Where Do We Go from Here?

How Tomorrow's Prophecies Foreshadow Today's Problems

Dr. David Jeremiah

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780785224211
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

National Bestseller—New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal & Publisher's Weekly

Today's headlines shout of modern plagues, social tensions, economic crises, and rampant depression. Many are asking, what day is it on God's prophetic calendar? Trusted Bible teacher and Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah opens the Word of God to reveal what it has to say about the days we are living in.

Sharing how prophecies and wisdom from centuries ago still speak the truth today and point the way forward for tomorrow. Whether one is new to biblical prophecy or a longtime student of the Bible, this timely message will encourage and recalibrate us to the mission of God in our daily lives. Journey with Dr. Jeremiah back to the Bible to find out, Where Do We Go from Here?

• A Cultural Prophecy: Socialism
• A Biological Prophecy: Pandemic
• A Financial Prophecy: Economic Crisis
• A Political Prophecy: Cancel Culture
• A Geographical Prophecy: Jerusalem

And how these all lead to the Final Prophecy—the Triumph of the Gospel. The day of Christ's return is coming. We haven't long to wait. But until then, we need to understand what the age requires—and we need to do what the Lord commands.

Interested in learning more? Check out other books by Dr. David Jeremiah:

• The Great Disappearance 
• Where Do We Go from Here
• The World of the End
• Living with Confidence in a Chaotic World
• Is This The End?
• The Book of Signs
• After the Rapture

Chapter 1

A Cultural Prophecy—Socialism

“But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

MATTHEW 24:37

Under the cover of darkness, a middle-aged man inched out the window of his seventh-story apartment, then silently repelled seventy-five feet to the ground. A pair of bolt cutters snipped off his ankle monitor, and the man jumped into a waiting car. This was no movie. After fifteen years of imprisonment on bogus charges, Iván Simonovis was escaping Venezuela.

Simonovis had once been a Venezuelan hero. As a key member of an important SWAT team, he ended a seven-hour hostage situation, all of it captured on national television. That propelled him to celebrity status. After being appointed safety officer for Caracas, he dedicated himself to fighting crime and removing the corruption that had defined the capital’s police force for years.

Things changed when Simonovis ran afoul of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s Marxist president and emerging dictator. Chávez viewed thedecorated safety officer as a potential rival and accused him of crimes against humanity. The charges were false, and the trial was a sham. In the blink of an eye, Iván was behind bars with no hope for reprieve. For stretches of time, he was allowed to see sunlight for only ten minutes a day.

In 2014, Iván was moved to house arrest to seek treatment for nineteen chronic health conditions, many of them caused by his imprisonment. Knowing this was his only chance, he arranged his daring escape. After speeding off in a car, he spent three weeks evading security in a cat-and-mouse pursuit. A fourteen-hour ride in a small fishing boat got him to a Caribbean island, from which he flew to the United States.¹

Iván could recall when Venezuela was the wealthiest nation in South America. The per capita income of its citizens was greater than those of China and Japan, almost rivaling the income of US citizens. The people of Iván’s generation enjoyed religious liberty, political freedom, personal dignity, and economic opportunity.²

But when oil prices crashed in the 1980s, and then again in the 1990s, the Venezuelan economy experienced a dip. That dip became a dive in 1998 when the Venezuelan people elected Chávez as their president. Once in power Chávez relentlessly implemented the socialist playbook formulated by the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, and other nations. His first task was to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution, guaranteeing citizens the so-called free rights of government-provided health care, college education, and social justice. When the Supreme Court ruled against Chávez on several important issues, he responded by stacking the court with twelve new justices, all loyal to him.

Socialism totally engulfed the country when Chávez was reelected in 2006. Fully in control of the courts and the legislature, he moved quickly to nationalize the media, removing voices of dissent. Then he authorized government agencies to seize privately owned wealth and property from Venezuela’s citizens—all in the name of “fairness” and “equality.” Chávez took control of the nation’s oil industry, expelling foreign investors and influence. He nationalized power companies, farms, mines, banks, and grocery stores. His final step was to eliminate term limits for elected officials, setting himself up to rule for the rest of his life in the style of Russia’s Stalin and Cuba’s Castro.³

Not even Chávez could evade the last enemy. He died from cancer in 2013. But his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued to implement Chávez’s agenda—even going further in some areas to force a Marxist agenda on the Venezuelan people. Today Venezuela is descending into anarchy, and record numbers of Venezuelan migrants are fleeing northward, trying to reach the border into the United States.

Socialism, Prophecy, and You

Right now, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with you. If Venezuela has proven that socialism is a bad idea, why should anyone care?

You should care because socialist visions and policies are invading the United States. You’ll hear them discussed under four different names: socialism, communism, Marxism, and cultural Marxism. From my studies, it seems many people consider these terms nearly synonymous. As you read the rest of this chapter, these four titles will show up, but they all refer to the same invasive ideology, one that seems to deceive people with unusual ease.

