We reserve a few minutes to discuss current trends that you’d expect from reading Bible prophecy.

We are futurists. We interpret all unfulfilled prophetic passages as future events that will occur in a literal, physical, apocalyptic, and global context.

Biometrics, Artificial Intelligence, cashless commerce, the manipulation of human DNA, global government, the exponential growth of human knowledge, and the rebirth of national Israel are End Times phenomena the Bible predicts. All of these are increasingly trending in the news.

Have you ever heard of the panopticon?

“The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century.”

The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of a penal institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.

More-and-more I am coming across the word in reading about the advances in biometric identification coupled with closed circuit TV surveillance. For example, an article posted by Technology Review said,

Many of the new products look to integrate face recognition with another form of recognition. The Russia-based facial recognition company NtechLab, for example, offers systems that identify people based on their license plates as well as facial features. Algorithms try to extract as much information from the video stream as possible. In these systems, facial recognition becomes just one part of an apparatus that can identify people by a range of techniques, fusing personal information across connected databases into a sort of data panopticon.

The article noted, “This technology is focused on government and law enforcement applications.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/01/31/1044576/corsight-face-recognition-from-dna/

It is disturbing to think that governments are creating huge data bases about each of us from a multitude of sources in order to better surveil us.

An article posted by theGuardian.com noted,

The looming interconnectivity between objects in our homes, cars and cities, generally referred to as the internet of things, will change digital surveillance substantially. With the advent of wider networked systems, everything in our homes, cars, and workplace will soon be able to communicate, creating a vast amount of data about our lives. There may not be a central tower, but there will be communicating sensors in our most intimate objects. And this deluge of data won’t only be passed back and forth between objects but will most likely wind its way towards corporate and government reservoirs.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham

This authoritarian surveillance trend is what futurists have predicted for decades.

In the Revelation, the Image of the Beast is a panopticon. Each citizen will be marked in a way that they are participants in a system that controls all commerce and industry. Swear allegiance to the antichrist or be killed by his image.

We believe the resurrection and rapture of the church are imminent. It could happen any moment; nothing needs to happen before it. It will happen before the Great Tribulation.

Jesus will return in the clouds.

He will raise the dead in Christ.

He will transform the bodies of living believers to glorified, resurrection bodies.

We will all join Him in Heaven while the earth endures one final seven-year campaign of severe evangelism.

Are you ready for the rapture? If not, Get ready; Stay ready; Keep looking up.

Ready or not, Jesus is coming!