Armageddon

In Christendom there have always been a number of folk who seem to gleefully predict the end of the world. For example, a New England farmer after careful study of the Bible thought that God would destroy the world between March 21^st 1843 and March 21^st 1844. His followers got rid of all their possessions, and thus were in bad shape when the prediction didn't work. Some of the kin of these folk went on to become today’s Seventh Day Adventists.

The founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith told his church leaders in February of 1835 that the end would come with 56 years.

In 1881 an astronomer using spectral analysis saw the Halley’s Comet tail had some deadly gas, cyanogen, in it which caused many folk to conclude that would be the end of it all.

Good ol Pat Robinson in May of 1980 sounded the alarm that the world would end by the end of 1982, “I guarantee you…”

Another comet, Hale-Bapp showed up in 1997 caused more alarm by a cult called “Heavens Gate. Unfortunately some of the did find their end when 39 of them committed suicide  on March 26, 1997.

The great Nostradamus who has predicted many events said that the world would end in 1999. But if you have ever read his quatrains, you know they are as difficult to understand and the book of Revelation which promotes a lot of the hair-brained predictions.

If the infamous Y2K which frightened computer folk over the world had folk believing that would be the end of the world but it was just the end of Lotus 1-2-3.

Richard Noone wrote a book in 1997, “5/5/200 Ice: the Ultimate Disaster” saying that the planets would align making the Antarctic ice 3 miles thick by May 5, 2000 and that would be the end.

The Church of God leader Ronal Winland wrote in his book in  2006 that 2008 that hundreds of millions would die and it would be the worst time in human history. Nope, it was just the end of the Bush administration which was a good thing, though he definitely tried to make it the worst of times according to many.

And the list goes on and on. I have always written this junk off for what it was, the ranting of a bunch of weirdo’s who seemed to chant, “Ha, ha, ha, I’m saved and your not.” Sick.

When folk have come to me as a pastor would supposedly know biblical stuff better than others, I’d tell them I didn’t have a clue, but if God didn’t want waste a perfectly good creation we’d likely have another approximately 13 and a half billion years left which at the time was the nature life expectancy of the universe according the the science of the day. Most found this highly unenlightening.

Perhaps now I may join the doomsday sayers but from a different perspective. It has never made much sense to me for God to break what he had created. But human beings, that is a whole other story and our track record for reaping mass destruction upon each other is not good.

Perhaps, I think, humanity may be the only species to bring about its own destruction given our current responses to the global warming phenomena. A bunch of folk make it a political issue rather than a scientific one. More take a traditional ostrich stance by burying the heads in the sands and try to ignore it. We have by almost all measures not followed God’s command in Genesis to be stewards of the earth: The God said, ‘Let us make man (human beings) in our image after our likeness. And let them have dominion (responsibility) over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” ~ Gen. 1.26. Well, that hasn’t worked very well.

So, as Al Gore warned five years ago the polar ice may melt by now, more scientists are seeing this as likely and we can’t stop it raising the sea level 3 feet or so. It’s not a good time to be buying coastal property. For a long time the fear was the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and ultimately may cause a 10 foot increase in ocean levels. CBS news science reporting has recently talked about the slow collapse as being unstoppable in the future. NASA studies of 40 years of ground, airplane and satellite data shows this weak “underbelly of the West Antarctica.” The ozone hole, and human carbon emissions are clearly the guilty parties in causing all of this over and above natural warming and cooling cycles.

Scientists seem to be the modern prophets who warn that if we don’t change our ways, terrible things will result. And like the Old Testament prophets they are not just predicting the future but interpreting what is going on at present.

So, will this be our own Armageddon caused by our own hands? I don’t know. I hope that as in the past God will intervene, likely through the hands of enlightened human beings that are not myopic and care for the future and accept responsibility for the planet God gave us.

With all that said, we must remember Jesus words about the subject: ³² “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ~ the Gospel According to Mark 13.32