Author Bio - Who am I?

Date: November 12, 2024 - Time: 15:07 GMT
A few people have emailed me recently, asking for an author bio. This website is not intended to be about me, but since some of you have been curious enough to ask, here's who I am:
My Conversion
I am now in my late fifties, and from the UK. I became a committed Christian during my first year at university, studying mechanical engineering. That said, my parents were Episcopalian Christians and I had a fairly traditional Christian upbringing, with church attendance until about my teenage years. I was privately educated, and my school had a traditional non-evangelical Christian ethos.

Having been christened as an infant, I have a Christian godmother who, by my teenage years, had been well and truly born again and become one of the boldest and uninhibited evangelists that I know. She took her responsibility to help my parents raise me in the faith quite seriously. In my teenage years I used to see her at the beginning of each summer vacation, and every year she gave me a Christian book to read. These had a profound impact on me, at a time when I was really struggling to reconcile the simple faith of my early years with what I was being taught about evolution in my biology classes. I had lost my confidence that the bible could be trusted, and if it could not be trusted in regard to our origins, how could it be trusted in general? But each summer I would read the latest book my godmother had given me, and it created a quiet excitement in my soul, a 'what if this is actually true?' kind of excitement. But then the next year of school would start and I returned to a feeling of being rather lost, struggling to make sense of life and wondering if there was any real meaning to it. And although school had a traditional Christian ethos, I wasn't aware that any of my peers were believing Christians, so faith was not something I felt able to talk about with anyone. I felt too embarrassed.

I think I was 17 when my godmother gave me Hal Lindsay's book, 'The Late Great Planet Earth'. That summer I felt that same inner excitement that previous books had generated, and found it quite amazing that prophecies written thousands of years ago were apparently being fulfilled in my lifetime.

The breakthrough came when I was 19 and studying at university. In freshers week at the very beginning of my studies, I found out that one of my fellow engineering students was a born again Christian. Not only that, he had spent his year out between school and uni as part of a mission team. It just about blew my mind that this guy, who seemed pretty cool and confident about life, was not only a Christian but active in sharing his faith. I had never met anyone like that who wasn't a generation older than me. A couple of months later, we were standing in the dinner queue one evening and he said to me, "Jesus is a good friend of mine. I would love to introduce you to him one day". I didn't know how to respond, and he didn't push it. But it left me intrigued, and over the weeks that followed I wondered if it was really possibly to know Jesus in the way that he had implied. I had always thought that you had to believe, but that you wouldn't know until you died whether it was really true or not. But if you could somehow know Jesus, that could change everything. And it could mean there is actually meaning to our lives - we aren't just blobs of cells on legs, the product of billions of years of random chance.

My engineering studies were significantly more intense than I had anticipated, and in the middle of that first year I became quite stressed and worried that I might fail. It threw me into something of a depression, and over a few short weeks I felt like I was being sucked into a downward spiral, almost a kind of spiritual whirlpool. Without a real sense of meaning in life, I didn't know how to get out of it. Almost at a point of despair, I approached my fellow student and asked him to tell me about Jesus. Three days later I got down on my knees and prayed a sinner's prayer. I confessed my faith in Jesus and asked him to forgive me, and to come into my life and reveal himself to me.

I guess I half expected to see a flash of light, or something, and was somewhat disappointed that it didn't happen. But as the days went by after that, it quickly became obvious to me that something had radically changed. Hope was filling my heart, and with it an excitement about the future. The feeling of emptiness had gone. God had filled the god-shaped hole in my heart. I wouldn't have described it in those words beforehand, but that is how it now felt. And as my friend taught me the basics of Christian discipline, I began to wake up an hour early each morning to read the bible and pray. The bible had always seemed quite dry and boring before, but now there was something almost alive about it, and it often felt like God was speaking to me as I read it. As such, I began to devour it, to the extent that it became quite a distraction to me when I was trying to focus on completing my assignments, much like smartphones can be these days to many young people. My friend also taught me to talk to God as my heavenly father, believing that he was present in the room with me, and suddenly I was no longer alone.

