Our Time is Up

Friends 'till the end. That's what we called ourselves. There were four of us. We stuck together through thick and thin. We all met in kindergarten and have been the best of friends ever since. If you saw one of us, the other three were never far behind.

There was Paul. Good old Paul, always in trouble. You could tell by looking at him, that trouble followed wherever he went. He didn't fight, or do drugs or anything like that. No, Paul was best at burping loud in the library, or making faces at the principal behind his back, and getting caught. Y'know, good, clean, trouble. One time in the school cafeteria, he stuck two olives up his nostrils and couldn't get them out, so he had to go to the nurses office. That was Paul. He was always there when you needed him. When one of the other three of us got in trouble, we always knew it could have been worse, just by looking at Paul.

Then there was Zeke. Zeke was the kind of person that everyone wishes they could be like. He was smart, and happy, and good hearted. He was from a Christian family and they were just plain wholesome. Zeke never complained about anything, and if anyone else did, he always had the perfect thing to say that would really make a person think. He knew the answers to "What Would Jesus Do?" about almost anything. If anyone didn't like Zeke, it was because they were just plain jealous of him.

Then you have Jerry. Jerry was spoiled rotten, but he never acted like it. He had everything a kid could want, and it seemed like he didn't want it. I never could figure out what it actually was that Jerry wanted, but he always seemed a little bit empty inside for some reason. He came from a good Christian family, too. But something about Jerry was sort of sad. Kind of like he wanted to know something, but didn't know what. Sometimes he would just stare off into space, like he was daydreaming, but if you asked him what he was thinking about, he'd just blink his eyes, shake his head back to reality and say, "I dunno." He was just being, Jerry, and we all accepted each other, just as we were. We didn't try and change each other. We were pals.

And, last but not least, there's me. I'm just your average kid, living your average kid's life. I'm not smarter than the next kid, or dumber than anyone else. I'm a believer, but I'm kinda quiet about it. There's a lot of people like me. We just think that we're here for a reason, we don't know why, but we're certain God knows and we're gonna live our lives the best we can, have as much fun as we can, and then someday, we're going to die and go to heaven. Period.

Biblical End Times - Our Time is Up Soon
Biblical Time is Up Warning

It's not quite going the way I planned. It's not going the way Jerry or Zeke or Paul planned either. Our motto was friends 'till the end, but we never thought the end would be so soon.

I guess I always knew that someday the world would come to an end. I mean, everything that has a beginning, has an end, right? I just didn't expect it to be in MY lifetime. Really, how many times have people said the end of the world is coming? Thousands? More? Even the little red hen. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" We used to call it "doomsday" when I was a little kid. It was always something, that with just the mention of it, sort of made you a little ... respectful. It was always just so hard to believe that it would actually happen. It's one of those things that you think is so unlikely, it couldn't possibly be ... now.

Well, needless to say, I was wrong. You know, I wish I had paid attention in history class, I wish I had read my Bible more, and I wish I was more serious about the things there were to learn in Boy Scouts. I just might be more prepared. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, it doesn't matter now. It's time, whether I like it, or not.

This isn't the kind of story that starts with a place on a beautiful grassy hillside with a trickling brook at the bottom, blue skies with pure white puffy clouds and a breeze gently waving through the trees that someone is sitting under. This is ... IT! THE END! TIMES UP!

It started all of a sudden. There was lightning and thunder and what sounded like voices. The earth was shaking. I didn't know what was going on. Something fell from the sky, but I don't know what it was. Maybe it was a meteor, or an asteroid or a nuclear bomb, but then there was fire. The trees all burnt up. And all the grass, it wasn't green anymore. It wasn't THERE anymore! That was just the beginning.

Well, not really. Let me start at the beginning of the end. I can see that the signs have been slowly happening for a while now. So slowly, in fact, that I never even noticed. You bet that if I had read my Bible more I might have noticed. It's all unfolding, just exactly like it says.

There have been many people who have claimed to be the Messiah (That means they think they are Jesus). Jim Jones and Charles Manson, just to name a couple.

Biblical End Times - Our Time Is Up Facts
Biblical Time Is Up Now

Then, there are the wars. Oh, my, World War I, World War II, The Korean War, Hiroshima, Israel, Viet Nam, Granada, the Persian Gulf ... did I forget a couple, dozen?

In the 1900's alone, there were over 100 earthquakes. Since 2000 there have been over 300 already! That's three times as many in five years as there was in the past century! Not to mention the tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes, blizzards, floods, tidal waves and ... TSUNAMI's. Now there's something we never even heard of before. Now, everyone knows what a tsunami is.

