Chronology of Latter-day Events

The Christian Mark of the Beast Survival Manual Copyright © 2014 by Erik K. Olinger All rights reserved.

READERS: This is a rough-draft of the manuscript.  It is unedited and contains errors that will be corrected at the final release.

Chronology of Latter-day Events

While the Bible upholds an apocalyptic return of Christ and time of distress for the world, it does not give a precise chronology of events that will transpire. The Bible is a dependable source of revelation and it gives a legitimate account of the last days, but because the events are not in a precise order like the charts attempt to be here, but rather they are in the form of linguistically colorful prophecy passed on through the prophets and apostles, the events must be arranged out of Scripture. Doing so requires interpretation, and this author has taken a pre-millennial stand. The book of Revelation does have the prophetical events arranged in a semi-organized way with which to extract a logical timeline of events.

The three main views of Christian eschatology (latter-days) will be discussed in the chapter, Christ’s Second Coming and the Tribulation. The focus of this timeline of events is pre-millennialism, however within pre-millennialism are three more views that one must decide upon, two of which are time-lined here for comparison. Both the pre-tribulation and post-tribulation views that are within pre-millennialism are time-lined chronologically here with a concise list of corresponding passages. The timeline will be helpful to reference throughout the remainder of this manual, and should be referred to often. There is also a corresponding section in Appendix A that provides a concise listing of Scripture that corresponds to the timelines here. Most learning Christians will not need to read each verse given in Appendix A, although they should at some point (they are also covered well throughout the book). Appendix A can be disregarded until needed. Pre-tribs place the rapture/translation of the saints before the tribulation, while post-tribs place it after. It must be disclosed that time-lining prophecy events with perfect accuracy is not possible. Some readers may place some of the events in a different order, sometimes quite reasonably. These events could be arranged always in the order in which Revelation presents them, however there is reason to believe that some of the events have to be chronologically placed in a different order than they are seemingly intimated in the Bible. Usually, sticking to the order given within each break of the Bible is the best method for laying a base timeline, after that the context of the passage and common-sense should be used to determine placement.

Table 1

Table 2