Missionary aspirations
Being born again brought about such a radical change of worldview that for a while, my enthusiasm for my engineering studies rather waned. All I really wanted to do was study the bible and tell the world about Jesus. Nothing else seemed comparable in importance any more. So my father was appalled that summer, when I told him I was thinking of quitting my course. Fortunately he gave me good advice, and told me that a university degree is like a passport - it opens all kinds of doors in life, and I would be foolish to forfeit that. So I did complete my degree, but in the summer vacations I joined mission teams, beginning to prepare myself for a career as a missionary, not as an engineer.

After my graduation, my father was once again appalled when, instead of applying for a graduate engineering position, I joined a two-year program as a trainee missionary in Cairo, Egypt, and nothing he said could dissuade me. Dad's view was that if I wanted to pursue religion as a career, I should join the Church of England and do it properly. But as a missionary to muslims in Egypt, he was afraid I would get my throat slit.

As things turned out, those two years were tremendous fun. In closed-access countries like in the Middle East you can't openly be a missionary, so you need some kind of cover. But as a young man in my early twenties, it was sufficient to be a student of Arabic for two years, and you could easily do so on a tourist visa. So my mornings were spent in language school, and my afternoons and evenings were spent with young Egyptian men, trying to get to know them and to appropriately and respectfully share the Gospel. I lived with two other missionaries, one a young new recruit like myself, and another who was older and more experienced. In addition to his guiding oversight, there were weekly team meetings, which gathered the various sub-teams like mine together for worship and training. I also had regular one-to-one meetings with one of the senior team leaders. It was a great introduction to mission among Arab muslims. And as a bonus of those two years, I fell in love with a pretty English girl who was part of the same team but living in another part of Cairo. At the end of my commitment, we both returned to the UK and got married.

The next four years in the UK were spent preparing for long-term careers in mission. I completed one more year of professional studies, and then worked for a year of work so that we could return to missions work in the Middle East with a proper long-term cover. And we both completed two years of full-time theological training at a British bible college.

We spent the next fourteen years working in the Arabian Peninsula, in association with the same missionary organisation that we had trained with in Cairo.
Major Christian Influences
As I look back on nearly forty years as a Christian, I am aware how much my Christian godmother impacted me during my teenage years, with those books she gave me each year. One year it was 'God's Smugger' by Brother Andrew, the missionary epic of how he smuggled bibles into closed-access countries behind the iron curtain, and supported the underground Christian church. Another year it was 'Chasing the Dragon' by Jackie Pulling, a British missionary who went to Hong Kong and ministered to drug addicts, sharing the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit, and demonstrating its truth with healing through the laying on of hands, and deliverance from demonic bondages. Another year it was 'The Late Great Planet Earth' which introduced me to the hope of Christ's return and the need for the Gospel to be preached in all nations before the end will come. Several weeks after my conversion, I was privileged to meet Jackie Pullinger when she came to speak in my university town. At the end of the meeting, she laid hands on me and prayed for me to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that I might be empowered in my Christian witness. Later that evening I prayed in tongues for the first time, a gift that I still greatly appreciate in my personal prayer life for its edifying effect (1 Corinthians 14:4, Jude 1:20). Another key influence at that time was John Wimber. That same summer, I read his book 'Power Evangelism', and attended one of his large healing conferences in the UK.

So for sixteen years, inspired in part by Brother Andrew, I sought to be a witness, not behind the Communist iron curtain, but behind the Islamic one, if I might call it that. In my early days in Arabia, I sought to boldly share the Gospel with Arab colleagues at work, but when my fixed-term contract ended it was not renewed, as questions were being raised as to my true motives for working there. Fortunately we were able to move to another city in the same country and I found a job there. Whatever suspicions my previous employer had about me, they left me alone without pursuing me or getting me deported. But the experience taught me that I needed a different strategy if I wanted to have a long-term ministry in that country.

