My Own Interest
As a baby my parents had me baptised, and they chose several friends and relatives to act as my godparents. I grew up attending private schools that each had a strong Christian ethos, in a traditional Episcopal kind of way. The school day always started with chapel, where we sung a hymn and then listened to the headmaster or the chaplain give a short talk, before we headed off to lessons. Certainly as a child I assumed the existence of God, and when we prayed the Lord's Prayer in chapel it was meaningful to me. But in my teenage years I studied science, and Biology was presented in such a way that I found it hard to reconcile with the bible. By my late teens I was a confused agnostic, and had concluded that until we died we would never really know whether God was real or not. We would then either enter into the reality of heaven, or disappear into a void of nothingness. However, by that time one of my godparents had become a very committed born-again Christian. I typically saw her each summer, and every year she gave me a Christian book to read in her efforts to help me find true faith. At the age of about seventeen, she gave me 'The Late Great Planet Earth', written by Hal Lindsay in 1970.
Hal Lindsay's book deeply impacted me. Could it really be true, as Lindsay claimed, that ancient biblical prophecies were being fulfilled in our day, and that world events were aligning with end time events as portrayed in the bible thousands of years ago? Having read this book again quite recently, it amazes me what an impact it had on me at that time. With hindsight, it was clearly the Holy Spirit at work in my heart, arousing an inner excitement that maybe the bible could actually be true after all. Maybe God was actually real!
But I didn't know what to do with that excitement. In time it faded, until the following summer my godmother gave me another Christian book. The same excitement was aroused, and again it faded. But when I started university I met a Christian student on my course, and he explained what I needed to do to become a Christian. After directing me to read through John's Gospel, he led me in a simple prayer that went something like this: "Dear Lord Jesus, I believe in you as the Son of God and that you died on the cross to save me. Please forgive me all the wrong things I have done, and come into my life and save me. Help me now to follow and obey you for the rest of my life".
These are not magic words or an exact formula, but they contain the basic elements of faith, repentance, and confession that are part of surrendering your life to Jesus as your Lord and Saviour (Acts 2:38, Romans 10:9-10). I also received adult baptism several months later in church.
I saw no flash of light at my point of surrender, nor had any dramatic spiritual experience. But in the days that followed my conversion I knew that I was different. There was no longer the same emptiness in my heart. Instead a new sense of joy and hope was growing within me day by day. I knew now that God was real, and I began to talk to him as someone who was real. I began to wake up early each morning, allowing time to read the bible and pray before having breakfast and heading off to lectures. The bible was no longer the dull book that I had struggled to relate to in school religious studies. It now had a strange life to it, as though God was speaking to me through words written thousands of years ago. I now had a real awareness that God not only existed, but he was involved in my life and he loved me. Gone was the bleak meaninglessness of thinking we were alone in the universe and the product of mere chance.
My experience of conversion is what Jesus described as being 'born again' (John 3:3). It was a new beginning that was so life-changing, I wanted to spend the rest of my life helping others to find faith as I had done. In university summer vacations I joined city mission teams and started learning how to share my faith with others. After finishing my university degree, I joined a Christian mission on a two-year commitment, and headed off to the Middle East to share my faith with people who otherwise had little opportunity to hear about Jesus.
Apart from a period of training at bible college back in the UK, I spent most of the next twenty years involved in mission in the Middle East. They were exciting times in many different ways. But in my interactions with other missionaries over that period there was one thing that saddened me. Most of them had little if any enthusiasm for studying biblical prophecy. In interdenominational circles, eschatology (the study of end-time prophecy) is almost a taboo subject. Hal Lindsay's book had played a very significant role in leading me to faith. But they saw no benefit in it. To them, it was a divisive subject, and best avoided.
In about 2007 I came across Mike Bickle's website (mikebickle.org). Mike is the senior pastor of the International House of Prayer in Kansas city. His teaching includes a significant focus on end time prophecy, and I began to download and listen to his sermons. This re-ignited my own interest in eschatology, and has led me to study it more deeply.
In about 2015 I began to read through Mike's sermon notes on '150 Chapters on the End Times'. Doing so reminded me of laying out all the pieces of a jigsaw. I read each chapter in turn, and tried to understand how all the pieces fit together. In about 2016 I read 'God's War on Terror', by Walid Shoebat. This gave me additional insights into what the bible says about Islam, and how it relates to Antichrist's end-time empire and to Mystery Babylon.
Up to this point, I had only been studying end times in a fairly casual sort of way during my spare time. But the apparent complexity of the 'end time puzzle' was starting to frustrate me. So in 2018 I decided to take several months off work. I created the website, endtimebible.com, as a place to record and organise my study of each of the pieces. I started with Mike's list of 150 chapters, but as my study progressed it expanded to cover 260 chapters. I used website plugins to help me tag and sort prophecies according to common themes and topics. By the end of it, I had written what I call 'The End Time Bible Commentary'. I wouldn't call this a finished work. But it is a snapshot of how I understand end times, and I hope it may be a useful resource for others with an interest in eschatology. My project took me much longer than I had originally anticipated, and by early 2019 it was time for me to go back to work and earn some money. But in my spare time I have continued to read books on eschatology by various different authors, with diverse views on the subject. Eschatology involves many variables, and you inevitably have to make assumptions about some of them. My purpose in writing 'The End Time Puzzle' is to explain what the variables are, what assumptions I make and why, and what conclusions that leads me to.
