With all of these natural disasters occurring such as hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes and more, people are predicting and beginning to question whether it is the end of the world or if the second coming of Christ (also known as the rapture) is upon us.
“Do I think it’s the end of the world? Absolutely not. Mainly because this has happened in the past,” said junior criminal justice major Remington Burch from Trenton. “I remember growing up with the ‘end of the world’ mentality every couple of years when several natural disasters happened within a small time-frame. So personally, I think we are gonna be okay.”
Jake Wylie, senior accounting major from Kenton, had a differing opinion.
“I do think the end is very near because it talks about it in scripture,” Wylie said. “I think we’re closer than we’ve ever been.”
The tragedies we are seeing in our country and around the world are not the hand of God trying to punish people who are not doing everything he commands. God is not a God of disaster and distress. He is a God of good and only good comes from the work of his hands. There is a real enemy to humankind at hand in all of this and it is the evil and darkness spoken of as Satan in the Word of God.
“I think the current natural disasters occurring serve as a reminder to God’s children that we must always be alert and awake,” said senior marketing major Aranda Tate from Union City. “Mark 13:32 says ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.’ Maybe God is using these disasters to wake up his people.”
Senior agricultural communications major Janie Peery from Fayetteville, echoed this idea.
“I think we should always be ready but it also says in Matthew 24:36 that we will not know the day nor the hour of his return, but we should definitely keep spreading the gospel and stay alert,” Peery said.
John 10:10 describes the whole picture. If God loves us then why the tragedy? The answer is because the Lord Jesus was sent to us as the only way of a victorious life filled with hope as told in John 14:6 as well as John 1:1-6. When mankind rejects the only hope sent to earth to save and redeem them, then all that is left is the enemy who causes chaos and confusion. When we turn to the Lord, he turns to us in forgiveness and healing.
“I don’t necessarily think ‘oh my! Earthquake! It’s the end of the world!’ but these events do line up with scripture in Matthew 24 and they prove that the rapture could happen really, really soon,” said freshman cellular-molecular biology major Anna-Grace Jones from Dyer.
Matthew 24 is the spine prophecy and explanation of the end times. Matthew 24:7 says there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. The verse before this speaks of wars and rumors of wars and it describes that as we get closer to the coming of Christ, these things must happen so we must not be alarmed by them.
All of these things are very evident in the times we now live, indicating that we are very close to his return.
“Is the end of the world near? Yes. I know it will happen soon but ‘soon’ is a relative term,” said junior management and finance major Morgan Goodman from Cleveland, Tennessee. “Jesus said 2,000 years ago that he would be coming back soon and we’re still here.”
With all of this in mind, the second coming of Christ could be today. It could be tomorrow. It could be a hundred years from now but we must always be ready no matter what. Matthew 7:11 says, “Repent! For the kingdom of Heaven is near.”
I would suggest that ‘the end of the world’ rests upon the how we understand the ‘world’ and the ‘apocalypse’. The latter may simple mean revelation as it does in classical Greek. While world may be a metaphor to express being without God, in the sense that one is either part of the world or the Kingdom, part of the problem or part of the solution. But we’ll shall have to wait until Christ returns to establish the Kingdom. Then the question becomes, will that event confirm the existing theological based faith paradigm or will he reveal something new, even the same revelation of the first coming that so threatened the religious orders of Jesus day that he ended up on the cross?