Why the End Times Berean?

I’ve been a Christian most of my life and thinking about the prophesied return of Jesus for more than 30 years. Instead of going into the ministry, though, I went into the world working as an engineer. I’ve had a lot of victories and a lot of losses over the years, but I never lost my belief in the God of the Bible, or the reliability of His Word.

In 2002, though, I started getting my life whipped back into shape. I got married to a beautiful Christian woman from Mexico named Consuelo, and we began building a life together based on a shared faith in God and His Son Jesus Christ. If you don’t already know this, the first step to getting your life going in the right direction is to start reading your Bible and praying daily. It’s unbelievable how many problems can be solved that way over time. They don’t necessarily go away, but your perspective sure can begin to change. Many times, that’s all that’s needed to start healing and feeling better. Other times, you find wisdom or grace in the Word to improve a bad situation or in answer to prayer, God sets you free.

In my career, I went back to school and got my PhD in mechanical engineering and focused on a new solid-state welding technique called Friction Stir Welding. Then I just continued developing my professional research career and taught as an adjunct professor at Wichita State University. At the same time, my wife and I started to have children and we continued to grow our relationship together and with the Lord. And as we both started studying the Bible more diligently, we also began to study and discuss prophecy, too. We led Bible studies at home, including The Truth Project, and we even started a Bible study on Revelation in 2008. I also started making notes for a book on prophecy. But I didn’t feel a green light from the Lord to write it at that time, so I just waited and instead kept studying. Later, I made a job change and we moved to South Dakota where I had accepted a position as an associate professor and lab director at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Since coming to South Dakota, I co-founded a high-tech start-up that became so successful, I eventually had to resign from the School of Mines to focus on the business. With the freedom that being an entrepreneur has enabled, I’ve been blessed to be able to devote more time to research, writing and traveling abroad, including Israel. As I’ve studied Bible prophecy and done research on the history and archaeology of lands of the Bible, one subject in particular seemed like it needed to be shared. It has to do with the fact that the Bible says that there will be a temple standing in Jerusalem in the last days, but scholars and rabbis said that the Dome of the Rock was currently sitting on the exact site of the temple, so it just wasn’t currently possible to rebuild it. Well, initially that was fine with me. If that was the case, it wouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle for God, but the reasoning that was presented to justify that particular location just didn’t sit well with me. The answer to that question became the subject of my first book which is due out in August of this year, but I feel like I’ve got a lot more research and thoughts for these last days that I need to share, too. Some of those thoughts will, Lord willing, become future books, but other ideas are more bitesize and can be shared easily with a short blog post. And so, the End Times Berean Blog is born. I hope you will find it helpful in these crazy days in which we now find ourselves. May God bless you and lavish you with His mercy and grace as we look for and hasten the day of the Lord (2 Peter 3:12).

Till Every Eye Sees Him Coming on the Clouds,

Christian Widener