JUNE 30 2020
THE VERY LAST DAYS?
Gail Tverberg, an actuary, always writes an interesting and insightful blog, under the telling name of OUR FINITE WORLD. She sometimes quotes the Bible. I remember her citing Revelation 18:11 twice, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore”.
I believe that the last Bible book, Revelation, often depicts today’s circumstances! Today lots of merchants, lots of store-owners, lots of service workers, lots of tour operators, lots of large corporations are desperate, because suddenly their markets are gone, and that means deflation: nobody buys their inventory anymore.
That is just one sign. There are multiple others, of which the Pandemic, Locusts and Climate Change are just the most obvious.
Welcome to a New Economy!! Welcome to a New Church Scene. Welcome to a New Life-Style. Welcome to New Way of Living. Welcome to a new Virus-festering society. Welcome to The Very Last Days.
The Last Days?
Yes, I believe that the world is approaching more than a ‘fin de siècle’, more than just an end of an era: it’s approaching the END. Period.
Already we are thrown back to a more primitive status, almost each on their own. Will we ever go back to ‘normality’? Can we go back?
This begs the question, “What is normality?”
The word ‘normality’ has as its root the word ‘norm’, which indicates ‘the accepted standard’, which, in the last 100 years has seen drastic changes under the enormous increase of carbon fuels. The ‘normal’ has become ‘abnormal’. Suddenly we are confronted with ultimate questions, involving the essence of life, involving also the entire concept of ‘inclusivity’.
For centuries we white Westerners, have regarded the world as our exclusive domain. Everything revolved about our wishes, our desires, our goals and ambitions, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Actually we have gone further: the white face of humanity was seen as the preferred segment of society. That’s now changing, fortunately, to some extent, but we still exclude creation from our life. Our ‘normal’ includes global exploitation, totally part and parcel of business. Our ‘HEAVEN HERESY’ is at the root of our wrong approach. We love Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount but gloss over his words that ‘the humble will inherit the earth’. One translation of ’humble’ reads, ‘those who claim nothing for themselves’: we want everything.
Love Creation.
Dr. Barry Commoner coined the four laws of ecology decades ago. I have cited them often, but they bear repeating:
- Nothing disappears
- Everything is connected to everything else
- Nature knows best
- There is no free lunch.
These laws are gospel truths, in line with the principal Law of the Lord, which also bears repeating, “Love God – and his creation – above everything else, and our fellow humans as ourselves.” Loving God is not something abstract, uttering a few words of endearment: no, it is fulfilled concretely in loving his creation with – as Jesus put it – “all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength”. In other words: our entire human endeavor should be geared toward loving creation. God made it and thus it is holy. God made it and thus it is God’s Primary Revelation, his Direct Word. The Bible is God’s Secondary Revelation, his Indirect Word, of equal value, inspired, necessary to explain our faith and Christ’s mediation, but a human book nevertheless. The Scriptures will disappear: Creation will not. We have built our entire ecclesiastical enterprise on this wrong assumption.
Our ‘norm’, our life’s daily conduct, should be based on God’s Primary Word, but having failed the ‘love’ test we have sealed our doom and brought on our now looming demise and “The Last Days”.
The Bible repeatedly refers to The Last Days, not only Jesus in Matthew 24, but also John in Revelation, where a good portion is devoted to the global disasters preceding the final days, with earthquakes, pandemics and famines specifically mentioned.
Jesus tells us to always be on the lookout, because there will be definite signs, such as “the Great Desolation”, which we certainly are experiencing today in multiple manners, of which Global Heating and world-wide pollution are sure indications. Already earthquakes and volcano eruptions are increasing dramatically. Overall, there have been 2,267 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the last 7 days, and that is definitely alarming. Farther south along “the Ring of Fire”, Mexico was hit by a magnitude 7.4 earthquake last week.
| Yet the End will come as a complete surprise. |
Back to Revelation 18, and what it says of today.
The heading is The Fall of Babylon. In the Bible Babylon is seen as the world apart from God. The elite of Israel was exiled to the ruling empire of their days, Babylon, where they were forced to worship their gods. Those who refused were killed.
Today we all live in Babylon, and today we experience its Fall. Don’t for a minute believe that we can go back to ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ has directed us into the current abyss. The economy already was in poor shape, with many predicting a recession or worse. Then the VIRUS came along, the direct result of our riotous routines.
Revelation 18 directly speaks to us today:
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a lair for demons
and a haunt for every unclean spirit,
every unclean bird,
and every detestable beast
All the nations have drunk the wine
of the passion of her immorality.
The kings of the earth were immoral with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown wealthy
from the extravagance of her luxury.”
Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“Come out of her, My people,
so that you will not share in her sins
or contract any of her plagues.
For her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.”
All these words directly apply to us today. I find it striking that this passage mentions unclean birds and detestable animals. The African Swine Flu and Bird Flu figure prominently in today’s pandemics.
Today all signs point to a Global Economic Depression, aggravated by Global Heating and abrupt Climate Change, witness the tropical heat in Siberia and Arctic Canada. There the world’s largest store of METHANE is about to erupt, 28 times more lethal than our carbon-generating economy: that alone will seal our doom.
Add to the normal economic crises an angry planet, evident in earthquakes, volcanism, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, pestilence, wildfires, and, perhaps, a pandemic or two, and we reach a tipping point, exceeding the earth’s capacity to absorb punishment. Today the difference is that these multiple catastrophes will affect already badly crippled economies and stressed societies. This time governments poured in the money, but tomorrow their wallets will stay closed.
No, there won’t be a return to ‘normal’, because we have abandoned the ‘normal’ thanks to our God-Eclipse. Normal is living according to the ‘norms’ of creation, as captioned in the Laws of Ecology, and Jesus’ dictum of ‘Loving God.’
We have been sucked into a Satanic trap.
How do we climb out of it? Can we still do that?
That is the topic of my next venture into the ‘unknown’.