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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2009 Tom Flannery
680 words

SIGNS OF OUR TIMES

By: Tom Flannery

The United Nations called last week for a new global reserve currency to end dollar supremacy — just as Arab states reportedly launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using U.S. currency for oil trading.

Don't look now, but the dollar is under attack, and global elites who have long wanted a world currency believe that the iron is hot so it’s time to strike.  From there, the transition to a cashless society is no great leap, a conversion to a technologically-based “currency” controlled by the global power structure.

This very outcome was predicted some 2,000 years ago, when the apostle John foretold that a future world leader would one day compel all people “to receive a mark on their right hand or in their foreheads, that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark” (Revelation 13:16-17).

It sounds like science fiction, but it's important to remember that much of Bible endtime prophecy seemed like science fiction when it first appeared.  Today, anyone reading this passage would quickly conclude that it is describing a worldwide economic system run, as so much of the economy already is, by computers and elaborate electronics.  The “mark” would be understood to be an implanted microchip. 

Yet the apostle John didn't write from a 21st-century perspective.  Like the other men inspired by God to record endtime prophecy, he had to use his own first-century language and understanding to describe (as best he could) the extraordinary things that God was showing him.

In chapter 11, for instance, John foretells of two of God's great witnesses who will be martyred during this same future time, and he reveals that people throughout the world will see their corpses lying on a street in Jerusalem over three-and-a-half days (Revelation 11:8-9).  This was, needless to say, inconceivable in John's time — and for more than 18 centuries after that.

It was considered pure fantasy, and believing it pure folly, until global satellites were first launched in the middle of the 20th century.  Today, when we have an event of international interest — say, O.J. in the Ford Bronco — the event is seen by untold millions of people throughout the world as it is happening.  But no one before our time could have ever imagined it.

The same can be said for Jesus telling His disciples regarding the time of His Second Coming that “unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved” (Matthew 24:22).  He was saying that if He were to delay His return and allow the events of that future time to play out, man would wipe himself off the planet.

Again, there was no way to even begin to explain or understand such a concept prior to the mid-20th century, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to defeat Japan in World War II.  Nor could anyone explain or understand the Bible’s prediction about the future obliteration of Damascus (Isaiah 17), or its description of an entire army being instantaneously incinerated during a future attack against Israel in which “their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet, their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets, and their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths” (Zechariah 14:12).

So much of Bible endtime prophecy was so inexplicable from a human perspective for so long that God instructed the prophet Daniel to “shut up the words, and seal the book [of prophecy] until the time of the end” (Daniel 12:4), because only the people living in the final endtime generation would be able to comprehend it.

This was because, as God revealed to Daniel in this same verse, the final endtime generation would witness an astounding increase in knowledge (in the original language, a knowledge explosion) unlike anything the world had ever experienced before.

Thus, in light of everything that’s already been fulfilled of Bible endtime prophecy over the past half century, the end of the dollar's supremacy and the eventual implementation of a worldwide economic system isn't quite as far-fetched as it once may have seemed.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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