Well... here we are in the year 2012, the notorious year of many doomsday predictions – most based on a faulty understanding of the calendars of the Mayans. It is true that December 21, 2012 marks the end of the 5,125-year-long Mayan Long Count calendar, but what does that mean? I heard Leonzo Barreno, a Mayan timekeeper, comment in bemusement that no one asks the Mayans what they think of all this end-of-the-calendar concern. According to Mr. Barreno, who immigrated to Canada from Guatemala where he was trained by Mayan elders to read the ancient calendars, December 21, 2012 marks the end of the current calendar cycle and the start of a new one – something that has happened before (according to the elders this is the fifth time it's happened). This beginning of the calendar cycle is something to celebrate, not fear – but that doesn’t sell well in Hollywood.
It seems like for all of my life I have been living under various doomsday threats. I was a kid at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms build up. Watching movies like Planet of the Apes (the first one) and Dr. Strangelove, reading books like A Canticle for Leibowitz all added to the sense of the inevitability of nuclear annihilation. Throughout my entire life the Doomsday Clock has fluctuated between 12 and 3 minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock, maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is estimated to be to global disaster. I remember that the year I got married the clock was set at 3 minutes to midnight, and at that time there were people who actually questioned the wisdom of getting married and having children given the imminent end of the world.
But nuclear holocaust was not the only end-times scenario predicted during my life, there has also been endless speculation about the Bible’s predictions of the coming end of the world. Things really got rolling in the 1970 with Hal Lindsey’s bestselling book The Late, Great Planet Earth. My teenage years were filled with music like Larry Norman’s I Wish We’d All Been Ready and awful religious movies like A Thief in the Night. I was worried enough about the Rapture in those years that once when my parents hadn’t returned from a trip to Calgary when I was expecting them I became frightened, thinking they’d been taken in the rapture and I’d been left behind! Was I ever relieved (and a little embarrassed) when their car pulled into the garage.
For the past 4 decades we were told by these self-proclaimed Bible prophecy experts that the end of the world, the second coming of Christ, was just around the corner. They put together charts explaining the various stages of their end times scenarios, quoting passages from the Book of Revelation as their primary source. They seemed so certain, and so knowledgeable, and it was easy to get sucked into their prophecy predictions for doomsday. I had friends who were certain that Harold Camping’s predictions were accurate – the first time around. In September 1994 they gathered their family together to wait for the end to come. It didn’t. Harold Camping, rather than apologizing for his false prophecy instead made a new prediction (and wrote some more books). Last year both May 21st, and October 21st came and went without Mr. Camping's predicted end arriving.
All this fear-mongering has certainly sold a lot of merchandise. At the same time it has distracted people from the extensive environmental damage we continue to perpetrate while ignoring the warning signs (there is a doomsday scenario actually worth our time and attention). Why do we want to know when the end of the world is going to be? Is it a quest for control, for power over our destiny? Or is it just fascination with the negative (like our propensity for preferring bad news over good)?
Prediction
While preparing for a Bible Study a few weeks ago I realized that if one was to read the Bible literally (as many of these end-times prophets claim to do) then the Bible itself provides us with a very different possibility for the end of the world. Here is my doomsday prediction:
In the Hebrew scriptures there is a certain phrase that shows up many times, the phrase “thousand generations”. Usually this phrase is connected with God’s enduring faithfulness to the covenant made with the patriarchs. One good example of this is in Deuteronomy 7:9 which reads “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations…” Another occurrence is in Psalm 105: 7, a proclamation that “[God] is mindful of his covenant forever, of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations…” Or this promising description of God in Exodus 34:7: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation…” Other examples are found in Exodus 20:6, Deuteronomy 5:10, 1 Chronicles 16:15 and Jeremiah 32:18.
So I reasoned that if God was to be mindful of his covenant for a thousand generations that would put off the end of the world for a long time. I did some quick calculations: given that a generation could be 20 years (thus 2 generations would become the oft noted 40 years found throughout the Bible). If we date the start of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah to 2000 years before Christ, then we today are currently 4000 year from that point. Where does that fit into the thousand generations picture? Well, 20 years multiplied by 1000 would total 20,000 years. So 4000 of the 20,000 years have passed, leaving us 16,000 years away from the end of the world. My doomsday prediction based on this Biblical evidence is that the world will end somewhere around the year 18,000!
Personally I don’t put much stock in reading the most of the Bible in such a literal fashion. Thus when it says “a thousand generations” I don’t think it means 1000 right on the nose (not 999 and not 1001), rather I think it means for a great long time, longer than you can imagine. Or when the Bible says “forty years” I don’t think it means 14,610 days exactly, as I indicated earlier I think it means a couple of generations, or something like that. Most of the Bible needs to be read like poetry rather than a technical manual. The words of the Bible need room to breath, to have the freedom to bring new insights to new generations while at the same time maintaining the original authors’ intention.
The last thing I want to note about using the Bible to predict the end times is that Jesus himself points his followers away from this type of speculation. Jesus replies to a question about what the signs about the end times are, and when this will happen with these words: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” (Mark 13:32-33) No one knows, so stop trying to figure it out, instead be ready for the end to come at any time. Don’t be like the children who wait until the last possible moment to begin cleaning the house before their parents are supposed to get home (a favourite trick at our house when growing up). Instead live our lives like every moment is a gift from God (which they are)!
Every day we need to remind ourselves that our time is limited and thus we should not put off what God wants us to do. In the words of the prophet: “[God] has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) We cannot put this off because even if the end of the world is a long ways away, the end of our individual life is a lot closer. Our lives are fragile and can disappear as quickly as grass fades. The Psalmist notes: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” (Psalm 103:15-16)
So we should make the most of the time that is given to us, we should strive to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God, we should endeavour to love others as Christ has loved us. If we put more of our time and energy into heeding this prophetic call, into obeying Christ’s command, rather than wasting it on futile speculation about when doomsday will crash down upon us, then more of God’s reign will be revealed.
Postscript
Science Fiction author Frank Herbert thought about God’s covenant with the descendants of Abraham and Sarah as lasting a very, very long time. In his famous Dune series, set 26,000 years in the future, a group of Jews show up in the storyline (in the book Chapterhouse: Dune). If we were to simply calculate a generation as being 25 to 30 years (rather than the 20 years I suggested earlier) then this distant future envisioned by the Dune series would still be within the time-frame of a thousand generations mentioned in the Bible. All too often humans tend to see their current generation as the only truly significant one, and our ego-centric view leads us to believe that we’re living in a time when the most important things are happening. Quite the contrast with a storyline that lasts a multitude of generations.
All scripture quotations in this post are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
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