Mr. Ryan Mutter, Baltimore, Maryland

Thursday, November 19, 7:45 p.m. | The Garden Room, Moorestown Community House

Does the Bible teach that rebellion against God will always be permitted? Does it say that his creation will always groan under suffering and death?

At the end of the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation) in the New Testament, there is a brief description of a final rebellion against God, a last stand that follows an extended period during which humanity’s rebelliousness has been held in check.

This last and utterly misguided rebellion is so swiftly and thoroughly crushed that a repeat performance becomes impossible.

But this isn’t the last evil to be removed from God’s creation.

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” wrote the Apostle Paul (I Corinthians 15: 26)

“O grave, I will be thy destruction,” Hosea, an Old Testament prophet, represents God as saying (Hosea 13: 14).

“And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire,” wrote the Apostle John, when describing one of the final visions he was given (Revelation 20: 14).

Come hear about God’s promise to restore the peace and joy that His creation has done without for so long. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know priceless things about the future and have hope.

Mr. Jim Harper, Meriden, Connecticut

Thursday, November 12, 7:45 p.m. | The Garden Room, Moorestown Community House

The Millennium is a term among Bible scholars for the reign of one thousand years on earth by Christ and his immortalized followers. Only a few direct references to the length of this period can be found in the Bible, all in the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation, chapter 20, in the New Testament.

According to historians, such as Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a simple, straightforward belief in this extended period of an earthly reign by Christ and his followers was a hallmark of the Christian faith in its earlier days.

But many people who identify themselves as Christian expect the world to come to a fiery end in a great battle called Armageddon. The notion of a peaceful earthly kingdom has no more meaning than the phrase “post-Armageddon politics.” After all, everybody “knows” that Armageddon means the end of the world.

Are we suggesting that the earth will still be inhabited after Armageddon, that there will be something like “politics” during the Millennium?

Well, if we read what the Bible actually says, which in case after case after case differs from popular misconception, an interesting picture emerges.

But how can the world continue after Armageddon?

Will there be a New World Order?

What will it be like?

Will there be ordinary mortals walking around who think that things are greatly improved, but who may, at some point, develop very negative feelings about this New World Order, and chafe under its authority?

What does the Bible really have to say about the world after Armageddon?

Come hear more about a subject in Bible prophecy that receives too-little attention. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know priceless things about the future and have hope.

Mr. Paul Billington, Brantford, Ontario

Thursday, November 5, 7:45 p.m. | The Garden Room, Moorestown Community House

A prominent “woman” in the symbolic visions of the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation) in the New Testament., appears suddenly, impregnated, and about to give birth.

She is dressed in the sun, uses the moon as her footstool, and wears a crown of twelve stars on her head.

When she delivers her son, a red dragon goes to battle against him and his supporters. When the battle is over, the woman herself is persecuted by this dragon. Having been ejected from its high position of authority, it angrily disgorges a stream of water, like a flood, to engulf the woman. But she escapes into a wilderness where she receives much helpful attention from “the earth.”

A woman appears again in a later vision. Is she the same woman, but much further along in her career? This woman, described as “the great whore,” is carried upon the back of a scarlet-colored beast that is itself an embodiment of blasphemy against God. She has given birth to many daughters like herself; and she is drunk with blood, having had a particularly vicious attitude toward those who follow Christ. More than that, she has clouded the judgment of many people with her brand of wine, and has had dealings—conducted at anything but arm’s length—with rulers of “the earth.” The horns of the beast on whose back she rides despise her and eventually attack her, stripping her of her rich clothing and elaborate jewelry, gnawing at her and inflicting fiery burns.

Finally, there is a woman of markedly different character, a righteous bride prepared for the Lamb of God. She is a community of people, and her status and glory are further symbolized by a city of astonishing qualities that descends from heaven.

One woman comes to a hideous end.

The other lives forever in the company of the Lamb and God.

