The Tyranny of the Present

Presentation by Pete Garcia

Pete Garcia: The second component of this is convergence, and I look at this maybe a little differently than other people do, but I kind of break up into three sections. So you have the thesis, which is Daniel 9:24-27. You have the prophetic outline, which is the Olivet Discourse, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptic gospels. And then you have the detailed narrative, which we find in the Book of Revelation.

Now, we know that in… Well, first of all, we know we’re in the Last Days because in Hebrews 1:1, the coming of Christ the first time, His first advent, would usher in the Last Day. So we’ve been in the Last Days for 2,000 years now. And then secondly, Daniel writes or was told by the angel Gabriel in Daniel 12:4 that knowledge and travel would increase, and that means that there’s a technological explosion unlike the world had ever seen.

And so going back to 1903, remember, you know, that’s when we first figured out how to execute manned flight. And everything since then, you know, it’s gone from the speed of horse and the speed of boats driven by the wind to now automobiles, trains, planes, spacecraft, hypersonic vehicles, flying vehicles, you know, everything in between. We got guys rolling around in these jet packs now like the… I don’t know if you’ve seen them on YouTube or whatever, but they can fly sort of like Iron Man a little bit with these jet propulsion things, you know?

Going back to the thesis here, it sets the stage for all of Bible prophecy. We know that the six things that were accomplished on the cross there, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make a reconciliation or atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy, there’s kind of two components to this. There’s a legal component, and there’s a physical manifestation of that component, the realization of that.

I think the first three were physically and legally completed, but obviously the last three are still things that are going to be done at the Second Coming of Christ and the ushering in of the Kingdom Age.

With the prophetic outline, there’s nine birth pang signs, or categories, rather. There’re five general signs that are like the birth pangs that would increase with intensity and rapidity. And then there’s the four specific signs, starting with the abomination that causes desolation, the surrounding of Jerusalem, the particular cosmic events, the day, the sun turning to black, the moon turning to blood, and then obviously the sign of the coming of Christ when He peels back the skies and comes into the earth with the armies of Heaven in tow, which is all of you as well, right?

It sounds weird to read it. Well, it sounds normal to read it, but it’s weird to imagine yourself in that, on a horse, in the sky, riding back with Christ at the head of this army. Each of you, if you’re a born-again believer, you will be there riding with Christ coming back. I’m a pilot, but I’m also terrified of heights. I know that’s kind of an oxymoron. Do you feel that way? No. I’m okay if I’m in a machine flying it, but hiking on a mountain or something? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I cannot do that.

All that to say, we get to the detailed narrative where we see there’s 21-plus divine judgments and that Nathan brilliantly brought out with the angels this morning. There’re the seven Seal judgments, the seven Trumpet judgments, and then the seven Bowl judgments. There’re also seven thunders. We don’t know what those are. Those could be judgements, and if they are judgements, then we’d put it somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 divine judgments.

We have the Battle of Armageddon or the Campaign of Armageddon, the Second Coming, the Sheep and Goat judgment, and then the Millennial Kingdom. These are all things that God has sovereignly ordained to happen, theological determinism, and that kind of encapsulates both the past, the present, and the future. And so we know that in the time we’re in right now is the time of the Gentiles, right?

Karl Rove once made the statement, you know, Karl Rove from the Bush administration said that empires create reality, and in whatever age you live in, that’s the reality of your day. At the height of the Egyptian dynasties, they created reality for their day. At the height of the Roman Empire, again, they set the reality of that day. Great Britain at its geopolitical height, you know, where the phrase, “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” they set and created reality for their day.

And here right now in this present age, the United States has been at the geological, or geopolitical forefront leading the world for the last 70-plus years. But that’s not the real reality. The real reality is that empires rise and fall. They come and go. And I’m going to quote again from Mark Twain real quick. He writes: “If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but 1% of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of. He has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are always way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world. In all the ages he had done it with his hands tied behind him.

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Persian rose and filled the planet with sound and splendor and then faded to dream stuff and passed away. The Greek and the Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone. The people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now or have vanished altogether.

The Jews saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew. All others pass, but he remains. And what is the secret of his immortality?”

Well, we know what the secret is, right? Jesus writing here or speaking here in the Olivet Discourse in Luke’s version: “And they will fall by the edge of the sword and be led away captive into all nations. And Jerusalem will be trampled by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.”