Radio follow-up
For several years after that I served as the country co-ordinator for follow-up of Christian radio listeners. In the nineties, before the internet had really taken off, shortwave broadcasts by Christian radio stations in the Seychelles were one of the few ways that Arab Muslims seeking an alternative to Islam could find out what Christians believe. My early training in Egypt had taught me that trying to evangelise convinced and devout Muslims who have no interest in the Gospel can often seem like a soul-destroying task, and feel like you are bashing your head against a brick wall. But across the Muslim world there are individuals who are seeking truth and are not altogether sure they have it in Islam. Such individuals would correspond with the radio stations and receive answers to their questions. But if they requested a bible, it was likely that customs would intercept it if the radio station were to send one from abroad, and then they could be in serious trouble. So at that point the radio stations would pass names and phone numbers to missionaries like myself, so that we could discreetly deliver requested bibles and offer further follow-up. As a country co-ordinator, it was my job to receive these names and numbers, cross-check them against a database of known contacts, and then distribute them among those involved in radio follow-up within the missionary community. I followed up a quota myself, and shared the rest. First contact was always a slightly scary task, never knowing whether this individual was a genuine seeker, or might possibly be a plant by government authorities trying to weed out the missionaries. That never happened to me, but there was always that possibility. But it was also exciting. Sometimes they just wanted to receive their bible and then disappear. Sometimes they wanted to meet regularly and have their questions answered. Occasionally they were like ripe fruit, ready to give their lives to Jesus, and then in need of discipleship. And with that came the challenges of trying to disciple an individual in a country where introducing them to other Arab believers meant also exposing them to the risk of betrayal with serious possible repercussions including imprisonment, torture, and potentially even martyrdom.
Church leadership involvement and healing ministry
Before 9/11, the expatriate Christian community used to meet for worship in large gatherings. Unlike the local Arabs, foreign Christians were afforded much tolerance and religious freedom, as long as we didn't invite local Arabs to join us, or openly try to convert them. But amid the tensions that existed in a post-9/11 Middle East, large gatherings were considered too much of a potential target for terrorists. Consequently, the international Christian fellowship was forced to split into small groups that could meet in homes, house-church style. For me, a welcome consequence of that was that if you hosted house-church, there was much more freedom than there had previously been to choose what flavour of Church you wanted. In the previous large-group setting, worship meetings followed a conservative Christian style, with American Reformed and Southern Baptist Christians being the dominant influences on Church format and style. In my university days, as a recent convert, I had felt somewhat cheated by the traditional Christianity I had grown up with, annoyed that it hadn't led me to find Jesus sooner. I identified it with the type of Christianity that the Apostle Paul describes as 'having a form of godliness but denying its power' (2 Timothy 3:5). Whereas, the type of Gospel I saw people like Jackie Pullinger and John Wimber proclaiming seemed much more akin to what I saw Jesus and his disciples proclaiming in the bible, and the type of 'full gospel' that the Apostle Paul talks about in Romans 15:18-19, and 1 Corinthians 2:4-5. And so later on during my missionary days, I found it quite frustrating being part of a fellowship that was conservative and cessationist in terms of healing and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. 9/11 changed that.

My wife and I rented a house with a large basement, so we could easily host house-church, and initially after 9/11 we had about 20 attending. We shared the leadership with several other like-minded missionaries, and created a rota with an all-hands-on-deck type of approach to running house-church. Attendance quickly grew to 60 or more, which was about full capacity. My wife and I had a particular vision to pioneer Christian healing ministry in the country, and we partnered with some like minded friends in another Arab country to bring in healing evangelists with greater experience in this. As well as the western English-speaking house-churches, there were also several other fellowships for other foreign communities, and we took these visiting ministers to several of these. In addition, we hosted healing meetings in our home, inviting other missionaries to bring their Arab friends along for prayer. Obviously we were pushing boundaries doing that with local Arabs, but we got away with it. I remember on one occasion, we had the late James Maloney ministering in our home, and some missionary friends brought along a group of several young Arabs, one of whom had a withered right arm. If I remember correctly, his arm had been that way since birth. The bones were all there, but he had very little muscle on his right arm and only minimal use of it. While James and one of my friends laid hands on him and prayed, the muscle grew back on his arm and he gained about ninety percent use of it. Perhaps surprisingly, the young man was pretty freaked out by this! We found out later that his other Arab friends had brought him along as a plant to see what these strange foreigners were getting up to. He was a devout Muslim, with no interest in becoming a Christian, and getting healed left him in an awkward and somewhat unwelcome dilemma!

