ABOUT...

I come from Northern Ireland and grew up during the Troubles, not knowing peacetime until I was in my mid twenties.

I would later move to the Republic of Ireland for three years, then lived in eastern Europe for five, and finally returned and resettled in my native Northern Ireland in early 2022.

Although I was born into a Church of Ireland (Anglican) family, my parents gave me no religious instruction as a young child.

That all changed when, at around the age of eight years old, my father was stricken with Hodgkin's Lymphoma and told us he had months to live, there being no known cure for it at that time.

It was then that he said that there is a God and that my sister and I should seek His Son, Jesus, for salvation, and also entreat Him for my father's desperate situation; during that period, my father began sending us to Sunday school, albeit under the bad teaching of the very Arminian Independent Methodists.

Nevertheless, I believed in God and professed faith, only realising years later that I had probably merely begun on a path that would lead to conversion, rather than actually being converted.

I did, however, along with my paternal grandfather, pray for my father and as it transpired, a novel new drug for treating Hodgkin's Lymphoma was being deployed and offered to him with the prospect of it extending his life by "up to several years", so he agreed to take it.

After a long period of inexpressible sickness caused by the severity of the treatment, he was eventually given the all-clear and became the first person in Northern Ireland to be healed of that disease, earning him the moniker of "the miracle man" amongst the staff at the hospital treating him.

(Forty-plus years later and my father is still alive and, more importantly, professing faith in Christ).

Throughout my teenage years that followed, I drifted back into worldliness and the sins of my youth, especially rebellion against, and appalling disrespect for, my parents, a pattern that continued into my time at university (studying aeronautical engineering).

Not long after leaving with a postgraduate degree in another engineering discipline, I started dating a young woman who made no profession of faith, but who was marriage-minded and keen for me to seal the deal, so to speak.

Around the same time, I had returned to regular churching, this time with the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian denomination here in Northern Ireland and so I began to be faced with a dilemma, not wishing to marry someone outside the faith.

She came to profess faith herself at that time, but I was naturally suspicious that she might have been doing so for ulterior reasons.

All of this compelled me to study what the rebirth actually entails, egged on by certain nagging, pertinent Scriptures that were lingering in the back of my mind.

Before long, I was not just assessing her profession, but my own also and was alarmed to discern no obvious sign of selfless, disinterested love in my heart for God, despite for so many years having told myself that because I had asked Jesus into my heart in my earlier life I had to be saved!

This led more and more to immersion in the Bible, searching and studying, comparing Scipture with Scripture.

Eventually, I became disaffected with the Free Presbyterians for reasons perhaps best left unsaid here, and instead began attending the Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) around the late 1990s.

While there, I was exposed to very old school Reformed and English Puritan theology and authors, not so much from the ministry there but rather through speaking with others in attendance, and finally began to understand the meaning of the Gospel of Grace.

This naturally meant I also started to see that the Arminianism I was indoctrinated in as a child was a rival Protestantism to that espoused and enunciated by the Reformation.

In plainest terms, it was clearly "another gospel".

Meanwhile, I broke off with my erstwhile lady friend and not long after that, left the Covenanters too, due to a fallout with the minister on issues related chiefly to his pastoring.

I was in a wilderness for a while after that, although I did attend a mainstream Presbyterian congregation where the minister was somewhat Reformed, but annoyingly he did not adhere to the Regulative Principle, used modern bible versions, was soft on women's head-coverings, did not use real wine in the communion, and expressed what sounded to me like a Modalist definition of the Godhead.

Nevertheless, during that period I would meet my wife-to-be (outside of my own church circles) and more importantly still, began to discern love for God in my heart for the first time, to my tremendous relief, having previously read and trembled at John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

My early years of marriage were, disappointingly, full of backsliding and distraction, a situation that continued with the arrival of first one bundle of joy and then a second the following year; parenting two young children was massively draining but, in terms of temporality, perhaps the most joyful time of my life.

While our children were still toddlers, we relocated to the Republic of Ireland's countryside for three years after Satan struck at us through a vindictive neighbour lying about us to social services and bringing officious scrutiny upon us just when we needed it the least.

