Beware of prophecy

This is the second part of the article titled "The Time of the — Almost — End."   Four Moons San Antonio, Texas, autumn 2013. An evangelical pastor with a twenty-thousand-seat church, a television network, and a publishing house at the ready puts out a book. The title: Four Blood Moons . The thesis: between April 2014 and September 2015 there will be four total lunar eclipses, one after another, and all four will fall on Jewish feast days — Passover and Tabernacles. It had never happened, he says, except on three occasions: in 1493, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; in 1949, after the birth of the State of Israel; in 1967, with the Six-Day War. Every time, something enormous for Israel. So something enormous is about to happen.[1] The book sells hundreds of thousands of copies. They make a film of it for the theaters.[2] Television talks about it. The four eclipses arrive right on schedule — the last, on 28 September 2015, was even a supermoon, and half the wo...

The time of the end. We begin with something on which we agree with everyone. The "conclusion of the system of things," or the time of the end, exists. It is not the invention of some organization. It is Jesus who speaks of it, on the Mount of Olives, answering a precise question from his disciples: "What will be the sign of your presence and of the conclusion of the system of things?" (Matthew 24:3, NWT). And Jesus answers. Wars and reports of wars. Food shortages. Pestilences. Earthquakes in one place after another. An increase of lawlessness. The love of the greater number growing cold. False prophets. Great signs from heaven. Men growing faint out of fear (Matthew 24:6-12; Luke 21:11, 25-26). Let us stop a moment. There have been those who took these words seriously. They looked at the world around them, compared what they saw with what Jesus had said, and drew the conclusion: this is it. And they did not keep it to themselves. They announced it everywhere...