The Beautiful Effects of ‘Great Tribulation’

Jesus prophesied a time of unequaled suffering—and a cause for immense hope.
 

Jesus Christ said something shocking—and it should have far greater force in our modern minds than for His disciples. After all, we know about Hitler and Stalin, death camps and gulags, atomic bombs and nuclear warfare.

When asked about conditions at the end of the world, Jesus prophesied that the nations would experience “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Matthew 24:21).

We want to believe that history’s worst is behind us. And truly, humanity’s past is painfully rife with poverty, disease, starvation, torment, oppression, massacre, genocide and war. But Christ’s words signal that we are yet to experience worse tribulation than any ever suffered!

He said further (in verse 22) that “except those days should be shortened,” every human being would die.

These words have particular poignancy right now, in a world gripped by despair and fear caused by pandemic and panic among peoples and their governments. Overnight, we have seen food supply disruptions, record unemployment, masses of people lining up for food handouts. We have seen rule of law destroyed, oppression enacted, freedoms revoked.

It is startling. But compared to the suffering prophesied by Jesus Christ and forecast throughout the Old Testament and New Testament, it is mild. According to prophecy, looming ahead are race war, economic besiegement, financial collapse, starvation, far deadlier pandemics, nuclear war, foreign invasion, national captivity and literally billions dying.

Yet in the current crisis, a striking trend: Many people are thinking about God. A March survey of 1,000 likely American voters found 22 percent believe coronavirus and economic meltdown are signs of God’s “coming judgment” and a “wake-up call for us to turn back to faith in God”; 22 percent more believe one of those things. Nearly 3 in 10 believe these are signs we are in the “last days.” Pew Research found 55 percent of Americans say they are praying for the pandemic to end. There has reportedly been a 40 percent spike worldwide in Google searches for the term “prayer.”

God does intend this adversity to provoke such thinking. Sadly, a great many people are responding in rather the opposite way. Rather than using confinement for reflection, religious devotion or family bonding, they are bingeing on television, movies, video games, pornography or marijuana use.

Thus, if God is using this crisis as a “wake-up call,” clearly the calamities will have to intensify before they truly jolt a great many people.

This points to the reason for Christ’s prophetic warning. And it illuminates the way to avoid the suffering to come.

The Gulag

That the Great Tribulation will be harsher than anything in history is stunning when you consider the industrial scale of suffering in the 20th century.

World War i was called “the war to end war” because it was so massive, so murderous and so horrific that people couldn’t fathom going to war again. But before it was even over, something happened that would perpetuate the nightmares of the 20th century: the Russian Revolution. Once in power, the Bolsheviks began mass arrests and imprisonment. Captives included millions of peaceful, innocent citizens perversely deemed enemies of the cause.

Then World War ii came, and it eclipsed the horrors of World War i tenfold. It was terrible tribulation, such as the world had never seen: submarine warfare, V-2 rockets, aircraft carriers, concentration camps, atomic bombs. And conditions in Russia had deteriorated dramatically under Joseph Stalin, one of history’s greatest mass murderers. Even while hurling men by the millions into fighting the Germans, he continued the imprisonments and purges of millions more of his own people—tribulation that ground on long after the war ended.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of those prisoners. He would later write a series of books describing life in captivity: The Gulag Archipelago. This meticulous account powerfully describes tribulation and captivity. It portrays shattered freedoms, rampant injustices, brutal arrests, torturous interrogations, horrifying camp conditions, and countless grotesque manifestations of human nature among both officers and prisoners. It makes the reality of the coming Tribulation achingly real.

Captives of the gulag numbered in the millions. Soviet officials extracted as much work from them as possible while providing as little care as possible. Camps were devastatingly filthy and diseased. Captives were starved or literally worked to death.

“[T]he life of the natives consists of work, work, work; of starvation, cold and cunning,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. Prisoners were barefoot and nearly naked—and this in a wasteland tundra that “was eternally covered with snow and the blizzards eternally raged over it.” At times on a given work site, hundreds of laborers froze to death.

The utter disregard for human life led to unthinkable atrocities. Despite requiring prisoners to labor in the cold for 10 to 12 hours a day or more, officials fed them next to nothing: “They poured water into a pot, and the best one might expect was that they would drop unscrubbed small potatoes into it …. And wherever there was a water shortage … only one bowl of gruel was cooked a day, and they also gave out a ration of two cups of turbid salty water. Everything any good was always and without fail stolen for the chiefs, for the trusties, and for the thieves ….”

