my four generations tell the story
Technology & Knowledge
speeding
ahead toward
the
coming of christ
by TM Smith
The notion that an incredible increase in the rate of travel and knowledge would be both the key that unlocked the meaning of the Book of Daniel, as well as a sure sign of the second coming of Christ, stems from the declaration made at the end of the Book of Daniel. It declares: “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Dan. 12:4
It occurred to me that in just four generations of my heritage, starting with the birth of my great grandfather in 1832, travel and knowledge have increased at break-neck speed. These things show that Christ stands at the door ready to call His faithful home to heaven with Him . In just four of his family’s generations major prophetic events and conditions have grown from no-existent or embryonic proportions to being fulfilled on a worldwide scale. In most ways, life for the editor’s great grandfather was much the same as it had been for Noah, Abraham, David, Jesus or Martin Luther. Travel, education, communication and world politics were just beginning to change at his birth in 1832. But just a mere three generations later, at the time of the editor’s birth, every sphere of human existence had been radically altered and by it the end times prophecies enumerated by Jesus, Daniel and Revelation had become realities. Nation had risen against nation, wars and rumors of war had come to overwhelm world peace and cost the lives of millions and millions of sons and daughters. Earthquakes and pestilence, perversion and social degeneracy, false predictions and bogus saviors now dominate the news, Travel and knowledge have been greatly increased. Europe is united and the foundation of the Antichrist Empire has been laid. And last, but not least, the Jews were restored to their homeland in Israel for the first time in 2,500 years. In this testimony the editor shows how all these things came about in just a period of four generations, how man’s life has been turned upside down by these things and how the world is speeding headlong toward the appearing and return of Jesus Christ.
Four generations is a unit of time, which God has long been using for the purposes of setting a time limit on prophecy. He said that he would visit the sins of the fathers on the third and fourth generation of their children. (Ex.20:5, 34.7/Num. 14:.8/Deut. 5:9) It was prophesied that Israel would be in bondage in Egypt for four generations. Gen.15:16 And, God told Jehu that as a reward for doing the right thing, God would allow four generations of his to reign as kings in Israel. 2 Kings 10:30 In each case, the four generations was a unit of measure used to determine the length of a prophecy, but it was also connected with judgment. In the law, where its references are always about the individual, God’s mercy would fall on four generations of those that did well and His judgment would come unto four generations for those who sinned against Him. As a nation, Israel was destined to stay four generations in Egypt while the sins of the Amorites were allowed to come to their fullest. Even kings are judged by this unit of time. While the children of Jehu did sit on the throne for four generations their reign came to a halt because of their father’s and their own sin. Four generations is a span of time, which God uses to let sin come to its full and have prophecy come to a fulfillment. 2 Kings 15.12 There are many alive today who could tell a similar story to the one I am about to tell. Just four generations removed, their great-grandfather, like mine, was living in a world untouched by the fulfillment of end-times prophecy compared to the one in which we live.
My mother’s people were farmers who came to America during the German and British immigrations of the 1700’s settling in the Midwest in Iowa and Missouri. Her paternal grandfather, John Myers, was born in 1832 on a farm in the fledgling state of Missouri, not at all long after the famous Daniel Boone had moved to the wilderness there. As a young man, my great-grandfather had an adventurer’s spirit. He left his farm roots and struck off on his own to find excitement in the untamed western frontier. In 1850, at the age of 18, he felt the lure of the California gold rush and headed to the Sierra Nevadas, becoming one of thousands of forty-niners looking for that pot of gold down river from Sutter’s Mill. After a few years of hardship, disappointment and poverty, he returned to the Midwest and the only life he knew. Eventually he returned to farming, got married and fathered eleven “farmhands” by two separate marriages. For the next 60 years, or so, until his death in 1911, he tried to make a go of it tilling the soil. Some years were better than others, but he barely eked out a living for himself and his family and spent most of his life on rented or indentured soil.