I remember another occasion with another healing evangelist who we took to minister at the Southeast Asian Fellowship. A Filipino lady came in, hobbling on crutches, due to paralysis on one side of her body. She received prayer from the minister, together with a German lady friend of mine who was a medical doctor, and a member of our house-church. As they prayed, the lady was healed, threw down her crutches and started running around the room, wailing somewhat hysterically with excitement. I think what excited me most about that experience was that only weeks earlier, this German doctor, after one of my sermons about healing, had said to me something like, "Honestly, I pray regularly for my patients but I have never seen it change anything. But I give them medicine and they get better!" I loved seeing God's graciousness in blessing this doctor's obedience with this dramatic healing. If we want to see breakthrough, we need to persevere in obedience to the word of God until our experiences line up with it. Healing ministry is a bit like evangelism. If you share the Gospel with several people and none of them get saved, it doesn't mean that the Gospel doesn't work. It means you need to persevere and share with more people until someone does repent and believe. So with healing, if you persevere, you will eventually see breakthrough. That said, I have never discovered a formula which explains why some people get healed and others don't. There are lots of factors that can facilitate healing and make it more likely, but at the end of the day there is no simple formula. Being someone with a mechanical engineering degree, I find that quite frustrating. I like formulae!

It was a time when God's power was beginning to break out, and I wondered what this might lead to. Would local Arabs start getting healed and saved in significant numbers? Would that get us into trouble and deported? A dramatic healing like the one above of the Arab with the withered arm certainly had the potential to get us into trouble, especially if it has led him to become a Christian. Think of how Christ's healing of the blind man in John 9 caused friction between Jesus and the religious authorities. Sometimes you just get a sense that something is about to change.

What happened next came as a surprise. On a summer vacation back in the UK, my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, with a 20 percent probability of her surviving five years. It turned our lives upside down! Obviously we prayed, and trusted God for healing. But still, we had to abandon returning to the Middle East, and instead settle in the UK and get the kids in school, while my wife started chemotherapy. Over the next year, we had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people praying for her around the world. But the breakthrough never came, and she died.
A new chapter
My three kids were aged between 11 and 16 at that time. One of them told me recently that when she died it felt like the world had come to an end. I think that is quite an accurate description of how it felt as we lowered her coffin into a six foot hole in the ground. During the first six months of her treatment, we had been fairly upbeat and faith-filled, anticipating a breakthrough. But after it became clear that there was nothing more the doctors could do to save her, the reality that she really might die was hard to adjust to. I could soon feel that same old depression that I had experienced in my student days, clawing at my heels. She was such an amazing wife and mother, and when it came to it, she died in faith, eagerly anticipating the glories to come. But I felt so inadequate and overwhelmed without her. In those last few months while she was dying, I honestly felt afraid that I might lose my faith. Healing ministry is a difficult path. Sometimes you experience the thrill of victory, but at other times, the agony of defeat. And there is no greater feeling of defeat than when you have just buried your wife. Nevertheless, I resolved to get a grip, and not allow depression to suck me into its miry depths. Proverbs 13:12 say, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is like a tree of life". But it is not inevitable that disappointment, or 'a hope deferred', makes the heart sick. You can fight it. Like it or not, life carries on, and you have to move on with it. If you allow disappointment a chance, the next thing is that it puts down roots and sprouts resentment. And if there's one thing that can make you lose your faith, it is resentment. I could not let that happen. But neither could I deny that a chapter of my life had ended, and that I needed to adjust to a new one.

