The End of the World

Dear Weekly Readers!  

God’s Peace be with you!   Here is an interesting article sent by a guest author.  Many of you may have heard of the predictions of the end of the world in December.   Well, as we know it did not happen.  

Let us turn to God’s Word on this topic, as we should with whatever questions we have!  

May God Bless your week!  John R.

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT THE “END OF THE WORLD”

The “end of the world” has been, and still is, an interest and fascination of many people throughout the ages.  Prediction and prophecies have all proved false because they all do not take God into account.

 

A current “buzz” that had some people disturbed was the prediction of the Mayan culture, or religion.  The Maya are a native Central American people, primarily in Mexico, Guatemala, and the northern part of Belize (formerly known as British Honduras). The Mayan culture arose in 250 AD, but its founder is unknown.  It flourished until about 900 AD, and continued to thrive in various places until the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s.  At its peak, the total population may have reached 2 million people, the majority of whom lived in modern-day Guatemala.  Their religion was characterized by 1) the worship of nature gods (especially the gods of sun, rain and corn), 2) a priestly class, 3) the importance of astronomy and astrology, 4) rituals of human sacrifice, and 5) the building of elaborate pyramidical temples.

What caused some renewed interest about “end time” events  these days is the Mayan Calendar. The Mayan’s believed there are five periods of time or “recreations of the earth”.  These units were used in the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which calculated that time elapsed from a zero date set at August 11, 3114 BC, which they determined was the dawn of the last creation period.  During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the current era of the Long Count Calendar.  The Maya wrote that date, which preceded their civilization by thousands of years, as Day Zero.  The Mays calendar doesn't end in 2012, as some have said, and the ancients never viewed that year as the time of the end of the world, archaeologists say.  But December 21, 2012, (give or take a day) was nonetheless momentous to the Maya. Anthony Aveni, a Maya expert and archaeoastronomer at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, wrote that it is the time when “the largest grand cycle in the Mayan calendar—1,872,000 days or 5,125.37 years—overturns and a new cycle begins.”  In December 2012 the lengthy era ends and the complicated, cyclical calendar will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning another enormous cycle.  "The idea is that time gets renewed, that the world gets renewed all over again—often after a period of stress.  (Aveni, author of The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.  It is this that has caused some speculation as to what might happen on this day. 

Scientists have rejected the Mayan prediction because no planets are aligned to cause any natural catastrophes, no meteor is racing towards the earth to cause a collision knocking the earth out of its orbit, and the magnetic force of the sun and moon is not strong enough to alter the earth’s magnetic field.

Both the Mayans and the scientists have not considered God’s creative power and his purpose for mankind in their teaching.  Leave God out of the picture, and you have no picture; only a collection of puzzle pieces that do not fit together.

What does the Bible say about God’s work in nature and for all of mankind?  Right from the first verses of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, we read that God spoke a word, and what he said came into being.  Nine times in Genesis 1, we read:  “God said…´and things came into existence.”  In the first three verse of the Gospel according to St. John, we read:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made..”  A few verses later we are told that Jesus is the Word made flesh (vs. 14).  Christ, the God-Man, is the center of all that is or ever will be.  In Hebews 1:1-3, this is affirmed for it says: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins…”

God in his majestic wisdom devised all the laws of nature by which everything in all the galaxies and solar systems function precisely as he has designed.  God still holds everything together by the word of his power.  This, also, means that God is in control of the time when he will bring everything in the present universe to an end.  He will choose the time.  He will speak the word and it will happen.

When will this happen?  Jesus tells us, “…of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Mt. 24:36)  Why only the Father?  The Apostle Peter gives us a hint in his second epistle.  We read in 3:3-4, that people will become scoffers, “walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?”  Peter give the answer where he writes:  “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”

 

That, my dear friend, is why only the Father knows the time of the end.  God being so merciful, loving, kind, and compassionate, his desire is that all men would repent and be saved.  So be delays the end.  No matter how vile things become for us on earth, he delays to declare his word of final judgment.  Like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11-32), our heavenly Father is a waiting father. 

Though none of us knows when the Father will speak his word in which the world will be destroyed by fire, we all know that “today is the days of salvation, therefore do not harden your heart.”  Our own departure from this world may be sooner than we think.  Repent and believe the Gospel!