Put away your notes, sign off Facebook for just a second, and reflect on the end of the world with me. (As soon as we are done here, I promise you can get back to Facebook.) Navigate to your favorite search engine and type in “natural disasters.” Take a look at any list of recent disasters and let the magnitude of loss sink in. It’s a scene out of those Tim LaHaye books you started reading two years ago, isn’t it? Now, scroll down a few search results and start clicking on all the apocalyptic sites. In a moment, you’ll be reading how the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated by the Illuminati, a group who is dead-set on ushering in the reign of the Antichrist, and how this same group is disguising the fact that a volcano in Washington is about to blow and cause earthquakes in California and somehow wipe New York off the map. Are you panicked yet?
Lest you dismiss these people as conspiracy theorists, read Matthew 24:7. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.” Anyone else thinking: Terrorism, war in Iraq, Katrina and Rita, tsunami, and earthquake in Pakistan? Is it time to start thinking about the Rapture? Or maybe we should be making hide-outs to protect ourselves from the Antichrist? Aren’t we supposed to be ready for the End Times?
I want to pretend that I’ve been saying all this with a smirk and distaining laugh, (After all, what’s the fun of being a wanna-be intellectual cynic if you can’t scoff at people’s self-produced paranoia?) but the truth is that when I read the news of the Pakistani earthquakes Sunday, I began to have Chicken Little thoughts. I mean, the tsunami last year had me wrapped up in a flurry of relief efforts for months. Then we get back to school this year, and the country is reeling from the effects of Katrina. How long can the world keep up with this?
But if the idea of hiding out in a bunker, waiting for the revelation of all things apocalyptic appeals to you, this is where you should leave off because I have no intention of encouraging such hysterics. Instead, I’d like to suggest that perhaps we’ve gotten ourselves a little worked up over natural disasters this past year. Not that they haven’t been significant, nor have our relief efforts been in vain, but our obsession with reading and watching news coverage of these events might be slightly excessive. Naturally, when something as big as Katrina hits close to home, it draws attention, but it shouldn’t produce this low-level panic in the hearts of Christians. Did you get this worked up about the European heat wave in 2003? Don’t seem to remember that? Funny—it killed an estimated 45,000 people. Think the tsunami of 2004 was the deadliest natural disaster ever? Check your history. In 1970, Bangladesh lost 300,000 people to flooding; in China, floods in 1887, 1931, and 1959 killed 900,000, 3 million, and 2 million people respectively; China also suffered an earthquake that killed 830,000 people in 1556; and the deadliest earthquake ever recorded killed 1.1 million people in Egypt and Syria in the year 12011.
We might want to reexamine the idea that these disasters are ushering in the End. While we are at it, maybe we should challenge people to look at the verses around Matthew 24:7. The passage reads:
Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come…All these are the beginning of birth pains. (Matthew 24:4-6, 8, emphasis added)
These things will happen Christ says, but they are only symptoms of a world left after the fall—a world that needs the Second Coming of Christ to restore peace and perfection. So when it comes to natural disasters, a response of grief and compassion is appropriate, but panic is not. We don’t stop only at natural disasters, though. This rule applies to all “Signs of the End of the Age.”
Though I’m not an eschatological scholar by any means, I would assert that marking the “End Times” as a special imminent period and reserving special actions and behavior for that time is contrary to Biblical and historical church teaching. The Church has traditionally taught that the time after Christ’s ascension is the “End of the Age.” The Biblical references and the historical teaching of the Church to Christ’s Second Coming refer to it, not as something in the future, but as something imminent. We are NOT nearing the End Times; we are living in them as were the apostles. We are NOT looking for signs that will tell us that Christ’s return will happen in the near future; His coming is imminent—ready to occur at any moment. None of this should be panicking us, nor should it be prompting us to prepare in a special way. Instead, it should be an encouragement to live out our Christian faith with the determination and intensity that God calls us to.
The most important thought to leave with is this: Christ’s Coming is a source of unspeakable hope to us as Christians. It’s the hope that one day the King will return and set right all that has gone so terribly wrong in the Kingdom. It marks the end of dominion of Satan. We will rejoice that these natural disasters, with their destruction and death, have come to an end, and our rejoicing will continue with the million other things which have been set right.
So Chicken Little, quit waiting for the sky to fall, pluck up your courage and start living with a determination and hope that comes from the knowledge of our Lord’s imminent return.
All natural disaster statistics taken from http://www.nbc.com/
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
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