All that really matters is endurance ...
No one escapes the first three and a half years of the Tribulation. Not the Church. Not you. Not me. We will either live by faith, trusting implicitly in the Father to protect us, or we will give up, hide in holes in the ground, and wish we were dead. There isn't another option. There isn't a diplomatic option, or a military option, or a humanitarian option, or an Islamic option. We will either be marked by God because we sigh and cry about the abominations committed here on Earth, or we will curse God, while still worshiping demons and idols. Enslaved spiritual Israelites and Egyptians didn't suddenly start worshiping demons and idols; they have been all along. So regardless of whether a person is a newly liberated spiritual Israelite, now really hated by the world, or whether the person remains a part of the world, the person can have a part in the first resurrection if he or she endures to the end. All that really matters is endurance; for to endure, the person will develop the faith necessary to be in the resurrection of firstfruits.
After spiritual Israel is liberated at the Second Passover, and after conditions here on Earth become so bad that if these days were not shortened no flesh would be saved alive, the archangel Michael in heaven and Christ here on Earth fight as on a day of battle. On day 1260--halfway through seven years of turmoil, the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of the Most High and of His Messiah (Rev 11:15). Satan is cast from heaven (Rev 12:9). A great earthquake occurs (Rev 11:13 & Zech 14:3–4). The armies of the king of the North that are surrounding Jerusalem pursue escaping saints into the valley formed by the split Mount of Olives, and are swallowed by the mountain (Rev 12:16 & Exod 15:12 & Dan 9:26). The man of perdition is destroyed (Dan 7:11–12). And Satan shall declare himself the returned messiah. Humanity has been liberated from bondage to him, but the world's economy remains under the fallen king of fallen Babylon. As such, he [Satan as the true antiChrist] demands that everyone who participates in commerce accepts his slave mark, thereby causing the newly liberated person to either return to slavery, or to live by faith. This antiChrist's slave mark is the mark of the beast, Chi xi stigma [Χξς], or the tattoo of Xx — the tattoo of the Cross of Calvary.
The endtime gospel of Christ, in addition to being a message of hope, is a warning against accepting the mark of the beast, is a warning about the high price that will be paid for not being covered by the Passover blood of Christ. Those who are in covenant with Christ can, by living entirely by faith, escape the third woe, the horrors of the wrath of the Father. But those who will escape by being supernaturally protected in place represent only a tithe of spiritual Israel (that tithe is the great multitude of Revelation 7:9); they escape by being within the theological walls of spiritual Jerusalem, living as a spiritual Judean--walking as Jesus walked. The 144,000 represent the number of physical Israelites who escape to a physical place of safety, that place Mt. Zion. They now follow the Lamb of God wherever the Lamb goes.
There is a goodly amount of work that remains to be done, for this endtime gospel of Christ that must be preached to all the world is only, at this Passover of 2003, beginning to be proclaimed. But this is the gospel for which Christ opens the door that no one is able to shut (Rev 3:8).
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"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."
--Fortitudine Vincimus—by endurance we conquer, Sir Ernest Shackleton's family motto--