Come hear more about these fascinating characters in the Apocalypse and what they represent. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know priceless things about the future and have hope.

Mr. Nigel Small, Burlington Township, New Jersey

Thursday, October 29, 7:45 p.m. | The Garden Room, Moorestown Community House

Threshing (or “thrashing” as it was put in earlier times) is the beating of a cereal grain to begin separating the edible kernel (or seed) from its dry and scaly casing, or husk, called chaff.

Before the 1800s, farm laborers were needed in great numbers for threshing. In the modern age, machines do the work. In Biblical times, an ox standing on a hard threshing floor was harnessed to walk in a circular path so that its hooves would crush the sheaves of grain and loosen the husks surrounding the seeds.

The Old Testament prophets wrote of God’s future judgments upon the world as a kind of “threshing.”

One of the prophets says that God Himself will gather the nations “as sheaves into the floor” (Micah 4: 12). He will summon their armed multitudes, says another, to “the valley of decision” (Joel 3: 14). According to scholars of ancient Hebrew, the word for “decision” in that verse is suggestive of a threshing instrument.

Although not many people are aware of it, there is also a fascinating extension of that idea into one of the best-known words from all of Bible prophecy—Armageddon—found in the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation, in the New Testament.

Does the Bible tell us more about this “Day of the Lord” that’s yet to occur, more about the threshing tool, and more about the “threshee?” And what about that connection with “Armageddon?”

Come hear more about this riveting subject in Bible prophecy, and thresh the wheat from the chaff of your own understanding. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know priceless things about the future and have hope.

Mr. Paul Schlicher, Yardley, Pennsylvania

Thursday, October 22, 7:45 p.m. | The Garden Room, Moorestown Community House

A red dragon—with seven crowned heads and ten horns—waiting to gobble up a newborn.

Another beast—with seven blaspheming heads and ten crowned horns—rising out of the sea.

Still another beast, with two lamb-like horns, working “miracles,” and speaking like a dragon, commanding that due reverence be shown to “an image” of the beast from the sea.

And yet one last lumbering monstrosity, scarlet in color, with seven heads and ten horns, each horn agreeing to devote its strength, in common union with the others, to the greater power of the beast as a whole.

To anyone with a basic knowledge of the Bible’s vocabulary of symbols, these “creatures” plainly stand for human empire, perhaps even the same empire, although in different phases and forms of its existence.

But how are these symbolic beasts to be understood? What clues are given in the Apocalypse itself?

And what about this Biblical vocabulary of symbols?

Also, what do we make of the war that will be waged by that last scarlet beast against the Lamb?

There’s a lot of nonsense in the religious marketplace of ideas purporting to answer these questions. Developing a sound understanding of what the Apocalypse is telling us about both the past and the future can be a challenge, but it’s one that rewards those who embrace it.

Come hear more about “The Strange Beasts of the Apocalypse” and the fate that awaits them all. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know priceless things about the future and have hope.

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Mr. Mike Robinson, Echo Lake, New Jersey

Thursday, October 15, 7:45 p.m. | The Garden Room, Moorestown Community House

The current administration in Washington may be the first ever to take a position toward Israel that has provoked public demonstrations of protest in that country against an American president.

This is a striking departure from the past. After all, the United States has long been the lone buffer in international politics against the waves of criticism that have increasingly been directed at the Jewish state during the 61 years of its independent existence. For example, United Nations Security Council resolutions condemning Israel, after gaining support from the other countries on the council, have often fallen short of approval solely because of an American veto.

But finally, even the United States—exasperated with the decades of chronic conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel, always a dangerous complication of world affairs—has started to turn, leaving Israel utterly isolated, even on the question of the need to prevent at all costs the development of nuclear weapons by Iran.

In their descriptions of the climactic crisis of Israel’s existence before the coming of the Messiah, the Bible’s prophets paint a picture of that country standing alone against an angry world and facing a great coalition of invading armies.