My grandfather was number ten of the eleven children and was born to my great-grandfather rather late in life, in 1887. I knew my grandfather, and as most little boys do, held him in awe and great admiration until he died in 1957. His tall lanky frame and jet-black hair made him seem a tower of strength and virtue to me. His nickname was “Chief” and it was always said of him that he looked like an Indian (Native American, today). There were always family rumors that there was Black Feet Indian blood somewhere in the Myers family tree. He was the typical country philosopher, a product of the late 19th Century cracker barrel society. Mayor of a Missouri farm town for two terms, he was also the town’s barber, a trade he had learned while serving with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s regiment in Texas and Mexico in 1916, and the place from which he cut his political teeth.. Missouri, being a slave border-state where slavery was permitted by law but despised by many, was a place of frontier justice, right and wrong, the law, wars and the Scots-Irish Bible belt. The Bible was a prime topic of discussion at the barbershop throughout his lifetime. Like so many small town leaders of that by-gone era, Roy was well versed in politics, the Bible and the law. He believed strongly that every man was created equal before God. He had a Baptist upbringing and was a man who regarded keeping his word as his most important and valued possession. He often quoted the Scriptures to his only child - my mother – in the context of a real life and the community in which he lived. He generally left the theology of the ministers confined to the walls where their pulpits spouted theory but not reality.
My mother was of a similar ilk, born in 1926. Though many of her father’s older siblings were still involved in farming, her father was now a full-time barber and resident of the small commercial “city” of a couple hundred folk, which served as the center of community activity and the hub for marketing the crops of the surrounding farms. Roy had instilled in Eloise much of the Bible’s sayings, a hatred for prejudice and bigotry, and a love for the truth. But like her grandfather before her, she too had the adventurer’s spirit and left for the big city of St. Louis as soon as she graduated high school. She had a somewhat checkered life, bearing five children with two husbands until becoming born-again (not at a revival meeting or through a TV ministry, but by noticing marked passages in her father’s bible one night) at the age of 47. Since then she has lived a life in Christ that has given her heightened adventure, but without its worldly instability.
I was the second of her children born to her in 1950.
As you can tell, I feel very closely connected to these four generations. Though the time between our births spans 118 years, I feel as though I can reach out and touch them, taste their lives, feel their problems and fears - they are that close to me. Though I never met my great-grandfather I knew and loved my grandfather, sat on the lap of the man who had walked in the fields and brought in the harvest with my great grandfather born in 1832. My mother and I have shared much of our adult lives because of the relationship we have with our Savior, Jesus Christ. My life and my spiritual, emotional existence are not far removed from that man who was born to a pioneering family in 1832. I knew and hugged the man who had been his son, who had worked on the farmhouse roof with him, who had held sheaves of wheat for him while he quickly tied them off before that rains came. I had seen the lines of life on his son’s face. I had heard the respect in people’s voices when they spoke about his son, Roy; seen clippings in the La Plata newspaper of people who still remembered the ‘excessive generosity’ of ole John Myers. Even if my hands did not touch John Myers my heart does. He’s that close. It is only three generations away; so close you can still be moved by the passion of his life, his trip to California, the disappointment of finding nothing but hardship in his dream, his struggle to provide for his huge family, the loss of a child, the death of his first wife. The bible sitting on the bureau.
And I can feel Roy’s pain at his father’s death, his wonder and trepidation at traveling to Texas, for he never left Missoura’ other than that time, except when he went to Chicago for treatment of Leukemia, where he died. People didn’t travel much in those days. The awe he must have felt at seeing the first armored divisions that were preparing to turn war into a new mechanized kind of horror. I can hear the determination in his voice when he went toe-to-toe against the big power company that was trying to get him to sell out his own people and do away with the town owned light plant. I see the triumph when he helped persuade the Santa Fe railroad to come through town by letting them have access to the town lake for water for their steam locomotives, and thereby helped every farmer in the country get their crops to market. Four generations is not that removed from us. The time is short and quick. What is incredible is how much prophecy has been fulfilled in the short amount of time between these four people’s births, how quickly prophecy flies, how travel, communications, knowledge, science, technology have changed our world and forecast the coming of Jesus Christ.