Self-employment
The next year my job did not go well. By the end of it I came to the painful realisation that the type of employment that had worked as an effective cover for me in the Middle East was no longer a fit for me back in the UK. I needed a new career! So at the end of that year I retrained in a completely different profession, and it enabled me to become self-employed and set up my own small business. God has been gracious and blessed me in this, and so I now have a business that gives me a decent income, but also great flexibility. I can take time off whenever I feel like it, even at quite short notice, and I find that really helpful at this stage of my life. Being self-employed, there is no sick pay, or holiday pay, or employer pension contribution. But there is always work when I want it, so I can take time off and then go back to it when it suits me. The only constraint is needing an income, so there is a limit to how much time I can take off. I think that, particularly as a man, gainful employment is such a key ingredient to feeling content and fulfilled in life. It took a couple of years for my business to really become a success, but getting past that point certainly helped in the healing process.

Remarriage
Getting married again has certainly also helped me get over the death of my first wife. I don't think I was designed to function at my best as a single person. That said, getting married again while I still had teenagers living at home and recovering from trauma proved more of a challenge than I had naively anticipated. I didn't realise quite how much I was asking of my new wife, and our happiness together has come at a price.

Reasons for Hope
Hebrews 11:6 says, "Now without faith it is impossible to please him, for the one who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him". I came to realise that I had seen too much of God and the outworking of his power to be able to deny his existence. So I wasn't about to lose my faith in that way, for which I felt very fortunate. But did I still believe that he rewards those who seek him? Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see". It made me realise that faith and hope are inseparably linked. In fact, if you want to have faith, you first need hope. So I began to study what the bible says about hope. But what is hope? I think it is Bill Johnson who I have heard define it this way, "Hope is the joyful expectation of good". That's not a direct biblical quote, but I believe it is accurate. Romans 15:13 says, "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in him, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit". In other words, hope has its source in who God is, and it is a product of allowing God to supernaturally fill us with his joy and peace. Because hope is part of God's nature, and we are made in his image, we need hope in order to function correctly. And with hope comes joy and peace, and also faith and love just as Paul says in Colossians 1:5, "Your faith and love have arisen from the hope laid up for you in heaven, which you have heard about in the message of truth, the gospel that has come to you". The Gospel is a message of hope that is laid up for us in heaven. Whereas faith is rooted in what God has done in the past, and shapes our worldview of the present, hope is focussed on what he will do for us in the future. That future includes our future in this life, but also in the life to come (1 Corinthians 15:19-23). And the life to come hinges, partly on our death, but more so upon our resurrection or rapture at the second coming of Christ (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). And so I concluded that ultimately, if I wanted to abound in hope and to restore my faith, I needed to study the blessed hope, as described in Titus 2:13 (NIV), "…while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ".

Admittedly, if you are working through trauma, there is more to it than simply studying about end times. Lamentations 3:21-26 (NIV) says, "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD". The author, generally believed to be Jeremiah, wrote this at a time when Jerusalem had just been destroyed, its temple and walls burned with fire, many of its people massacred, and most of the survivors carried off into exile. Whatever troubles I might have faced when my first wife died, they certainly weren't as all-encompassing as what Jeremiah and the Jewish people had just experienced. Notice the ingredients that give him hope: 1) Confidence in God's love, compassion, faithfulness and goodness, 2) waiting on him every morning, 3) speaking the truths of God's word to himself, 4) seeking him patiently, and 5) knowing the salvation that we have in him.

It takes time, patience and perseverance to work through trauma. But part of it is knowing and understanding the salvation that we have in him. We understand the all-important basics of that salvation by studying what the bible says about the death and resurrection of Jesus, and all that he achieved for us through it. But if we desire a deeper, more advanced understanding of that salvation, we need to study all that the bible has to say about the future. And you cannot do that without studying end times. The technical word for the study of end times is 'eschatology'.
'The Late Great Planet Earth' and beyond
As already mentioned, one of the books my godmother had given me as a teenager was Hal Lindsay's 'The Late Great Planet Earth'. And it certainly had a role in leading me to faith a couple of years later. Published in 1970, it is something of a Christian classic, selling over 15 million copies, and it presents eschatology from a Dispensationalist Pre-Millennial perspective. After my conversion at university, I joined a small Evangelical church that had originally been a Brethren Assembly but had experienced the charismatic renewal that touched many such churches in the 1970's. Back in the 1830's, it was John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren who came up with a new Pre-Millenialist framework for understanding end times that became known as Dispensationalism. So it was an accepted perspective in that church, and I felt reasonably informed whenever it came up in conversation. That said, end times was not a major focus of that church, but it interested me. Later on, when I was working in the Middle East, the mission organisation was interdenominational, and consequently discussions about end times were discouraged. For me personally, my understanding of end times was a motivating factor in my being involved in mission (based on Matthew 24:14). But because different denominations tend to adopt different perspectives on end times, missionary organisations often view eschatology as being divisive, and somewhat irrelevant when it comes to the task of reaching the lost with the Gospel. In an interdenominational setting, it is something of a taboo subject, along with topics like the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and especially 'speaking in tongues'. You learn quickly just not to go there!

