I took the time to follow Tim's link to his "new" article that "clarifies" his new, "atypical Christian" teaching about taking the mark of the beast.  What I read was astonishing.

 

Here, for example, is the last paragraph:

 

"So you see, my desire is not to minimize the real danger of taking the Mark of the Beast when it is decreed. You still want to avoid it "like the plague" (since that's what you'll get 3½ years later if you take it!). But if we preach a God who punishes people eternally for being taken by the greatest con job ever perpetrated on (starving) humanity, then who would we expect to be interested? People who are not attracted to develop the interest in a relationship with God now will have no strength to resist the Mark of the Beast, later."

 

Some things just make you stop and go, "Hmmm."

 

God does punish people.  And He punishes them for making wrong choices.  This is abundantly clear all through Scripture.  It is not up to us to polish God's Word to make it more attractive to a dying world.  Nor is it our job to make sure that people are interested or motivated to make right choices.  We are to proclaim God's Truth and let it stand on it's own merit.  The Holy Spirit is tasked with the responsibility of drawing men (and women) to God.  There is nothing beautiful about a battered, bloody, bruised, unrecognizeable, naked human body hanging on a crudely formed cross, suspended between heaven and earth.  There is nothing beautiful about sin, either.  The disease is dreadful and has eternal consequences.  (By the way - using Tim's logic - why would God punish me for a choice I didn't even make?  I didn't ask to inherit sin.  And I wasn't present when Adam and Eve made a wrong choice.)

 

A previous paragraph is also revealing:

 

"But notice, does it anywhere say that people will be tormented forever in punishment? It really only says their smoke will rise forever and ever (whatever that means is not clear). The context here is not eternal punishment in hell but the living hell on earth that people will be going through when God's seven bowls of wrath are poured out after the Rapture."

 

"Does it REALLY say that people will be tormented forever . . . ?"  Reminds me of a similar question posed in the Garden of Eden.  "Did God really say . . .?"  And we know who was asking that one!

 

As if to prove his point, "It really only says their smoke will rise . . . ."  Smoke?  "Where there's smoke there's -- FIRE!"  I've never yet seen a marshmallow on a roasting stick suddenly char and smolder without ever having been placed in the fire.

 

"The context here is not eternal punishment in hell . . . ."  Well, I suppose that if we're really trying to gussie up God's Word for Him because it seems He really doesn't understand how reluctant people will be to accept something so unattractive as hell and personal accountability for personal choices, then I suppose this is a valid conclusion to this whole thing.  Valid.  But so far from the Truth of God's Word as to be unrecognizable as God's Word.