Jesus is Coming Again

Glory Fire Church is an international denomination with churches in Miami, Bedford, Leeds and Hyderabad in India. Somehow their leader, Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, has become convinced that Jesus will return in the next 10 years (speaking at New Year 2020.) What led him to this conclusion?
The Apostle (as he is called by his church) foresaw that the 2020s would be a decade of 'end time shakings.' Notice that he said this a few months before the major coronavirus outbreak. Coronavirus had not spread outside China. It was hard to imagine, at that time, that the disease would spread rapidly across advanced western countries with good health care facilities, completely overwhelming their modern hospitals and killing thousands. It would have been easy to have made such a statement after the event. To have made this prophecy a few months before this happened is amazing. In March, when the pandemic was going on, the Apostle compared it to Luke 21:25,26. Men will faint with fear because of what is coming on the world. We have had this problem before. Spanish flu killed millions of people in 1918. Luke 21 also says that there will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars. Spanish flu was called influenza because astrologers thought it was caused by the stars and planets being in the wrong alignment. This is from an Italian word for influence, meaning influence of the stars and planets. No one knew how the illness occured. Viruses were discovered in 1949, when the electron microscope was invented. They are shorter than the wavelength of light and invisible to optical microscopes. If this is a sign of Christ's Second Coming, it also happened in 1918. What the Apostle was really drawing attention to was the fear that people now seem to have of such an event. No doubt people were afraid in 1918. In the absence of modern medical knowledge millions of people were dying, as opposed to thousands in our country in 2020. But even in 1918, it seems that people didn't have the same kind of irrational fear that they have now. Why are people in 2020 going to supermarkets and stockpiling food?  No one had told them that the government would ban all foreign imports but this was a rumour my friend heard at the supermarket. The government have had to reassure people that essential supply chains will remain open. There is no shortage of food. There was something about people in the old world that was more accepting of disaster. Their sons and daughters went off to war and many died. Epidemics happened and people were left crippled by polio or disabled by childhood meningitis. Perhaps our ancestors had more grief and could cope more easily with disaster. There have always been disasters. They did not always frighten us as much as they do now.
The Apostle says there is a spirit of fear. It is not a rational, proportionate fear because it is not an internal process of the ordinary mind. Rational fear is what stops you walking in front of a bus. The spirit of fear is an evil spirit, external to your brain. The spirit of fear is what tells people in the supermarket that the government are about to ban all imports to the country when the government are planning no such thing. We also have a much greater fear of climate change than previous generations. In the 1970s, I recall a children's encyclopedia that explained how Venus had a high level of atmospheric carbon dioxide and is a very hot planet, and that this had led to the theory that we call global warming. A team of Young Scientists on the television had also proved, for the first time, that aerosol propellant damaged the ozone layer. We thought that climate change was a problem and that we should do something about it. We did not have organisations with names like Extinction Rebellion. This is a name based on irrational fear. Historians tell us climate change has happened many times before in human history. We didn't become extinct then and we won't become extinct this time. Climate change might have propelled homo sapiens from a hunter gatherer lifestyle into agriculture, while still killing many due to starvation. The seas are higher than they were 10,000 years ago. It was also warmer in the early middle ages than it is now. The Romans had vineyards on the south coast. In the middle ages, there were farms in Greenland. It is wrong to see a teenage girl holding a sign saying, 'You will die of old age, I will die of climate change.' If the experts' predictions are right, coastal towns will be flooded and there will be more frequent famines in poor countries. It is unlikely the girl would actually die. A man and woman were beaten up by commuters in London when they climbed on top of a tube train holding a banner that said, 'Business as usual means death.' Extinction Rebellion have a spirit of fear. They are worked up into a frenzy. Their antics became so insane that in 2019 the government banned them from holding any demonstrations in London.
Read Matthew 24 and Luke 21. There are early signs of the Second Coming. Wars, famines and earthquakes in various places are the beginning of the birth pains. The end is not yet. Men fainting with fear because of what is coming on the world is a late sign in Luke 21:26. The end comes straight away after that.
