1. Is it because that is what you have heard all your life?

2. Is it because you’ve read some scriptures in the Bible that seem to indicate the things you believe?

3. Is it because you have studied the Bible intensely and found no contradictions in what you have always 
heard about the end time?

4. Or is it that you see flaws in the traditional end-time theology, but don’t know enough to really decide, 
so you go on believing what others say about it?

Contradictions?
Have you ever noticed contradictions in the Bible to what your pastor is telling you?  Well, many people 
have and it has caused them to either abandon any opinion about the subject, or to dig in and try to make 
some sense of it.

In the mid 1970s, I had just become a born-again Christian, after having gone to the Methodist church up 
to that time, and I became really interested in the things of God.  The Methodist churches seemed to never 
say anything about the end times.  

I started reading all kinds of books written by “Christian” writers.  One of them was “The Late Great Planet Earth,” 
by Hal Lindsay.  This was my first exposure to what is called “end-time” teaching.

Great Tribulation
Churches I had gone to before did mention that Jesus would return someday, but they never mentioned 
anything about “the rapture” or the “Great Tribulation,” “Armageddon” or any of that.  So, Hal Lindsay had my 
attention, at first, until I came to a place in the book where he made an assumption.  He assumed that when Jesus 
said, in Mt. 24, “this generation shall not pass away until all be fulfilled,” meant the generation when all the events 
He foretold began to come to pass.  He assumed something to be true and then built his whole case on that 
assumption.

Rapture
I was not satisfied with what he was saying, so I studied the subject of “the rapture,” and found, first of all, that the 
word rapture wasn’t in the Bible.  The verses he cited to declare it were taken out of context.  I was really getting in deep here.  

Preparations
I took a course in New Testament Greek and also Hebrew.  I then started, using an Interlinear Bible, comparing the 
words used in the KJV Bible to the meanings of the Greek words.  I used Strong’s Concordance as a Bible Lexicon.  
I saw many places where words were rendered with all sorts of varying meanings in the KJV, but in the Greek Interlinear, 
the renderings were consistent.  Why was this?  When read from the Interlinear’s English translation, there were many 
things that were clear and understandable, that were totally different to what was in the KJV.

So I continued for the next ten years to intensively study in several English and Greek translations of the Bible.  During 
this time, it occurred to me, that I was spending too much time in the book of Revelation and not going to the true 
source of “last-days” teaching, that of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.  (In the Old Testament, Daniel 9 
also prophecies of the last time.)

Narrow Studies
I began to narrow my studies to the “Olivet Discourse,” and all the prophecies that Jesus had made there concerning 
what, in Matthew’s gospel, He called “great tribulation.”  He did not say “the” great tribulation, as it is called today, 
just “great tribulation.” If we try to start with Revelation, we can make a lot of errors in building the right foundation for 
our beliefs.

In Luke we find the words “great distress” instead of “great tribulation.”  The Greek word translated “tribulation” in 
Matthew is the exact same word that was translated “distress” in Luke, the Greek word is “thlipsis.”

I found that in Luke 21, Jesus made it very clear that He was speaking of the destruction of Jerusalem and the 
Temple, and not the destruction of the whole world as the KJV has translated it, and as people like Hal Lindsay and 
Tim LaHaye have presented it.  They’ve made up a whole new “the great tribulation” from verses in Revelation.

One of the KJV mistakes was translating the Greek word “oikoumene” as “world” when the clear meaning of it was 
“the habitable earth,” and its usage at that time was clearly understood to mean the part of the earth that was under 
the dominion of the Roman Empire.  Consult your Strong’s Concordance and you can find the correct definition of 
the word.  

Then on top of that, in Matthew 24:3, the KJV translated the word “aeon” as “world” when it clearly means “age.”  
Jesus was not foretelling the end of the “world,” but the end of the “age.”  

These mistakes have made people believe for centuries that the destruction would be world-wide, when, in fact,
it was only for Judea and more exact, for Jerusalem. The only world-wide destruction in the Bible is the flood.  
Jesus likened it to the time of the flood in speaking of the unpreparedness of the Jews, but not indicating that it would 
be world-wide.

Hard to understand
One of the hardest things to understand is how an event prophesied for His generation got pushed forward 
to our future.  

Jesus clearly said, “This generation shall not pass away till all things be fulfilled.” Matthew 24:34.  What does
"all things" mean? The things he had just told them were about to happen.

He also told his disciples, “You shall not finish going through the cities of Judah until the son of man comes.”  

He referred to that generation of Jews as a “wicked and adulterous generation.”  He said the guilt of the shed 
blood of the prophets would be charged to that generation.  That would be the generation that would be destroyed.

So why do our preachers still tell us that He was speaking of a future generation, thousands of years later?  
They don’t know the truth and some don’t want to know it.

As it turns out, Hal Lindsay’s assumption actually was right, but he applied it to the future because he did not 
know that signs Jesus predicted had already occurred, in the generation Jesus had specified. 

For a clear understanding of the “end of the age” that Jesus talked about, go here.