Then, with our kids experiencing a conveyor belt of minor but persistent medical issues, and frustrated at the backward healthcare system on both sides of the border in Ireland, we relocated to a dormer town (home to many western diplomatic staff) on the western edge of Riga, Latvia, where access to specialists was both quick (typically on the same day it was requested) and affordable.

In all, we spent five up-and-down years in Latvia, the latter two of which were particularly stressful due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian measures put in place at shopping malls and large supermarkets (i.e. show proof of vaccination or be refused entry, so we naturally were excluded, being vaccine-sceptics from the birth of our children); on the plus side, Latvia never imposed any of the oppressive lockdowns I was hearing about back home in the UK and elsewhere, so we had a better sense of freedom during that trying time than all of our friends and family had.

However, it was during that period that I realised Satan was making a major move and, consequent to that realisation, I set myself to study the prophetic word in depth, having neglected it for many years.

Immediately, I saw I was facing a major problem.

Every online resource was either pushing a futurist model of prophetic interpretation or else tainted with Seventh Day Adventist silliness and, recalling how in my early twenties I had become switched-on, shall we say, to the Jesuitic origins of futurism and the Reformational origins of historicism, I decided to disregard every prophecy author from the modern era and instead look back at the old writers, back when the visible church was purer in doctrine and in practice than it is today.

Above all, my "hook" was a recollection from my youth of the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 being a symbol for the Lord's public witness (specifically, His public witness against error in the western world), and I saw that their "killing" (i.e. their silencing) was in the works with the warning signs very visible in the form of street preachers being harassed and arrested for speaking against the LGBT agenda, and rumblings online of new laws coming in the years ahead to effectively gag or greatly impede any open protest against the abominable things being championed by all the governments of the West.

Revelation 11 therefore became – and remains to this day – the epicentre of my enquiries.

I also recalled from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop in the mid 1800s a mention of another book he had written called The Red Republic, one that as a young man I had desired to read but never encountered; and so I searched for it online, found it and pretty much devoured it!

Hislop was the first Reformed writer (to the best of my knowledge) to make a material distinction between the Scarlet coloured Beast of Revelation 17 and the Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13, both of which had been conflated into mere phases of the Roman Antichurch by most Reformed writers hitherto.

Hislop, however, understood that the Scarlet Beast represented western power as destined to assume a new, irreligious (atheistic) and extremely wicked form for a very brief period right before its demise, and more distinctly still, that it would be "communist", even though he was writing at a time (1849) when communism was still an abstraction rather than the obvious ideology of any nation's government.

Hislop also understood the symbolism of the Two Witnesses and continued with much of the established historicist interpretation of their killing (i.e. they would be silenced by wicked laws at the behest of the beast system) and the happy restoration of them, bringing on the Philadelphian church age and with it, the godly assuming power over one, then another and another nation, until the whole world would have godly rulership, all in accordance with Daniel 2's "stone cut out without hands" growing into a "mountain" that will fill the whole world.

Naturally, this drew me into the eschatological observations of John Gill, the greatest bible-commentator of all, and other Puritan writers, notably Thomas Goodwin with his An Exposition of the Revelation.

And so, as the Covid pandemic transitioned into a vaccine-tyranny scenario outside, I was inside seeking God's help to make sense of, and refine (on the back of world developments since the days of the old writers), the Reformational historicist model with a view to working out not just what was happening, but also when certain things would come to pass, especially the demise of the beast system – as father to two young children, I was very anxious to find a reason to hope that they would not have to live through the dystopian oppression that was starting to leak from the proud statements of the World Economic Forum and its mouthpieces during the Covid crisis.

The results of that enquiry are what you see here on this website today and consist of a very strictly Reformational approach to interpreting prophecy, but updated in light of developments and the increase in knowledge since the days of the old writers, without whom I would not have been able to have performed any of this work; accordingly, they laid a foundation that, thanks be to God for gumption given, I have hopefully been able to build upon.

J.W.M. Woods