The vanishing ozone layer is something people thought was a bunch of nonsense, but it looks like it makes perfect sense when you read what the Bible says about things happening in the sky.

Diseases spelled with more letters than I could count on two hands and some that are named with letters because their real names are so long, are things that I thought only future generations would have to worry about. Way far in the future. Boy, was I wrong.

I can't believe people didn't see it coming. Jesus said it so clearly. Oh, I used to worry about what people would think or call me if I talked about Jesus. Not anymore. He warned us. We just didn't think it would happen to us. Just take a look at what Jesus said about the end.

Call me a Jesus freak if you want to. He was right. As right as rain. Bingo. Bulls eye. Hit the nail on the head. Whatever you want to call it, (I like to call it truth) I am on His team.

Like I said, this place isn't exactly like what you read about in storybooks. I can't describe it too well for you. Not because I don't know how, but because there are people looking for us. Bad people. A lot of people think these bad people are good, but they're not. They keep talking about peace. They really want to kill us, because we believe in Jesus. Who are they? They're called by the names satan, antichrist and the false prophet and all the people that work for them.

Biblical End Times - Our Time is Up Concern
Biblical Time is Up Quest Fear

I can tell you this much. We're in the wilderness, and we're in a cave. Who's we? Me, and Paul and Jerry ... and a lot of other Christians. Let me start, one more time. We were riding our bikes, and all of a sudden, Zeke disappeared. There was his bike, just rolling along with us until it slowed down slow enough to fall. We all stopped, with our eyes bugging out, and none of us could even talk for a few minutes. Poof! Now you see him, now you don't. He just vanished!

We didn't know what to do, so we thought we'd better go tell his Mom and Dad, but while we were on our way to his house, we found out that Zeke wasn't the only one who disappeared. As a matter of fact it looked like half the people on the planet were missing. There were accidents everywhere. People were crying and others were hurt. There were sirens going off everywhere. Then we heard some people talking about the Rapture.

Heck, I didn't even know what Rapture meant. We found out later, Rapture is when Jesus takes you up to heaven, if you're chosen, when the end of the world is really coming. No wonder Zeke was chosen. Zeke was never afraid to talk about Jesus. In fact, he was proud to. He was good, through and through. When we got to Zeke's house, there was nobody home. I think Jesus chose to take them all.

So that left the three of us. Paul, Jerry, and me. Paul was spending the weekend with Jerry because his Mom and Dad were out of town. We went to my house after Zeke's, but my Mom and Dad weren't there. We looked everywhere for them. They were there when I left and they didn't say anything about going anywhere while I was gone.

I couldn't believe it when our next door neighbor knocked at the door and said she was talking to my Mom and Dad out on the porch and in the blink of an eye, they were just, gone! My face grew white. I could feel all the blood in it, just up and leave. I thought I was gonna pass out, but Jerry grabbed my arm and sat down with me on the step. Paul said he was sure that his Mom and Dad would adopt me. I was troubled, and looking at Paul couldn't even make me feel better.

It took me a while to get used to the idea that my parents were really gone with Jesus and I was still here. I just wasn't ready for this at all. Once the blood decided to return to my face, we all hopped on our bikes and rode over to Jerry's house.

Biblical End Times - Our Time is Up Woe
Biblical Time is Up Signs

Jerry's Mom hugged him so tightly I thought Jerry might suffocate. Jerry's Dad found out that the cruise ship that Paul's Mom and Dad were on wouldn't be coming back any time soon so he said that both of us could staying with Jerry's family for a while. I remember wondering why Jerry's Mom and Dad weren't chosen, or why WE weren't, but before I had too much time to think about it, we were all on our way to the wilderness, and the cave.

You're probably wondering why we went to a cave in the wilderness. Well, in the Bible, it says that during the End Times (that's what the last 7 years before the end of the world is called), that God will take care of believing Christians in the wilderness for 3½ years.

We've been here for quite a while now. It was really tough at first to get used to some things. There's a lot of things you don't think about, until it happens to you. Like when the power goes out during a storm, THEN, you think about what it would be like to live without electricity. Or when the water is turned off to fix a pipe, THEN, you think about what it would be like to live without running water. But once the electric or water is turned back on, you soon forget about it and life goes on. The thing that was hardest for me to get used to was living without my Mom and Dad.

It took weeks before I stopped believing that they would be coming back. It wasn't until Jerry's Dad explained to me that I should be so happy for them, that they were chosen to go with Jesus, and I should be happy for myself too, because if you're a Christian and you're still here, it might mean that Jesus has an important job for you to do, like helping someone who hasn't accepted Jesus as their savior, to learn the truth and be able to go to heaven. When I heard that, I felt so much better.

