On our car radio today, we heard a commercial grimly warning of “three events” that will soon take place, that will destroy the world as we know it, cutting off the food supply and killing off “nine out of ten people” in America. The advertiser never got around to telling us what those three events will be: only that they’ll be catastrophically horrible. But if you send him a bunch of money, he’ll tell you how to survive them.
Survive to do what? Emerge from your shelter into the toxic rubble that used to be civilization, and maybe get killed by some Hell’s Angels types who want your stuff?
I don’t know about you, but it’s been years since I outgrew those Mad Max fantasies. Why would I even want to survive the total destruction of my entire way of life?
There’s a lot of apocalyptic imagining going on these days, much of it in literature pitched to “Young Adults”–The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. Well, all right, look at what Democrat and liberal government have done to places like Detroit, Camden, NJ, and Gary, Indiana. But even that falls way short of these dark fantasies.
In none of these do we find a suggestion that a sovereign God controls the fate of His creation and can, at will, intervene decisively in history. It’s all “We’re going to completely mess things up, and then we’ll buckle down and fix it”–whether it’s Global Warming, chemtrails, World War III, whatever. The Bible proclaims “The earth is the Lord’s,” but these doom scenarios say “No, no–the earth is man’s, to wreck or to restore as we see fit.” And apparently the Lord, if He exists at all, will do neither good nor evil. Instead, we get some guy who has all the secrets of survival at his fingertips, and will share them with you for a price.
It is up to God to shake the earth, to preserve the things that cannot be shaken, to establish a new heaven and a new earth from which sin and death shall be excluded. God takes His time, and God is patient: because “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” (2 Peter 3:9).
Shall we trust in Him, or trust in man?
God is not a man, that He should lie (Numbers 23:19).
Or, to look at it another way, Man is not God, that he should tell the truth.
Hear, hear!! You have just spoken my very thoughts in this one. In fact, I was asked to do a one-pager by a man who owns a bookstore here, and it was to be on this subject. My words were almost identical to those you just published here. People are so deceived, so ignorant and futile. I am very grateful that my life is in HIS hands.
I’d love to read what you wrote, Erlene.
I’ll see if I have saved it- and how do I send it to you if I find it?
If you ever meet an umbrella salesman, you will find that they love to talk about rain.
There’s an old sales tactic of alerting a prospect to a potential risk that they had not been aware of, then making that risk seem imminent and offering your product as a way of preventing the bad thing from happening.
Back in the days of encyclopedia salesmen, they would try to chat up parents about their children’s future and the need for them to get a better education. The conversation would then flow, carefully goaded so that an unwary parent would be convinced that without some advantage, their children would be doomed to a future of hard labor . . . but a set of encyclopedias would change all of that and for just “pennies a day” you children will have access to all sorts of advantages and end up with a brilliant future.
If they can get the prospect to follow them to that point, then pen will be put to paper and a set of encyclopedias will be sold, on the spot. I’ve heard this called “hurt and rescue” or words to that effect, and it’s one of the oldest tactics in the book. Setup a possible source of harm, make it seem an immediate threat; then offer a source of rescue from which you will profit.
Sounds a bit Hegelian. He would be proud.
It seems whenever a movie is made about the future it is gloom & doom. I like your line: ” And apparently the Lord, if He exists at all, will do neither good nor evil.” That is the MSM approach to reporting the news – that God Who created all things and sustains all things moment by moment has nothing to do with anything. The Governor of NJ, Phil Murphy, seems hell-bent on bringing in the brave new world as he signs legislation that allows transgenders to amend their birth certificates, and they don’t even need to prove they have had sex change surgery. Murphy to God: “Take that You irrelevant Being.”
Please do not remind me of how deeply the people of my state disgraced themselves by electing that jidrool. I really don’t know how we could have ever sunk to that.