SPRING 2020
COUNTDOWN
Before a satellite leaves the launching pad there always is a countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, lift off. And whoosh, amidst noise and flames, smoke and explosions, an enormous projectile is pushed into the blue yonder.
There also in a countdown to The Lord’s Return. There is some similarity: it too will be a noisy affair; it too will involve flames and fire; it too will be dramatic. Malachi, the last book in the Hebrew Bible, comes to mind: “A refiner’s FIRE”…The earth will burn like a furnace”, with the fire coming down from heaven.
That Countdown, that Cosmic Countdown, is not a simple reciting of a number: 10 days, 9 days, or 10 years, 9 years……… That countdown is more like 10 millennia, 9 millennia….. and just as changes in these previous 1000 year time periods were almost imperceptible, now, when ‘change and decay in all around I see’, suddenly the countdown to the Day of the Lord is like a rocket descending on us.
I was just talking to my wife, in isolation in a Nursing Home. She just said, (by phone) “Today it is good to be old. We have had the enjoyment to see kids and grandchildren. What is their future?”
REVELATION means just that.
The last Bible Book allows us to visualize the increasing pace of global deterioration. In Revelation 15: 5 till 16: 21 – look it up if you have a Bible – the last things are set into motion. The picture John, the author, provides us with is an accelerating succession of disasters, not unlike what happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, when Moses pleaded with the king there to ‘Let My People Go.’
Then the 10 plagues affected only the Egyptians, with the final calamity the death of all first-borns. This time also the liberation of The People of God is at stake, but now the disasters are not local, but universal and cosmic, much more intense and dangerous, and the people of God are victims as well.
But, as the Bible relates, for their sake God will speed up the COUNTDOWN. (Matthew 24: 22).
It’s not only the Bible that warns of imminent doom. Secular sources have come to the same conclusions, witness Yuval Noah Harari, the now famous Jewish professor and author of Sapiens. In a long article in a recent issue of the New Yorker (all articles there are long) he writes that “humanity faces three primary threats, “Nuclear War, Ecological Collapse, and Technological Disruption.”
Evidently his article was written before The Coronavirus appeared.
ARCTIC NEWS, which monitors the situation in the Far North, maintains that a sudden spike in temperature is possible. It writes that the trend indicates that 2°C was crossed in February 2020, and looks set to keep rising and cross 3°C in 2021, more specifically in January next year, which is less than a year away.
A 3°C increase means total disaster, means we all will burn to a crisp. That respectable scientists, whose life work is to study climatic conditions, offer this opinion, is more frightening than the Coronavirus, because it affects us all.
The appearance of the humble locust, swarming in their billions – as is happening now in Africa and the Middle East – is a symbol of evil and harbingers of change in the social order: see Exodus 10:1,4, 12-14.
It is all too evident that today the entire universe is implicated in the final demise of all of creation, because everything, everywhere, has become contaminated and despoiled by humanity: all the oceans are saturated with plastic and acidification of the waters are widespread. Even the highest heavens are chockful with satellites and other space junk. That’s why a total cleansing is needed, a process that might take thousands of years. But then “a thousand years are like a day” in divine terms.
Just imagine Noah – the ARK BUILDER – waking up: to him it would feel like he died yesterday. And so would Abraham and David and J. S. Bach and my grandparents………….
THE BIBLE IS NOT A HISTORY BOOK.
I know, the Bible is not a history book and neither does it provide a timetable for the future. It does, however, give us clear hints.
I see the current pandemic as a clear sign that we approach the End. Already the Coronavirus is a pandemic and produces panic in the planet’s population. Deadly droughts, hellish heat, and locusts devastate crops world-wide, indicating the onset of widespread famine.
It seems that everywhere the earth itself has become unsteady: storms, earthquakes, are rapidly increasing. In Revelation 16: 18 a dire prediction is made: “The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the high rises collapse. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.
In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature, and there are those that are the result of human action. Today both are evident.
It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as our own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against us the tormentors. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become the enemy and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, her marvelous technical prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.
The COSMIC COUNTDOWN is upon us. Revelation 11: 18 comes to mind:
The nations were angry, and your wrath
has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your
servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and
small. (The time has come) for destroying those who destroy the
earth.”