IN 1832…
Great-grandfather John’s world was rough and uncivilized by modern standards. When he was born in 1832 all of the signs of the end times were unimaginable or in their infancy. Most men were still traveling on foot, the back of a beast, or by cart or wagon. No one had ever heard of an automobile and few, except city dwellers, had even heard the pat-pat-pat of a steam engine or set their eyes on a primitive railroad system. Indian tribes still communicated by smoke signal. The cavalry used mirrors to send messages. The minting of the first US postal stamp was still fifteen years away. The pony express mail system was still fifteen years away. Travel and knowledge was much the same it had been for thousands of years. The elite and rich were the only ones who could afford an education. John would be past school age and in his twenties before the federal law making it mandatory for children to attend school, was instituted by the Congress of the United Sates. Europe had just been torn apart by the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing chaos would bring about revolutions that toppled many of Europe’s oldest reigning monarchies. Europe, master of the world, instead of being unified, was being set up for the two Great World Wars of the twentieth Century. Europe’s problems were not pestilence and earthquakes, for those rarely happened, but it was social strife and political upheaval. Unity was a laughable idea. It would take a war and Bismarck to unify Germany in the 1870’s. The false sciences of Psychology and Evolution and the silly romanticism of Communism, so influential in the deterioration of morals and biblical standards of conduct and major contributors to fulfilling the prophecies of 2 Timothy’s ‘perilous times’ concerning the last days, were not yet hatched. And as far as Zionism (the movement to get the Jews a homeland back in Palestine) goes, it had not even been considered. It still lay dormant, lost under the heavy weight of thousands of years of history, forgotten totally by the Church and the world. There was a smattering of revival of prophetic things in England and across America that was cropping up around the year 1832 but the only one who had not forgotten the prophecies about it or abandoned hope for its fulfillment, especially the return of the Jews to Israel, was God Himself. This was the basic prophetic condition of the world when John Myers came into it. But in the course of his lifetime it gradually and dramatically changed.
The Book of Daniel tells us that God sealed up the meaning of its end times prophecies until the last days when “travel and knowledge would be increased”. In 1832, the year of John Myer’s birth, a three-year expedition left Missouri to explore the uncharted Rocky Mountains. Seven years earlier the first steam passenger service had been launched in England. In the same decade the first railroad was opened in lower Manhattan using horses and sails as its mean of power. No president had ever ridden on a train. It was six years after John’s birth that President Martin Van Buren became this country’s first chief executive to experience train travel. That was just during his early childhood, during his lifetime the travel and knowledge of the world was increased exponentially.
By 1840 a trip from New York to Philadelphia took six and half hours by train down from three days in 1817. But still men lived, for the most part, as they had since the invention of the wheel, in a three mile an hour world. But things were on the move. A steam ship could carry a passenger from Boston to New York in a day, down from half a week or more at the turn of the century. In the first decade of John’s life more that 300 railroad companies sprung up in America laying down 2,816 miles of track. In the United Kingdom there were 1,331 miles of track and mainland Europe was beginning its railway boom as well. At the age of 18 when John left St. Joe Missouri for California the trip was by wagon and could take as much as four months or longer depending on weather and Indians. Less than two decades later when the transcontinental railroad was joined at Promontory Point, Utah the trip from New York from San Francisco, which once took as long and nine months, now only took eight days. That’s a difference of less than a day for every month. By the time John Myers was 50 years-old things had changed to the extent from the Rocky Mountains not even being explored to being able to leave his home in Missouri and go anywhere in the continental United States in under five days.
