Only God knows and He ain’t telling. I prefer to think of the End Times in a more positive setting than we need to be concerned about. God could have ended this world many times in the past but because of the preaching of the Saints and the conversions of sinners He would have cancelled it and allow the world to continue. As long as there is chosen souls in this world God will continue it. I believe God does not want to end this world. It is us who force Him to end it. There will come a time when God can no longer save the world as He is doing now that is by His Grace and Mercy. There will come a time when people may become so preverted as to resist any Grace at all and it may be so bad that unless Jesus comes physically then even what good is there left may succumb to the wickedness of the world and also become preverted. At that moment the Eternal Father had enough and allows Jesus to come to save what is left. If you want a timeline of my personal opinion and you may take it or leave it I will simply say that we will be entering a distressful time in the West. The West will undergo terrible conflicts which I believe will be internal. I believe you will see alot of uprisings in every country of the West where the rich have deserted the poor. Every Western country will undergo these terrible conflicts of the poor uprising against the rich. It must come so to teach the rich for their neglect of the poor. Every city in the USA have plenty of people below the poverty line. Detroit is the poorest city in the USA with over 28% of its population below the poverty line. Buffalo is the second poorest city with over 25% of its population before the poverty line. Now include all the poor in every city in the West and you get the picture. These people are begging for food and shelter and the basic needs and what are the rich doing for them. Practically nothing! Only for the Church the poor will be in greater poverty. The Church tries to help them but we are against a great horde of rich people who really do not care. Soon God will allow the something to change it. It will come naturally from the sinfullness of the rich and from the neglect of so many people. The poor will rise up against them and you will see the destruction of this Western empire that has so neglected to take care of its own. God though will be with the people and from this and through the generous help of the Eastern Church who have been saved from all this because the Eastern countries are just beginning to be democratic and have not the time to be like the West you will see help from the East both Orthodox and Catholics who live there and they will help us recover. From this I believe God plans to unite His Church and hopefully the whole world through great signs and wonders. The world been converted to Christ will have its Hosanna and live during an ernormous peace. But afterwards people will forget their blessings as the devil continues his work to lead men away from God and eventually the world will enter into a state far worse then what the West entered. This then is the beginning of the End and in a while it will get so bad that the Eternal Father will send His Son to end it. These are only my own thoughts. Pope John Paul II wrote about the West saying that democracy undiscliplined will ultimately self distruct. Notice he said democracy and not the Church. The Church will help us during these times as it always did and God will be there to as well as His Holy Mother to guide us and help us.
The end of time will only happen when we truely bring the Kingdom of God to earth. Jesus gives us sevaral images of this in the Gospels, but simply put, when we live together in peace and love as he taught. I’m not looking for that the happen any time soon.
*In dwelling on this further…I was thinking about all the mystical experiences that people have and how it is such a beautiful goft from God and I beleive it is God’s way of drawing us closer to Himself. And in understanding this I believe a clearer understanding of what I said in my last post would be that maybe revelations instructs us on how God will bring us into His Kingdom.
Thomas Aquinas, thank you for the summary. I appreciate it. Can you go into a little more detail and speak a little about the Great Monarch and the Three Days of Darkness?
Yes, I have the book!Shin: you can read all about it in a book entitled “Trial , Tribulation and Triumph, Before, During and after Antichrist”. The Author is Desmond Birch. It represents approx 23 years research in eschatology. You can find it at Amazon. No other catholic author even comes close to this wonderful exposition!
I have a few others too, from Tan, and various etext archives, etc. like Yves Dupont’s, Culleton’s, Rossi’s… Still would like to pick up more. I collect lots of source quotes, then weigh the authority and value of each.And what about the Return of Elias and Enoch?Yes, I have the book!
I’m curious to see how Thomas Aquinas would summarize it.
I never necessarily completely agree with the interpretations and commentary – it’s interesting to see though where even the off one’s focus on, and why – but Birch is really good, I agree.
I should pick up his book and go through it again.
This is my own understanding for the 2 witnesses in Revelation 11 so you can take it or leave it. My problem with Enoch and Elias is that they are only 2 men and we have a large planet to deal with it. What are they going to do ride the planes every 5 minutes? And I do not think God needs a blast from the past. Why does not He bring back all the Saints? My understanding to the Scriptures comes from the verse that says " These are the two olive trees and two lampstands standing before God…". I was thinking that this may refer to us the Church who constantly offers up the Mass and the Divine Liturgy before God throughout the world at every hour and day. So the 2 witnesses are then the Catholic and the Orthodox Church. East and West! From these 2 Churches God may call many people to go out into the world to give Him witness. So the number of the witnesses sent out will be more than 2. God can called many because there are many witnesses in both His Catholic and Orthodox Church. The so called 2 witnesses in scriptures may refer to those representatives of His 2 witnesses on earth that is the Catholic and the Orthodox Church. This then is your Enoch and Elijah. When it becomes really bad God will call many from each Church to do His witnessing.
Well, the only gripe I personally have with this is scenarios 4-6. The Catholic Church doesn’t really have an official position on the End Times, but ever since St. Augustine, most Catholic theologians have preferred an amilennial scenario. In the 1940s the Holy Office judged that premillenialist position, now so popular among many Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, ‘cannot safely be taught,’ though the Church has not dogmatically defined this issue.
I always hear naysayers from within and outside the Church who will make the argument that we've always had wars and rumors of wars and that WWI and WWII were examples of nation turning against nation, and the Black Death of the 14th century was a pestilence of Biblical proportions, but where I believe they get it wrong is when they seemingly disregard St Matthew 24:21 above. We are going to see something so cataclysmic that it almost defies description. More countries at war than in WWII, people starving in record numbers, multiple earthquakes, meteors hitting the earth, deadly plagues. I guess it's one of those topics that makes some people want to change the subject very quickly.