My theology diploma at bible college included a module on Revelation. The bible college was also interdenominational, so the lecturer was careful to present it from different theological perspectives. So he gave us a broad overview, but without going into any one perspective in any great detail. At least he taught me that whatever perspective one adopts, it is important to understand the other possible perspectives that bible believing Christians hold. That said, I do think it is right to have an opinion. Choosing to be a 'Pan-Millennialist' and just saying that it will 'all pan out in the end' is a feeble excuse for not bothering to commit time and effort to study what the bible teaches. Too many Christians, in my opinion, treat the second coming as a topic of secondary importance with little relevance for today. But what if we are truly in that final generation and his return really is imminent? In relation to the signs of his coming, Jesus commanded us to watch (e.g. Matthew 25:13), and the New Testament repeatedly warns us not to be deceived (Matthew 24:4, 5, 11, 24, Mark 13:5, 6, 22, Luke 21:8, 1 Corinthians 6:9, 2 Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 5:6, 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 10, 1 Timothy 4:1, 2 Timothy 3:5, 13, 2 John 7, Revelation 13:14). At his coming, let us be like the five wise virgins who made themselves ready, and not like the five foolish ones who couldn't be bothered (Matthew 25:1-13).

It must be about twenty years ago that I began to listen to sermons by Mike Bickle, the leader of IHOP. I would download them and often listen to them while I was driving. Mike is a great all-round bible teacher, but he has a particular interest in eschatology. Over time, his teaching steered me away from a Dispensationalist understanding in favour of Historic Premillennialism, which is based on the understanding of the early church fathers before the Church adopted Amillennialism. Probably the most obvious difference between Dispensational and Historic Premillennialism is the question of when the Church is raptured. Dispensationalists believe in a secret rapture of the Church several years before Christ's glorious return, usually before but sometimes in the middle of the Great Tribulation. That means that Jesus has two comings, first a secret coming for the Church, and later a glorious return with the Church. The Historic understanding is that the Church is raptured at Christ's return in glory. That still leaves the big question as to at what point in the Book of Revelation the glorious return occurs. The three main options are:- 1) at the sixth seal in chapter 6, or 2) at the seventh trumpet in chapter 11, or 3) at the battle of Armageddon in chapter 19. Over time, I accepted Mike's view that equates the seventh trumpet with the last trumpet of 1 Corinthians 15:52, and chose option 2. In that case, the church must expect to go through the Great Tribulation but to be spared the wrath of the seven bowl judgments. It is only very recently that I have changed my mind, and come to the conclusion that Jesus returns in glory at the sixth seal. It is at the sixth seal that the sky is split open and people on Earth are able to look up at the sky and see God the Father sitting on the throne together with the Lamb (Revelation 6:14-16). The events that immediately precede it in verses 12 and 13 correspond to those Jesus describes in Matthew 24:29. And verse 17 tells us it marks the beginning of the Day of Wrath. So if Jesus is going to deliver us from the coming wrath (1 Thessalonians 1:10 and 5:9), this is the time for the rapture to happen. And the raptured Church is exactly what we do see in the next chapter (Revelation 7:9-17) before the seventh seal. Consequently, I have had to update my Revelation commentaries to reflect my current understanding, and I still have some updating to do with many of my other commentaries.

