AUGUST 21 2016
EVERYTHING WILL COME OUT IN THE OPEN!
This week I do a bit of speculating both by means of TREND ANALYSIS and through BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION with the aim to fathom what is going to happen within the next decade. Tricky business, this.
I am pretty sure that the weather is signalling that we are experiencing something new. Already in some parts on our globe crops have been ruined both because of lack of rain or too much of it. Climate Change at work, even though some 40 percent of the US populace still deny this phenomenon.
Today, due to these new weather conditions, combined with increasing demands on natural resources, FEW will become a new acronym, with the three letters standing for FOOD, ENERGY AND WATER. These items, so basic to life that we tend to take them for granted, will increase in price: food because of drought, erosion and floods, energy and water because of their finiteness.
First trend indication.
Prepare for inflation, perhaps substantial. The global food supply chain is a real-world system that cannot be “fixed” with financial gimmicks. No amount of money-printing will replace crops lost to weather extremes, replenish depleted fresh-water aquifers, magically rebuild top soil lost to erosion, repair the environmental ravages of industrial pollution or increase the world’s oil supply. It’ll be about 2-3 years before this starts hurting, so, if you are smart, start growing your own now!!
Second trend indication.
Price increases are manageable as long as wages and income also go up, but I don’t think this will be the case because governments everywhere struggle with ever larger deficits, which mean that state generosity will end. There also will be increasing demands on the public purse thanks to aid to areas stricken by natural disasters, and that combined with higher police costs due to the threat of terrorism, real or imagined, don’t count on higher wages.
Also with a recession or even a depression overdue, governments on all levels will collect less tax revenue, and even face the danger of going broke and repudiating debts. This means that the standard of living will decline, perhaps drastically.
The same advise as above.
Third trend indication.
With increasing pressure on families making ends meet, an equally unpleasant development will be further family disintegration, meaning more crime, as also funds for policing and protection will be scarce or non-existent.
The next president of the USA will face immense problems. At this point, less than three months before the election, it looks that a reluctant electorate will choose Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate. It seems quite likely that the Trump followers will revolt and violence and civic disobedience will bring on a Police State, placing further demands on the economy. Looting and civil disobedience will increase.
Fourth trend indication.
The root cause of world-wide unrest may well be globalization, a force destructive for everybody, Western as much as any other. Globalization glorifies the wasteful Western Way of Life everywhere and exploits lax pollution controls and labor laws world-wide. This means that some seven billion plus of ever more greedy consumers must share the ever diminishing FEW = food, energy and water. This will leave not enough for everybody, causing wide-spread conflicts, creating ever more dissatisfied people, more rebellious, more on edge, fighting for the leftovers.
Combine these four trends with extreme weather conditions and APOCALYPSE is the next step because the situation I have outlined also correspond with what the BIBLE tells is in its last book known by the Greek name of APOCALYPSE.
ENTER THE BIBLE
I know that APOCALYPSE is usually connected with something awful, something terrible, something to be avoided, but in reality the BIBLE book by this name emphasizes one concept in particular: EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS: our true nature and that of all matters will be revealed. That is something to be welcomed: don’t we all really want to be what we are and see what life is all about? True, it will involve some hardship, but all is well that ends well.
We find this situation in the very last chapter of the Bible: Revelation 22: 11, where it says:
“Let those who do wrong, do wrong even more, let them who do vile, continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”
That indicates that everything and everybody reverts back to their true essence: the bad people become worse, the good improve.
We now live in a masked world, a world in disguise. Matters are not what they seem: they are much worse. That’s the secret that the politicians so carefully want to conceal.
THE GREAT UNRAVELING
So what do I see happening in the not too distant future?
We are now approaching the Great Unraveling. For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear the true nature of our world will be laid bare.
In 1919 Keats, after experiencing the devastation of World War I, wrote the following:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Now, after almost 100 years, these words are becoming true because, with the relevance of the church virtually vanished, the Satan, that immense moving power behind the world’s happenings holds humanity in his/her clutches. He/she has convinced us that God is dead, is a product of the past, some self-satisfied sugar uncle, totally irrelevant for the age of the Internet and space travel. The Satan has sold humanity on the notion that men and women everywhere are now fully in charge.
And they are.
With God out of the picture the Satan, that devilish beast, that horrible creature, is dominating this last phase of human history. Watch out!
