How The 21st Century May Become Our Last

Our planet as we know it is in peril

"The time has come for judging the dead,
    and for rewarding your servants the               prophets
and your people who revere your name,
    both great and small—
and for destroying those who destroy the           earth.”

                           -Revelation 11:18 NIV

Warnings about the end of the world have always been a sober part of the Biblical message. At some point our Creator's patience will end and judgment will begin. The earth will be purged of violence and evil and an era of a new heaven (atmosphere) and a new earth ushered in.

Meanwhile, we are hearing all kinds of apocalyptic predictions from secular scholars that echo similar kinds of end time disasters. Here are some of them, each resulting from humanity's addiction to comfort, convenience and excessive consumption:

1. Human activity in the past several decades years alone has accelerated a warming trend on planet earth to an extreme danger point. What had been predicted fifty years ago as the our going through a cooling cycle has instead turned into a warming one. This is contributing to alarming sea level rise, devastating droughts, massive fires, more frequent and more violent storms, and the eventual thawing of Siberian and other Arctic and Antarctic land masses, which in turn will result in the release even more carbon that has been safely stored in a frozen state for millennia.

2. Our clearing of millions of acres of rain forests vital to the health of the planet--all due to our insistence on ever more overconsumption (especially of meat products)--is ongoing and is actually increasing, adding to the danger of ecological disaster.

3. Corporate farming involving large scale poultry, beef and hog production has resulted in the need for using ever more powerful antibiotics to prevent animal diseases--and which enter our food supply. This, along with our over use of antibiotics for our human infections, means there is a greater and greater likelihood of nature creating antibiotic-resistant diseases that could cause a plague of death exceeding that of any in human history.

4. The threat of nuclear war remains an ever present danger. The supply of atomic weapons stockpiled by Russia and the U.S. alone is capable of destroying all life on earth multiple times, and the danger of such a disaster is heightened by our addiction to the kinds of war-making that could all too easily escalate into an all out nuclear holocaust. 

5. Safe and sufficient supplies of water to meet the needs of rapidly growing populations are sure to become a serious problem, especially as drought conditions worsen in more places around the world.

6. Our rivers and oceans are becoming polluted with megatons of plastic and other waste that threaten marine life and the priceless coral reefs that help sustain it. The South China Sea, for example, which provides ten percent of the world's seafood, is near to becoming depleted, with all nations in that area competing to get their share of the fish that remain.

7. We are in ever increasing danger of cyberattacks which could cripple our nation's power supply and its means of production, transportation and communication, and destroy our economy as we know it.

All of this sounds extremely pessimistic, I know, as was the prediction of the prophet Jonah that all of Nineveh would be destroyed, then the home of the world's greatest super power, Assyria. But according to the Biblical account, the city was spared when everyone from the king on down repented of their "evil ways and their violence."  (Jonah 3:6-10)

That, I believe, is our only hope.