Advances in communication and the transfer of knowledge were meteoric also. The innovation with the greatest impact was the telegraph. In 1844 Samuel F.B. Morse transmitted the first telegraph message “What had God wrought!” from the Supreme Court Building in Washington D.C. to a B&O Railroad station in Baltimore. Within four years there was a telegraph line between Chicago and New York. Companies began to spring up around this new invention that instantly linked men who were thousands of miles apart. In 1856 Western Union was formed and within ten years it had become the first great American corporate monolith, helping to form the first American Stock Exchanges. By the end of the civil war in 1864 more than 75,000 miles of wire had been strung across the continent. News of John’s birth would have passed by word of mouth and by slow delivery of newspapers. But now information of every sort was delivered in an instant to anywhere that had a telegraph pole and a wire hanging on it. It became a federal offense to tamper with wires or messages. The news of Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826 probably did not reach many Americans for weeks - even months. The news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1856 was received by the nation within hours. America had become a nation of alcoholics because the road system was so bad and it was so difficult to get grain to market before it spoiled that it was better to preserve them as ‘spirits’ so they could get to market. John Myers was rumored to be among those alcoholics that gave rise to the suffrage movement before his death. The railroads helped change that dilemma so that fresh produce could get to market, though alcoholism was too deeply ingrained in the American life-style to be eradicated or much effected. But the changes in travel and communication through knowledge had effected the world’s mode of life drastically during his life.
At the time of John’s death in 1911 many other major prophetic factors of the end-times still loomed on the horizon in a state of dormancy, however. Europe was three years away from its first world war, but these would be the fulfillment of “nation rising against nation” as foretold by Jesus. As he read his Bible the prophecies about the Jews and their return to Palestine must have still seemed far-fetched. The Zionist movement had only begun, and in such an obscure way that it could have escaped his attention altogether.
In 1887…
When grandfather was born in 1887 end-time prophecy was about to explode. The French-born inventor Gottlieb Damilei introduced the first combustion engine driven automobile. The German leader, Bismarck, warned Europe against a global conflagration between the colonial empires. And the first calculator was introduced by a French engineering student. Individuals had the freedom to travel quickly and on his own time-schedule. It was mandatory that his community provide him with an education. Colleges and universities were springing up every year in every state of the Union. Travel and knowledge were greatly increased; technology was gearing up, economy was working full force for technology and knowledge’s purposes and cause. The two-and-a-half thousand year-old prophecy was bursting forth. When Roy was but four years old a Jewish journalist, Theodore Herzel, became appalled by the anti-Semitic sentiments at the famous Dreyfus trial in France. The Jewish officer was wrongly accused, convicted and sentenced for treason. In a short time Herzel had mustered enough support to call attention to his desires for a homeland for Jews. When Roy was ten years-old the first World Zionist Congress was held at Basel, Switzerland, in August 1897 and the Zionist Movement was officially born.
The invention of dynamite by a Zionist Jew during the First World War caused the British government to agree to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine (known as the Balfour Declaration) in return for the formula, this gave the movement the impetus it needed to push for an Israeli nation. As Roy’s life progressed there were rumblings and questions being asked in the Church about the possibility and propriety of the ancient prophecies of the Jews being restored to Palestine and if they might be literally fulfilled. Nine years before his death these unlikely prophecies concerning the Jews had been unbelievably fulfilled. Roy had seen two World Wars and witnessed how they were used by God to make the return to the Jews to Palestine a reality. The unthinkable, the unimaginable had come to pass. In 1948 the United States recognized the nation of Israel and a government of Jews was set up in the Promised Land for the first time in two and a half millennia.
In 1926…
When Eloise was born to Roy the pace of the world was quickening even more. Airplanes were beginning to dot the skies. The world was being drawn closer and closer together. What took six days of travel now took one day. What took six hours took one or two hours. Before she was a year old Charles Lindberg had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Mail was no longer being delivered by pony express but by airplane. And the first liquid fuel rocket was launched in Auburn, MA by Robert Goddard. Goddard told the newspapers, “Now it is possible for man to travel to the moon.” Eloise would see man plant a flag on the moon before her fiftieth birthday. The year of her birth saw the first talking movies and Scottish inventor John L. Baird gave the first successful demonstration of a new medium called television. Now you could see and hear a person instantly.