Already the world, which the Bible calls “Babylon”, that once glorious Babylon, has lost its infinite charm in spite of alluring travel brochures. Today the entire planet presents a pathetic picture.
Babylon – our present world – simply cannot endure because it is no longer vested in God. Outside God nothing is safe, outside God everything, however beautiful it may seem and however great it may appear, in essence is nothing other than vanity. That’s the reason why matters are not what they are and why they must be exposed. Soon – and the process has already started – this entire masquerade will end and every mask will be removed. That is the meaning of everything that has happened and will happen, and that is what the last things are all about.
REVELATION AT LAST
This ripping away of the camouflage is the ultimate meaning of this astonishing book of REVELATION that John has seen and has described. Eventually the most profound reality must penetrate through all the pores of the ultimate illusion and the TRUTH will triumph. In its last BIBLE chapter this thought is poignantly expressed as, and I repeat: “Let those who do wrong, do wrong even more, let them who do vile, continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.” (Rev. 22: 11). That hits the nail on the head. The mask has to go, the secret must be unveiled: everything in the end must become what it always has been already.
Several factors are involved in this de-masking process. John gives insight into these from the point of view of divine judgment. That so carefully constructed and properly propped up house of cards of human pride has already started to crumble under the hammer blows of the divine judgments.
These judgments are cosmic in character as the totality of the universe is connected to this. It seems to me that CLIMATE CHANGE fits that bill.
In these last days humanity will be hit exactly there where it imagines itself to be the strongest, in its technical knowhow and in its mastery over nature. Already hacking has imperiled that beautiful tool of THE INTERNET, making it highly vulnerable. Our computer driven economy totally depends on electricity, another highly vulnerable link.
The book of REVELATION paints an immensely frightening picture. It describes how NATURE will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: NATURE will breach all the constrains humanity has laid upon it, and will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics. All these will be more severe than ever. And as part of all this comes the dissolution of human society. Wars will come of an intensity and severity never before experienced, causing incalculable confusion. This will result in the coming of the kingdom of the one world-tyrant, the beast with his abhorrent body, arising out of the ocean of the community of nations.
Again for a short spell the human throne will be established. Humanity has not turned to God, has only become more outspoken in its resistance, more spiteful in its hatred, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, those who are unjust will commit even more injustice; those who are vile, more vileness will follow. The masks will fall off.
SIN
Apparently that is the total purpose of this biblical picture. In the last empire, all motives, which have dominated the world’s history from times immemorial, all these will come to their unrestrained revelation. Sin will appear in the full sense of the word, in its breathtaking hubris, in its self-elevation to God’s throne, in its all-out discarding of everything that stands in the way of this brazen effort. Human vilest intentions will rise to the surface. All veneer will vanish and melt away in the heat of the last days. Humanity, not as single persons but as humanity in its totality, as collective species, will rise up in its dream of the totalitarian world empire, lauding its greatness, its power. It now only has the one idol, but the idol carries the same bizarre and distorted feature that it itself has. This idol is its own image, magnified into infinity. That is the Antichrist, the culmination of the world’s history.
All this initially has to reach a certain level of maturity, must first take on a definite final shape before all that for which the believers of all ages so fervently have hoped can come about. Then, in the end, the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the New Jerusalem will dawn.
Actually, expressed in the language of John, this is not strange at all. At last everything in the world becomes what it should have been all along.
Nature has no independent existence, but is an instrument in God’s hand and is part of God’s plan and does what God wants. She does not become that: she is that. And we humans, we who revolted against God, we who in the depth of our striving are the great fugitive from God, and always rebel against him, we grimly keep on embracing this world because this is our last and only refuge.
That world still is God’s primary Word. The Bible, God’s written and secondary Word is no longer read or is misunderstood. So God is speaking through his Created Word, loud and clear, through heat and drought and floods and earthquakes, saying beyond a grain of doubt that we have forgotten those lines in THE LORD’S PRAYER that ask ‘forgive us our trespasses’ which lately have centered on our environmental sins.
There’s another matter that is easily forgotten, also by the church: JUDGEMENT DAY.
Sinning against God`s wonderful creation is still sin, because our Capitalistic Society, in its hubris and our eager compliance, has fashioned a society where SIN against creation occurs inevitably, is so ingrained in the way we live that we all take it for granted.
If there ever was a generation that needs forgiveness, it is ours.
LORD HAVE MERCY.