Hello and welcome. It is in our day that God has opened up the Scriptures. He has taken the seal off of His Word in order to allow people to understand that we are at the time of the end. It is true that we now know that May 21 in 2011 will be the date for the Rapture and October 21 in 2011 will be the date for the end of the world.
All of this information is found in the Bible. Books and pamphlets have been written that are laying out all of these teachings from the Scripture and showing that, yes, these dates are true and trustworthy. This is only because they come from the Bible and from no other source. If they did come from another source, then we would not have to be concerned about them because they would just be like anything else in the world.
However, the Bible is not like any other book or any other teaching of man in the world. It is far supreme and far above all religions, all philosophies, and all of the noble ideas of mankind. The Bible stands by itself. And, really, what we are coming down to, as we get ever closer to this date of May 21 in 2011, is an important question for each person. The big question is, “Do you trust the Bible or do you trust something else?”
Some people are going to trust their churches who will tell them that they do not have to worry about a date. Some people are going to trust their pastor who will say the same thing. Or some people are going to just trust their own minds and conclude that there is nothing to worry about. But none of these things are very trustworthy. Actually, they are not trustworthy at all because the only truly trustworthy thing in the world is the Bible.
Why is this? Why is the Bible so trustworthy? In 2 Timothy 3:16 [note: speaker inadvertently said “2 Peter”], God says:
All scripture…
This would be the whole sixty-six books of the Bible.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God…
This means that God inspired it. He moved men of old to write exactly what He wanted them to write. Therefore, even though men wrote down the words in a book—for example, as God commanded Jeremiah to do, and you can read about this in the book of Jeremiah—it was dictation from God to these prophets of old, and God said exactly and perfectly what He wanted to say.
The Bible is trustworthy and faithful and it tells us that God cannot lie. It is an impossibility with God to utter a falsehood. It says this in Titus 1:2:
In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;
This promise is to all of God’s elect people and He will fulfill it. Actually, we are getting very close to the completion of God’s promise to save a people for Himself. This is why May 21 will be the Rapture and the resurrection. Simultaneously, God will take His people out of this world and into Heaven, fulfilling His Word. Therefore, these words are true that God “cannot lie.”
If God is telling us the truth about saving people, He is also telling us the truth about condemning the rest of mankind, which are the unsaved individuals who do not have a Saviour. They do not have Christ paying for their sins; therefore, they have to pay their own wage because the Bible tells us “for the wages of sin is death.”
So all of these poor people will die and perish and their lives will come to an end, either some time during that five-month period in 2011 or on October 21st itself when they will be utterly destroyed and annihilated, because they will cease to exist.
You see, this is why it is all coming down to the Bible itself. Do you—and this question is for me and for every person—do you trust the Bible?
God gave us a very good illustration of trusting His Word in the book of Jonah when He sent Jonah to Nineveh. We know the story of how at first Jonah ran away to Tarshish and the Lord caused a mighty storm to assail the ship that Jonah was on, until finally they had to throw Jonah overboard in order to stop the raging waves. This did stop the minute that they threw him over. Then the Lord prepared a whale which swallowed up Jonah. Jonah was then in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights. Then he was spit out. The whale vomited out Jonah onto dry land, not too far from where the Lord had wanted Jonah to go, which was to the city of Nineveh.
So God again commanded Jonah to go into the city and to “preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.” (You can read about this in Jonah 3.) Jonah did go into the city and he proclaimed one sentence, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown [overturned].” This is all that we see recorded in the book of Jonah. There was nothing more. There was just that.
Then after going into the city a day’s journey, we find Jonah going outside of the city and sitting under a gourd to see what would happen. What did happen is what we read in Jonah 3:5, that “the people of Nineveh believed God.”
Why did they believe God? It was a prophet named Jonah who was a stranger and a foreigner and probably in a very unkempt appearance who appeared to them. Yet even though we could think of a thousand reasons as to why the people of Nineveh should not have trusted this prophet Jonah, this man—because our natural minds can really find reasons as to why we should not trust the Word of God—God was working in the city of Nineveh, in the lives of those people, and He caused them to believe that Jonah was a true prophet who was proclaiming the truth and that he was an ambassador for God Himself.
When an ambassador comes, he does not represent himself but the one who sent him. This is why the Ninevites believed God and not Jonah. As a result, they sat in sackcloth and ashes and fasted and cried mightily unto God that He might have mercy on them. Perhaps He might, but they did not know.
We are not told how long they remained in this kind of condition, but their lives did not continue on as normal. There was a big interruption. There was a major interruption in the course of events of that city, and that is because they believed the Word of God. They did not have much of it, only one sentence that we are aware of, but they believed it. God so blessed it that the whole city, from the king on down, did repent.
Jesus confirms this in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew, “They repented at the preaching of Jonas [Jonah]; and, behold, a greater than Jonas [Jonah] is here.” And it is true that we have the whole Bible. We have “all Scripture” and it is in harmony in its conclusion that May 21, 2011 will be the Rapture.
Why are you not responding as the Ninevites? Why are you not taking account of your life and looking at yourself and saying, “I have sinned. I have transgressed the Law of God. O Lord, have mercy!”
You are not to literally sit in sackcloth and ashes, but in your spirit you can cry out to God that you might have a rent heart. “Rend your heart, and not your garments,” that you might be made broken and contrite before this “evil day” come.
You see, this would be trusting the Bible and believing the Bible. Multitudes will not. But the Lord is sending forth His Word to find those who are typified by the Ninevites, because He will cause them to turn from their sin and He will cause them to walk in His statutes and to experience the great salvation of the Lord.