End of Days?

The apocalypse is upon us…
At least according to George Noory, and – with a few qualifiers – to Pat Robertson.  Okay, I am neither a theologian nor an eschatologist (assuming there really is such a word).  And, in all fairness, I confess that I occasionally wonder if the current goings-on in the world don’t portend The End.  On the other hand, I suspect that every generation from the Resurrection today has had the same thought at one time or another.  The last big forerunner of the apocalypse was the Y2K bug, which turned out to be more of a gnat than the locusts of Revelation.  (By the way - as an IT guy who spent two years on Y2K fixes, YOU ARE ALL WELCOME.)

The question I have about this is – so what?  People get in a tizzy about the end of the world, and I just don’t see what the point is.  After all, the world ends for 250 - 300,000 people every day.  That’s the equivalent of a city the size of Corpus Christi.  And if Jesus doesn’t come back in the next twenty or thirty years, then I’ll probably be shuffling off this mortal coil myself.  So the end of the world seems jut a little bit irrelevant – one bad move on the freeway leads me to judgment just as surely as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords coming down the Interstate on a white horse.  Maybe it’s because I’m not a dispensationalist.  If you are expecting the Pre-trib Rapture, then I guess the signs of the times might have some big impacts on your investment strategy.  On the other hand, perhaps the reason for the end-time jitters lies a little deeper in our human nature.  I know it’s a lot easier to imagine the whole world coming to an end than it is to imagine the universe going on perfectly normally without me.  If the whole wide world is coming along, too, then the whole thing seems just a little bit less personal.