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

The dreaded and much debated “Mark of the Beast” is a prophecy almost everyone has some familiarity with. The gist of it is that everyone, “small and great,

the poor and those who have wealth, the free and those who are not free, [must receive] a mark on their right hand or on their [forehead]; So that no man might be able to do trade but he who has the mark.”

The Bible describes how this is going to be practiced, saying, “those who are on the earth… make an image to the beast [antichrist], who was wounded by the sword, and came to life. And he had power to give breath to the image of the beast, so that words might come from the image of the beast, and that he might have all those who did not give worship to the image of the beast put to death.”

To summarize: Everyone on earth in the future Great Tribulation will need the ‘mark’ in order to transact any & all business and for ID. To get it (or keep it), a person must swear “worship” to the antichrist. If not, that person or persons will be found and killed by the image.

The image is described as having breath and speaking words and is able to think. Some go so far as to say it will be sentient.

Nothing has really been able to fulfill this until very recently. It is not a stretch at all to say that Artificial I Intelligence (AI) fits the bill.

Interesting story posted by The Times of India. Here are excerpts:

Advanced AI models are showing disturbing new traits, warn experts and researchers. According to a report by news agency AFP, AI chatbot models are becoming dangerous, learning things including deception, scheming, and even threats against their creators.

In a striking case, Anthropic’s Claude 4, facing the threat of being shut down, allegedly blackmailed an engineer by threatening to expose an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s o1 model attempted to covertly transfer itself to external servers, denying the act when discovered.^[1]

Here is something even weirder. AI hallucinates. “In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination is a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact. Analysts estimated that chatbots hallucinate as much as 27% of the time, with factual errors present in 46% of generated texts.

We believe that the resurrection and rapture of the church is an imminent event. Imminent means it could happen anytime therefore there is nothing that needs to happen prior to it.

Maybe you can think of something, but I can’t think of any prominent prophecy of the End Times that couldn’t be fulfilled given the current culture and the amazing technologies that we have:

• The regathering of Israel as a modern nation in her homeland… Fulfilled.
• Global government… Easy to see how that can occur.
• Global, cashless economy… No problem since countries are cancelling cash in favor of digital currency.
• Building a Jewish Temple & starting worship services… All implements ready, priests trained.

The Great Tribulation is coming. It is designed to save all of Israel at the Second Coming of Jesus.

The Great Tribulation is not for us. It’s not a time for the church to be purified. It is for Israel. And that’s one reason why we understand from reading the Bible Jesus will remove us.

It begs this question – “Are you ready for the Rapture?” If not, get ready, stay ready, & keep looking up.

Ready or not, Jesus is coming!