Matthew 24 - part 2

Anachronism -- an error in chronology; especially: a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regards to each other.

I used to be a part of a Science Fiction and Fantasy writers group. Most of the others in the group loved the creative bursts of actually putting pen to paper, but weren't so keen on studying their topics. For the fantasy writers, this meant anachronisms... a lot of them. No, your medieval hero does not yearn for the excitement of the big city (medieval cities were just as boring as medieval villages. They only smelled more exciting, and by exciting I mean disgusting.) No, he's not happy that he's losing weight while on his adventure (medieval folk were not sedentary and did not have all of our excess calories. Pudginess was a sign of health and considered attractive back then.) He doesn't put his gold in a bank (feudalism and banking don't coexist well), and seeing a dead body does not throw him into some introspective loop (he's seen one or two already... "bring out yer dead!").

Some of the examples above -- and I'm not even giving you the worst -- are pretty sad, but the reality is that keeping any sort of anachronism out of your historical musings is hard to do. The story doesn't even have to be in a historical setting. One quick example:

My all time favorite novel is Lucifer's Hammer. It's a wonderful romp through an America devastated by a meteor strike. Still, one of the main characters grabs pepper bottles by the armful when it's obvious that this is an apocalypse because he thinks it a smart thing to do. His rationale is that these will be valuable since pepper traded pound for pound with gold in Western Europe during the Renaissance. This is an anachronism. What the character (the writers really) don't understand is why pepper was so valuable back in the day. You see, Western European culture in the Renaissance was segregated between rich and poor. Rich people were considered noble, decent, sugar and spice and everything nice. Poor people were base and low and there were all sorts of laws to make sure that they knew their place. So for the Europeans, the most important thing for anyone well to do was to make sure that everyone else knew by God that you were well to do. When spices from the East were first introduced, they carried a status symbol and the rich would douse them on everything at their banquets as a sign of wealth. This was a fad, and like all fads it wore off. So no, pepper doesn't have the intrinsic value that would justify grabbing it by the armful before the starving hoards raid the grocery stores.

That was a tricky one. Matthew 24 has a tricky one too.

In the last post we saw Jesus give specific instructions for a near-term apocalypse then make these sorts of, "Oh, yeah, and later the world ends," statements that seem to gloss right over the most important details. Then it's almost as if he huddles the Jewish listeners back together and says, "Alright, back to the important stuff. Watch for fake messiahs."

In verse 27 He tells his listeners not to believe reports of His return since, as will be explained at length in the later New Testament books, you won't need a report when Jesus returns; you'll know.

24:28 Wherever there is a carcass, the vultures will gather.

Jesus uses vultures as a sign, or visible evidence, of an event. He uses it to say, "watch for the signs and you can prepare for the event."

24:29 Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

And here it is. C.S. Lewis looked at this and thought that Jesus must have been mistaken about the date of His own return. But it wasn't Jesus who made the mistake. It was Lewis.

1) The first thing to understand is what the disciples are really asking when they present the initial question: "Tell us," they said, "When will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age." Matthew -- 24:3. But this shouldn't even be a question, should it? They are using the exact same language as we would if we were asking about the rapture and final judgement. Don't those words mean the same thing to them?

Anachronism. No, the disciples meant something totally different.

In Matthew 16 Jesus tells His disciples that He will be killed. Peter tells Jesus he won't allow it. Jesus tells Peter what he can do with himself... or something. Whatever their understanding of what was happening during Jesus' final trip to Jerusalem, they still didn't understand that Jesus was going to: 1) die physically, 2)then return physically, 3)then ascend into Heaven, 4) then return in the form of the Holy Spirit, 5) then finally, return physically. Luke 21:36-49 recounts Jesus' appearance to His disciples after His crucifixion and resurrection. This was when the lightbulb came on:

Then He opened their minds so that they could understand the scriptures. He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name, to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." -- Luke 21:45-46.

Point 1 -- In Matthew 24 the disciples did not understand what they were asking or what Jesus was telling them.

2) So what did they mean?

Imagine that your church was the only church in the world. It's a big church. It has satellite buildings, still, it's the only game in town (or on planet Earth for that matter). Your fellow parishioners are the only other Christians in the world. Everyone else believes something totally different that what you and the others in your church believe. You don't associate with those people outside your church, and they think you're a freak. Now, Jesus tells you that your church, the church, is going to burn to the ground. Think for a moment. What's the one question you'd ask Him?

