Are the END TIMES imminent?

There have been at least 34 individual predictions of the end times since 2000. It was once a familiar sight, men standing on street corners, wearing sandwich boards, declaring the end of the world is nigh. The sandwich boards may have mostly gone but the message hasn’t. Here in the UK we are seeing a significant rise in evangelical missionaries coming from the United to states to cities around the UK, proclaiming the end times are imminent. Cheers Cousins!

Why do they think the world is about to end? The Bible says it will happen when people become lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, and disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, and slanderous, without self control, brutal, treacherous, reckless, and swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. So when human beings display these characteristics, according to biblical teaching, Jesus will come again to judge the world and rebuke it for its sins. Haven’t men always displayed these characteristics?

In Matthew 24 Jesus talks about famines, wars. But there has always been famine and wars. In Luke 21 he talks about tsunamis, floods and chaos in the world. But there has always been floods and chaos in the world. In Ezekiel 38 it says that Russia, Turkey, Iran, Libya and Ethiopia will invade Jerusalem and God will send floods, hail and fire upon them, and then the end will come. I am sure that Ethiopia, to name one country, has other things on its mind right now. Of course Peter talks about sceptics and scoffers in the last days. It is all terribly convenient. Question the belief structure of the religious right and they can quote scripture at you. Everything that man says or does can be seen as another portent of the end times, if that is the prism through which you wish to view the world.

Are the end times imminent? These people who are actively seeking Armageddon are negating their responsibility to make better choices in the here and now. For example, what is the correlation between those who believe the end times are imminent and what they are doing to support efforts to fight global warming, or poverty, or famine, or even the geo-political climate in the Middle East? I don’t think it takes a genius to figure that out in the Trump Religious Far Right Administration!

If you think that the end times are imminent, surely this has the possibility of making you a less responsible citizen right now – leading to the kind of chaos and harm that leads people to say the end times are on us – a vicious circle of complicity, if you will.

The way things are going it might be the end of the world as we know it, but the end times?? Heh.