One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded struck Japan in March 2011. It was so powerful that it moved the entire planet by shifting its axis over 6 inches and shoving Honshu, the main island of Japan, 13 feet to the east. The tremor was so violent that it actually sped up the rotation of the planet and shortened the length of that day. As one of the most powerful ever recorded, the Tohoku earthquake devastated the region and demolished the Fukushima nuclear plant leading to a deadly release of radioactivity. 18,000 people died or are missing. Fears of a meltdown of Japan’s nuclear power plants wrought by the damage from the quake spiked sales of iodine pills in America. At the same time, bloodshed and violence escalated in Libya and Syria and threatened to rend the shabby dictatorships across the Middle East. Meanwhile bees are mysteriously disappearing and frogs are mutating accompanied by massive die-offs of birds and fish at widely dispersed locations around the world. Mysterious sounds emanating from the heavens and the earth are reported worldwide. And the sale of doomsday bunkers continues to surge. What is going on?
I don’t know any more than you do. But I have some suspicions. To understand what is transpiring we may need to pull our Bibles from those dusty boxes in the attic. I don’t say that lightly because suggesting that we may be witnessing Biblical prophecy unfolding is to risk the sideways glances of friends and neighbors who assume that early onset dementia has blunted one’s faculties. Such prejudices are not without merit based on the folly of misguided date-setters and millenarians who perennially, and incorrectly, predict the end of world.
Before you scoff ask yourself: If we were Noah’s neighbors before the Great Flood would we have recognized the fulfillment of prophecy? Would we have realized the degree of our descent into immorality and ungodliness? Would we have snickered at the lunacy of Noah’s feverish, colossal boat building and scoffed at the seemingly tortured logic that drove him to obsessively assemble pairs of animals and ready his craft for sailing? Would we have continued to deride his faith and piety even as the rains began and the waters rose?
One thing is certain: In the panorama of biblical narrative one factor consistently portends God’s wrath; mankind’s profligate descent into immorality and depravity. To put our present state of affairs into context we need look back only a couple of generations for a revealing moral barometer. For those of us old enough to remember there was a time in America when divorce was less than half the rate it is today. Having a child out of wedlock carried a social stigma. There was very little “recreational drug use” and the everyday participation in the drug ritual was confined to a small, pitiful minority of outcast addicts subsisting on the margins of society.
We remember when you had to learn things in school and teachers cared less about your self-esteem than they did about whether or not you learned math, history and English. There was no such thing as school shootings or predatory teachers bedding their students. And the anarchic jungles that pass for many classrooms today were inconceivable given pervasive discipline accompanied by a liberal use of corporal punishment by teachers and administrators; discipline and punishment that were supported and often similarly meted out at home. More importantly, parents then were the adults in a familial relationship rather than abdicating their responsibilities by trying to be an indulgent friend to their children.
The “we” I refer to are the aging baby-boomers; those of us in or approaching our 6th decade of life. As children we lived through the Cold War in the ‘50s and ‘60s and endured the ludicrous “duck and cover” drills that we were assured would protect us from being vaporized by the detonation of a Soviet thermonuclear warhead. More significantly for the portentous present our generation witnessed the greatest moral convulsions in American society. As teenagers in the ‘60s we lived, and many of us participated in, the ground swell of liberal trends manifested in extremes of moral relativism and such self-indulgence as free love, unbridled drug use and an overall hedonistic lack of personal responsibility. In the decades since our nation’s left turn in morality has created a pockmarked cultural landscape littered with the detritus of decency, probity, and righteousness. Liberalism grew into a social, traitorous cultural and political force that ultimately bullied our political leadership into a disastrous, ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. More darkly, liberalism was the mechanism behind human catastrophes like the destruction of the black family under the misguided socialist effort to forge “the Great Society” and institute income redistribution under the guise of welfare.