No, planet earth did not end when the temple was burned and torn to pieces by the Romans in 70 AD. The world didn't end. But their world -- the one that had so much meaning to the Jewish disciples -- did in fact end!

Point 2 -- to the disciples "sign of your coming" = when are you going to save us from what happens here (ie: the loss of the temple and the access to God and special status before God that it represented). For them "coming of the end of the age" = and when exactly is this horrible thing going to happen.

When Jesus focuses on the near-term events He is answering their questions. When He speaks more broadly He is placing those events in their overall context.

In the next post we finish the chapter and Jesus give us our first picture of the rapture... or does He?

Matthew 24 - part 1

C.S. Lewis was a brilliant man. Language is a primary human means of expression and understanding human thoughts; Lewis had a gift for languages. In other words, he had a gift for understanding things. He was fluent in something like seven or eight of them by the time he finished the English equivalent of high school. Like I said, a brilliant man.

But even the most brilliant men can be wrong. Lewis once wrote that Jesus was mistaken when He said that the events of Matthew 24 would happen in the lifetimes of the people within earshot. Now, Mr. Lewis meant this an example of how the Bible could be trusted, since it recorded even its own flaws, though most evangelicals (myself included) could have done without this little bit of corroborating "evidence".

Lewis was wrong. The Bible never records Jesus' mistakes. How could it. He never made any.

24:1-2 -- Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to Him to call His attention to the buildings. "Do you see all these things? He asked. "I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.


In the spring of 70 AD the city of Jerusalem fell to the Romans. A last group of defenders rallied inside of the temple, probably believing that God would protect them while they were inside. The Romans burned them out and in doing so, the gold leaf on the ceiling, as well as the golden nails that pointed up from the roof (to keep the birds off) melted into the stones. For days the Romans pulled the stones off of each other, one by one, in order to pry out the gold after it had cooled.

For reasons we will discuss in the next post, the disciples were a tad disconcerted by the prophecy. They asked Jesus about this, his coming and "the end of the age".

24:4-5 -- Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name claiming, ' I am the Christ,' and will deceive many.


Jesus wasn't kidding. During the Roman occupation (63 BC to 135 AD) historians have identified forty different 'Christs'. These were Jewish military leaders who promised 'salvation' from the Romans. And yes, they deceived many, which is why the Romans kept bringing legions in to put down the rebellions.

After this Jesus says the end is still to come and gives a vague, ominous statement of wars and famine.

24:9 -- Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death...

Eleven of the twelve disciples were martyred. Only John lived out his natural life, dying somewhere toward the end of the first century.

After this, Jesus covers the next nineteen centuries in the span of two sentences:

24:12-14 -- Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm till the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

You could preach a sermon on verse 12. Probably fill a book with all the pregnant meanings in those three verses. For now, just notice that Jesus has spent most of his time so far addressing the specific, near-term future of the people to whom He is speaking. After that He gives a brief, "Then a bunch of stuff happens and the world ends" summary.

Now He goes back to the near future of the disciples and early church members:

24:15-16 -- So when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation, spoken of through the prophet Daniel -- let the reader understand -- then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

According to early church records, when the Romans under Titus were approaching Jerusalem the church located in the city did just what this passage told them to do: they ran for it. The record doesn't say exactly why, but apparently they took this passage to mean that just like Antiochus' approach in 168 BC the next approach will mean a repeat of death and mayhem at the hands of the pagans. And this turned out to be the wise interpretation since nearly all the people who stays were killed after a long, horrific siege. Josephus lays out the gory details in his history, The Jewish Wars, I won't go into the carnage except to say that Jesus' statement in verse 21 "for there will be a great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now, and never to be equaled again," was certainly true for His people, the Jews. This was the worst they ever had it.

Time to play with the kids. I'll start with "...wherever there is a carcass" next.

Another religious nut saying the end is nigh... so what?

"There is no sanctuary." -- from the movie 'Logan's Run' (1976)

In Logan's Run, the world's surviving population lives in a dome city long after whatever calamity drove them permanently indoors. The rules of bubble-city life are simple: no one leaves and at thirty you get "renewed" -- an elaborate ceremony where everyone gets to watch you die. Logan is a Sandman, a bubble-city policeman, and gets assigned to find out where the "runners" are going when they try to escape the domed slice of Heaven. His mission is to find this place (called sanctuary) and destroy it.

