Nothing in Scripture locates the Rapture in time. There is no prerequisite other than the fact that it hasn't happened yet. However, we can apply reason and predict that it will occur not long before the tribulation period Jesus spoke of, because tribulation will surely result from it. So if you are looking for a sign, you might use increasing evil as a barometer to forecast a day when the church will be silenced. The Rapture, it seems, should come no later than that.

But there is no way to calibrate the barometer because the world has never been what it is today. To put it simply, we don't know how bad things can get. There have always been pockets and periods of extreme evil, but the world has never been as interrelated as it is now, and the ultimate strength or weakness of that is unknown.

Scripture has a way of transcending human progress. It tells us that Babylon will be destroyed in the last days. The destruction detailed by Isaiah and Jeremiah did not happen when the Persians supplanted the Babylonian empire. Nor was Babylon destroyed when the Greeks overcame the Persians. Alexander the Great wanted Babylon to be the capital of his empire. Though it gradually lost commercial significance, many Jews continued to live in Babylonia, and it never became the permanent ruin seen by Scripture's prophets.

On the ancient Euphrates River site in Iraq there stands a reproduction of Nebuchadnezzar's palace built by Saddam Hussein using some of the original bricks. It has become an archaeological site protected by the United Nations. New York, for various reasons, is an increasingly unsuitable host for the UN headquarters. But what city would be more suitable?

At the end of Sunday there was an imaginative preview of the center of world commerce, government, and religion that Babylon will become. In the midst of it the Rapture announcement it strikes like a thief in the night, stealing the spotlight from the "Great City."

Until relatively recently the literal revival of Israel was considered impossible. Now that Israel is the focus of world events and Jerusalem is an international city, must it continue to seem unlikely that Babylon on the Euphrates will become important again?

Next to Jerusalem, Babylon in mentioned in the Bible more than any city. Babylon was the fountainhead of Satanic religion. Jerusalem was "the city of God" and will be so in the future. Is it unreasonable to expect that Babylon will rise again only to be permanently destroyed as detailed in Revelation chapter 18 while Jerusalem lives on as in Revelation 21?

Chapter 13 in The Day and the Hour: Tuesday offers solutions to the economic, political, and physical problems that seem to stand in the way of a city on the Euphrates in Iraq becoming that "Great City" and an important seaport. It surely makes a good story.