Only the willfully blind can fail to see how the “international constellation” has been gradually aligning with the Biblical depiction of “the last days.” But a willfully blind world was also foreseen by the prophets.

Come hear what the Bible says about the world’s increasing impatience with Israel. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know priceless things about the future and have hope.

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Mr. Ryan Mutter, Baltimore, Maryland

“What’s this world coming to? God only knows.”

How many times has that been said aloud or even thought by people as they read a newspaper or an Internet news site, or hear news broadcasts on radio or television?

In a prophecy spoken by Jesus during the last week before his crucifixion, he said that the time just before his return to the earth would be marked by great distress and the widespread feeling among the nations of being trapped by circumstances and having “no way out.”

Other Bible prophecies speak of developments before Christ’s return as being like the labor pains of a woman about to give birth, meaning that they would be increasingly intense as the time drew closer, with less and less time between the episodes of distress.

How well the ancient prophecies express the mood of our times, with its string of crises that seem more and more dire!

Come hear what the Bible says about where the world is headed. We hope that you will be pleased to learn that you can know some priceless things about the future.

Mr. Ron Hicks, Washington D.C.

The modern state of Israel declared its independence in May 1948.

It occupies a seat in the United Nations and is represented in organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

It has ambassadors in most of the world’s capitals, and receives ambassadors from most of the world’s nations.

It sends athletes to the Olympic games.

How could it have happened, then, that in the last decade, maps have found their way onto the Web sites of major international corporations that did not show Israel, and that a map without Israel was even posted at the United Nations in November 2005 during an annual event?

The battle over what maps should rightfully show between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is an extension of the seemingly endless conflict between Arabs and Jews. Sometimes the battle is out in the open; sometimes, as in the case of the maps, the struggle is more subtle.

Does the Bible say anything about what the world’s maps will finally show in that part of the world?

Come hear about the surprise that the Bible says is coming for mapmakers everywhere.

Mr. Dan Jorgensen, Westfield, New Jersey

Since becoming president of Iran in August 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has issued one menacing pronouncement after another about the Islamic world’s need to eliminate the Jewish state of Israel, saying that Israel’s destruction is both inevitable and imminent.

Few Westerners understand how Ahmadinejad’s sense of mission is informed by the teaching of his strand of Islam (Shi’a Islam) about the end of the world. Yet that view of the world’s future has shaped the positions of the Iranian government since the Revolution of 1979 established an Islamic Republic.

Compared to the prophecies of Shi’a Islam, the Bible paints quite a different picture of where things will stand at “the end.” And it identifies “Persia” (the ancient name of Iran) by name as standing prominently with Israel’s enemies, which is itself remarkable, given Persia’s ancient sympathies toward the Jews and the relatively benign stance Iran once had toward Israel.

Will the prophecies of Shi’a Islam or those of the Bible prevail?

Come hear more about these competing views of where the world is headed, and weigh which one rests on a stronger foundation.

Mr. Allen Laben, Norfolk, Virginia

They were dispersed into exile from their ancient homeland. As centuries passed, they were persecuted in one country after another where they sought to establish roots in exile.

Uprooted again and again, they kept moving.

Though scattered around the globe, they survived, maintaining their separateness and identity as a people, becoming the stuff of byword and proverb: “The Wandering Jew,” “The Eternal Jew.”

And in the middle of the last century, after the most horrific episode of persecution in their long history, they returned to the land of their ancestors, creating an independent state for the first time in over 2,000 years.

The Jews.

Israel.

Their story stands alone, utterly unique among the peoples of the world. In 17th-century France, when Louis XIV asked for a proof of a higher power, the philosopher Pascal answered: “Why, the Jews, your Majesty — the Jews.”

And now, in 2009, the politics of the world remain complicated by the problem of Israel and the Jews.

Come hear more of the people whose experience over the centuries was all foretold far, far in advance, whose very existence declares, “Yes, there is a God.”