Now what’s coming ahead of us right now because we’re at the end of this particular empire, the American Empire, I call it Pax Americana, as that comes to its end, it’s going to transition into the final human empire, which we call the beast kingdom, right, led by the Antichrist, the 10 kings, the False Prophet. And they are going to bring such persecution against the Jewish people that only 1/3 will survive.

Now out of the Holocaust, if you think back to World War II, 1/3 died then, and 2/3 survived, and now it’s going to be reversed. It’s going to be that 2/3 die, and only 1/3 survive what’s coming. Convergence, whether we’re talking about the wars, rumors of wars, pestilence, social decay, cultural decline, the hardening of hearts, all of that, it’s all happening with such intensity these days that it’s so wearisome.

I quit watching the news back in 20–whenever we pulled out of Afghanistan like we did. 2021 I think. I couldn’t watch the news anymore. Now I just catch the news on whatever I catch it on, X or Facebook or something, and then I dig into it and see, okay, is this a true story, or is this just like fake news or whatever the case is. So, it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming.

Sir John Glubb writes, “The people of the great nations of the past seem normally to have imagined that their preeminence would last forever. The belief that their nation would rule the world forever naturally encouraged the citizens of the leading nation of any period to attribute their preeminence to hereditary virtues. The impression that it will always be automatically rich causes the declining empire to spend lavishly on its own benevolence until such a time as the economy collapses, the universities are closed, and the hospitals fall into ruin.”

And I mean, you kind of look around today, we’re thinking, “Wow, that looks like today,” you know? The Strauss-Howe generational theory model, hero, artist, prophet, nomad, these are 80-year cycles that break up into 20-year segments. You put the hero generation of those folks that are born out of the Silent Generation, who fought in World War II that led them through the 1960s.

The Gen X folks, I believe, is the 1965 through 1980, which I’m Gen X. After us is the Millennials. Then you have Gen Z, and the Gen Z guys are always, by the time they come around, that Gen Z comes around, that is when some catastrophic thing happens. And if you go back 80-year cycles, you can go back from the Revolutionary War. You fast-forward 80 years you get to the Civil War. Fast-forward 80 years from that, you get to World War II, and we’re in that time period right now. We’re right on the cusp of it.

And these are things that the US in particular could not avoid. We could avoid World War I. We didn’t have to get in World War I. We didn’t have to get in the Gulf War. We didn’t have to get in the Korean War or Vietnam War. Those are all wars we chose to fight and get into. These other wars are…everything comes together at that time, and it forces a nation to do something, right? And those are these cycles that we’re in.

So all these things are converging in this particular 10-year period between 2020 and 2030. You’re all familiar with this quote here: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” Where do you think we are now? Oh, gosh. Right now, there’s two competing overarching world agendas. You have the East, and you have the West.

The West is in decline culturally, socially, morally, religiously. Look at all the different Pew, Gallup, Lifeway, all the different surveys that are out there. The decline is steady across not just Christianity, but most faiths are going down. We’re also being bought up by the mega corporations, right, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, who own like some ridiculous amount of the global economy already.

But these two empires, these two agendas, these two civilizations are competing for dominance. And right now, there’s a giant orange cone in the middle of the road that everybody has to go around, and that is the United States of America, and especially under Trump. Under Biden, man, we were getting rolled over, you know, left and right, but under Trump, he’s like, “No, no, no, this is not going to happen anymore.”

So he’s coming at it from a worldview of restoring America to American greatness and going on for another 250 years, which we know is not feasible or possible, both realistically or biblically, that the world does not exist, God did not create everything, all of creation, so that the United States can go into its golden age. We’re simply in a long line of other empires that have arose and will eventually collapse.

James Warburg in 1950 stated, “We shall have world government whether we like it or not. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.” 1950 he said this to the Senate committee there. It’s coming. There’s no way of avoiding it.

Just this morning, I heard about the right of repair. Anybody raise your hand if you’ve heard of right of repair. That is disturbing beyond belief. If you don’t know what it is, it’s basically that corporations can make things that you have no right to repair, and if you try and repair it yourself, it’s illegal. Your truck, tractor, phone, computer, printer, whatever, they want to be the exclusive rights to repair everything, and you have to buy all your services through them and all of their tools, equipment, et cetera. Everything has to be done through that particular corporation.

