The CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 2
“THE LAST DAYS”
Before I continue with “The Church In Flux”, I have to come up with definite substantiation that “We live in the Last Days,” and for that I don’t have to go any further than the major harbors in the world, where ships are at anchor full of the stuff that people used to buy but no longer can afford.
There is a striking passage in Revelation pointing to that exact situation. I refer to chapter 18 of the last bible book, for which the heading is “The Fall of Babylon,” or “the demise of an economic system.” That could be ours. If you have a bible, look it up, especially verses 9 -13. Here’s a quote, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her (Babylon, the modern world) because no one buys their cargoes anymore…”
How striking! Yes, today we are in The Last Days, and the sorry thing is that when I go to church – which I do – nobody seems concerned about it, nobody pays any attention to it, even though this issue is a recurring theme in the Bible. The entire New Testament has been written in the expectation of Christ’s speedy return. In Acts 2, when the church had its modern beginning, we read that people sold all their possessions and shared what they had, in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. Since then there have been a lot of false alarms.
Of course all Bible readers know that the day and the hour are unknown. That restriction means very little. I compare it to the birth of a child. There we know the approximate date, but not the ‘day or the hour.’ We know that after a 9 months period more or less, new life will come, but even when labor pains start the actual time of birth cannot be accurately predicted. In the same vein we cannot say that on December 23 2012 at 8.22 p.m. we will see Christ’s glorious re-entry. The Bible is quite emphatic on this point: the Lord repeats it twice in Matthew 24 that not even the angels or the Son of Man know the exact date and time. That makes eminent sense to me.
Yet the Lord tells us to keep watch, because there will be definite signs. Jesus points to the fig tree and how it, at a certain time, will change in appearance, signaling summer. In the same way there will be tell-tale symptoms of the Lord’s return. So what other indications are there? Are there more signs of the ‘fig tree’ out there?
Most definitely. Ships full of stuff nobody wants or needs are not the only pointers. There’s something deeply fundamental going on: the entire growth model we have created ever since World War II is simply unsustainable both ecologically and economically. We have this song in church where the line ‘Nature sings” appears. Well, believe me, nature doesn’t sing anymore: she screams: “No more.” The edifice of economic growth is crumbling. It depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change, earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …
We can’t do this anymore. All that money was borrowed against real estate, which now is rapidly reducing in value. Ships full of that merchandize are now sitting everywhere, because, suddenly, we don’t have any money left to buy their cargo. But politicians, in order to get reelected, depend on this treadmill exercise of more and more, so they are pushing not only the economy but everything else over the cliff, even though our so-called high standard of living has been obtained by depleting all our natural stocks – water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land.
Frankly, we are at a historic moment: the collapse of wealth, both personally and globally.
A few economists risked the scorn of their colleagues by predicting this disaster and a few scientists warned us that we are living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets, but our elected officials, by and large, have downplayed the dangers.
Here’s what a European think-tank wrote recently: “It is high time for the general population and socio-political players to get ready to face very hard times during which whole segments of our societies will be modified, temporarily disappear or even permanently vanish. For instance, the breakdown of the global monetary system we anticipated for summer 2009 will indeed entail the collapse of the US dollar (and all USD-denominated assets), but it will also induce, out of psychological contagion, a general loss of confidence in paper money altogether.”
Does this mean that people will change their living habits? No of course not. There are still billions out there who have observed our Western Wealth, and want a piece of that same pie. This process is going to continue till it is no longer possible: that moment is at hand.
James Lovelock in his The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, writes in his Preface to the U.S. Edition that “We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up…billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the arctic region where the climate remains tolerable.”
In a recent discussion on Alanna Mitchell’s latest book Sea Sick, the reviewer writes: “While Mitchell is walking on the Australian beach with Tim Flannery, the author of the influential book The Weather Makers, and an impassioned advocate for a rational approach to global warming, he tells her that she is ‘documenting the last days of a system. Humans are now interfering with the most basic elements of that system'”.
We do have a serious problem. According the Harriet Friedman, a University of Toronto professor specializing in analysis of food systems, “more than half the world’s agricultural land suffers moderate to extreme soil degradation. Climate change will certainly make yields unpredictable in the future, if not already.”
So when will all this take place? More about that next week.