A Ramble About Judgment Day

You know it's not good when watching the evening news resembles a cheesy b-rated end times movie, or book for that matter(I ought to know, I've read enough of them in my younger days). I also read a lot of Hal Lindsey when I was a teenager, he was probably my first introduction to Christian discipleship and theology. Needless to say, I disagree with a lot of what he had to say then. But there is one salient point, his major point, that I am coming to agree with more and more. Judgment Day isn't just coming, it's either extremely near, or else we're in the beginning stages of it.

No, I'm not basing this opinion on the moral state of the world. Nor am I basing it on the current political situation in the Middle East. Nor am I basing it on some book I've read. What's more, I think most people can sense it as well.

Do I think that God is finally venting His anger on us? Honestly,... no. I don't think this has anything to do with God's anger. I think this is God allowing us, as a species, to reap the whirlwind, in many cases literally, of our own actions.

Tonight, on the news, they reported that food prices, globally, are about to skyrocket. This has been caused by bad harvests. Those bad harvests have been due to the devastating weather patterns we've now been having for the last year or two. Whole crops have been destroyed. There are now very few credible scientists who now believe that these weather events aren't either caused or influenced by human induced global warming. This human induced global warming is caused, in large part, by the technological advances (and widespread usage of that technology) made in the last three hundred years. The impetus for those technological advances, in almost every case, was to help people live longer, and so that they don't have to work hard, or at least not as hard as they used to (relatively speaking, given when the individual tech advance was made).

So, we can boil down just the disastrous weather events, and the food shortages, which have been happening to two primary causes. The first is to stave off death as long as possible. The second is to keep from working hard. Remember Genesis 3? What consequence did God give Adam (which could also be translated as “Mankind”) specifically? To paraphrase “You will work really hard scratching a living from the soil, and you will die.” So, the impetus for all of our technological advances can really be boiled down to the refusal to accept what God decided for us to begin with. And this refusal has literally condemned mankind, and every other creature on Earth.

We can also trace a number of contributing factors in the same manner back to desires to feel good, desires to have more, and desires to become something more or believe we are something more than we're not, and no to just a few isolated individuals, but to humanity as a whole. Greed, for example, is the desire to have more than you already do. This is what drives corporate executives. Those same corporate executives then make decisions about which course of action will make them the most money with as little risk to themselves as possible. These kinds of decisions are what drove the Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and drive oil companies to strangle any alternative fuel research they can. These kinds of decisions are what drove the recent financial crises, and continue to drive US unemployment as more jobs are shipped overseas (which is why the recession has technically ended even though huge numbers of people are out of work). Think it through and you will see that all of these things can be traced back to someone, somewhere acting selfishly to any degree on one of these desires.

From a certain point of view, mankind is in fact being judged for our refusal to obey the Gospel. Not it's refusal necessarily to believe the Gospel, but to obey it. What do I mean by this? The Gospel of Jesus Christ, as most Bible School professors will teach, is that Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. That He was buried, and that He was raised the third day according to the Scriptures. But is this really all that it is? No. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ Himself. It is everything about Him. He is the Teaching. His life, His death, and His resurrection are all a part of the Gospel. The Gospel is the Cross as well as the resurrection. The Teaching of Jesus Christ was and is, essentially, a life of poverty, self-control, and humility. If we all obeyed the Cross, denying ourselves and picking it up like He told us to, then this world wouldn't be in the position it's in right now.

If we all abandoned our desires to have more stuff; if we all abandoned our desires to feel good and not work hard; if we all abandoned our fear of death (which is meaningless for those in Christ Jesus) and embraced it when He chooses for it to happen; if we all were truly honest with ourselves and with life and exercised those simple constraints which He Himself practiced and taught then none of these disastrous things which have happened recently would have happened.

But this isn't a judgment on a single individual, or even everyone individually. This is a judgment on mankind as a whole as it reaps the consequences of its choices throughout thousands of years of human history. No one individual can take full responsibility for all of it. We all share in it, we all have a part. And just as it took more than one person to bring it about, it will take all of humanity making really hard choices which it doesn't want to make to make it stop before it gets worse, if it can be stopped that is. We may already be past the point of no return weather wise.

This is why, unfortunately, it won't stop. Mankind as a whole doesn't want to make those choices. Mankind as a whole wants more stuff. Mankind wants the easy life. Mankind doesn't care who it has to hurt to get it. Mankind wants to live as long as possible because it's terrified of death. Mankind wants to feel good.

I wish I was wrong. This is my opinion, and only my opinion, on the state of the world right now. If things suddenly turn around and get better, I'll be the first one to admit that I was wrong and give a huge sigh of relief. I wish that this wasn't a giant mirror that we as a species are being forced to look at to show us what we truly are, but it is. That's why He allows us to suffer the consequences of our actions, so that we take a good hard look at ourselves and make the choice to change our hearts and minds and repent, but a collective malfunction requires a collective repentance.

I wish that somehow we could all be “raptured” away from what's about to happen, but that was never the teaching of the ancient Church. They understood that we would all go through the fire together and come out the other side with our gooses a little cooked, and that we who follow Jesus Christ would need to continue to do so until the end no matter what happened.

So, we have global weather disasters, global food shortages, global unemployment, we know that oil will run dry within the next fifty years (some analysts saying twenty), and riots and revolutions. The CIA analysis released a couple of years ago said that these are their primary areas of concern regarding potential near future conflicts and wars. The scariest thing of all is that it's likely to be only the beginning.

I think most people sense it somewhere inside themselves. Some kind of Judgment Day is upon us, and it is the consequences of our own actions which are judging us. I truly hope our Lord Jesus Christ does come back soon, otherwise there won't be anyone left after we're done with ourselves.