DECEMBER 28 2019
THE STATE OF THE WORLD (2)
This is my 1000th blog. From the year 2,001 through 2010 I wrote a weekly column in the Belleville daily, The Intelligencer, about 800 words each. I then combined two of them for publication in the Christian Courier every fortnight. They both paid me.
I quit writing for them in 2010, and expanded my weekly blog to 2,000 words, with the totally unrealistic and basically utopian aim to reform the church and also the world: an ongoing, never-ending and impossible project, which I will assume again in February, DV – which stands for Deo Volente or the Lord Willing.
Here’s my prediction for the 2020s.
I believe that the coming decade will be decisive for humanity. The Lord said in Matthew 24 that we can’t pinpoint the day and the hour of COLLAPSE, but he also mentioned that there will be definite signs to herald his coming again.
It’s all there in verses 15-16, “So when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation spoken of through the prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”
That’s happening now. So open yourself up to some prophetic proclamation as predicted in this Matthew passage and be painfully prepared to experience the events described in that text.
Here are my comments on this Bible passage.
- Standing in the holy place refers to God’s creation in general, as Psalm 33:9 tells us, “He spoke and it came to be”. God, upon completing the world and all that lives there, called his handiwork ‘good’ seven times, and placed humanity there to make it even better. By and large Christians have failed to see creation as God’s holy place, and have done exactly the opposite to God’s intention.
- “The abomination that causes desolation”, refers to Climate Change, an absolute abomination, directly offending God’s creative act. That it causes desolation is all too evident in Global Heating.
- “Let the reader understand,” applies to a time frame that can only be understood when the event occurs. Nobody 100 or even 50 years ago could have imagined the catastrophic changes now taking place in the seas, the landmass, the air, and in human beings.
- “Flee to the mountains”. This tells us to get out of those places where the panic will be the greatest: the cities. As Jacques Ellul has pointed out in THE MEANING OF THE CITY, Cain built the city as a defiant answer to Paradise. He wrote that the city – human domination of creation – represents the ultimate rejection of God.
Collapse.
Back in 1974, Henry Kissinger said in an interview:
I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. [Emphasis added.]
History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved.
Gail Tverberg, a prominent actuary who writes a blog, OUR FINITE WORLD, in her latest edition, quotes Revelation 18: 11-18. Here is that passage:
And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, because there is no one left to buy their cargo— cargo of gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls; of fine linen, purple, silk, and scarlet; of all kinds of citron wood and every article of ivory, precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble; of cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, and frankincense; of wine, olive oil, fine flour, and wheat; of cattle, sheep, horses, and chariots; of slaves and souls of men:
“The fruit of your soul’s desire
has departed from you;
all your luxury and splendor have vanished,
never to be seen again.”
The merchants who sold these things and grew their wealth from her will stand at a distance, in fear of her torment. They will weep and mourn, saying:
“Woe, woe to the great city,
clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet,
adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls!
For in a single hour
such fabulous wealth has been destroyed!”
Every shipmaster, passenger, and sailor, and all who make their living from the sea, will stand at a distance and cry out at the sight of the smoke rising from the fire that consumes her. ‘What city was ever like this great city?’ they will exclaim.
Notice the suddenness of the collapse: In a single hour!
Once collapse comes, it comes as a total surprise: fast, ferocious and fatal.
Gail Tverberg disputes the common economic theory that when oil becomes more difficult to find and more expensive to distill, prices will go up. It’s her contention, and I agree, that “the market” will not tolerate higher prices of oil products, because stagnant wages prevents the consumer from paying higher prices. Thus the oil industry is caught in a real bind: they need higher prices for oil products because the easy stuff has been used up and EROEI = Energy Return of Energy Invested is higher.
Here what she wrote,
“The question of whether prices will rise to allow future energy extraction is another problematic area. If we believe standard economic theory, prices can be expected to rise when resources are in short supply. But if we look at Revelation 18: 11-17, we find that when Babylon collapsed, the problem was low prices and lack of demand. There were not even buyers for slaves, and these were the energy product of the day. The Great Depression of the 1930s showed a similar low-price pattern. Today’s economic model seems to need refinement, if it is to account for how prices really seem to behave in collapses.”
The 2020’s?
I believe that the 2020’s will be the most disastrous ever experienced by humanity. ARCTIC NEWS, administered by top climatic experts issued this warning:
“The above image (not shown here) depicts how humans could go extinct as early as 2020. The image was created with NASA LOTI 1880-Nov.2019 data, 0.78°C adjusted to reflect ocean air temperatures (as opposed to sea surface temperatures), to reflect higher polar temperature anomalies (as opposed to leaving out ‘missing’ data) and to reflect a 1750 baseline (as opposed to a 1951-1980 baseline), with two trends added. Blue: a long-term trend based on Jan.1880-Nov.2019 data. Red: a short-term trend, based on Jan.2009-Nov.2019 data, to illustrate El Niño/La Niña variability and how El Niño could be the catalyst to trigger huge methane releases from the Arctic Ocean.”