Here's what a regular day is like for us here. We wake up in the morning and check to make sure the campfire is still burning. If it is, add dry wood that doesn't make it smoke so that none of the bad guys can find you. If the fire died out overnight, start a new one. Good luck, because you don't have a lighter, lighter fluid or matches. If the sun is shining, a magnifying glass is your best friend. If the sun isn't shining, you'd better start rubbing two sticks together, just like you saw on the old Indian movies.

Breakfast is something that one of the adults hunted for. Maybe fish. Yum. Fish for breakfast. Lunch and supper are a little easier to like because for some reason your taste buds do not agree with fish that early in the day. If you're a fussy eater, you will go hungry here.

There are chores to be done. Fresh water must be carried from the stream, but it must be checked by an adult to make sure it isn't poisoned. Everyone washes their own clothes and dishes if you made some out of wood or something else around the campsite. You have to be kind of quiet all the time. Life is really different here. But I'm glad I'm here.

Biblical End Times - Our Time is Up?
Biblical Time is Up Answers

I'm getting to know someone real well on this adventure. I'd like to tell you about him. His name is John. He lived a long, long time ago and he knew Jesus. They hung out together a lot. He wrote this book that I've been reading. I've never been much of a reader. If the story isn't super interesting right from the get go, it's like reading the dictionary. BORING. But not the things that John wrote. Even though I read John's book once before, I thought I'd give it another shot, since I'm a little older now and I understand things a little better. You can read something a second time, and catch on to so many things that you didn't get the first time you read it.

See, when Jesus was alive, John was one of His apostles. But when John was a lot older, he was a prisoner. The Romans ruled a lot of the world back then and they didn't like it that John was spreading the news of Jesus to people, so they shipped him off to a place called Patmos Island. There was sort of a prison there. It was probably a lot like the cave I'm in now.

Now, you have to imagine being John. You have met Jesus. You heard Him tell the secrets of life. You ate with Him, drank with Him, traveled with Him, watched Him do miracles. People walked who couldn't walk, people who were blind, saw, people who couldn't hear, heard, just because they believed in your best friend. You heard Him tell the Jewish people that the reason He was there was because they broke their promise to God. All they had to do, was follow His commandments. A lot of times they turned their backs on God and didn't keep their word ... or His. So, being the merciful, ever loving God that He is, He sent His Son to make a new promise. Now, all they had to do was believe in Jesus.

John saw it all. Yep, he had a front row seat. All the way up to the Jews hanging his best friend, the Son of God, on a cross, because He claimed to be, who He really was. Three days after they took his beloved friend Jesus down off the cross and buried Him, He came back to life and told His apostles and disciples to preach the gospel (the truth) to the whole world. Jesus spent 40 days on earth again after He rose from the dead, teaching the fellas how to spread the Good News of God's new promise, and introducing them to the Holy Spirit, who he left here to help Christians and then God took Jesus up to heaven.

Now, here comes the part that made me want to get to know John better. While John was on that island, Jesus sent John a vision. That means, John saw things that Jesus wanted him to see, kinda like a dream, only the things that Jesus showed him are really going to come true one day. They are right now.

Jesus told John to write these things that would happen at the end of time, in a book so people would be ready when the End Times got here. There was just one little problem. The Romans who already didn't like John and put him in prison for teaching about Jesus, REALLY wouldn't like what Jesus told John to write. John loved Jesus so much, he just had to get the message out, so, John had to use his imagination, and write what Jesus told him so that Christians would understand it, but the Romans wouldn't.

He had his work cut out for him. The book that he wrote is called The Revelation. When I read it the first time, I thought it was just a scary story with lots of make believe creatures and horror, like at the movies. Now I know that those creatures are real symbols for certain nations and people and the devil, and the horror that John describes isn't science fiction, it's what's really happening! It's called the Great Tribulation.

The Biblical End Times - Our Time is Up
Biblical Time is Up Danger

The cool thing is that if you are a true Christian believer, God will take care of you in the wilderness for 3½ years while all those things that Jesus told John about are happening. And that's why I'm glad I'm here, because I am a believer and I wouldn't want anybody but God taking care of me.

I've learned a lot of things since I've been here. The bad people who I told you about earlier, have a mark that they want you to take. They put it in your right hand or in your forehead. They won't let you buy or sell anything if you don't have it, but if you take it, then you belong to the devil and you won't go to heaven. I'd rather starve than belong to the devil. He wants to own everyone in the world. He won't own me.

It's a funny thing. I look around at all the people who are here in the cave. Some people used to be very important people to the world. Some were lawyers, doctors, business people, and some are just regular folks like me, only adults. Well everyone is pretty much the same now. God doesn't care if you're a big shot, or just a little person. It's what is in your heart that counts to Him.

