Eschatology Q & A, part 2

We were asked this question on our forum by one of our members:

Q. Will it be possible for man to fake the Second Coming with false signs and deceive many people? If that would be so, then many may say that it was prophesied in the bible and the Second Coming is yet to come. What are your thoughts on this?

Here is my response:

A: Ask any futurist who believes he is living in the "end times" or in the "last days" today, how does he know? And he will say it is because he sees "signs." And where are these "signs" described? In the Bible of course! But the apostle John saw these very signs, and referred to them, when he said, "Little children, we *know* it is the last hour." He saw that what Jesus said would happen was happening, and thereby he *knew* that it was the last hour.

The futurist is in a real tough spot now, for two reasons:

1) In order to say that the "signs" he is seeing now are those spoken of by Christ, he has to say that the apostles were all mistaken (as was Jesus, since he put them in the specific context of that generation--and that is a whole other problem for him: Jesus was right about the signs but wrong about their timing?), and if the apostles were mistaken about the signs, what else were they mistaken about? Their credibility has been shot, by the futurist's own admission...and yet, he still consults their writings to tell him what signs he should be watching for?

And this was a real "light bulb" for me when I was first looking at the time statements in the New Testament:

2) In order to say that the statements of urgency and imminency apply to our time now (or that they applied at any time beyond the first century) we must also be saying that they meant *absolutely nothing* to the people they were written to. And that is a pretty absurd suggestion, is it not? And yet....that is exactly what a futurist paradigm demands.

However, Christ's promise to return in their lifetime is quite enough to render the question of whether "signs of the Second Coming " could be faked today moot. Because again, the only way for one to be deceived by such signs would be to say that Jesus was either uninformed or deliberately misleading, in which case one has discredited the very Scripture he is trying to use to identify the supposed signs. Furturism, we now see, really is impossible to defend.

Tami