Still Here! Surviving the End Times: Still Here Series

By Braxton DeGarmo

Writing fiction is one thing. Studying the Bible and writing about its teachings is quite another. This project was over 5 years in the making. After all, I would never want to be guilty of adding to or subtracting from the Word of God. I hope and pray that I've lived up to that standard with this book.

 

The End Times. The Rapture. A world dictator called the Antichrist. The great tribulation. Christ's second coming.

What do you know about these topics? What you've heard in church? Maybe all you know is what you've read or seen in popular fiction. But do you know and understand where some of these ideas came from?

 

I know I didn't. I'd been taught about the End Times from the pulpit in several churches we had attended over the years. And yet, something gnawed at me about a few of the Scriptures used to support those teachings. And then, roughly six years ago, I began a Spirit-led journey through the Bible that I never imagined would result in a book. Now, here it is.

 

Open your mind to the possibility that most, if not all, of what you've been taught is wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christen Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781943509355

Braxton DeGarmo

Braxton DeGarmo spent over 30 years in Emergency and Family Medicine, both in and out of the military, before retiring to focus on writing in 2014. He writes from a Judeo-Christian worldview, but he writes his stories to reach and entertain people of all backgrounds. Many of the incidents in his books are based on real occurrences, people, and experiences in his own life, such as learning to escape a water crash in a helicopter. Human trafficking, medical kidnapping, government corruption, and other social injustices have become the premises used for his stories. And the technologies described in his books are all current . . . and possible.

Book preview

STILL HERE!

Surviving the End Times

by

Braxton DeGarmo, MD

COPYRIGHT

Still Here!: Surviving the End Times – Copyright © 2019 by Braxton DeGarmo. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Braxton DeGarmo.

Paperback and eBook Edition Publication Date: September 2019

ISBN-Kindle (mobi) edition: 978-1-943509-34-8

ISBN-ePub edition: 978-1-943509-35-5

ISBN-Paperback edition: 978-1-943509-36-2

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scriptures marked KJV are taken from the KING JAMES VERSION (KJV): KING JAMES

VERSION, public domain.

Scriptures marked AMP are taken from the AMPLIFIED BIBLE (AMP): Scripture taken from the AMPLIFIED® BIBLE, Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by Permission. (www.Lockman.org)

For more information, go to:

www.braxtondegarmo.com

FOREWORD

For as long as I've known my friend Braxton, he's always been the guy who's looking at things from an angle that you didn't see, but then after he unpacks what he's observing I always think to myself: Why didn't I see that? It was sitting right in front of me! Braxton's new book Still Here! read exactly this way when I picked it up, a theological adventure of looking at Eschatology, Jesus, and our need for a bold faith.

For those who have never considered these things before, there is a good portion of the book dedicated to the reviewing and contrasting of different theological views. This is very helpful for all of us because these views have evolved and changed over the generations as understanding and maturity forms in the Body of Christ.

In an era where there are no shortages of voices that emphasize how things are going to get better and better, this book becomes a little bit of an antagonist because its primary focus is not onward and upward. And to add to the irony, Braxton doesn't fill in all the blanks for the reader, but encourages the pursuit of God, the pursuit of the Bible, and our need to think and ponder what is true and what is false during these years. Be prepared to be challenged, stretched, and stirred as Still Here! brings God's kingdom comes to light in a fresh way!

Jim Stern

Lead Pastor, Destiny Church of St. Louis

INTRODUCTION

Why read this?

So, why should I read this book? asked a friend who had expressed interest in what I was writing, when I offered him a first draft copy to read. As we ate lunch and talked, his question kept swimming through my head. Yeah, why should anyone want to read this?

As you look around the world at events that are changing our society—sometimes in small increments, sometimes in major upheavals—have you ever wondered what might be in store for you, your family, your friends? Perhaps you were raised in a church that taught that we believers would be whisked away before any really nasty stuff hits the fan. Maybe your church doesn't talk at all about the End Times, the period before Christ's return. What if everything you've been taught is only part of the answer, or maybe none of the answer to that question?

This book is intended to make you think, to open your eyes to possible scenarios you'll never hear from most pulpits, if at all. We humans tend to be creatures of habit and lots of times those 'habits' are based on traditions set up long before us, by people who, while having good intentions, couldn't see in the mirror any more clearly than we can. Some of those traditions may even have been devised at first with nefarious, self-serving intentions. My hope is that by the time you've finished this book, you'll have a better idea about where much of the thinking about the End Times came from and how those ideas fit with Scripture.

Why is that important for you? We're admonished by the Lord to stay alert and be prepared for His return. What if you're prepared for the wrong thing and don't see the clear signs around you that signal His imminent coming? The Jewish people at Christ's first advent were like this. Based upon the traditions of the Pharisees and Scribes, they expected a warrior king to free them from Roman rule and set up His eternal kingdom. Instead, Christ came as the 'suffering servant' and most missed Him. Will you stand strong in your faith, or will you join the millions who already have fallen or who will fall away from the church in disbelief? If what I present to you in the coming pages helps you to stand strong, then I've succeeded in reaching the goal I believe the Lord set before me in writing this book.