You can see the people who used to be important, they think a lot. When we first got here, they talked a lot, like they still wanted to be as important as their old jobs made them think they were. Like the Bible says, at the end, people will be eating and drinking and buying and selling and planting and building, just as if the world is gonna go on forever. I know those same people are now thinking that they wasted all their life trying to be important in a way that wasn't important to God.

God takes good care of us out here. Just when it seems like there won't be enough food, or firewood or water, something happens and it all works out fine. It always reminds me of the story where Jesus fed thousands of people with just a few fish and a few loaves of bread, and there was still leftovers.

I pray a lot now. I didn't used to. When we first got here, I thought I was going to die of boredom, but there was more to learn and do than I thought. We made a sun dial, because there aren't any clocks. We play games with rocks, like you would with marbles, and sometimes it's more fun than video games. There isn't a TV or radio. There aren't computers or refrigerators or microwaves. It's the wilderness.

Sometimes people have gone to get things for us. I don't know how they get them because nobody here has the mark, but they come back with different kinds of things every time. Some people just couldn't take it here, and after a while, they went back and took the mark, just so they could eat more or buy cigarettes or something. I'll never take the mark, no matter what. They'll be sorry.

Jerry doesn't like it here. He's always fighting with his Mom and Dad and never wants to do any work. He sure acts spoiled now. Now that he can't have things, he wants everything. I tried to talk to him but he keeps telling me he just wasn't cut out for this kind of living. I explained to him that it will all be worth it in the end, but he won't believe it. He stares off into space more than ever now. I pray that he doesn't leave and take the mark.

Paul is a different story. His Mom and Dad were almost never home before the End Times began. He was always either home alone or spending the night or weekend somewhere. Even though people thought he was going to be trouble here, he surprised them. He was just so scared because things were so weird the day that Zeke disappeared, that he didn't know what else to do.

I've known Paul all my life, and even though sometimes he was rowdy, he has a good heart. I don't think Paul even believed in Jesus when we first got here, but he's definitely a Christian now. Maybe Paul is the one that Jerry's Dad was talking about, because we've spent a lot of time together just talking since all of this started and Paul is like a different person. He sure knows how to fend for himself and he loves to work around the cave and the camp.

Neither one of us had seen our parents for a while now so we kind of felt like we were supposed to stick together. Paul started reading the Bible with me more and more and we've learned more since we've been here, than we had in all our years of school put together. Paul even teaches some of the younger kids Bible stories every afternoon to give the parents time to rest or do work that they can't do with the little ones under foot. I had to stop him once from putting rocks in his nostrils to make them laugh, but he'll be alright.

Lots of people are still out there without the mark, but didn't make it to the wilderness either. Some will die because of their belief in Jesus, but they will go to heaven. The people who don't ask forgiveness for their sins, will go to a place called the Lake of Fire, forever.

Jerry just told me a little while ago that he's going to leave and take the mark. Paul and I tried everything to change his mind, but he just doesn't want to listen. When I showed him the part in the Bible about the Lake of Fire, he just rolled his eyes at me and walked away. His Mom and Dad and Jesus are going to be so sad. I'll pray about it even more. God gives all of us the chance to choose. I hope Jerry will choose God.

God said that His people will be tested. I think that's because He wants to be sure that His angels will not trade Him for anything. That's why He sent the Great Flood in Noah's time, is because a bunch of the angels traded being in Heaven with God to come down to the earth and be bad. And satan, well, satan was God's perfect angel, once upon a time. But then, he decided he wanted to be better than God. He's so jealous of God, that he goes around the world doing everything he can to try and win people's souls from God.

The wilderness is a really good test. People think they are really strong, and they can really make you believe it with their words, but will they do anything for God? When Moses led God's people through the wilderness, it was for 40 years. They disappointed God many times. I'm not going to disappoint Him. Whoever believes in Jesus through the End Times and doesn't take the mark, gets to live forever with Him and God. I think 3½ years isn't a long time at all compared to forever.

Biblical End Times - Our Time is Up Summary
Biblical Time is Up Conclusion

The Bible says that we can't even imagine the great things that God has prepared for those who love Him. That is the thing that Jerry is missing. He wants something out of life, but he doesn't know what it is. That's because what he wants is what God has prepared for him, but he can't get it until he proves that he would do anything for God.

Jerry is one of God's sheep. He is just lost. Paul and I have to go talk to him again before he makes a choice that he will be sorry for, forever. Jerry is my friend. Friends 'till the end. What would Jesus do? I will never give up. Zeke taught me that.

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