"Heard a Rumor That the End is Near"

I believe it was in the late 1980s that I first visited New York City. I don’t remember who all was there, but I do remember that Mom and my aunt were with me. As we were going down one of the infamously busy streets, we passed a woman who was handing out flyers while saying in a loud ominous voice: “Jesus is coming back in 1992!”


I remember that because when 1992 rolled around, though I didn’t tell anyone until years later, there were nights that I went to sleep wondering if I would wake up in my bed or in Heaven. I had heard that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thess. 5:2), and, as young people often do, I felt I was “too young to die.”

On the 1996 Newsboys album “Take Me To Your Leader” is a song called “Lost the Plot.” It’s a haunting description of the apathy that seems to have permeated Christian culture in the West over the course of my lifetime:

When you come back again
Would you bring me something from the fridge?
Heard a rumor that the end is near
But I just got comfortable here.
Sigh.
Let’s be blunt.
I’m a little distracted.
What do you want?

Headaches and bad faith
Are all that I’ve got.
First I misplaced the ending
Then I lost the plot.

You can read the full lyrics here.

I was reminded of that song as I read a story in today’s London Telegraph:

WikiLeaks: tension in the Middle East and Asia has 'direct potential' to lead to nuclear war

Tension in the Middle East and Asia has given rise to an escalating atomic arms and missiles race which has “the direct potential to lead to nuclear war,” leaked diplomatic documents disclose.

Rogue states are also increasing their efforts to secure chemical and biological weapons, and the means to deploy them, leaving billions in the world's most densely populated area at risk of a devastating strike, the documents show.

Reading this story, one would wonder if Julian Assange was helping to recreate the alarm that was reportedly caused by the 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” After all, who can forget the iconic images of Fat Man and Little Boy being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, respectively, or the young Vietnamese girl whose village had just been attacked by napalm? Or, for a more recent example, the attack on Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen that earned his cousin the nickname “Chemical Ali”?

Before you start to panic, let me remind you of the words Jesus spoke 2,000 years ago:

“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” (Matthew 24:6-8, emphasis added)

When it’s the end of the world as we know it, how will you feel?