God’s judgment continues, judging the beast & his followers, while offering hope to those who have & will accept Him, and hope to those who are martyred during this time.

Predicting what events will occur in the year 2016 is dangerous and rarely helpful. However, one thing seems certain about 2016: The Middle East will be on center stage. No matter what occurs in Asia or Europe, the world continues to be drawn to the Middle Eastern cauldron. It seems reasonable to conclude that this region will remain unstable, volatile and terribly dangerous. Events of the last few days validate this assumption. Consider these developments:

On 1 December 2015, at the opening of a three-day meeting in Washington to discuss the ethics and use of gene editing, David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology perceptively declared, ?Over the years the unthinkable has become conceivable and today we are close to being able to alter human heredity.? This meeting, called the International Summit on Human Gene Editing, was convened by the national academies of three nations?the United States, Great Britain and China. The primary focus of this meeting was to discuss whether gene editing should be used to make heritable changes to the human gene line.

Chapter 13 reveals more details of The Anti-Christ & his False Prophet, and their deception & control over mankind.

The year 2016 is a presidential election year and, although it seems as if the campaign began in early 2015, as we move into the New Year, voters will begin to get serious about a candidate. I am not interested in speculating on who will or who should win the election in November. I want to devote this edition of Issues to some thoughts for the future president and, by extension, for the voters who will elect that president.

Much of American culture still accepts the manger at Christmas. We still see manger scenes in church, on front lawns and on Christmas cards. But in our increasingly secular, commercial, and sexually liberated society, we keep the horizontal message of the manger but often eliminate the vertical message entirely. We like the shepherds and their lambs, but are uncomfortable with God, miracles and the incarnation. In short, the biblical worldview about Christmas is rapidly losing market share to a more secular, materialistic one that is horizontally comfortable but vertically challenged.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16th-century changed humanity?s perspective and understanding of the physical universe. At the end of the Scientific Revolution (the 17th century), Sir Isaac Newton synthesized the work of others (e.g., Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, etc.) with his own original thinking, and produced a compressive understanding of the laws of the physical world (e.g., inertia, gravity, etc.). . . But on 25 November 1915, Albert Einstein published a theory that challenged this understanding of the physical world.

Dr. Eckman discusses the details of the Sounding of the 7th Trumpet, and we are introduced to 7 figures who are dominant during the last half of the Great Tribulation.

In the United States, capital punishment remains legal in 31 states and in the federal civilian and military legal systems (for specific crimes). The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution has been understood as the key section of the Constitution governing capital punishment, and it has been interpreted to apply to murders committed by mentally competent adults.

Chapter 11 of the Book of Revelation introduces us to two key players in the Day of the Lord: the Two Witnesses, and to the Anti-Christ.