In such conditions, only one thing dominates the mind: “Hunger, which forces an honest person to reach out and steal (‘When the belly rumbles, conscience flees’). Hunger, which compels the most unselfish person to look with envy into someone else’s bowl, and to try painfully to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor is receiving. Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to allow it to be distracted by anything else at all, or to think about anything else at all, or to speak about anything else at all except food, food and food. Hunger, from which it is impossible to escape even in dreams—dreams are about food, and insomnia is over food. And soon—just insomnia.”

Sickness and disease were rampant, yet, Solzhenitsyn writes acerbically, “there was no doctor’s aide, not even an orderly, and as a result there were no sick, and anyone who pretended to be sick was taken out to the wood in his comrades’ arms, and they also took a board and rope along so they could drag the corpse back the more easily.”

The work projects—clearing forests, breaking rocks, mining ore, building railroads and canals—staggered forward at incalculable human cost. The system’s “principle form of waste,” Solzhenitsyn writes, was “the last-leggers.” “[E]verything built by the Archipelago had been squeezed out of the muscles of the last-leggers (before they became last-leggers). And those who survived … must take upon themselves the disgrace of their own preserved lives.”

“Philosophers, psychologists, medical men, and writers could have observed in our camps, as nowhere else, in detail and on a large scale,” he wrote, “the special process of the narrowing of the intellectual and spiritual horizons of a human being, the reduction of the human being to an animal and the process of dying alive” (emphasis added throughout).

Jesus Christ says the Tribulation to come will be worse.

God doesn’t want to put anyone through that if He doesn’t have to.

God’s Hammers

The Great Tribulation that Christ prophesied will not arrive without warning. He personally warned of it 2,000 years ago. Centuries before that, God warned through Moses, Hosea, Amos and other prophets. He warned through Ezekiel, after he and his people had suffered nation-destroying tribulation, conquest and enslavement.

Ezekiel, a captive himself, prophesied that in the future, Israel’s descendants would again suffer tribulation on an epic scale. These descendants make up modern nations that include, most prominently, America and Britain (for proof, request The United States and Britain in Prophecy). Ezekiel 5 prophesies that a third of these nations’ populations will die in violence within cities, and another third in nuclear attacks. The surviving third will be enslaved, just as Ezekiel was. The numbers—more than 100 million in each of these waves—defy imagination.

Why would God allow and, yes, cause such suffering? Not simply to punish, but, in fact, to correct.

God is trying to reach people, to help them repent. He is a Father, trying to reach His sons. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Hebrews 12:6). Though God’s correction is grievous in the moment, when someone responds positively it brings beautiful results (verse 11).

God has a set of hammers. If we fail to heed the gentler correction, we force Him to use bigger hammers and harder blows to dissuade us from living the way that leads to death.

The Great Tribulation is the biggest hammer of all—but even it is a corrective tool. It will succeed in driving thousands of His own wayward Spirit-begotten saints back to Him. It will bring “a great multitude, which no man could number” into His Family (Revelation 7:9). Ultimately it will do much to prepare the whole world to come to know Him!

The Gulag Archipelago illustrates how the Tribulation will actually succeed as a tool of correction. Horrible as it is to contemplate, the Tribulation is actually an expression of God’s love.

Convicted by Conscience

The great majority who entered the Soviet gulags were broken by them. Yet Solzhenitsyn documented how some few, though crushed in body, actually grew stronger in mind and spirit.

When someone is forcibly plucked from his life and thrust into a world where survival is the lone goal, in a sense life becomes exceedingly simple. One prisoner described the slow hours of internment, the quiet, the time to think: “Here all the trivia and fuss have decreased. … I have experienced a turning point. … Here you harken to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside.”

Consider it: Right now, even amid global crisis, people remain distracted and self-absorbed. Thus God, rather than give us up to sinful self-destruction, must find a way to cut through the noise if He is to reach people and teach people.

Solzhenitsyn quoted a proverb: “Poverty and prison give wisdom.” And another: “Freedom spoils, and lack of freedom teaches.”

Gulag captives work on the massive Belomor Canal with primitive tools; by some estimates the project killed over 200,000 laborers.
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

“Torn from the hustle-bustle of everyday life in so absolute a degree that even counting the passing minutes puts him intimately in touch with the universe,” he wrote, “the lonely prisoner has to have been purged of every imperfection, of everything that has stirred and troubled him in his former life, that has prevented his muddied waters from settling into transparency.” How much does life’s tumult muddy the waters of your mind and inhibit contemplation?