El Niño.
There’s an El Niño expected next year, based on the high water temperature in the Pacific. It invariably ups the heat everywhere, especially in the Arctic, where its rise has been double of that elsewhere. When the methane buried there is released, a gas up to 25 times more lethal than CO2, world-wide collapse is certain.
OK: I have tried for 20 years.
For the past 20 years I have spun my yarn, in a sense a unique kind of writing because I don’t know of any other essayist who has combined contemporary information, and placed it in the context of the Bible.
I believe it was the great theologian Karl Barth who said, and I paraphrase, “sermons must be delivered with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” Well, I have done that, and next year February I hope to continue this venture, because that’s what it is: an exploration into the unknown.
I love Jacques Ellul’s writings. In THE MEANING OF THE CITY he states that “(It’s in the city) that the desire to exclude God from his creation is most evident…The cities of our time are most certainly that place where humanity can with impunity declare themselves master of nature. It is only in an urban civilization that we have the metaphysical possibility of saying, “I killed God.”
That is the State of the World, 2020: by killing nature, by saturating the elements with carbon content, by uprooting the decomposed vegetation buried deep into the earth, for times untold, we are the instruments of our own demise.
It seems to me – and this thought has tortured my mourning mind for a long time – that when collapse comes, it will be sudden and comprehensive: ecological, spiritual, financial, physical, geographical, economic, political, augmented by earthquakes and (un)natural disasters: totally total: not an area excluded, a convergence of all possible ills, including money, the desire for which is the root of all evil, certainly evident today.
Talking about money: There’s something crazy going on in the finance field. Over the course of 2020 $4,665 TRILLION of US Treasury bills (USTs) will mature and need to be rolled into new USTs. During 2019 the US budget was $1,022 Trillion in the red. The 2020 new deficit is already pegged at a minimum $1,183 Trillion. That means that the US Federal Bank has to monetize or print about $6 Trillion.
Again at a time of low oil prices, the then Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, on August 14 1998, said “There will be no ruble devaluation……….. The situation is entirely under control.”
Three days later, the Russian ruble dropped more than 60 percent. When this happens in the USA the US economy will crash much harder.
My historical religious basis.
I love the psalms: I read one of them aloud every morning at breakfast time. Take Psalm 115. I remember my paternal grandfather, at meal time start his prayer with the opening words of this psalm: “not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory.”
Not to us, O LORD, not to us,
but to Your name be the glory,
because of Your loving devotion,
because of Your faithfulness.
Why should the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in heaven;
He does as He pleases.
Their idols are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.
They have mouths, but cannot speak;
they have eyes, but cannot see;
they have ears, but cannot hear;
they have noses, but cannot smell;
they have hands, but cannot feel;
they have feet, but cannot walk.
They cannot even clear their throats.
Those who make them become like them,
as do all who trust in them.
That’s the sort of god we are worshiping continuously. Our gods are useless. Our ‘money’ god is a blimp on the screen nowadays. And we have made it a god. When money collapses, and it is merely a phantom, no longer ‘silver and gold’ which had real value, but any one number we type in, we collapse with it: our mortgages, our stock market, our fancy toys, our credit cards, our office towers, our cities.
Such is the STATE OF THE WORLD, A.D. 2020. A.D. stands for Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord.
Last week I quoted Deuteronomy 32: 17-20. It has a line referring to the State of the World, 2020, “And my anger will burn at them in that day, and I shall leave them, and I shall hide my face from them….and shall see what their end will be.”
The word ‘end’ here does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future, a future that has arrived, a future that is NOW, a society without God. And, indeed, the End is here. Not many people will like this sort of ending.
But it is not the ultimate End. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 48, asked us, “Be Perfect.” That word ‘perfect’ in Greek is ‘teleios’ which is derived from ‘telos’ as in telephone, telepathy, television. It means ‘far’ or ‘the end’, the ‘distant future’. That ‘distant future’ is NOW.
Yes, the decade 2020 will be tumultuous, to say the least: it could quite well be the decade in which Christ returns.
Bonhoeffer called himself an “Anthropos Teleios”, a person who with every action tries to gauge the end-result of his action, and so be ready for eternity.
That too should be our aim in 2020 and beyond.
Nevertheless I wish you a blessed year.