Consider this: Hugo Chávez had plenty of cheerleaders in the United States during his rise, including Hollywood stars like Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Danny Glover. Socialism seems to hold an almost hypnotic power over many thinkers, and it’s spilling into the common culture. A 2020 poll showed that 40 percent of Americans had a favorable view of socialism. That was up from 36 percent in 2019. Even more frightening, 47 percent of Millennials and 49 percent of Generation Z viewed socialism favorably.⁴ Indeed, one 2019 poll in AXIOS found that 61 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 have a positive reaction to socialism.⁵

And then there is this: In 2020, Bernie Sanders nearly won the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. This is the same senator from Vermont who declared, “I am a socialist and everyone knows it.”⁶

In addition to Sanders, recent elections have seen record numbers of socialist candidates win roles as representatives both in state legislatures and in Congress. Notable among them is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2018, she became the youngest congresswoman in history.

Ocasio-Cortez is an avowed member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States. Given her young age and massive following, many believe she’ll run for president of the United States one day. That’s a sobering thought given her stated goals of ending capitalism and implementing the same socialist agenda that failed so spectacularly in Venezuela.

I’ve come to the conviction that this ideology represents a real and present danger to the freedom and prosperity that has defined America and other Western nations for centuries. As I’ve researched this book, one verse keeps coming to mind: 2 Timothy 3:1. Here it is in the Amplified Bible: “But understand this, that in the last days dangerous times [of great stress and trouble] will come [difficult days that will be hard to bear].”

Jesus said it like this, “But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matt. 24:37–39).

What were those “days of Noah” like? Genesis 6:5 describes them this way: “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

The people of Noah’s day ignored and ridiculed his warnings. Noah built and preached for 120 years, and not one single individual outside his immediate family believed him. The people were so indifferent that they didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late.

The heedlessness of the people in Noah’s day will be duplicated in the last days of our world’s history. It will be a day much like ours, a day when ideologies like socialism can sneak in without much attention.

Ask anyone under communism and they’ll probably agree: socialism is an invasive weed planted by Karl Marx. Despite its catastrophic failures, it keeps spreading over the earth like kudzu. Will this be the dominant political philosophy on earth when the tribulation begins? Yes, that seems likely. Socialism is tailor-made for the Antichrist’s appearance. It creates global conditions that bring great stress and trouble, difficult days that will be hard to bear. And it demands a one-world system of government, which Scripture says will be established before the end of history.

Revelation 13 describes the Antichrist as a beast having vast power and authority. “The whole world marveled . . . and gave allegiance to the beast . . . And he was given authority to rule over every tribe and people and language and nation. And all the people who belong to this world worshiped the beast” (Rev. 13:3, 7–8 NLT).

This beast, or Antichrist, will be empowered by Satan, “who deceives the whole world” (12:9), and aided by the false prophet, who “deceives those who dwell on the earth” (13:14). The Lord warned us against this kind of deception: “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8).

What Is Socialism?

How, then, should we view socialism today? How should we define it? Listen to the definition offered by the World Socialist Party of the United States: “The establishment of a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole. . . . We call this common ownership, but other terms we regard as synonymous are communism and socialism.”⁷

Socialists believe the world’s means of production—including infrastructure, farms, factories, energy, natural resources, medicines, and more—should be under the control of “the people.” In other words, society as a whole should own the raw materials and the systems that produce wealth. In a free market system, these materials are usually controlled by companies or individuals, but in socialist countries they are owned by “the people.”

Of course, there’s no way to make decisions based on such a loose concept as “the people.” So under socialism, the government becomes the sole authority and controller of the means of production. Unfortunately, governments are controlled by specific people—often the kinds of people who seek out power. And those people are entirely corruptible by greed, selfishness, lust, vindictiveness, violence, and the overwhelming desire for authority. As more power flows to the government, the handful at the top become dictatorial.

While I was writing this chapter, a news network ran a story about a Chinese woman named Xi Van Fleet. She had survived the brutal communist regime of dictator Mao Zedong. In an impassioned speech to a Virginia school board, she elaborated on the similarities between what happened in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and what is happening in the United States right now. She said, “They use the same ideology, and same methodology, even the same vocabulary. And with the same goal. The ideology is cultural Marxism. And we were divided into groups as the oppressor and oppressed. . . . And the take out methodology is also very similar. It’s cancel culture. We basically canceled the whole Chinese civilization pre-communism.”⁸

In his book We Will Not Be Silenced, Erwin Lutzer helped us understand the kind of Marxism we’re seeing.

Today we face what is known as cultural Marxism. It is not being imposed on people on the war battlefields; instead, it’s a form of Marxism that wins the hearts and minds of people incrementally by the gradual transformation of the culture. Bombarded with exaggerated and illusionary promises, people accept it because t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Cultural Prophecy—Socialism
• Chapter 2: An International Prophecy—Globalism
• Chapter 3: A Biological Prophecy—Pandemic
• Chapter 4: A Financial Prophecy—Economic Chaos
• Chapter 5: A Theological Prophecy—The Falling Away
• Chapter 6: A Biographical Prophecy—End Times People
• Chapter 7: A Political Prophecy—Cancel Culture
• Chapter 8: A Spiritual Prophecy—Spiritual Famine
• Chapter 9: A Geographical Prophecy—Jerusalem
• Chapter 10: The Final Prophecy—The Triumph of the Gospel
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author