Another late sign of Jesus coming again is Matthew 24:14. The gospel of the kingdom will preached to the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come. This is happening in our lifetime. In 1974 the Dawn Conference (Discipling a Whole Nation) aimed to preach the gospel to every country and to have radio programmes in the main language of every country by the year 2000. It succeeded. Today there are no countries in the world that don't have some Christians living in them, even a few thousand Christians in the most persecuted muslim countries. Bible scholars point out that the word in Matthew 28:19 translated as nations means people groups. But these are being reached rapidly. Comparing the Big 31 unreached people groups website to Project Joshua, it is possible to see how the church is expanding so rapidly into some regions that it is impossible to keep some websites on the subject up to date. All the major unreached people groups in India have a Bible and online New Testament in their own language. Most of these were completed in 2016. Computers make Bible translation easy. All the South American people groups on the Big 31 now have significant numbers of Christians living among them. None of them are unreached. Big 31 was up to date 5 years ago when it was written. Two major events have happened in the last 30 years. Firstly, most missionaries are now from South America, Africa or Asia. These people find it much easier to become missionaries and there are more of them. Secondly, the same people have access to modern technology. There are radio programmes on the internet made by Christians in Ghana and Glory Fire Church have a television programme made by Christians in Hyderabad. All you need to make a translation of Bible stories into a new language is to take a French Bible, give it to someone who is bilingual, and sit her in front of a mobile phone. There you are, 40 Bible stories given to a story telling culture which may not even have a written form of their language in one afternoon. So many people have mobile phones already. The aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia, the Siberian people in the remote Russian mountains. Operation Mobilisation and Mission Aviation Fellowship go there and only have to produce apps for mobile phones that people have already. Elon Musk is designing a new generation of communication satellites that don't require a dish at the receiver. Sky TV was the height of technology in the 1990s. Constellation satellites are in a low orbit and don't require a dish. They will bring the internet to places on Earth now too remote, the places where MAF still rely on VHF radio. Solar PV panels will bring cheap electricity to places too remote to have powerlines. People there will be able to charge a tablet or mobile phone. The new Alexa speakers will cost no more than a transistor radio. They have no screen. They have no keyboard. These peripherals are expensive. The Alexa speaker is voice commanded. You say, 'Alexa, give me BBC news' and it gives you the news. A new generation of satellite internet receivers will become very cheap.
Another interesting development in the coming decades will be the 4K map. Based on the maps used for American election campaigns, this divides an area into council wards, areas of 4,000 people where there is one elected councillor. This allows people to see small neighbourhood blocks where there are few Christians. Evangelism would be focussed on those areas. Today, there are two categories of unevangelised people groups, unengaged, who have had no contact with the gospel, and least reached, where fewer than 2% are Christians. In the 1990s we didn't have those 2 categories. People groups were simply unreached, meaning unengaged, and there were far more of them, including whole countries. For these 2 categories to exist at all, the world is much more evangelised than it was then. A standard of 2% Christians would include muslim areas of England and also some white native areas of England. 1960s housing estates of 4,000 people often have only one church, or sometimes no churches. In Ouston, County Durham, there is a Methodist church in the original village where the coal mine was until 1929. There is no church on the much bigger housing estate that was built in 1965 and added to in the 1990s. A church meets in a local school. On many modern English housing estates you walk miles to find a church and it has only a small congregation. The main church on a council estate in Elswick, Newcastle, has only 20 members. The only other church on this estate is a Seventh Day Adventist church. Perhaps the South Americans and Africans will send missionaries to evangelise us. Much of the spiritual life in England is amongst black churches.
Do I believe Jesus is coming back in the 2020s? No. It's always dangerous to fall into date setting. I expect that the day of his coming is not far away. I would like to see Elon Musk and his new generation of satellites allow churches in the Himalayas to broadcast their Sunday services to people with Alexa dot speakers on their bedroom cabinets. That might be quite some time. We are probably talking decades rather than centuries. Jesus did say that no man knows the hour but he also said that when you see these things happening, meaning what I call the late signs, you know that the end is near, right at the door. That is surely the case now. Some of you reading this article will die of old age. I am 53. I expect to be raptured and taken up with Jesus to meet him in the sky. It is very likely that Jesus will return in the next 35 years. If I am wrong, and you are reading this in the 2090s, do not laugh. Take a good look at the world around you. Take a good look at the Scriptures I have quoted. Are the people around you afraid? Is the gospel being preached to every people group in the world? How close do you think you are to the Second Coming of Christ? He will come when you least expect it.