The bible tells us “You will know them by their fruit.” Among the fruit of liberal madness are a chronic urban underclass made up of racial and ethnic minorities plagued by hopelessness, addiction and violence. Liberalism’s moral relativism also stoked the now-insatiable demand for mind-altering substances that saps human potential, destroys individuals and families, corrupts our culture and makes criminals of recreational drug users who are often otherwise law-abiding citizens. And the most evil manifestation, the poster child for evil incarnate, euphemistically labeled “pro-choice,” is legalized abortion that has killed more than 50 Million babies since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
Our freefall to the depths of immorality has a hand maiden in liberalism. But liberalism is not the cause. It is merely a tool; a manifestation of a much more destructive force. A force whose very existence we feared only two generations ago but now widely deny in our headlong rush to embrace all that is secular hedonism. That force is evil.
Liberalism brooks no acknowledgement of evil in the nature of man. A case in point is the European Union and the broader effort to forge a New World Order. The dangerously naive theory is that a New World Order is a panacea that will magically get humanity working in harmony and unison to usher in unparalleled peace and prosperity while avoiding the next otherwise inevitable catastrophic world conflict.
The utopian impulse for one world government casts a long shadow. A staple of the liberal agenda for more than a century, the catholicon of one world government is supported by the panoply of secular progressive notables including the late liberal media icon Walter Cronkite. When it was pointed out that one world government was contrary to God’s plan for mankind he mocked the entire concept stating, “I’m glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.”
The biblical parallel to this nostrum is the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis. A superficial understanding of this story implies that God’s anger over man’s rebellion to his authority stemmed from efforts to unify the humanity of the generations following the Great Flood. The Babylonians strove to create an ideal state – their version of a new world order – predicated on a visionary system of religio-political and social perfection by speaking a single language and attempting to build a tower to reach the heavens.
A more nuanced understanding is based on God’s omniscience regarding the base instincts of man and the machinations of the source of evil – Satan. That understanding acknowledges evil’s latent and manifold influence on His creation. God frustrated the Babylonians by casting humanity to the four corners of the Earth, confusing their language and instituting tribal diversity. He knew that one world government creates the conditions for a synergistic increase in the power and depth of mankind’s dark impulses leading to unrestrained evil. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do (Genesis 11:6). We don’t have to look far to see the evidence, albeit on a smaller, regional scale. It is manifested in the murder of tens of millions during Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s killing fields. In spite of these lessons the symbols of the European Union include a headquarters building modeled on the Tower of Babel and a statue in front of their administrative building of a woman riding a mythical beast based on End of the Age symbolism described in the Book of Revelation.
The ancient pagan urge did not die at Babylon. It has coursed amid other hidden Satanic trends all these centuries to reemerge in new wraps as the Purpose-Driven Church, the New Age Movement, and the Emerging Church. These heretical doctrines are steeped in occultism and pantheism and are leading millions away from the salvation of Jesus Christ by substituting mysticism and contemplative spirituality for Christ’s shed blood at the Cross. There are an estimated forty million adherents to the Emerging Church in the U.S. who subscribe to the belief that Jesus Christ isn’t the only way to Heaven; that Allah of Islam is the same as Krishna of Hinduism, who is the same as God of Christianity. In their view, many religions lead to Heaven.
Are we the contemporary incarnation of Noah’s neighbors? I don’t know. But I do know that the human condition appears right for the outpouring of God’s wrath. In his famous “Evil Empire” speech in 1983, the always prescient Ronald Reagan framed today’s moral battle: “The struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.”
The evidence that the final pieces are falling into place for the end of the Age of Grace leaps from the daily headlines. I hope to share with you some of that evidence in the coming weeks. Those of us blessed with the gift of spiritual discernment via the Holy Spirit may feel a tug of nostalgia for what is passing. That is why it is important to keep a proper perspective by remembering that every distressing event that occurs moves us ever closer to our blessed hope in the Rapture. We are the generation of humanity that will witness some of the most spectacular miracles ever seen as the final chapter of the history of mankind plays out before us. With that end our omnibenevolent God will cleanse His creation of the stain of Satan’s evil and restore us to a proper relationship with Him. Maranatha!
Dean T. Olson
Omaha