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“How should Christians react to doomsday predictions?”
You know what’s worse than nuclear Armageddon, for me at
least? The prospect of ending life in an old folks’ home while succumbing to Alzheimer’s just
slowly enough that I occasionally notice my mind’s merciless and
inexorable deterioration. Of the various fates that might turn me
into a quivering bag of
Yeah, as I have said about a few of the questions we’ve handled here over the years, I might be the wrong guy to ask. I’m not exactly the median respondent in any survey you might conduct.
Peacefully in My Sleep
Hey, if we all had our way, we’d probably go to meet the Lord peacefully in our sleep. That’s just not how it plays out for most of us. Yet somehow, I believe our Lord makes us adequate to the challenges he sets for us. Even if I have to go into eternity in the way I dread most, I am confident he will be there with me every step of the way and that he will not test me more than I can bear.
“But Tom,” say a bunch of our younger readers, “you’re flippin’ ancient. You get discounted coffee at McDonalds. Of course you’re not worried about nuclear Armageddon, the zombie apocalypse, COVIDs II and III, the ticks-on-steroids plague or the World Economic Forum making us eat bugs. You don’t care about AI, aliens, the Russians, the Chinese or the Iranians taking over the world because you’re not going to be in it all that much longer anyway.”
Fair point, guys, and far from me to be the crazy old Christian sporting the Après moi le deluge T-shirt, or worse, actually saying it and meaning it like Hezekiah (“Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?”). Such sentiments are not a good look for any believer. If it helps, I have three adult children I love more than just about anything in this world, and if I could somehow manipulate reality to make it a better place for each of them, you bet I would be seriously tempted. My concerns these days are far more for them than for myself.
And yet … and yet … is this stuff really the sort of thing we Christians are supposed to worry about?
An Expurgated History of Doomsday Predictions
Perhaps it may help to review a selective history of doomsday predictions. They are not a new phenomenon. Let’s keep it within my own lifetime, and from an age when I could actually understand and fear the constantly-shifting storylines the fearmongers were fearmongering.
In the 1970s, the media told us to expect water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. A new ice age would arrive by the end of the millennium. Scientists predicted urban dwellers would need gas masks by 1985 and that nitrogen buildup would render land unusable. A 1976 consensus predicted imminent famines. Oil was supposed to run dry that same year, then by several later dates, then 1990. History gave us a big “no” to all these.
James Hansen predicted regional droughts in the 1990s. The
Maldives were supposed to be underwater by 2018. Al Gore predicted an
ice-free Arctic by 2013, later revised to 2014, and then 2015. Okay, let’s not
get started on Al Gore. But I lived through a time when my own
New millennial predictions included children not knowing what snow is by 2000, Britain having a Siberian climate by 2020, and 50 million climate refugees seeking new homes in the same timeframe. The Arctic was going to be ice-free by 2016, then 2018. Aum Shinrikyo predicted nuclear war would destroy the world between October 30 and November 29, 2003. Many-times-revised predictions of oil depletion in every year from 2000 through 2020 have yet to occur. Please, please, please do not use the words “global boiling” in my presence. They are sheer nonsense, and the person who coined the phrase undoubtedly knew it. And how many times in your life have you been told the economy is about to completely collapse tomorrow in such a fashion that any reasonable person should expect to lose everything?
The vast, vast majority of doomsday scenarios turn out to be in error, dependent on low-percentage events or improbable calculations that ended up wildly off the mark. Perhaps that might be a satisfactory answer for the fearful Christian. Hey, despite all this, we are all still here.
Not Completely Satisfied
Yet I find myself less than completely satisfied with it. Why? Because an inevitable, unstoppable doomsday really IS coming, and Christians should not fear it. The Bible teaches it. What’s not to like about the whole world’s system being given a moral reboot and Jesus Christ being installed as head of everything forever? That’s what we look forward to, and it’s a glorious prospect. For me, the fact that 1,000 years of bliss must be preceded with a massive worldwide purge of all evildoers and residual wickedness is a feature, not a bug.
I was talking with a friend two Sundays ago between church meetings. He was in just this kind of quandary. He was reading bloggers, listening to podcasts, looking at the legal and illegal immigration statistics and the unrecognizable staff in his local Tim Horton’s, and he was starting to sweat bullets. I totally understood. I used to live in that headspace myself not so many years ago.
Maybe it’s a cliché, but I meant it at the time and I mean it now. It doesn’t originate with me, but I believe it with all my heart. I said to him, “Ken, we know the end of this story.” His face transformed. A week later, he told me he had deleted all kinds of social media connections and apps that were sending him troubling information day after day, and he was feeling greater peace in his heart already.
Do You Believe?
I’m not suggesting we put blinders on. I’m just asking a simple question: When we go to the scripture, do we really believe what we read? Has God actually given us a spirit of fear that we are supposed to tremble at, or are we supposed to be powerful, loving and self-controlled? I for one would rather be the latter, and I say make whatever changes in your life help you get there.
Can I add one more thing? When we ask “How should Christians react?”, we probably ought to take into account what sort of Christians we are talking about. We are not all at a single level of impeccable, perfectly seasoned maturity, and our Lord is incredibly gracious to the spiritual babes among us. He knows their tenderness and weakness, and he expects less of them than he expects of, say, me. An infant in Christ who wildly overreacts to fearful predictions of doomsday, then course-corrects in a panic through nights of feverish prayer, may be doing exactly the right thing for his or her age, knowledge level and spiritual maturity.
We are not that. What’s your excuse?
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