That’s just one thing amongst thousands that are going on right now that are mind-blowingly disturbing. Yet most people just go on with their life like, “Well, that’s normal,” you know, or they’re not even paying attention. If they knew what was happening, they’d probably be freaking out too. We’re at peak technology, global satellite internet, real-time streaming, biometric financial systems, central bank digital currencies that are programmable money, your generative artificial intelligence.

Everybody that’s in the know is saying that we’re already in artificial general intelligence right now. It took us years to get from AI to AGI, and it could take weeks to months to go from AGI to ASI, artificial super intelligence. And you’re talking about singularity, event horizon, and they have no idea what’s going to happen beyond that. We could go to Skynet, if you’re familiar with the Terminator movies, or we could go… You know, they’re hoping for some type of utopian system, but simply look back at history and see how everything has turned out, and we know that it’s not going to go that way.

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. Now you can have designer babies. You can go in and get all sorts of stuff done genetically that begins to augment and change you fundamentally as a human being. Quantum computers. I’m convinced that the beast kingdom is going to run on quantum computers. It is so powerful, so powerful. The issue, the limiting factor right now, is in the stability of managing the qubits, and those systems have to be kept at absolute-zero temperatures in order to make those things work.

But if they come up with some type of room-temperature solution for their servers and whatnot, it’s game over. Those systems; they will be the most powerful systems. Imagine, if you don’t know anything about quantum computers, if you have a PDF, a document on your computer, and let’s say it’s 1,000 pages, and there’s one word in there that you’re looking at or you want to find, and it’s on page 999. Your normal computer will start on page one. Control + F in page one, it’ll just go through page two, page three, and all the way to page 99 until it gets to that word.

A quantum computer will look at the whole book all at the same time and find it instantly. Apply that to a library. It’s the difference between a librarian knowing information about one book versus a librarian that’s read every single book in the library and can perfectly recite it. I mean, that’s the power of the quantum system. It’s tapping in into a technology that we don’t even understand yet.

The directed energy weapons, lethal autonomous weapon systems, nanotechnology, hive mind technology, all this stuff was science fiction like 10 years ago, and it’s all reality right now. These all also fulfill Revelation 11 and 13. You think about the two witnesses that are killed and their bodies are left on the streets of Jerusalem, and the whole world sees their bodies laying there. That wasn’t even possible until our generation, until satellite television, and now we have smart devices and cameras everywhere.

Revelation 13, the programmable digital currency. If the currency was going to remain fiscal and paper currency and coins and things like that, there would be no way for the Antichrist to control all buying and selling. But if it’s in a digital system, that is one way that one person can do that.

And we know that the coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders. Think about that when the False prophet is able to call down fire on somebody from the skies; and think about directed energy weapons. If he’s got a chip in his head that’s linked to some satellite that he controls, and wherever he goes, the satellite is tethered to him, and if you make him mad or whatever, he can just sit there and think about it and have you zapped.

To most people, that’ll seem like magic, but we know that, you know, sometimes that when technology goes to a certain level, people tend to think of it as magic anyways because they don’t understand how it works. Most of the Church today. Again, I go back to this church that I visited that’s in a long line of churches that I’ve had this conversation with, how many people just dismiss prophecy out of hand or what’s going on in the world. They’re completely tone-deaf to what is happening.

Okay, we talked about hindsight, insight, and foresight. Now, these are examples of the benefits of these in Scripture: “His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, when they remembered that these were the things written about Him, that they had done these things to Him,” John 12:16. He told them about something that was going happen like there in John 14:29: “I tell you these things ahead of time so that when it happens, you’ll believe.”

Now they’re going back and saying Jesus was reminding them of these things, like the two on the road to Emmaus, and then they can go back and look through the Scriptures in the Old Testament, which is what they had at the time, and say, “Oh yeah, this is it. Psalm 22, this is exactly how He was crucified,” and on and on and on.

Insight: “Of the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do.” They had understanding of the times and knew what Israel ought to do. Foresight: “And now that I told you this before it comes, when it does come to pass, you may believe.” Now, that’s in the positive.

Now, this is the negative here: “But we speak in the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages of our glory, the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew, for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” I find that an amazing passage from Paul. Had they known that by crucifying Jesus, all that would happen, they would’ve never done it. It’s mind-blowing.

