Last Days?

I am not an alarmist or conspiracy theorist or a prepper or a doomsdayer. I am however someone that believes that God warns people before events take place through the gift of prophecy. This short article that follows is just meant to make us think a little more clearly about things that are being said prophetically about the day-and times in which we live today. I welcome your feedback. Blessings!

Perhaps the most astonishing testimony about the Armenian genocide was told by Demos Shakarian (1913–1993), who was an American Christian businessman of Armenian origin, based in Los Angeles, and who founded the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI), a Christian organization to bring the Gospel to businessmen.

Demos was named after his grandfather, who left Armenia for America due to the 1855 prophecy of the Russian “Boy Prophet,” Efim Gerasemovitch Klubniken, that an unspeakable tragedy was to soon come upon Armenia. His grandfather and Efim were part of a large group of Pentecostal Christian Armenians who moved to Los Angeles years before the Azusa Street Revival.

Efim’s family was Russian and they were the first Pentecostal Russians to move to Armenia. From earliest childhood Efim had shown a gift for prayer, frequently going on long fasts, praying around the clock.

In the 1850s, when the illiterate Efim was eleven years old, he had heard the Lord calling him again to one of his prayer vigils. This time he persisted for seven days and nights, and during this time received a vision.

But what Efim was able to do during those seven days was not so easy to explain.

Efim could neither read nor write. Yet, as he sat in the little stone cottage, he saw before him a vision of charts and a message in a beautiful handwriting. Efim asked for pen and paper. And for seven days sitting at the rough plank-table where the family ate, he laboriously copied down the form and shape of letters and diagrams that passed before his eyes.

When he had finished, the manuscript was taken to people in the village who could read. It turned out that this illiterate child had written out in Russian characters a series of instructions and warnings. At some unspecified time in the future, the boy wrote, every Christian in Armenia would be in terrible danger. He foretold a time of unspeakable tragedy for Armenia, when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children would be brutally murdered. The time would come, he warned, when everyone in the region must flee. They must go to a land across the sea.

Although he had never seen a geography book, the Boy Prophet drew a map showing exactly where the fleeing Christians were to go. To the amazement of the adults, he drew the Atlantic Ocean! There was no doubt about it, nor about the identity of the land on the other side: the map plainly indicated the east coast of the United States of America.

They chose Los Angeles, where many Pentecostal Russians settled before the Azusa Street Revival. There, the boy wrote, God would bless them and prosper them, and cause their seed to be a blessing to the nations.

Many Armenian Christians were not convinced that the prophetic message was not genuine.

And then, a little after the turn of the century, Efim announced that the time was near for the fulfilment of the words he had written down nearly fifty years before. He said, “We must flee to America. All who remain here will perish.”

Armenian Pentecostal families packed up and left the holdings that had been their ancestral possessions time out of mind. Efim and his family were among the first to go. As each group of Pentecostals left Armenia, they were jeered by those who remained behind. Skeptical and disbelieving folk — including many Christians — refused to believe that God could issue pinpoint instructions for modern people in a modern age.

But the instructions proved correct. In 1914 a period of unimaginable horror arrived for Armenia. With remorseless efficiency the Turks began the bloody business of driving two-thirds of the population out into the Mesopotamian desert. Over a million men, women and children died in these death marches. Another half a million were massacred in their villages, in a pogrom that was later to provide Hitler his blueprint for the extermination of the Jews. “The world did not intervene when Turkey wiped out the Armenians,” Hitler reminded his followers. “It will not intervene now.”

The few Armenians who managed to escape the besieged areas brought with them tales of great heroism. They reported that the Turks sometimes gave Christians an opportunity to deny their faith in exchange for their lives. The favorite procedure was to lock a group of Christians in a barn and set it afire: “If you are willing to accept Mohammed in place of Christ we’ll open the doors.” Time and again, the Christians chose to die, chanting hymns of praise as the flames engulfed them.

There are those today, especially Muslims and Turks, who deny the Armenian genocide, just as they deny that Nazi Germany committed a Holocaust against the Jews. And there are also those who deny God speaks and warns todaythrough prophecies, visions and revelations.

Yet, those who had heeded the prophecy of the Russian boy headed to Los Angeles, U.S. and were saved.

With information from American Minute and The Happiest People on Earth, by Demos Shakarian.

Portuguese version of this article: Armênia, o primeiro país cristão do mundo, e o primeiro genocídio do século XX

Source: Last Days Watchman