Times and Seasons

When I became a Christian, back in 1973, I studied the book of Acts and discovered the importance of the work of the Holy Spirit. I was baptised in the spirit and experience the working of his power. I also studied all the scriptures and discovered the greatness of God.

Later I read Hal Lindsay’s book The Late Great Planet Earth and other end-time teachers. Hal Lindsay had a big influence at the time. When I became a minister, I taught the same teaching, but after a while I became uneasy, because it seemed so negative. This did not fit with what I had learned earlier about the power of the Holy Spirit and the greatness of God. So I started studying the scriptures, to see if the Hal Lindsay’s teaching was correct.

I discovered that the end-time teachers play a clever trick. They take all the negative scriptures and apply them to the current age. They take all the positive scriptures and push them out to the millennium. This explains why their teaching for the current period is so negative. Then they line it up with the newspapers, and it seems plausible.

However, I could find no justification in the scriptures for splitting the scriptures in the way that they do. There is no reason why all the negative stuff goes into the current age. So I began to study the scriptures for a paradigm that made more sense. I discovered the rock and the mountain in Daniel, which suggested that there are two stages in the development of the Kingdom.

A turning point was reading a book called The Puritan Hope by Ian Murray. This was a history of a revival that took place in England and Scotland in the 17th century. It came out of Cambridge University and a group of Bible Teachers who were really skilled at the preaching the scriptures. So many people would turn up to hear them preach, that they would not fit in the buildings. They would preach for several days in a row. It was an inspiring story, but the interesting thing was that they believed that they should pray for the conversion of the Jews. From studying the scriptures, they believed that the promises of the gospel would not be completely fulfilled until the Jews were converted.

The importance of the calling of the Jews was a new insight for me. It led me to studying Romans 9-11. This opened up a new way of understanding the scriptures, because I realised that the key to the next stage of the Kingdom coming is not the Jesus returning, but the fullness of Jews. I then went to Revelation and I found that this approach made sense of that book too. It changed my perspective on Jesus Big Prophecy too.

I then spent about ten years studying all the scripture and building up an understanding of how they all fit together. My book Times and Seasons is the result of that work.