Jesus, Paul, and the book of Revelation consistently teach that the single event that the church should look out for is the abomination of desolation when Antichrist will take his seat in the temple and demand that the world worship him. That is the key event that the Bible teaches that believers are to discern.
There will, however, exist general conditions just before the onset of the Antichrist’s great tribulation. I’ll list a few of these general conditions.
This imagery alludes to Genesis 11:1–9,
The whole earth had a common language and a common vocabulary. When the people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” (They had brick instead of stone and tar instead of mortar.) Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered across the face of the entire earth.” But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the people had started building. And the LORD said, “If as one people all sharing a common language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let’s go down and confuse their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” So the LORD scattered them from there across the face of the entire earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why its name was called Babel–because there the LORD confused the language of the entire world, and from there the LORD scattered them across the face of the entire earth.
The basic message of this Genesis passage is that the world rejected their Creator; instead they made themselves an end “so that we may make a name for ourselves.” They used “bricks and tar” to build their achievements. They were able to do this because they had a “common language and common vocabulary.”
This ancient city of Babel is a type for the eschatological Babel—a global “city.” Twenty years ago, we could discern the blueprint to the eschatological tower of Babel, but today we can see the edifice rapidly being built.
1. Religion. There are three religions in the world that are accelerating. Islam seeks to take over the world. Militant environmentalism eradicates the sacredness of human life. Secularism denies God all together making the individual the chief moral standard. All three are competing for world dominance.
2. Technology. The Internet and Big Brother seeks to connect the world in a common language. The internet is being taken over by the state. They are beginning to record our every move. It is indubitable that the Antichrist will enforce his mark of the beast technology by utilizing this technology on a grand global scale; but there will also be a demonic aspect to the mark: “And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.” (Rev 13:15). And it should go without saying that it is only a matter of years that we will be a cashless society, even right now we are de facto cashless.
3. Politics. A lot could be said about this. But I just want to note that there is a concerted effort for globalism among the world’s leaders and elite today. Sovereign nations will no longer be sovereign. We are becoming a global Babel—a collective god. Will you confess Caesar or Jesus as your Lord? The last generation of the church—as the first generation did—will make that choice.
God will smash this Babel-technology when Jesus returns. I believe the world will live in an agricultural society in the millennium with Yahweh-Jesus ruling the true united nations and the true religion.