But there is no sanctuary. The runners were all getting turned into salad by an unfriendly android named Box. Sanctuary was a mass delusion that people wanted to believe so badly that for them, it became real.

Sounds hokey, you say? Maybe a few idiots would believe in some totally fictional place, but never a whole city.

I think it's perfectly plausible. In fact I think the vast majority of people have their own version of sanctuary and they hold to it even in light of the most damning of contrary evidence.

Question: Aren't Christians always saying that the world is ending?

Answer: Yes and no.

Yes, no matter how far back in history one goes, you can always find a few disaffected individuals proclaiming the imminent destruction of the world. Jesus and the apostles actually get accused of this, although as we will see, mostly that's owes to confusion over the whole 'times' concept. Historically, the people walking around with sandwich boards telling us that we are doomed are people who have decided that civilization would be better off gone. For them, sanctuary is the apocalypse. Strange, I know. And yes, this is always a small fringe group. But they can be noisy nonetheless. After all, when you want the world to die then the end times becomes your moment of vindication (we talked about vindicating moments in Why doesn't my life make sense and What are the trumpets) and if you're off your rocker you may want everyone in earshot to know that you're about to be vindicated.

Now for the 'no'.

Most Christians do not take solace in the idea that the world is going to be burned to a cinder... and they never have. But that doesn't mean that sanctuary for this group is the place that Jesus has gone ahead and prepared for them. If you are reading this now you likely fall into this category. Don't beat yourself up over it. There is a simple reason for this; Heaven is a difficult concept to wrap one's brain around. So most of us create a kind of pleasant metaphor for Heaven. It's our sanctuary.

In History isn't what you think it is - part 1, I talked about Emperor Frederick the Second and the poor saps who accepted his fraudulent replacement. Those "sleeping emperor" myths fell out of a belief system called millenarianism -- the idea that God was going to bring about a 1,000 year long party for Christians on this world and that someone like Frederick the Second could usher those good times in. That 1,000 year long holiday was sanctuary for generations of Christians. Life was hard and a 1,000 year long party sounded so good it just had to be the true interpretation.

Millenarianism is virtually gone today. These days, the average Christian makes sanctuary out of the end times prophecies by convincing themselves that the likely time for fulfillment is at the end of their own lives. So, the typical fifty year old Christian with an optimistic outlook will say that the world will end in thirty years, whereas the twenty year old thinks it's more likely that God will come back sixty years from now. Etc. etc.

At the other end of the spectrum there is Michael Schermer, skeptic poster-child, who often mocks Christian eschatology (the notion that the world can any time in the next billion years). They're all deluded, he says. They don't realize the power of science and human ingenuity. But that's his sanctuary. It's a pleasant delusion, nothing else.

A good example of the reality came last week. Last Thursday the UK Guardian ran a story on insiders in the IEA (International Energy Agency) calling attention to the fact that they have been pressured by governments (like ours) to underreport the rate at which oil supplies are dropping. A couple of days later it ran a follow up story lamenting that the news -- which they seemed to think was a blockbuster -- had hardly caused a ripple in the worldwide press. After all, if the IEA is exaggerating the supply numbers for oil, and if our modern civilization and our lives for that matter depend on that oil supply....

But that's the thing about sanctuaries of all stripes; they can seem so believable that anything that intrudes into the fantasy is viewed as craziness. The people at the UK Guardian may have just as well been walking the streets with a sandwich board.

Now, on to Matthew 24.

The end times investment portfolio - part 2

Gold -- We're getting into the better asset classes, but things like gold and silver are still not without their problems. I think gold values will definitely increase over the next few years, especially compared to our dead-in-the-water currency. Gold is a safe haven when times get bad. Unfortunately, it's not that much of a safe haven when times get really bad. Desperate countries tend to seize the gold assets of their citizens. Can't happen here, you say? Actually it already has.

On April 5, 1933 during the Great Depression the new President, Franklin D Roosevelt, demanded that everyone surrender their gold assets to the government. Any US citizen found in possession of more than $100 worth of gold coins/bullion was subject to arrest. If and when that happens again gold will only be useful as a trading instrument on the black market. And there you run into another problem. You see, it's difficult to tell gold's karat weight just by looking at it, so black marketeers tend to value pure gold no differently than they do cheaper gold alloys. This means that in the tribulation a handful of pawnshop jewelry will likely be just as valuable as a handful of pure gold coins.