Hal Lindsay's book deeply impacted me. Could it really be true, as Lindsay claimed, that ancient biblical prophecies were being fulfilled in our day, and that world events were aligning with end time events as portrayed in the bible thousands of years ago? Having read this book again quite recently, it amazes me what an impact it had on me at that time. With hindsight, it was clearly the Holy Spirit at work in my heart, arousing an inner excitement that maybe the bible could actually be true after all. Maybe God was actually real!
But I didn't know what to do with that excitement. In time it faded, until the following summer my godmother gave me another Christian book. The same excitement was aroused, and again it faded. But when I started university I met a Christian student on my course, and he explained what I needed to do to become a Christian. After directing me to read through John's Gospel, he led me in a simple prayer that went something like this: "Dear Lord Jesus, I believe in you as the Son of God and that you died on the cross to save me. Please forgive me all the wrong things I have done, and come into my life and save me. Help me now to follow and obey you for the rest of my life".
These are not magic words or an exact formula, but they contain the basic elements of faith, repentance, and confession that are part of surrendering your life to Jesus as your Lord and Saviour (Acts 2:38, Romans 10:9-10). I also received adult baptism several months later in church.
I saw no flash of light at my point of surrender, nor had any dramatic spiritual experience. But in the days that followed my conversion I knew that I was different. There was no longer the same emptiness in my heart. Instead a new sense of joy and hope was growing within me day by day. I knew now that God was real, and I began to talk to him as someone who was real. I began to wake up early each morning, allowing time to read the bible and pray before having breakfast and heading off to lectures. The bible was no longer the dull book that I had struggled to relate to in school religious studies. It now had a strange life to it, as though God was speaking to me through words written thousands of years ago. I now had a real awareness that God not only existed, but he was involved in my life and he loved me. Gone was the bleak meaninglessness of thinking we were alone in the universe and the product of mere chance.
My experience of conversion is what Jesus described as being 'born again' (John 3:3). It was a new beginning that was so life-changing, I wanted to spend the rest of my life helping others to find faith as I had done. In university summer vacations I joined city mission teams and started learning how to share my faith with others. After finishing my university degree, I joined a Christian mission on a two-year commitment, and headed off to the Middle East to share my faith with people who otherwise had little opportunity to hear about Jesus.
Apart from a period of training at bible college back in the UK, I spent most of the next twenty years involved in mission in the Middle East. They were exciting times in many different ways. But in my interactions with other missionaries over that period there was one thing that saddened me. Most of them had little if any enthusiasm for studying biblical prophecy. In interdenominational circles, eschatology (the study of end-time prophecy) is almost a taboo subject. Hal Lindsay's book had played a very significant role in leading me to faith. But they saw no benefit in it. To them, it was a divisive subject, and best avoided.
In about 2007 I came across Mike Bickle's website (mikebickle.org). Mike is the senior pastor of the International House of Prayer in Kansas city. His teaching includes a significant focus on end time prophecy, and I began to download and listen to his sermons. This re-ignited my own interest in eschatology, and has led me to study it more deeply.
In about 2015 I began to read through Mike's sermon notes on '150 Chapters on the End Times'. Doing so reminded me of laying out all the pieces of a jigsaw. I read each chapter in turn, and tried to understand how all the pieces fit together. In about 2016 I read 'God's War on Terror', by Walid Shoebat. This gave me additional insights into what the bible says about Islam, and how it relates to Antichrist's end-time empire and to Mystery Babylon.
Up to this point, I had only been studying end times in a fairly casual sort of way during my spare time. But the apparent complexity of the 'end time puzzle' was starting to frustrate me. So in 2018 I decided to take several months off work. I created the website, endtimebible.com, as a place to record and organise my study of each of the pieces. I started with Mike's list of 150 chapters, but as my study progressed it expanded to cover 260 chapters. I used website plugins to help me tag and sort prophecies according to common themes and topics. By the end of it, I had written what I call 'The End Time Bible Commentary'. I wouldn't call this a finished work. But it is a snapshot of how I understand end times, and I hope it may be a useful resource for others with an interest in eschatology. My project took me much longer than I had originally anticipated, and by early 2019 it was time for me to go back to work and earn some money. But in my spare time I have continued to read books on eschatology by various different authors, with diverse views on the subject. Eschatology involves many variables, and you inevitably have to make assumptions about some of them. My purpose in writing 'The End Time Puzzle' is to explain what the variables are, what assumptions I make and why, and what conclusions that leads me to.
