Okay, I can see you looking at the tagline for our blog, “harbinger of doom and bliss.” You’re saying—aren’t you?—“I get the harbinger of doom bit. Hard times are coming on this rotten old world.” “But,” you continue, “BUT … how do you also get to be a harbinger of bliss? If language means anything, then doom and bliss are antonyms. They’re polar opposites.”

My thought on this is yes, doom and bliss are opposites. Yet both destinies are approaching the human race, and at the same speed.

Doom is coming. Bliss is coming. Exactly how soon, no one knows as of this writing. Within the next decade or two, many students of holy writ suspect. Certainly within the lifetime of those who are young adults today, most conservative teachers of prophecy would opine. But the fact is that no one knows. Whether they are near or far away, they are coming. Both doom and also bliss are coming upon the human race.

It will appear at first that doom has fallen upon God’s people. Yet in the end, after the Antichrist has been defeated and dethroned, after Satan has been bound, then those who cling to God will come out ahead. Way ahead. So superabundantly blessed are they that the word “bliss” becomes quite appropriate as a description of their state—their ongoing state that will never be taken away from them.

Mirroring this experience, the earth dwellers and others who follow the Antichrist will do well for a while, materially. They will receive property. They will be cared for in times of scarcity. Yet they will suffer much more for much longer than the redeemed do. They have nothing permanent but loss, regret, and misery. There will be no “second chance” for them. Those who take the Mark of the Beast, which identifies them as belonging to the Antichrist, have only agony ahead of them as the centuries roll on. The term “doom” never fitted the fate of a group more than it fits the fate of this group. They will have forfeited all joy. Their existence will be nothing but prolonged agony. They are the damned, who are also the doomed.

While we stand and proclaim the truth found in God’s holy Word, there are two destinies I see for mankind, for mankind is divided into two factions. Those for God, who have humbled themselves and received His offer of new life, can—and should!—look forward to eternal bliss. Those opposed to His righteous rule over their lives can look forward only to short-term enjoyments followed by lifetime after lifetime of doom, a doom that just keeps rolling, a regret that never leaves, a pain that never stops. We must warn them before it’s too late, before the “night … when no man can work” (Luke 9:4b).

So we are harbingers, you see, of both doom and bliss.