Lesson 1: Introduction

Most of us want to know what lies ahead of us, what the future will hold, and how we can truly prepare for it. God designed us to want this – the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 3:11 – “…He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

He wants us to yearn for and seek these things through Himself rather than trying to find them through other ways – and the numbers of people who seek such information from fortune-tellers or other ways are pursuing this information from sources which cannot know God’s Truth but are eager to do evil toward the seeker. God warns us, in such places as Deuteronomy 18:9-14, against seeking information from such people. There is judgment coming to those who practice these things as well as to those who hire such people to advise them.

Then why would God place this desire in our hearts? He did so to make us turn to Him for the answers. And yet, He will not tell us everything because He has a purpose for this time of our lives here on earth – to teach us to walk by faith in Him (Hebrews 11:6). If we could know all that the future holds for us, we would never need to learn to walk by faith.


From the very beginning of creation, people have wanted to be independent. God created us to have some choices, so we could choose to love Him. He did not create us to be pets or robots. Remember, the very first temptation for the first people God created, Adam and Eve, was that of “being like gods, knowing good and evil.” This desire, being like God, was the very first sin, the sin of Lucifer. But it was not the “being like God” which was the sin; it was the fact that we would attempt to do so on our own which made it sin. In 1 John 3:2 we read “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.”

What an amazing promise! God wants us to be like Him! But this cannot happen by our own efforts; we must allow Him to make us like Himself. This is where trust comes in; we must learn to trust Him to do something in us that we cannot completely understand.

Therefore, in this study of End Times Prophecy, we will learn how to understand the things God has already revealed to us who trust Him. He will not reveal this to anyone who is not His child, nor will He give understanding to us if we simply want to use the information for our own purposes. He wants us to learn to see His way rather than our own way.

Prayer: Father, teach us to know Your way, give us a spirit of trust in You as we have never before trusted.