MAY 1 2020
FORTUNATELY: THE END IS NEAR.
My closest birthday is 92. I can unequivocally state that ‘my end is near.’ I may have a few years left, but I am a finite being: someday, perhaps soon, my perishable life will end and I will die, and will be resurrected imperishably: life without end. Amen. My daily prayer is Maranatha, Lord, come quickly.
Our earth too has a finite problem. The globe itself will always remain, but human life won’t. We all will die in one gigantic fire.
Sounds awful. It is. I go by what the Bible says in 2 Peter 3:
But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar,
the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and its works will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?
You ought to conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness as you anticipate and hasten
the coming of the day of God, when the heavens will be destroyed by fire and the
elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with God’s promise, we are looking
forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.
Just as the Coronavirus appeared out of nowhere, so too THE DAY OF THE LORD will come totally unannounced: could be tomorrow.
A riddle solved. Perhaps.
For a long time I had no idea how this would come about: now it has dawned on me that we ourselves will be the perpetrators. When the then known world drowned, the ARK was there to save a remnant. Then the Lord vouched never to initiate such an act again. Not necessary either: today we all can visualize life’s extinction. We see it all around us: we already live in a dying world judging by the disappearance of species. Someday, perhaps this year, 2020, Global Heating will reach the trillions of tons of METHANE, stored in the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean. That will do it. METHANE is some 40 times more lethal than the GHG (Green House Gases) we emit whenever we ignite the engine of our adored automobiles.
The current VIRUS phenomenon is sure sign that the world population has outgrown its resource base. Returning to the 2019 economic enterprise will merely speed up faster disintegration.
Don’t expect that the UN or the USA or the European Union will magically devise a solution to the world’s plight. It’s not that we don’t know what to do: the recent close-down of some activities saw a rapid decrease in pollution. No, it’s not that the END is inevitable, but greed always triumphs: rain forests will still be leveled; carbon fuels will still find new applications; the rich will still be getting richer and the poor poorer; the weapon industry will still strive and infrastructure deteriorate: no, more of the same is not the answer, because it simply will push the economy farther along the route toward collapse.
The Bible tells us so.
No, I am not one of those fundamentalists who use the Bible as a guide to history, but the Bible, in a few words, tells us that God is the Creator, that humanity wanted to be like god, switching allegiance to God’s opponent, that Jesus, perfect human, perfect God, bought creation back, and will deliver the goods once humanity has succeeded in ending all life.
Yes, we are the culprits.
In Paradise we ended creational harmony with the most ominous results. We broke up the Kingdom! We distorted creation with disastrous consequences. “Cursed is the ground because of you” Gen. 3:17 tells us, with Monsanto monstrously magnifying that momentum.
Once sin affected just one portion of that beautifully holistic order, it infected its totality, slowly ruining the entire earth, because God, in his wisdom and humility allowed it to be subject to destruction: Deuteronomy 31: 17, 18 expresses this without a grain of doubt, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”
God himself took this fateful step because we, humans, we wanted to be kings, because we refused to live in a world, even in God’s marvelous Kingdom, that wants to be subject to him alone.
So here we are.
We now live in a world without God. Now we are ‘gods’: we call the shots, echoing John Milton: “better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven”.
Now people like Trump and Boris Johnson and Putin and the Saudi Princes are in charge. And with them in control we daily experience the terrifying consequences.
We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.
And the church?
That’s something the church has never grasped. 1 John 5: 19, (located somewhere far in the Bible who very few read anyway) plainly says that “We are God’s children, but the entire world is in the power of the Evil One.” Sad, but true.
Jesus, of course, knew this, as is evident from John 17, where he tells his Father in heaven that ‘we don’t belong to a world ruled by Satan’, but the church has seen this as a sign that we are heaven bound: Christ’s followers belong to His kingdom!
Jesus saw the influence of Satan everywhere. When his disciple Peter’s mother-in-law suffered from a fever, Jesus “rebuked” the illness and “it left her” (Luke 4:39). When Jesus and his disciples were at sea and a severe storm endangered the ship, Jesus “rebuked” the wind and said to the sea: “Be still!” (Mark 4:39). The forces behind that storm and behind that fever are Satanic; the world of hideous demons plays a blasphemous role in these phenomena. Yes, the Coronavirus is a Devil’s tool!
Jesus shows us here a scenario regarding life in general—awesome storms, Climate Heating—and what will affect us in particular—mysterious diseases, Pandemics— replete with ominous consequences. No longer is our universe one of simple beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one of unpredictable powers which threaten us with annihilation from all directions.
Demon-possessed.
The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influence of this satanic situation.
It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majestic, harmonious unity of creation- God’s Kingdom! – as it emerged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed humanity, dwell after the fall into sin.
The horrible truth is that God’s Kingdom is in shatters: creation groans. That is the profound tragedy confronting the life of the world, the brutal and cruel consequence of the Satanic rule.
History in a nutshell.
There you have it: world history in a nutshell: God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy the Kingdom that comprises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. Yes, God’s Kingdom, synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious veneration, this Kingdom is being destroyed, is coming apart at the seams: is close to death! Deuteronomy hit it in the nose: with us in charge there is decomposition, brokenness, fragmentation, enmity, contradiction, meaninglessness, darkness, death. Everything that once was beautiful is now to be pitied and without hope.
Oh: we are so powerful.
Yes, we can do mighty things; yes, we can penetrate the secrets of creation, but all that no longer makes sense because we can never build a harmonious world; we can never restore its disorder, because our war against nature is destroying its existence: our oceans are acidified; our soil is polluted; our rainforests eradicated. All our effort and care are reduced to rubble under the weight of the curse that threatens all human life. There is no escaping it.
Just like we, our earth has a finite problem. The globe itself will always remain, but human life won’t. We all will die in one gigantic fire. The Bible calls it, correctly: a purifying FIRE.
Fortunately our world is pregnant with a new earth: time for its delivery is imminent.