A Year off to study End Times
For several years after doing my study on 'Reasons for Hope', I had wanted to take time off work and do a proper study on end times. In reality there is never an easy time to do that. But after September 23, 2017 and the apparent astronomical fulfilment of the great sign prophesied in Revelation 12:1-2, I felt time really might be short and I had to commit without putting it off any longer. So I took time off at the start of 2018, and used Mike Bickle's list of '150 chapters on End Times' as a starting point for my study. Having taught myself how to build a website when I started my business, a website seemed the obvious format for organising and sharing my study in an organised way that also took advantage of computer search tools. And inspired by Mike Bickle's policy that "our copyright is the right to copy" it meant I could share my study for free without needing to monetise it in any way. I wasn't sure how long it would take me, but it was nearly the end of 2018 by the time I was done, and at that point I really did need to go back to work and start earning some money again!

Although I frequently make minor updates to my commentaries, I regret that over five years have since passed without me taking off another significant amount of time to further the project. There was part of me that would have loved to take time off at the start of 2020 and to write a book that summarised my end time expectations. It seemed appropriate fifty years after the publication of Hal Lindsay's book, which you might accurately sub-title as 'A 1970 Dispensationalist vision of End Times'. I thought to give my own book the sub-title, 'A 2020 vision of End Times'. In hindsight, I am quite glad that I didn't as world events would quickly have shown me to be a little short-sighted, not to mention a little arrogant!

I say that somewhat in jest, but actually there's a couple of serious points to make there. Firstly, those of us who choose to have an opinion about end times need the humility to admit that we are probably wrong about quite a lot of things. Secondly, those who choose to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of end times are often critical of people like me who adopt a more detailed position, especially when we change our minds about certain details. But a willingness to change our minds is absolutely essential. Let me explain why.

Jesus and the Weather Forecast
In Matthew 16:3, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees and Sadducees saying, "You know how to judge correctly the appearance of the sky, but you cannot evaluate the signs of the times". Effectively, he had just quoted the proverb, "A red sky at night is a shepherd's delight. A red sky in the morning is a sailor's warning". And he was chiding them for paying more attention to the weather forecast than to the signs that speak of his coming. So Jesus, who told us in regard to end time signs that we must 'watch', likened it to paying attention to the weather forecast. Of course in his day, weather forecasting was incredibly crude and basic, and was simply a matter of trying to predict the weather over the next 12 to 24 hours. Today, with modern satellites and supercomputers at their disposal, meteorologists can predict the weather with reasonable accuracy up to a week or two in advance. But imagine you are planning a weather-dependent outdoor event for Sunday in a week's time. Each day as Sunday approaches the forecast for that day changes slightly because the meteorologists' computer algorithms are continuously being updated with the latest satellite data. In that respect, eschatology and meteorology are alike, because Jesus expects us to watch and to continuously update our understanding of biblical prophecy in light of the latest data of world events. So it is totally okay that what might have seemed like reasonable conclusions in 1970 when Hal Lindsay wrote his book now seem quite out of date. So we need a 2024 vision of end times.

Witnessing the End
Another reason I am glad I never published my '2020 vision of End Times' is that in 2023 Christian Widener published his book, 'Witnessing the End'. He had clearly had it in the making for a few years, so I think it would be reasonably accurate to refer to it as his '2020 vision of End Times'. And he did a much better job than I think I would have done. He also revealed a very significant fact that is relevant to Daniel 9:25, which I was unaware of. Not only did King Artaxerxes issue a decree to rebuild Jerusalem in about 458/457 BC. But in 1537 AD the Ottoman Ruler of Palestine issued another decree for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Not only that - it is set in stone on the Temple Mount. Now if that doesn't make you stop and wonder, I don't know what will! So Daniel's timeline of '70 weeks' of years may have a second fulfilment starting in 1537, and if so, then the '70th week' started in 2020. Wow!

Retirement Plans
For some years I have been looking forward to retirement, so that instead of needing to earn a living, I can spend my time studying and writing. I think I am just a few years away from being in a position to do that. Then again, if Christian Widener is right, Jesus may well have come back by then. All I can say is "Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!" Meanwhile, I hope that what I have completed so far is a blessing to you as together we eagerly await him (I Peter 1:13, Hebrews 9:28).

God bless you,
Paul Macisker