Repayment of debts -- this one will never go out of style. If you are looking for a safe place to put your money, put it into the debts hanging over your head -- car payment, house mortgage, whatever. The current bankruptcy laws in this country are all predicated on the notion that lenders won't go out of business if a few of their creditor are not able to repay. In circumstances where that is not the case the government allows lenders to compel creditor repayment with things like debtors prisons. Trust me on this one, being out of debt will be better than being in debt in the near future.

On a related note. I don't feel knowledgeable enough to try and give a countdown to a US financial collapse, however I caught Peter Costa (a financial analyst) on CNBC Thursday giving his prediction; he think the US government will be in bankruptcy 18 months from now.

Food -- This one is tricky. The US currently produces about 50% more food than it consumes. Even if our currency became worthless tomorrow there is no reason to think that our government couldn't cobble together some sort of voucher program by the end of the week. The problem of empty store shelves wouldn't happen here overnight. It would take a year or so. But famine is one of the hallmarks of a "time" and the tribulation will be the worst of the lot... and you can't eat gold.

The US has a spread-out infrastructure that assumes we will be able to transport all that food across the hundreds of miles of state highway. Unfortunately, we import most of our fuel. If Mr. Costa is right and the US begins defaulting on its debts in 18 months then we will have a very difficult time buying foreign oil which will make it awfully tempting for our military to simply take it since we are already there and this will likely cause other nations to.... sorry, this line of thinking is the sort of thing that makes me curl up in a fetal ball and watch Entertainment Tonight until I can convince myself that the biggest problem facing this nation has something to do with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.... Ahh. I feel better already. Man that Kanye West is a jerk.... What were we talking about again?

Buy cans, buy dry foods, buy peanut butter. You want high calories and long shelf life. Yes, I said high calories and I don't care what your BMI is. Don't worry, we may all be going on a diet together before too long.

Firearms -- The Biblical prescription to "turn the other cheek" is not a call to pacifism. For the ancient Jews a slap on the cheek was an act of provocation. Jesus was telling his listeners not to be provoked into a fight. When it came to the fights themselves, they didn't settle matters with their fists (hardly anyone did back when a broken hand could mean a permanent disability). No, the Jews settled fights the same way everyone did in the ancient middle east: with knives. We usually translate the word as "sword" and Jesus actually has his disciples take stock of how many weapons they are carrying (Luke 22 36:38). They had enough to fight off bandits and that seemed to be the emphasis.

Bandit attacks and general lawlessness are endemic in countries during economic collapse. If you have anyone that you do not want to see kidnapped (the big thing in post-collapse Argentina) then I would recommend you own a firearm and a substantial amount of ammunition. Learn how to use it. Also buy a cleaning kit.

The tribulation is going to be a gun fight. I wouldn't recommend bringing a knife to it.

Miscellaneous -- Camping equipment, a stock of any medicines you might need, wine keeps forever and hard liquors become useful as medicinals and trading goods.

Yourself -- skills, abilities, and areas of knowledge. Learn to forage (yes, there are edible plants where you live). Learn to knit. Anything that could make you less reliant on civilization.

Property -- In each of the last three "times" the best predictor of survival was the ability to pack up, leave civilization such as it was, and flee to the countryside until the hardest of the hard times had passed. This is the one ace that a Bill Gates might have up his sleeve that still wouldn't put him at an advantage over the average Amish person, but would probably make him more prepared for the hard times than you and me.

If you are in the financial position to buy land in the countryside, preferably with a stand of fruit and nut trees nearby, as well as access to clean water, then I envy you.

Seek ye first -- I saved the best for last, and this one we can all do: invest in relationships with others and with your creator. Not only is it the only investment that pays dividends in the life to come, but it also pays off in this one as well. Others) Whatever you know, whatever you have, we are still -- all of us -- going to find ourselves lacking something when the times get truly difficult. It would be nice then if a few other people could still stand the sight of you. God) in my opinion the most important attribute in a survival situation, right above 'high pain threshold' and 'flexible mindset' is the all-important 'reason to go on living'. God gives purpose, don't forget Him and don't succumb to bitterness just because your life suddenly isn't going the way you planned it.

Next post: but aren't people always saying that the world is ending? Why is now different?

The end times investment portfolio - part 1

The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful. -- Matthew 13:22.

