Prophecy all through God's Word is and always has been for us to meditate upon. For the past two-thousand years it sat in the background of our minds....because it was not God's timing....but was never forgotten or ignored....not by the Puritans or Whitefield or Spurgeon or Martyn Lloyd-Jones or anyone....but today it should no longer be on the back burner....because in the past hundred years-plus those prophecies have exploded in their fulfillment....slowly at first but expanding exponentially now.
There are dozens of avenues to go down....whole books such as Daniel and Revelation and all of the Old Testament prophets....but also passages somewhere in just about every book in God's Word....Old Testament and New Testament.
In this post I want to bring up one obscure passage....well the passage is anything but obscure but the reference to an exact number of fish....153....is rather obscure. This was in the last chapter of the Gospel of John....and Jesus had shown himself to the disciples for the third time since His resurrection. They were in the boat....unsuccessful in catching any fish....and Jesus appeared in disguise on the shore telling them to cast their net off the right side of the boat....which they did....and immediately caught that large number of fish....153 to be exact!
It has always been obvious that Jesus meant to relay something to us in that 153 fish were mentioned....and scholars have forever thought this question over....coming up only with a few not very convincing ideas....and that is all that I have....and I've had this thought for many years....a couple of decades at least.
The entire twentieth century had been one of fulfilled prophesies on the end-times....and May of 1948 may have been the most important of all.....but in my mind....the period....give or take a year....of 1980....had been a time of paradigm change in the world.....beginning with an extraordinarily political influential pope in John Paul II....and then came Reagan....and Gorbachev was beginning to assume real power just at that time....and you can throw Margaret Thatcher into the mix.
The world was changing....and it is only now....with Trump....changing again. The thought that had been in my mind for so long was that the United Nations accepted its 153rd member right at that time....1980....it was as if in that....with the 153 fishes....or 153 nations....God's Word was telling us that the stage was now set?
These thoughts and this concept very well may be wrong....but that is not the real point....which is that we Christians need to be thinking and meditating and praying upon God's prophetic end-times Word....all the time....at least it being in our minds every day. So....right or wrong....correct or incorrect....we are showing that we desire our Savior to return to this corrupt and violent world!
One more thing....related to this....in the seventeenth chapter of Revelation....concerning the Beast....this odd statement is made...."Here is the mind that has wisdom...the seven heads are the seven mountains on which the woman sits.....there are also seven kings....five have fallen....one is....and the other has not yet come....and when he comes he must continue a short time....and the beast that was....and is not....is himself also the eighth....and is of the seven....and is going to perdition." Revelation17:9-11 NKJV
So one can come up with all kinds of thoughts on this.....here's one....1980....or thereabouts was the beginning of the paradigm change....Reagan and H.W. and Clinton And W and Obama....were the five kings that were kings no more. That means that Trump was the king at the epicenter of this verse...."one is"....and Biden was the king that was there for a short time....and then comes the eighth....who was also of the seven.
Just a thought....probably wrong....hopefully wrong....but this is an example of where our minds and our hopes and our attention should be right now....for did not Jesus tell us a little earlier in Revelation....13:18...."Here is wisdom....let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast....for it is the number of a man....his number is....666."?
