As I was finishing off my Saturday by catching up on some reading on my Kindle, I came across an interesting article in today’s Arizona Republic, that originated from a writer at the Washington Post.
There has been much hype and excitement over the year 2012 in recent months. The news channels are running stories, the web is abuzz, even our own web site has written a few posts. It is important to remember that if you are a student of the Bible that the timing for the events of the last days are spelled out in great detail in the Scriptures. All of the events that are said to happen by 2o12 seem to be in conflict with what the Bible has to say.
Currently, our greatest sign that we are in the final generation before Jesus comes for His church, is that Israel is back in their own land again in fulfillment of Ezekiel 37. We really could not begin the prophetic time clock until this event happened, as all other last day prophetic events center on this single happening in history. Now that Israel is back in her own land again, this sets the stage for all of the other events spoken of in the Bible to come to pass.
The next event that has no specific date of fulfillment is of course the Rapture of the Church. Literally “no man knows the day or the hour” of this event, but we do know by the times and seasons that Jesus’ appearing is very near. While we are watching for the return of our Lord, the world scene is readying itself for the one world ruler whom the Bible calls “The Beast”. He will unite the world under one government, one military, one economic system, and one religion.
I personally believe that because Jesus’ appearing is eminent, that this world ruler is already on the world stage and about to make his appearance if not already. It appears from the scripture that he will make his appearance politically at first, then militarily later as he uses force to bring into subjection all of those governments in resistance to his power. An aligning of the southern nations of the former Russian republic will be a force to attack Israel either just prior to the Rapture, or directly thereafter.
When this attack occurs as described in Ezekiel 38 and 39, the world, including the United States will not move against this attack militarily, but will file only protests against the action. The reasoning behind why the United States will be precluded from military action is due possibly to the Rapture having recently occurred and the United States Government being in chaos and disarray. Imagine 100 million citizens suddenly disappearing from the U.S. the confusion and mayhem that will follow.
For information purposes and a few giggles, I include below this post from today’s news for your consideration.
“That stuff about 2012? It’s Not going to happen“
Washington Post, October 17, 2009
Joel Achenbach
The notion that 2012 heralds the end of time has something to do with a mysterious Planet X that will supposedly hurtle into, or perhaps merely perturb, Earth. Also, there might be geomagnetic storms, a pole reversal, and a new-found unsteadiness in the planet’s crustal plates. All of that, or variations thereof, can be studied in depth in scores of books now jostling for eschatological primacy with such titles as “Apocalypse 2012,” “The World Cataclysm in 2012″ and “How To Survive 2012.”
This is no joke to David Morrison, senior scientist for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. He has counted 200 different books for sale about 2012. As the author of an online feature called Ask an Astrobiologist, he has received nearly 1,000 e-mails from people who think something dire is about to befall the planet. One teenager wrote to Morrison that he’d rather commit suicide than see the world destroyed. Many of the letters, Morrison said, presume that the government is covering up the imminent catastrophe. Letters begin, “I know you can’t tell me the truth, but … “
In an article published in the latest issue of Skeptic magazine, Morrison explains that the 2012-as-Doomsday meme represents a convergence of New Age mysticism and Hollywood opportunism. It is, in short, a hoax.
The idea draws some of its inspiration from the Mayan “long count” calendar. The date of Dec. 21, 2012, marks the end of a 394-year cycle of time known to the Maya as Baktun 13. But there is no reason to think that the Maya believed this was the end of the world as we know it.
Another inspiration, apparently, is author Zecharia Sitchin, whose books detail a cosmogony featuring the mysterious planet Nibiru, unknown to modern science but plain as day to ancient Sumerians. This planet, readers are told, has a highly elliptical orbit around the sun and enters the inner solar system every 3,600 years. A collision between Nibiru and another planet supposedly created both Earth and the asteroid belt. There also were ancient astronauts from Nibiru who came to Earth and created modern humans.
Ensuring that no bad idea goes unexploited, Sony Pictures has leaped into the mix with a $200 million blockbuster, “2012,” coming out on Friday the 13th of November. The trailers show the entire planet coming unglued. The movie doesn’t explain why, exactly, but we do see that Los Angeles falls into the sea. A tsunami obliterates a Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas. The dome of St. Peter’s tumbles into the square and smashes a throng of Christians. An aircraft carrier crashes into the White House during a big wave.
The director is Roland Emmerich, promulgator of cinematic calamity in such flicks as “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” This time, what he throws at Earth makes each of his previous efforts look like a Merchant Ivory film.
In promoting the movie, Sony has used the marketing slogan “2012: Search for It.” Someone Googling “2012″ will find plenty of doom-saying. Sony has set up a fake Web site for something called the Institute for Human Continuity -www.instituteforhumancontinuity.org – which uses scientific-sounding language to detail the upcoming shredding, torching and obliterating of the world from so many directions it makes your head spin (“large amounts of solar radiation will bombard the Earth and heat up the molten, semi-liquid layers beneath the lithosphere, thus allowing the crust to shift more easily”).
The reality about the universe is that it is, in fact, wild and woolly, with all manner of exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, not to mention comets that plunge toward the sun and rogue asteroids that just maybe have Earth’s number. But it is simultaneously a fact that Earth is in a quiescent part of the galaxy, a rural place where not a whole lot happens in any given epoch. Cosmologically, we’re in North Dakota.
As with all pseudo-science, the real science provides a platform from which the human imagination soars to great heights of irrationality. For example, although there is no Planet X, or Nibiru, there is, indeed, a dwarf planet beyond Pluto called Eris. It’s in a stable orbit and is not coming anywhere near Earth. If there was a Nibiru heading our way, one of the 100,000 amateur astronomers on Earth would have spotted it long ago.
“You have to be pretty dumb not to realize that Nibiru is a no-show,” Morrison says.
Morrison calls this sort of thing “cosmophobia.” His efforts to head off 2012 paranoia is ironic in a sense: He has been a pioneer in the study of near-Earth objects that might potentially pose a hazard to the planet. In recent years, astronomers have mapped all the asteroids near Earth that are 2 miles in diameter or larger, Morrison said. Nothing seen so far poses an imminent threat to Earth.