We tend to think of wealth as a panacea, a genie in a bottle that can give us our every desire upon command. But when you think about it, wealth is really only good at providing two things -- comfort and status. If you're wealthy enough, you can hire others to do all the things you don't want to do, you can get the best health care, and always be warm and comfortable. You can also buy the sorts of things that have no real value except to set you apart from the masses. For example, a Bentley automobile hardly does anything that a Honda can't, but it provides the status that comes with being a person that can afford a Bentley.

Here's my "deceitfulness of wealth" blog quiz:

Question: who is richer, Bill Gates or some random Amish person riding around in a horse drawn carriage, tilling a field by hand, and living in a house heated only with a fireplace and wood-burning stove?

Think about it....

It's Bill Gates of course. Come on. That was easy. Okay now, what if the power goes out? Now who's richer? Still Bill Gates you say? Still easy?

Not this time.

This is the deceitfulness of wealth. Your mind tricks you into thinking that money equals power, true control over one's environment, but it doesn't. What we commonly think of as wealth is really only useful under a narrow set of optimal conditions. Here in America, we have lived at the top of the world's food chain for the last century or so, and have therefore lived our entire lives in that narrow set of optimal summer. We think that's how it's always going to be because we've never known anything else. We are -- I'm sorry to say -- tragically wrong.

Here's the answer to our earlier question: if the power goes out (and it's when, not if, but I'm not in an especially dark mood today so I'll stick with if) Bill Gates will have nothing left but his name. Seriously. His only hope would be that people considered him special enough due to his success in the old world that they would protect him from the new one.

But he would still have money, wouldn't he? No, like everyone else, his "wealth" is largely bound up in cash/stock/etc. Things that have no intrinsic value. But what if he stockpiled food and water and such? Then he would have to have the skills and abilities necessary to keep others from coming and taking those. Couldn't he get other people to protect it for him? Probably not. In a world of order all it takes is cash to gather a following. In a world of disorder it takes something else entirely. Bill Gates doesn't strike me as the sort of person who could muster a following through sheer force of personality.

So what was the point of that maudlin exercise?

Just this: the things that you have been taught to believe are worthwhile goals -- a big house in the suburbs, a bank account flush with cash, "financial freedom", are just the sort of things that will have little or no value in our future. Let's take them one at a time. Starting with the worst....


Bonds -- NO!


Cash -- keep a few hundred in your house somewhere and a few thousand in a bank account. The money in the house is in case the government declares a "bank holiday" and shuts down financial institutions for a few days or even weeks. The money in the bank will give you a little buffer in case you lose your job. Beyond that, cash is probably the second worst place you can store your assets. I can't think of a single historical example where a debt-riddled nation defended the value of its own currency. The governments use inflation to pay off those debts. The inflation helps them, but hurts you. But then you didn't really think they had your best interest at heart, did you? The dollar will continue to lose value. One day, possibly soon, it will collapse.

Oh, and while we are on the subject, FDIC insured will become a meaningless term in the future. The account the FDIC used to pay bank clients for money they lost when their banks went belly up was virtually empty at the end of 2008. At the moment the US is using all sorts of shenanigans to keep repaying clients of the ever-increasing number of bank failures. It's working so far. It won't last forever. That's why if you are going to put your money in bonds you may as well throw it all into a blender and hit the 'puree' switch.

Stocks -- If you are more than ten years away from retirement the odds that you will ever see a single penny of your IRA or 401K approaches zero. As early as last spring congress was already considering a proposal to seize retirement accounts and replace them with government IOU's. The sticking point was how to do it without crashing the stock market. If it happens it will cause riots, but we're still in the early stages of this thing and there's no telling what will happen when our legislators get desperate enough.

Stocks may actually be a good investment in the short term. The problem is that they every bit as doomed as cash over the long haul. Short term, all the cash that the US and other debt-strapped countries are printing has to go somewhere. Even government backed bonds return a negative number against inflation, meaning that stocks may be viewed as a better investment vehicle... and could have a nice run over the next few years. The trick is like winning at black jack table in a casino; when do you cash in your chips? You know the house is going to win in the end and you're going to go home wearing a barrel with suspenders. So what do you do?

