HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 27, 2024 – God is good at drawing lines. He does it all the time. He drew a line between the children of Abraham and everyone else, and then between the children of Israel and everyone else. Prior to that, he drew a line between what was acceptable in the Garden of Eden and what wasn’t, and what wasn’t acceptable in the Garden was unceremoniously expelled. A similar line was drawn between the pre-Flood and post-Flood eras, and between pre-Sodom and post-Sodom (that is, Sodom and no Sodom, respectively).

Then there’s the biggest line God’s drawn thus far, which is the line between everything before Jesus and everything since Jesus, which we know as the Old Testament and New Testament times or the dividing of time into BC and AD. Shortly after that line was drawn, the second temple was destroyed and all of Judaism with it.

I mention lines because there’s a big one in the offing, again to be drawn by God. I’m talking about the line between the end of the pre-tribulation era (what Jesus called the “beginning of sorrows”) and the start of the Great Tribulation. It’s mentioned in the book of Daniel and in the book of Joel. Jesus also talked about it in the Gospels, as did John in his book of Revelation. That line, when it’s drawn, will be the penultimate line. The final line will herald God’s Judgement on the world and its complete annihilation.

But that line – the final one – may still be a long time coming. Only God knows when it will be drawn. The line I want to talk about now is the one that comes before that line, the one that divides the beginning of sorrows from the Great Tribulation, because when that line is drawn, there’ll be no more conversions.

As born-again believers, we need to be aware of when there’ll be no more conversions, as it will be a pivotal point in the evolution of our Church. It will change how we interface with the world and with each other. The Church proper began with the conversion of the disciples on the morning of Pentecost, ten days after Jesus’ ascension. That was the first time that God’s Holy Spirit was given to believers upon rebirth as a constant indwelling presence. And just as suddenly, unexpectedly, and definitively, God’s Holy Spirit will one day cease to be given, and only those who already have God’s Spirit will retain God’s Spirit. Everyone else will retain one or more of the various fallen spirits of the world.

I have not made a secret of my wanting to go home at God’s earliest possible convenience. In that, I’m like Jesus when he said to his disciples: “How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?”, only you’re not my disciples and I don’t mean you personally. I just mean I want to go home as badly as Jesus did. I want to go home not only because of what God’s shown me awaits me in Heaven, but because of the horrors that will be unleashed on Earth once God draws that penultimate line between the beginning of sorrows and the Great Tribulation, and there are no more conversions.

Jesus talks about that time as the worst that’s ever been or ever will be. John in Revelation provides a few more details, none of which would make me want to prolong my stay, if I were still here. After each of the horrors is unleashed, the unbelieving survivors, instead of repenting and turning back to God, curse him instead, as if Job’s wife were hissing in their ears, egging them on. But the few believers who do remain will have to be like Job, ever faithful in their suffering and not giving into the temptation to just “curse God, and die”.

There’s a false teaching that’s gained steady traction over the years regarding conversions that will be made throughout the Great Tribulation period, right up until the time that Jesus comes back for his Church. These conversions will not happen because there will be no more conversions after the start of the Great Tribulation. There will be believers, but no new believers, and the Church will continue to dwindle in size, likely all the way down to or below the original number that it was on the day of Pentecost, which was somewhere in the vicinity of 3,000 souls. When Jesus asked: “When the son of man returns, will he find faith on earth?”, he meant for us to seriously consider the implications of that question.

Nowhere in the book of Revelation does it say that anyone repents after the seventh seal is opened and the first trumpet is blown. Nowhere in Jesus’ narratives in any of the Gospels regarding the time of what Jesus calls “great tribulation” does he mention conversions. What he does talk about is the necessity for believers to patiently endure to the end. What he does mention is the proliferation of highly seductive false teachers and false messiahs, implying an accompanying proliferation of highly convincing false conversions and false proselytizing, all leading to an end-times globalized false church.

We’re already, as a Church, neck-deep in false teachers, false messiahs, and false converts. In fact, the entire worldly church, which sprang up like a weed around the True Branch probably the very next day after the Church was planted at Pentecost, is premised on false teachings and false conversions. These, 300 years later, were supercharged into overdrive by the pagan Constantine, when he founded what eventually grew into a pearl-clutching version of the Holy Roman Empire, renamed the Holy Roman Church and its protestant and orthodox offshoots.

We are safe inside the line God has drawn separating his True Church from the worldly church – the Kingdom from the world – but that doesn’t mean we aren’t exposed to the false church’s seducing lies. God permits us to be exposed even as he protects us behind his firmly drawn line because tests must be conducted and loyalties measured. How else are we to solidify and affirm our place and positions in Heaven? It is not and has never been enough simply to state: “I believe” and then to live our lives indistinguishable from the rest of the world, other than for some strategically placed Christian-themed bling. As the adage goes, “talk is cheap”, which is why tests of faith are necessary.

Jesus makes a very clear distinction between the time he calls the beginning of sorrows and the time he describes as the worst there ever was. These are two very distinct time periods, divided by a line drawn by God himself. In describing these two distinct periods, Jesus cautions us that many will try to convince us that the time of great tribulation has already arrived. He tells us to beware these people and not to follow them or be seduced by their rhetoric. In today’s terms, they’re the breathless “Jesus is coming back soon!” crowd or those who are constantly drawing parallels between world events and the mark of the beast or the rise of the anti-Christ. Not being born-again, they’re inhabited and informed by seducing spirits whose sole purpose is to lure believers away, to mislead and misguide us, and ultimately to humiliate and demoralize us into forsaking God.

When God draws that line between the beginning of sorrows and the Great Tribulation, there will be no more conversions, but there will still be a testing of the remnant Church and a falling away of some. Being sealed by God means you have God’s Spirit within you and are protected by God; it doesn’t mean you have an automatic ticket to Heaven. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. We are vulnerable to losing God’s grace right up until our final breath here, otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have advised us to “endure to the end”. He didn’t say “endure until you’re reborn” or “endure until the first trumpet is blown”, he said “endure to the end”. Our hardest tests will come at the end of our time here on Earth, as they did for Jesus. And then our own line will be drawn, the one that God will draw specially for each of us, his children – the line separating us from this life and the one to come.

But our work here is not yet done. We all need to be reminded of this every now and then, just as we need to be reminded to take a break from our labours every now and then. Jesus took breaks, and so should we. But we should never feel that we can retire from active duty and rest on our laurels. The time for rest is not yet, not for us. We don’t rest here. We’ll rest when we get Home.

I do not want to be here when the Great Tribulation begins. It’s bad enough living through the age of the beginning of sorrows, which the world has been in now for a while. The demons are growing ever bolder with the passage of years, and every passing of a believer is shrinking the size of our Church. We need to be very careful not to take God’s grace and protection for granted, but to assiduously, and with what Paul called “fear and trembling”, treat everyone – not just believers – as we would want to be treated, especially and particularly in our thoughts. This is true spiritual warfare. Jesus said that treating others as we would want to be treated is the summation of Holy scripture. In that, as in everything else, we need to take Jesus at his word.

When the line is drawn and the conversions stop, the hardest of all tests will begin for the remnant of God’s Church still on Earth. Pray, as Jesus urged us, not for a long and prosperous life in the here and now but to endure to the end and to be called Home before that horror show begins.