Are You Ready for the End of Time?: Understanding Future Events from Prophetic Passages of the Bible

It is always refreshing to pick up a book written over a hundred and thirty years ago and to read about the clarity of vision the author had, and awareness of, the times we live in. Israel had not been reborn as a nation and was not even on the horizon, to signal the end of the age, yet they still had that sense of the imminence that the Lord Himself was coming for His church, the true believers in Him. Maranatha.

Except for the dispensational theology, of which I believe Ryle is mistaken when interpreting who "Israel" are in both the Old Testament prophecies and Romans 11, his eschatology is a dynamite. The doctrine of the second advent of the Lord Jesus Christ is indispensably crucial yet sadly often avoided or neglected for at least two reasons; the difficulties associated with the mysteries surrounding the event, specifically in the book of Revelation and the fact irresponsible, or I should say, false teachers came up with an exact date and time of the event itself, the gloom and doom's day that tends to shy people away for concern of being labeled as religious nuts. For those who are familiar with Ryle, he can't be farther from being a doomsday prophet, though his preaching style is forceful as usual, which I understand may make some readers uncomfortable. In a sermon about idolatry, Ryle mercilessly exposed and blasted the Vatican with words whose precision and severity I rarely or never heard, "... idolatry never yet assumed a more glaring form than it does in the Church of Rome at this very day, ... idolatry is one of the crying sins of which the Church of Rome is guilty. Romanism in perfection is a gigantic system of Mary worship, saint worship, image worship, relic worship, and priest worship, that it is, in one word, a huge organized idolatry" (p. 87, 89). What every reader should not miss in this volume most importantly is the sermons on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the parables of the ten minas and the signs of the times that Paul hinted in the epistle to the Romans, "the night is nearly over and the day is almost here," which come under the sermon titles of "Watch," "Occupy Till I Come" and "What Time is It," respectively. The applications of these expository texts that Ryle pounds on the readers in great details are best summed up as "So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light" and best enjoyed and put to actions with the lessons learned in John Piper's "Future Grace."