One thing to realize: stocks are very much like cash in that they have virtually no intrinsic value. In theory, a "shareholder" is supposed to have a say in the running of the company. In reality, companies are run by a board of trustees who could care less what happens to the poor saps holding the company's stock. You need look no further than to the high profile bankruptcies of the last two years for proof. When Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch died (oh, I'm sorry, I'm suppose to say, "were restructured") just to name two, even though the companies continued on in different forms the shareholders were always hung out to dry.

My personal choice here has been to play a group of alternative energy stocks, hoping for a vain attempt to get off of the fossil stuff before the things get really bad. At some point I will have to sell out and turn whatever cash is left into something that has real value. I'm not kidding about the black jack example; this is gambling, pure and simple. And just like every smart gambler knows, you don't play with anything you can't afford to lose.

Next post I'll go on to the better asset classes.

Damascus - the city of the future

See, Damascus will no longer be a city, but will become a heap of ruins. -- Isaiah 17:1

Skeptics point this out as exhibit A when attempting to disprove Biblical prophecy. This has never happened. There is no event in world history that even comes close to woe Isaiah pronounced upon Damascus around 700 BC. And that's a problem.

You see, the total number of Old Testament prophecies comes to around 2,000. Virtually every one has been fulfilled. But it only takes one. The Bible holds itself to the standard of perfection. Scribes may have goofed in a few typos and an ancient word or two may make translate tricky, but if a prophecy is just flat wrong than the whole edifice of Biblical teaching comes crashing down. Seriously. And this prophecy was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong....

Well, it would wrong be if you accepted one little precondition as being true. You have to say that the prophecy must come true in "ancient times" for it to be wrong. Why shouldn't you say that since pretty much all the other prophecies were fulfilled way back when? Let's look at another prophecy that illustrates the point.

In Jeremiah 50 we are told that the mighty walls of Babylon (three hundred feet tall, two hundred feet thick, the largest wall ever constructed around a city) were going to be completely destroyed. He wrote that around 500 BC. It didn't come to pass until 850 years later, when the Roman Emperor Julian had his men disassemble the wall so rebels could no longer use it as a stronghold.

Now, we still consider the 4th century AD as "ancient times" so skeptics leave this one alone. And they sort of have to since it really is quite a coincidence. But I personally can't think of any reason why Isaiah would have considered himself to be living in "ancient time" or why somebody like Jeremiah would have considered 850 years in the future to be any different than 2850 years in the future. We are the ones who slapped on the label "ancient times". Not them.

No, the destruction of Damascus did not take place in "ancient time". It's still to come. It's going to happen soon. And you seriously do not want to be in the area when this one takes place.

A few observations:

1) verse 1 -- "heap of ruins" is pretty self-explanatory.

2) verse 6 -- "yet some gleanings will remain", gleanings were the crops that were overlooked by the crop pickers. This says that their will be a few survivors living in the ruins.

3) verse 7 -- "in that day men will look to their maker", their are no atheists in foxholes. Not many pagans either. Remember that the key difference between paganism and Christianity is that paganism is an attempt to control, or harness the power of the metaphysical world whereas Christianity is a release of control to the metaphysical Creator. Why no pagans? Because you release control when you're desperate.

4) verse 11 -- "yet the harvest will be as nothing in the day of disease and incurable pain." This is a bizarre construction to find in an ancient manuscript. There was nothing in Isaiah's day that ruined crops as well as cities, that caused "disease and incurable pain". That's a product of our modern age. And there is only one thing that will do it -- a nuclear warhead.

Now fast forward to the modern day. Damascus is the capital and chief city of modern day Syria. Syria is currently working on developing nuclear weapons so that it can be the military equal of its mortal enemy, Israel. And at some point -- probably not too far in the future -- Damascus is going to be reduced to rubble; a city populated by a few heavily radiated survivors. The world will end by fire, but this prophecy tells us that selected areas will have fire dropped on them even before the final barrage. There will be partial destruction before there is complete destruction.

Next post, I hit a few miscellaneous topics before looking at Matthew 24. The first topic: finances, where should I invest my money in a world where time is running out?

The prohecies of Daniel - part 7

My favorite historian is a Frenchman by the name of Fernand Braudel. At the end of his magnum opus Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 which was published in 1979, he made a series of predictions as to where he thought the European economy was headed. Every single one of them were wrong.

More recently, my November '09 copy of Scientific American came in the mail with a cover that reads: "A plan for a Sustainable Future, How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030." In the article, the authors give a lightly detailed description of a zero fossil fuel world. The kick off date for this little utopia is next month when world leaders meet in Copenhagen for an energy summit.