In captivity, there is so much time, and so much motive, to think deeply and examine yourself differently. “Here is a rewarding and inexhaustible direction for your thoughts,” Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought—can’t you possibly correct it now? Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws. But … before your own conscience? But … in relation to other individuals?”

If you were to be enslaved this way, would you look back with regret at how you lived and the choices you made?

“I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on Earth which is undeserved,” said another captive, Boris Kornfeld. “Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”

Solzhenitsyn recognized that you may argue this point when you see children and other innocents brutally punished—yet, he wrote, “there was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. And many will accept the same for themselves.”

This man had been a hardened Russian officer. Yet there in the gulag, as he contemplated life, he thought, “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.” Recalling his past, he thought, “How many unused opportunities there were. When will we now make up for it? If I only manage to survive—oh, how differently, how wisely, I am going to live. The day of our future release? It shines like a rising sun.”

Refining

Zechariah 13:8 describes the same Tribulation that Ezekiel 5 prophesies: Only one third will yet live. What will God do with these survivors? “And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The Lord is my God” (Zechariah 13:9). Yes, this cruel captivity will accomplish God’s purpose by refining these victims. God will work with them to help them ascend in character. “Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver,” He says; “I have tried you in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10; Revised Standard Version).

Solzhenitsyn movingly described the refining that captivity can effect: “Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering. And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you. … It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship.”

Immersed in an environment of unspeakable barbarity, some rare individuals gain moral clarity. “Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant,” he continued. “You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience. You are ascending …. Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength.”

“[I]f you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”
Boris Kornfeld

The humiliation of captivity can lead to a humility of spirit. When pomp and vanity are exposed as false and worthless, space can be created for something more pure. The mind can awaken to all it once took for granted. The captive clutches for meaning, for hope and humanity, for God. “How gratefully his fingers reach out to feel and crumble the lumps of earth in the vegetable garden (but, alas, it is all asphalt). How his head rises of itself toward the eternal heavens (but, alas, this is forbidden). And how much touching attention the little bird on the window still arouses in him (but, alas, there is that ‘muzzle’ there … and the hinged ventilation pane is locked).”

How achingly easy it is to neglect what is truly important. Soon, though, many millions will have their illusions exposed and everything they cherish stripped. Untold millions will become even more depraved and animalistic.

But in that darkness, something truly beautiful will occur: An innumerable host will accept the chastening and scourging, they will take hold of humility, they will embrace the correction, and they will be refined like molten gold.

Among the things people will be deprived of in the Tribulation is God’s truth. God prophesies of a famine of the word (Amos 8:11). Today, that truth is abundant. People can readily access it through the Trumpet magazine, the Key of David television program, radio programs, podcasts and many publications. But soon it will be gone.

This is why we are urgent to publicize God’s warning message while we can. Those future captives need this message. They need He Was Right. They need Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s booklets on Lamentations and The Song of Songsspecial messages from God to His recalcitrant spiritual sons.

We say, like Christ, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4).

The founding book of the Trumpet’s publisher, the Philadelphia Church of God, is Malachi’s Message. In that book, Mr. Flurry shows that the last era of God’s Church before Christ’s return—called the Laodicean era—began after the leader of God’s Church, Herbert W. Armstrong, died in 1986. (Read Christ’s message of correction to this rebellious era in Revelation 3:14-22.) Since that time, the true Church of God has splintered and resplintered. Yet God has been knocking on the Laodiceans’ door for 30 years through the pcg. He is still knocking, beseeching them to open the door to Him.

Those who fail to heed will be thrust into the Great Tribulation. Scripture prophesies that in this holocaust, they will have to repent or lose their eternal lives. And to prove their hearts, God will actually give them an important work to do in their captivity—testifying to their captors about the truth of God.

The Value of Memory

Solzhenitsyn wrote a lot on the importance of memory in captivity. “Own nothing! Possess nothing!” he wrote. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.”

This prisoner used his memory to extraordinary effect. He composed hundreds of lines of poetry in his mind, endlessly rehearsing and refining them, without committing them to paper. “This was very rewarding, in that it helped me not to notice what was being done with my body,” he wrote. “Memory was the only hidey-hole in which you could keep what you had written and carry it through all the searches and journeys under escort. … No longer burdened with frivolous and superfluous knowledge, a prisoner’s memory is astonishingly capacious, and can expand indefinitely. We have too little faith in memory.”

