Now I said last week that there’s another great question we needed to answer, and before I go back into more about the Man of Sin, I’d like to take you to that question. How will we know we escaped? You’ve arrived at a destination…Blessed, or happy, is he that waits and comes to the 1,335. (Dan. 12:12). To come to it, you’d have to know you did. I use the analogy of driving to Los Angeles from New York. You can’t head out to L.A. without a map. Without any picture of Los Angeles, you have no idea where it is or what it is…what it looks like when you get there. So you just sort of takeoff. Somebody says, “You know what? Go west.” Well, you could wind up in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, San Diego, or you could wind up at any city in the West that’s short of Los Angeles. You know, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver or Salt Lake City. You just don’t get there. Because you don’t know what Los Angeles looks like, you won’t know if you’re there.
And you’re with other people in the car…“Does anybody know if we’re in Los Angeles?”—“No?”—“Well, no, somebody said this is Des Moines, Iowa.”—“Okay, well…I don’t know where that is either, but I guess…” How would you plan a trip to Los Angeles without knowing whether you arrived? You’d have to know what Los Angeles looked like, where it was, what it meant…how to know your journey was over, and that’d be no matter where you started from, you see? You could take the analogy as, no matter where you lived in the world, not just if you’re starting from Los Angeles, because God’s people are all over the world. How do we know we got to L.A., if L.A. is “escape” at the 1,335?
Let’s imagine we get to the 1,335, but we don’t know that we did…And maybe somebody has a hunch we did…and we’re all sitting in a circle. “Well, it said we’d be happy…Everybody feel happy? Everybody feel happy? Anybody not? Nobody’s not happy, are they? Oh, they’re all happy. Okay…Well, who feels like an escapee? Does anybody feel like an escapee? Who feels like we waited long enough? Anybody feel…Raise your hands, we waited long enough…” Does anybody think it could be like that? Where you wouldn’t absolutely know. You’re watching and praying always to escape, but you can’t really know if you did.