Hey, a testable prediction! Can you give us an estimate of when exactly you think Moloch's self-destruction will close in on him? I'd like to check it for accuracy.
Questions such as this one sometimes require observation over a few generations to decisively answer.
I'm happy for BADecker to claim a confidence interval for his claim. Otherwise it's just so much hot air.
Consider Revelation 9:6:
Quote
During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.
Revelation is a little bit difficult to understand. Some of it is literal, and some figurative. Some of it talks about the future, some about the past, some about all times.
Some scholars consider that the above passage refers to the next age... the New Heavens and the New earth "time," which is also the Lake of Fire "time," which is the time of the eternal hereafter.
Personally, while I am not entirely decided, I think the above passage talks about a present universe time that is coming up shortly. I think that God will allow modern research to discover a method whereby people can medicate themselves in some marvelous way, so that they live indefinitely.
What might this indefinite life include? It might include the ability to grow new limbs where old ones are lost. It might include the capability to increase the abilities of certain organs to do their job and function, such as night-sight in those who opt for it. It might include something as complex as short-distance telepathy.
Modern science and medical research is already a ways into developing some of these things. Consider, for example, the M1 and M2 "genes." Deactivate the M1, and you automatically live 50% longer, provided you can deactivate it simultaneously throughout your whole system. Control the switching on and off of the M2 gene, and your cells will continue to divide indefinitely in a good way.
The M1 and M2 gene controls are coming. They need to be absolute controls, or there will be side effects. But the knowledge of these genes and some of their operations have been around for more than two decades. And the controls are coming. These genes are only two little research areas that might free people from death when they are finally controlled.
The point is, Moloch would be one of those who would opt for this kind of life-without-end. It might be available to him within his lifetime. This means that nobody would be able to tell for sure when Moloch's self-destruction would actually finalize. Of course, it would be set in place - and maybe is already - because he might have already locked himself irreversibly into his resistance against God.
Moloch's actual destruction would, then, come at the Judgment Day. Jesus tells us that nobody knows exactly when that time will be... the time of His return.
A thought regarding the Revelation passage above: Will there ever come a time that people will want to die, but won't be able to? Almost nobody really wants to die. But a few people have been in such great pain or trauma that they have thought that they wanted to die, and have wished for it.
Imagine that you are medicated to live indefinitely, and that you actually cannot die because of it. Imagine that you remain alive through the pain and trauma of a Mexican drug cartel, or an ISIS dismembering. Imagine that you are burned in a literal fire, and wherever your molecules go, you remain alive with them, feeling the pain of complete "dissolution" without any way to stop it. Imagine riding yourself out like that, within a nuclear blast.
As things stand right now, nobody comes back from true death, even though doctors may seem to bring people back from death now and again. Now, think about the pain that you have when you get a cut on your finger. Or, remember the pain of a broken bone that you had in the past. We don't know for a scientific fact that dead people are not experiencing total-body pain through all time to come after they die. What would it be like if the doctor could fix you to live forever, bodily, even if you were totally obliterated?
