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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Predictions You Can Trust

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

There have been some less than stellar predictions made over the years.

In 1878, Sir William Preece, the chief engineer of the British Post Office, said, "'The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not.

Albert Einstein said there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.

It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

We don't like their sound and guitar groups are on the way out.

The Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles in 1962.

The world is going to end on December the 21st, 2012.

December 21, 2012 was when the 5, 125-year Mesoamerican Long Count calendar—the Maya calendar—was set to expire.

Many said, with the expiration of this calendar would come the end of the world.

Interest in the whole affair was fueled largely by 2 groups.

1 the media and 2 conspiracy theorists and others like them who never did meet a good theory they didn't just fall in love with.

When Hollywood comes to the party and produces a movie dealing loosely with the subject, you've got a runaway train.

Add internet rumors, speculation, and just enough information about the ancient Maya to tantalize the curiosity, and something like this takes on a life of its own.

I'm in Belize in Central America, in the heart of what was once Maya country.

The Maya really were a remarkable people.

In a country the size of New Jersey and with the population of Wichita, Kansas, little less than 400, 000, there are still a lot of remnants of the Maya past.

The Maya flourished from about 250 AD to around 1200 AD or so, building incredible cities made entirely from stone and made without the use of steel tools.

So did the Maya calendar really portend the end of the world?

You know, it's interesting that there are some people who just love speculation.

That is, there's a lot of mystery about life.

We weren't there in the past, and we haven't yet been to the future.

So, some people just can't help but speculate.

And there are some who love speculation and prediction.

Recent history is littered with claims about the end of the world.

1 man forecast it would occur in 1994, which evidently it did not.

So he reconsidered and concluded the correct year would be 2011, which didn't work out well either.

Did people really believe that, that the world would end in 2011?

The yes was a very small group of people who were committed to the idea, largely out of respect for their teacher.

Did the public at large buy that the world was coming to an end in May of 2011?

But the Maya calendar, now that got people excited.

The predictions were made, the predictions were heard, the predictions were widely publicized, but the predictions, predictably enough, came to nothing.

Now thinking people aren't going to get carried away by this sort of thing, are they?

No facts, no science, no evidence at all to suggest these things are true?

Surely thinking people aren't going to buy into this kind of stuff.

But seers, astrologers, psychics, Big business.

Recent reports state that more and more people, especially millennials, are embracing witchcraft and astrology, Eastern meditation, yoga, which is Hinduism, tarot card reading.

People are grabbing onto this, even though there's absolutely no evidence that it's valid, and they're rejecting the Bible, for which there's a ton of evidence.

Now, of course, Christianity is ultimately a faith venture.

You don't meet God on the street, shaken by the hand.

We believe in the existence of God by faith.

But what do you do with the mountain of evidence that suggests strongly that the Bible is everything it claims to be?

There's a bit of history in the United States as far as religious predictions go.

In the 1830s, a Baptist named William Miller had a conversion experience that led him to study the Bible.

He was determined that he would work out or work through any contradictions or inconsistencies he found in the Bible.

He found a prophecy that he was convinced dealt with the end of the world and with the return of Jesus.

And he became certain that Jesus was going to come back to the earth in the year 1843.

Some of Miller's followers, Millerites they were referred to, discovered that this kind Baptist preacher was wrong in his calculations by a year.

Now William Miller wasn't a fanatic and he wasn't a crackpot.

He was simply an honest Baptist Christian man who was honestly wrong.

There were thousands of people in America's Northeast that hoped along with William Miller, but their hopes were dashed.

So religious predictions aren't anything new.

In fact, go back to the New Testament and you find the followers of Jesus expecting Jesus to expel the Romans from Israel and set up His kingdom on earth.

And then there's the Maya calendar, which some people, many people took to mean that the end of the world was gonna take place in December of 2012.

Now the Maya were remarkable builders, they were brilliant mathematicians and they were skilled astrologers, but they did not predict the end of the world.

And even if they had, they would have been wrong.

So where can we find predictions that we can trust?

I'll share them with you in just a moment.

The signs of Jesus' return are all around us, but what does the Bible say we should look for?

Find out by getting today's free offer, Seeing the Signs.

To receive this free DVD, Call 800-253-3000 or visit us online at iiwooffer.com.

Find out for yourself what the Bible says about the signs of Jesus' soon return.

Call 800-253-3000 or visit iiwooffer.com.

Thursday, August the 5th, 2010 was not a happy day for 33 men when a collapse in a mine in Chile buried them 2, 300 feet below ground.

No matter how much they tried to escape, there was no way out.

On the outskirts of the San Jose mine, over 2 and a half thousand people gathered.

And with each failed rescue attempt, despair increased.

Families gathered together to pray for a miracle.

From the Atacama Desert comes a story of tragedy, a story of uncertainty, yet a story of courage, hope, and ultimately a story of salvation.

Wait on the Lord and the miracle will come.

In December of 2012, a hundred members of a Christian church in China were arrested.

They had been warning people about what they believed would be the trouble coming to planet Earth On December 21 of that year, when the 5, 125 year Maya calendar expired, the time that some people were teaching would bring about the end of the world.

The Maya were advanced enough to be considered the Greeks of the New World.

They had figured out that the year contained 365 days.

They had 18 20-day months and 5 additional days, although they didn't seem to recognize the extra quarter of a day in each year.

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