Before her birth a world of organization had been created at the end of World War I to promote world unity and bring about world peace. Though the League of Nations fell apart it’s offspring, the United Nations, has given world unity a boost since its inception after the Second World War in 1945. Since that time organization after organization has spawned new hope in Europe for a united European Community. From a time when all of Europe was at each other’s throats Eloise had witnessed the coming of European unity, a miracle thought impossible during the generations of her grandfather and father.
The European parliament, World Court and Common Market have slowly made way for the unity of Europe, which is all but fully realized today. The EU or European Union has broken down its borders and barriers and share common economic and political goals. Today they are able to routinely put forward a common front when faced with crisis form within or from without. They share a common currency. They have a president. Europe is essentially one.
Since 1950…
Since my birth in 1950 the changes in travel and communication have progressed to a point where they would be utterly mind-boggling to my great-grandfather, even my grandfather. Computers, heart transplants, electronic money, cell phones, genetic engineering, community colleges, GEDs and CDs, tech schools, digital cameras, recording devices, e-mail and Blackberries, jets and helicopters, atom smashers, satellite TV, nuclear power, microwave ovens and Cialis - what next? … How could he have even guessed at such stuff. He couldn’t have.
The Jews celebrated the 50th anniversary of Israel in 1998. Jerusalem became the capital of Israel after the war in 1973. The world wants a peace accord with them according to the prophecies of the Antichrist spoken of in Daniel. The only part of the prophecy yet to be fulfilled is that of the Antichrist’s covenant with them and the seven year period of the Tribulation (See chapters 9, 11 & 12 of Daniel and Revelation 6-13)
Europe is unified. After the war years, which Jesus said would happen, they are of one mind and one spirit and have a resolve now to do things together. Even age-old divisions have come tumbling down with the fall of Communism, the dissolving of the iron curtain and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The way for the Antichrist is very nearly prepared, his power base almost established. All we await is his installation as Europe’s head.
Earthquakes and other natural disasters are on the rise. My forefathers had little inconvenience with these things, but now the world is being bombarded by them (See Matthew 24, Luke 21 and Mark 13)
The strangest, most bizarre and unspeakably evil things are happening on a daily and regular basis. When mass murders, senseless crime and vandalism used to be an unusual thing in my mother’s day it has become the “norm” of a society that has fulfilled the scripture THAT SAYS, In the last of my days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” (2 Tim. 3.1-5)
All of these things were forecast by prophecy. For centuries, Bible-believing Christians were told that when they began to see these things happen it would indicate that the appearing and return of Christ was close at hand. In just four generations, little more than one hundred years, these unimaginable things have all blossomed into reality. With increasing intensity and velocity these signs continue to affect the world and herald the return of Christ. Take a look at the newspaper tomorrow, I guarantee you will see evidence of these signs of the times and the nearness of Christ’s appearing.
Such an increase of Travel and Knowledge
in just four Generations
It should be noted here that there is a difference between what one could call “the appearing” of Christ and “the return” of Christ. The “appearing” of Christ refers to His coming in the clouds and calling His people up to meet Him in the air. This is commonly called “The Rapture”. The “appearing” happens suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, without warning. Only those who have been waiting and watching for Him will see and hear Him at His appearing. Once He appears and the Rapture has happened He and the raptured saints will return to heaven to begin preparations for the Tribulation and His return. The “return” is a completely separate event from the “appearing”. At the end of the Tribulation all eyes on earth will see Him coming with His huge army of saints. At His return He will be coming all the way back to earth to take the throne as King of kings. He will come back on a white horse to descend upon the earth with wrath and vengeance to defeat the rebellious armies of the world at Armageddon. Unlike “the appearing”, “the return of Christ” will not be instantaneous or come without warning. Its time will be easily predicted because it will come at the end of the seven-year Tribulation.