This book's beginnings

To get started, I'd like you to know a bit more about me and my walk with the Lord. While I was raised in a mainline denominational church, my family left that church when I was a teenager. That church, in a Biblical sense, was dead. Our well-educated, and much respected Reverend taught homilies, not the Bible. In hindsight, the power of the Holy Spirit was not behind his sermons. I became agnostic. I went to a fairly liberal (at the time, really liberal now) university, majored in sciences and engineering, took the obligatory class in evolution, and more.

But then, in medical school, something stirred inside me as I studied embryology and physiology. The odds of life and the intricacies of the human body being created by happenstance and evolving over eons of time no longer made sense to me. The mathematical odds of such were astronomical, well beyond what mathematicians consider impossible. The gaps in the theory of evolution made me realize it was still just that, a theory, not fact, as many teach it today.

From that seed, God opened my eyes in a personal way. Several years later, my wife developed a malignant muscle cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, and the extensive surgeries had restricted the use of her right arm . . . to the point that she couldn't lift her arm. She could hold things in her right hand, but then had to move it with her left. I helped her with her physical therapy. I knew what she could and could not do with that arm. Our doctors told us she wouldn't live to see our young children go to school.

At the urging of a friend, she went to a small, charismatic church near the Army post where I was stationed at the time for a Wednesday night service, while I stayed home and watched our young children. The next morning, she related to me that the pastor had called her forward, had told her things that he couldn't have known, and prayed for her arm. She told me something had happened to her there, and then lifted her arm above her head . . . by herself.

Nothing like a miracle to get your attention.

Oh, and as I write this, she's helping our daughter with her first child, our fourth grandchild. Our oldest grandchild will graduate high school next year. God is Good! All the time!

I bring this up because, at that point in 1985, I was a complete novice when it came to the Bible. Sure, I remembered the Bible stories that every child in every church was taught. But the real substance of God's Word had been missing in my life. I soaked it in like a dry sponge taking up spilled wine. And wine was never intended to be spilled.

And over the course of time I learned about the word eschatology—the study of the End Times. That church where God healed my wife was a 'pre-trib' church, and I took that teaching as, well, gospel. Over the next 20 years every church we attended taught a pre-tribulation, pre-millennial eschatology—which I'll discuss shortly for those unfamiliar with the term. I took it as a given that God would airlift His church away from this planet before all those nasty things prophesied in Daniel and Revelation occurred. It would likely be His angel, Scottiel, who would beam us up.

Yet, over those first 20-plus years I also matured as a believer and took seriously the study of the Word for myself, not just what I heard from the pulpit and guest speakers. Unlike so many theology and seminary students who are taught the teachings of past 'men of God' and who repeat and build upon those teachings, rather than investigate the Bible for themselves, I had only enough time outside my medical practice to read the Bible, not read book after book on theology. And over time, a few Scriptures stood out that didn't harmonize with the pre-trib concept. I always came back to one set of verses in particular, in which Jesus Himself told His disciples that:

38 For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of God. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark 39 and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:38-39)

Jesus used Noah as His example, but Noah wasn't taken away from the world to sit out the flood and then brought back when the land was dry. He was protected through the flood. Now, some pre-trib scribes say that Noah was a type for the Jews who would go through the tribulation period, the time of Jacob's Troubles, and that Enoch was a type for the church which they say will be raptured ahead of the trouble. But Enoch was taken up by God 895 years before the flood, not just before it occurred. And Noah? He was a righteous man, a man favored by God and, by some teachings the ninth priest of the Melchizedek Order. How does he fit as a type for nonbelieving Jews?

The story of Lot gave me similar reservations about a pre-trib rapture. Lot was led out of the city by angelic beings before destruction hit Sodom and Gomorrah. He and his daughters were protected, not removed from the planet to sit out the fireworks. [Now, many might argue that Noah was 'lifted' out of the flood and Lot was taken out of the city, but those are weak arguments, in my opinion. Would God leave Noah and his family in the water to protect them? What incredible endurance swimmers they would have been. And what about all the animals? And Lot would have required an 'atomic bomb shelter' to have stayed in Sodom. Again, I see these two examples as poor types for a rapture.]

I struggled with the idea that believers might have to go through the tribulation. Had I missed something about the pre-trib concept? Was there an explanation that I hadn't heard or read that would let me harmonize the above verses with a pre-trib rapture? I couldn't find one, so I started to look at post-tribulation teachings—that we would be caught up in the air with Christ upon His physical return to the earth. And yet, that, too, didn't fit many of the Scriptures I'd read. Plus, would He really take us off the planet only to turn around and follow Him back? Didn't make sense to me.

In reality, as I read more, I came to see that both the pre-trib and post-trib teachings had some concepts that seemed to be Biblically supported, and yet, also concepts that could not be supported. Somehow, I simply couldn't see God doing that, telling us to expect something His Word only half supported, or maybe didn't support at all. There had to be something else with better scriptural support.

That's when I discovered the pre-wrath rapture concept. To some, this is a recent teaching, and yet, when you begin to understand it, you start to see as you read the Bible that it might have been how the early church understood it. The early church was under persecution by the Jews as well