I give the above examples to illustrate a point: if you are going to make predictions about the future and, unlike Daniel, you don't have angels feeding you inside information, then you need to at least be conversant in two areas -- history and science.

Braudel's knowledge of human behavior was good, but his science was lacking, particularly in the area of geology. he didn't know that Western Europe lacked the geological resources to compete in an expanding, global economy. First, Soviet Russia collapsed because its most valuable export (oil) became historically cheap when the Saudi's glutted the market in the late 80's. Then the North Sea started running short of a lot sooner than many thought and now Western Europe is becoming an energy slave to a suddenly resurgent (but no longer Soviet)Russia. Still, Braudel's predictions were the definition of steely eyed perfection compared to the Sci Am article. Mr. Braudel died in 1985, but if he hadn't, the laughter brought on by a pair of scientists telling him that there was any chance of a binding resolution coming out of Copenhagen -- and of the participant nations actually abiding by said resolution -- probably would have killed him.

Science is necessary because one needs to know how all this material stuff in the observable world around us interacts. History comes in handy because human beings tend not to obey all the obvious laws of cause and effect and just because it's in our long term best interests to cut our fossil fuel usage doesn't mean that it's going to happen. History draws a rather nasty trend line on that one.

The reason I bring this up now is that we have come to the "half a time", the period of decline in church influence from which there is no rebound -- not on this earth anyway. Let's sum up:

The first time involved a genocidal campaign or three from pagan Rome, but the more significant decline came when the pagans were forced to call themselves Christians and Christianity's identity was watered down with pagan beliefs. The second and third "times" are so close to each other in chronology that if you drew them out on a time line the two circles would actually overlap. Christians get a little too cosy with Celtic paganism, kill each other, kill pagans, kill each other some more. At the end of the third time Christianity sees itself as two separate entities(Catholic and Protestant) and both of these entities looked to increase their number of followers. Now, if you think that competition between the two sides had nothing to do with following push to send missionaries out over the entire world and that it was purely agape love that drove the process, well... God bless your tender heart. The good news is that the worldwide mission movement was still fairly early in the process when Catholics and Protestants called off their hostilities and stopped fighting each other in every city not named Belfast. By the 1800's the politics were on the back burner, and missions because people just really need Jesus became something of a reality.

Then came Darwin.

It's not like he created materialism, of course. But when you convert two thousand years of history into a few blog posts you have to make do with broad brush strokes; Darwin was the icon. By the mid 1800's, when worldwide missions were just beginning to hit their stride, another movement was hitting something else. They usually don't call themselves materialists -- sounds too negative -- but the stated belief that there is nothing outside of the material world, no Heaven, no hell, no spirits, no nothing except what you can see and taste and touch and measure is properly called "materialism".

The last hundred and fifty years in a nutshell: materialism seems to flourish in materially wealthy societies. No surprise there. When you have it in abundance, you tend to focus on it. Just in the last decade, the materialist community in the United States is taking on an ugly tone towards us religious folk. Go to a bookstore and you will likely find an entire section of books devoted to "debunking" Christianity. Many of these books do not look at us kindly. We get compared to Nazis, parasites, anything and everything unintelligent. Turn on the tube and you can watch Christians painted as weirdo-freaks on just about every major station. Materialism and Christianity have been staring each other down for the four hundred years -- staring without blinking for the century and a half -- and now, snarling for the last decade. The only thing left is for Christianity to absorb materialist thinking the same way it did Greco-Roman and Celtic Paganism. And yes, it has already started.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine railed against our church's decision to change to name of its Bible study classes to "lifegroups", thus removing anything from the name that sounds religiously kooky (it's on the linked site, downtoJesus.com). Now this is a fairly harmless if somewhat annoying example of just what happened in earlier times. The church tried to appeal to the dominant culture. It did... and managed to water itself down to such a degree that it the result was a whole flock of people, now affiliated as "Christians" who were still subservient to the dominant cultural belief system. You can probably think of a hundred ways that the current church is pandering to the materialists, and maybe a few ways in which it has incorporated materialist thinking.

It won't end well.

As for the next spat of Christians dying in mass? That's already started too. As to when it goes global, that's where the science comes in. In the next post we leave Daniel and let Isaiah show us what the city of the future looks like.