Amid the Tribulation, God’s people in captivity will search their memories, and God will help them remember. They will recall remnants of God’s truth. They will recollect their time in God’s Church. They will think on Psalm 137 and the hymns they sang. Like those who composed that psalm, they will be exiles in captivity, mourning. They will actually remember that psalm by remembering that hymn from The Bible Hymnal.

And verses 8-9 show that they will testify to their captors. They will deliver God’s warning to their guards and officers of the fate that awaits them!

The Bible says that God’s people, who have finally repented and are doing His warning work, will be martyred for it. Yet because they repented, they will have qualified to receive eternal life.

Solzhenitsyn described astronomer Nikolai Kozyrev, a fellow prisoner who “saved himself by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the universe—and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what time and the passing of time really are.” Contemplating God enabled him to survive despite being confined for a year with a man who had literally gone insane.

Nikolai thought and thought, until he reached the limits of his own knowledge. He cried out: “Please, God! I have done everything I could. Please help me! Please help me continue!”

Just half an hour later, the guards came and gave him a book: A Course in Astrophysics.

“Where had it come from?” Solzhenitsyn wrote. The prison library generally held only Communist propaganda. “Aware of the brief duration of the coincidence, Kozyrev threw himself on it and began to memorize everything he needed immediately, and everything he might need later on.” Imagine the hunger for true knowledge people will possess during the famine of the word. They will hunger for meaning and for hope! If only we could appreciate these things now, while they are abundant.

The book exchange at this prison would swap out the books every 10 days. But just two days after Nikolai received this book, the prison chief made an unscheduled inspection. “His eagle eye noticed immediately. ‘But you are an astronomer?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Take this book away from him!’ But its mystical arrival had opened the way for further work, which he then continued in the camp in Norilsk.”

Can such an event be explained any way other than that the omnipotent, omniscient God was watching and listening and working in the life of an unconverted prisoner in a Soviet gulag?

How closely attentive will God be in the lives of the captives and exiles of the Great Tribulation? He will be meticulously orchestrating circumstances for the Laodiceans, for the innumerable multitude that never knew God until the Tribulation struck, for the nations of Israel, and in fact for all humanity.

‘I Will Sow Them’

Of those experiencing this severest of punishments, God says in Zechariah 10:9, “And I will sow them among the people: and they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children, and turn again.” As their ordeal leads them to repent, God will actually use them to reach still others.

“God will sow the Laodiceans in far countries during the Tribulation. Half of them will ‘turn again’ to God—realizing what they almost lost,” Mr. Flurry writes in his booklet on Zechariah. “But what makes this verse so inspiring is the fact that God is in control of the situation. He says, ‘I will sow them.’ Why does a farmer sow seed? So he can have a harvest! … God will actually sow them in foreign countries so they can teach the Gentiles. Even as the Gentiles threaten to kill them, they will say, Go ahead—but I’m telling you what’s coming. God’s message will be taught all over the world by the Laodiceans! Isn’t that amazing? God sows them so He can reap a harvest.”

Today, these people are rebelling against God—yet He is preparing to correct them and save them from spiritual death—and far beyond that! He is preparing to use them to save still more people, even their own captors!

Love Is Strong as Death

Solzhenitsyn described an array of tools and tortures Soviet interrogators used to break captives and extract confessions. They interrogated one old woman repeatedly, but she refused to tell them anything. “At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman’s face, and she replied, ‘There is nothing you can do with me, even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing me. But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute.’”

Solzhenitsyn knew of several people like her, who would choose death rather than cooperate or sign anything denouncing anyone.

Given harsh enough conditions, everyone can be broken. That means God must protect us and those in the Tribulation from those conditions that would break us.

Song of Songs 8:6 describes the Laodicean woman, suffering in the Tribulation, and turning to God. “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm,” she says, “for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

“There is coming a time when this repentant Bride of Christ will become a courageous witness for her Husband in the face of death, amid the nightmares of the Tribulation,” Mr. Flurry writes in The Song of Songs. “She will look her persecutors squarely in the face, and say, Love is strong as death! I can love God and I can die for Him because I love Him so much!”

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned” (verse 7). “What a breathtaking scripture,” Mr. Flurry writes. “If we are loyal to God, nothing can destroy true love—nothing! Not even death.”

Amid so much tragedy in the Church today, God is full of hope that His precious Spirit-begotten sons will make it.

