Dear friends:

Today on Daystar TV I watched the funeral service of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham.  She went to be with the Lord on June 14, 2007 at the age of 87.  The service was very moving.

She was a wonderful and saintly woman.  We are privileged to have had her in our midst.

Billy sat on the front row.  He was composed, but unexpressive, possibly because it seemed he could not hear the speakers.  His daughter would sometimes describe to him what the speakers were saying, but he was still expressionless, pale, seemingly lifeless.  When it was his time to speak, he was only able to briefly stand next to his chair, holding on to his walker, and say a few short words.

At the end of the service as family departed, I was touched as Billy slowly ambled out with his walker, hunched over, barely able to make it.  He was gaunt and colorless.  He looked near death himself.

As he went out the church side door, I was struck that he briefly glanced back.  I sensed that he was glancing back at history, and us.  I sensed the Holy Spirit saying that as the age of Billy and Ruth Graham is fading, so is the age of the Gentiles.  Their ministry was really launched in 1949, the very year after Israel was born, not coincidentally.  Other major world ministries were born near that time, not coincidentally.

Billy Graham has been a principle voice of God in the earth to the generation that saw a reborn Israel, a clear last-day sign from the Bible.  He has seen the gathering storm.  He has heard the Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the title of one of his books.  The day Ruth died, Iran-backed Hamas captured Gaza.  Their violence and hatred for Israel will soon spread to the West Bank.  The hoofbeats are getting louder and louder.

Billy has sounded the trumpet.  He has warned the world.  Having faithfully done so, his mission is near its end.  For those of us remaining, it tells me that we will soon hear that long-awaited trump of God, when Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel.... and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

Amen.  Come Lord Jesus.

Jim