We focus on Bible prophecy each week for about five-minutes, calling it a “Prophecy Update.”
We’re living in the Last Days. It’s currently the Church Age – an age of grace and the sharing of the Gospel. It will be followed by what is prophesied in many Bible passages, but especially described in chapters 6-22 in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. I’m talking about the future seven-year Great Tribulation.
In the middle of those years, the world leader we most commonly call the antichrist will assume complete control over his citizens. No one will be able to buy or sell, or conduct any business, without swearing allegiance to him.
Governments in the Great Tribulation will control every aspect of people’s lives. There will be no privacy. Thus you would expect them to even now be trending in that direction.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek,
… a quarter of Americans have bought “smart speaker” devices such as the Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod. (A relative few have even bought Facebook’s Portal, an adjacent smart video screen.) Amazon is winning the sales battle so far, reporting that more than 100 million Alexa devices have been purchased. But now a war is playing out between the world’s biggest companies to weave Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Alphabet’s Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Facebook’s equivalent service much deeper into people’s lives. Mics are built into phones, smartwatches, TVs, fridges, SUVs, and everything in between. Consulting firm Juniper Research Ltd. estimates that by 2023 the global annual market for smart speakers will reach $11 billion, and there will be about 7.4 billion voice-controlled devices in the wild. That’s about one for every person on Earth.
The question is, then what? These machines are not creating audio files of your every decibel – tech companies say their smart speakers record audio only when users activate them – but they are introducing always-on mics to kitchens and bedrooms, which could inadvertently capture sounds users never intended to share. “Having microphones that listen all the time is concerning. We’ve found that users of these devices close their eyes and trust that companies are not going to do anything bad with their recorded data,” says Florian Schaub, a University of Michigan professor who studies human behavior around voice-command software. “There’s this creeping erosion of privacy that just keeps going and going. People don’t know how to protect themselves.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-12-11/silicon-valley-got-millions-to-let-siri-and-alexa-listen-in
No privacy. 24/7 surveillance. It is setting the stage for what was predicted. It is as expected from reading your Bible.
Jesus promised He’d return to rapture His church – which entails the resurrection of the dead in Christ of the Church Age, then the translation from earth to Heaven of all living believers.
It is presented in the Bible as an imminent (any-moment) event.
Are you ready for the rapture? If not, get ready, stay ready, and keep looking up. Ready or not, Jesus is coming!