This is in Daniel 12. I’m just going to read the last portion here: “And none of the wicked shall understand, but the wise shall understand.” None of the wicked are going to understand what’s happening. Look at all the crazy stuff going on in the world today, and everybody’s trying to explain away the UFOs as aliens or climate change is because we have too many SUVs on the planet, all the nonsense stuff. We’re overpopulating the planet. We need to reduce the population by like 7 1/2 billion people.

Cow gas, you know, flatulence, all this stuff, it’s ridiculous to us, right? And I’m going to read here the last portion. You guys are familiar with Matthew 16 where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees, and He’s saying, “Hey, you guys can read the signs of the weather, but you can’t… You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times.” Again, this foresight was lacking with them. They had no ability to recognize the time of their visitation, just as Jesus says in Luke 19:44.

Now, presently, we live in an age where we can look back in time and look at the resurrection of Christ, look at all the historical, archeological, theological arguments, and see that they make sense and that they’re validated, and they’re verified. I mean, Jesus is the most vetted person in human history by every metric you can imagine, right? And nobody can come up and dismiss any of that. Even ardent atheists have a difficult time dismissing Jesus as even a historical figure. They know He is because every culture recognizes Him.

We can look back at the conception of the Church in Acts 2, that the Church began there and began to spread forth from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and then to the ends of the world, just like Jesus said it would. Now we’re in this…The Church is the mystery kingdom, in my humble opinion. And then when you read back to Matthew 13 in the kingdom parables, there’s seven mystery kingdom parables. Paul wrote seven letters to seven churches. Those all overlay on the seven letters to seven churches that Jesus gave. They all kind of sit on top of each other. It’s amazing how that works.

And what we’re looking forward to now is the return of Christ for the Church at the Rapture of the Church. And since we don’t know the day or the hour, it doesn’t need signs to happen, what we look at is the signs that happen after the Rapture of the Church, and we can see those things in spades coming. They’re already here. They’re all over the place. We’re watching the beast kingdom infrastructure being built right now, physically, these AI data centers. I mean, who knows what those things will eventually be turned into?

I’m convinced that churches will be turned into martyr camps or places where they take people to be beheaded and stuff. That’s how blasphemous this is going to become inside the 70th week. All the churches that you see around, all these nice, beautiful churches everywhere, inside the 70th week of Daniel, these are going to be places where they take the resistance and kill them. These will be the murder centers.

But we know that Christ is coming back. We know that He has not abandoned us because He promised us in Revelation, excuse me, John 14:1-3, that if He goes away, that He is going to come back and return to take us to be where He is. Revelation 19, the Second Coming, I’m not going to read through all this for the sake of time. You guys are very familiar with this, but the King of kings is coming back, and He’s going to open up the skies, and we’re going to be riding with Him, right behind Him, marching into the world from the sky to reclaim His planet and to set up His kingdom.

That sounds a lot more exciting to me than, you know, some prosperity gospel guy saying, “Ah, we gotta do the seven-mountain mandate and all this kinds of stuff.” No, this is going to be a real military event. Some of you have served. Many of you have not served. You’re all going to serve in this conflict coming up. You’re all going to be veterans of the Second Coming.

What we have to look forward to after that, the Millennial Kingdom, the Great White Throne Judgment, and the eternal order of the ages. And we know that the new Jerusalem will come down, presumably like a satellite, a low Earth orbit satellite that hovers over the face of the Earth, providing light to the nations. And we are going to be able to come, go back and forth to travel because we won’t be in our normal physical bodies anymore. We’ll be in our glorified, uncorruptible, transformed bodies that we can move at the speed of thought.

In one minute, we could be chilling in our mansion in New Jerusalem, and the next minute God’s like, “Hey, I need to go down there and take care of this issue in the African continent.” We’re like, “Boom, I’m there.” You just open your eyes, and you’re already there serving, doing whatever it is God has us to do.

And lastly, let me close with this, foresight. We worship a God that is sovereign, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. That is what He reveals to us in His Word. This is who He is. “Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there’s none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, from the ancient times that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.'”

Closing

Nathan Jones: We would encourage you to get your own copy of the Where is the Promise of His Coming 2026 Bible Conference, either on DVD or flash drive. Along with four fantastic presentations, two compelling question-and-answer sessions are also included. Order your copy today, and you can always visit our Christ in Prophecy YouTube channel to watch the conference’s live stream.

Tim Moore: In the next episode in our Where is the Promise of His Coming? conference series, I’ll dive much deeper into that question. The answer will surely, as Dr. Reagan likes to say, “bless your socks off.” Godspeed!

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