personal conversation with someone I love very much. I’m not about to compose vast academic essays, full of references and multiple-point arguments. There are many wonderful resources you can access yourself, so that you can read/watch/listen to the sorts of things I read/watched/listened to when I was here with you, and I have compiled a list of these under the Resources tab in the menu above.

PLEASE BE AWARE: YouTube, Google, Amazon and the like will start pulling things down, hiding websites from search results, shadow-banning websites and posts, censoring information, and engaging in digital book-burning on a scale never seen before in order to keep this information from you. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the secular, politically-correct/’scientific’/liberal woke narrative that has been the centre of everything, from education to politics, for decades now. They have already been doing this for years under the guise of ‘fact-checking’, ‘misinformation prevention’ and the like, and you need to realise that truly free speech and access to the politically-incorrect and inconvenient points of view will soon be intensely curtailed. Get this information whilst you still can, and download it, print it, file it, memorise it. In particular, get your hands on a copy of the Bible and treasure it more highly than anything else, because in it are the very words of Life Himself; the Lord Jesus, the Messiah.

One more thing. I promise I’m not about to preach at you. I simply want to share what’s on my heart. If I never had a chance to share this with you when I was with you, it’s not because I didn’t care; it’s because the right opportunity never presented itself, and I didn’t want to shoehorn a conversation that wasn’t natural or caring for where you were at. I wanted you to know, first and foremost, that I loved you, and that I wanted to get to know you and get alongside you in life as your friend, and that’s still my goal now. If I was with you, I’d be giving you a huge hug and my eyes would be shining with joy at the chance to share with you some of the most exciting and wonderful things that give my life meaning and purpose, and an ultimate, certain everlasting future…all because of LOVE.

Read on (go to the bottom of the blog posts page and click on the first post to read them in the order I wrote them in!). I hope this makes sense, and I hope and pray with all my heart that you, too, will find this everlasting love and life for yourself in the coming days.

Becky xx