CNN wrote a piece today about a psychic who claimed back in 2008 that “around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”
Sylvia Browne died in 2013, but the coronavirus has just put her book in the #2 slot on Amazon’s nonfiction chart.[1]
Rumors are rampant. Fear is more epidemic than COVID-19. And people are flipping through the pages of Revelation trying to figure out what’s next and expecting Jesus to show up atop the Mount of Olives any day now.[2]
But Christ told his disciples, “this joyful assurance of the realm of heaven’s kingdom will be proclaimed all over the world, providing every nation with a demonstration of the reality of God. And after this the end of this age will arrive.”[3]
I’ve heard a lot of talk about the reality of God, but I haven’t seen much demonstration of it.
According to the CIA and Pew Research Center, five years ago, there were more than 2.4 billion Christians among the world’s 7.5 billion people. If one out of every three people on the planet was a Christian, the planet wouldn’t be in the accelerating mess it’s in, and everyone would have heard the gospel by now, since each of us would need to share it with only two other people in our lifetime.
But that’s as silly as the CIA statistic.
Getting back to my point, we don’t need to be looking for more disasters as a sign of Christ’s return. And we don’t need to talk to everybody we can collar about Jesus.
WAY before anything else, Christ-followers need to become a lot more like Christ, so the world can see what he looks like, hear what he sounds like, see how he behaves and decide whether they want to go his way or the way of the world.
~ Photo by Annie Spratt
[1] Browne, Sylvia, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, Berkley, 24 June 2008.
[2] Zechariah 14.
[3] Matthew 24:14, TPT.