It will take extraordinary moral and spiritual courage to do what these saints do. Yet at the same time, God will have to carefully calibrate their experience to give them the opportunity. Solzhenitsyn made a crucial point. He said every person has a breaking point. When a prisoner didn’t comply, it was really a sign that his captors hadn’t successfully pushed him to that point. Regarding the defiant captive, he wrote, “For a reader who is not in the know this is a model of heroism. For a reader with a bitter Gulag past, it’s a model of inefficient interrogation.”

Given harsh enough conditions, everyone can be broken. That means God must protect us and those in the Tribulation from those conditions that would break us. “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

‘Our Last Prison Sky’

The Laodiceans will die in that captivity. Sadly, far too many will die not for God, but trying to save their lives by submitting to their captors and other criminal activity in captivity.

But a great many will repent and be martyred for God, proving themselves worthy of becoming the Bride of the Lamb who was slain.

Isaiah 54:4-5 have a thrilling message to the Laodiceans who will repent: By turning to God and giving up their physical lives, they will be resurrected not only into His Family but as part of the Bride of Christ. “Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame …. For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.” Yes, God hid His face, but only for a moment. And for a magnificent purpose. Think of all that God will accomplish through the correction of captivity.

Solzhenitsyn called his time in the gulags “the most important years in my life, the years which put the finishing touches on my character.” He wrote, “Our initial, first prison sky consisted of black swirling storm clouds and black pillars of volcanic eruptions—this was the heaven of Pompeii, the heaven of the Day of Judgment, because it was not just anyone who had been arrested, but I—the center of this world. Our last prison sky was infinitely high, infinitely clear, even paler than sky-blue.”

Revelation 7 describes two groups of people who will be protected from the horrors that immediately follow the 2½-year Tribulation in the terrible, yearlong Day of the Lord. The first group is the Laodiceans (verse 4), who die and are sealed: Their resurrection at Jesus Christ’s return is certain.

The second group is “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (verse 9)—including Israelites (people from the English-speaking nations) and Gentiles who listened to those Laodiceans. Verse 14 shows that these are people who repented in that merciful Tribulation.

A Second Exodus

Isaiah 11:11 shows that God will protect individuals in that great multitude during the Day of the Lord, which is when He will pour out His fury upon their captor nations. Then, just as He did with the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, God will deliver these modern slaves with a mighty hand (Isaiah 27:12-13).

God will clear a path for this massive multitude by pushing mountains of water out of their way and shepherding them to their Promised Land. This modern exodus will be so vast that people won’t even remember the ancient Exodus through the Red Sea (Isaiah 11:15-16; Jeremiah 16:14-15).

Julia Goddard/Trumpet

The horrors of captivity will have finally softened these people’s hearts so they will to listen to God. That is all He ever wanted: for their hearts to be turned to Him so He can save them from sin and death, and lead them in the way that produces eternal life!

“Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all. … Thus saith the Lord; Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord, that thy children shall come again to their own border” (Jeremiah 31:12, 16-17).

The horrors of captivity will have softened their hearts so they will listen to God. That is all He ever wanted.

Imagine people you know—friends, neighbors, co-workers, family—having been taken captive. Imagine seeing them broken and emaciated, yet with softened hearts willing to submit to their great Creator. Imagine God’s emotion!

“Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord. … Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. … I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (verses 20, 31-34).

What a wonderful picture. This is what God is preparing for even today.

The coronavirus chaos is merciful tribulation, aimed at bringing people to repentance. And if they don’t repent now, God will increase the intensity of the tribulation—and even increase the intensity of His mercy.

How merciful is God, always seeking to turn hearts of the children to their Father. This is all the love of a Father, trying to reach His sons.

Reflecting on his captivity, Solzhenitsyn came to have this astounding attitude: “Bless you, prison.” Then he added, bitingly, “(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is very well for you to say that—when you came out of it alive.)”

Thankfully, Scripture reveals that the billions who never knew God and will not escape that merciful Tribulation alive will be resurrected and given another opportunity to repent.

We have a sliver of time left before the Tribulation Jesus Christ prophesied breaks out upon the world. Repent now, while truth is abundantly available to you! Repent now and claim God’s promise to protect His faithful from the suffering to come. If you have turned away from God, turn back! If you have never committed to God, commit!

Join the work of God that is laboring urgently to use the few remaining moments we have to blast God’s message as loudly as possible to the largest audience possible!