Are you excited and hopeful about the future? I am.
However, if a person was to look at the news and listen to what some of our "experts" and "leaders" are saying about the future it would be easy to be pessimistic. Just this week, as a case in point, an eminent Australian scienties, Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicted humans will probably be extinct within 100 years because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change. According to Professor Fenner, human beings will come to an end as a species sometime in the foreseeable future.
Professor Fenner is hardly alone in his pessimism. This global gloom about the problems of the world and its hopeless future has been going on a long time. We see it in doomsday movies from Hollywood about the end of the world that shock and scare a generation of our youth. We hear it in the classrooms of our universities telling students that climate change will dramatically affect their lives. We hear it from our politicians that something must be legislated now, while we still have time. Did you notice that all of these alarmists seem to be saying the same thing? Human beings are ruining this planet and only the governments of the world can save us if we support their leadership. Also, people who deny such “experts” and “leaders” and their solutions aresaid to be the real problem.
One of the most powerful statements that any Christian can make in this hour is the FACT that the world is not going to end... ever! Jesus did talk about an “end of the age” in Matthew 24:14, but the Bible never speaks about an end of the world. The “end of the age” our Lord talks about is when humanity’s leadership without God comes to an end. That is problem now. Human beings are trying to run the world without God. If you doubt that, ask Al Gore at his next lecture on global warming about his prayer meetings. Of course, there aren’t any because he doesn’t believe God is in charge down here. The Lord of glory is the “junior partner” on this planet. People seem to have forgotten or don’t want to be reminded that the Lord created the world to be a beautiful thing that will continue forever. The Heavens and Earth will never come to an end according to Revelation 21.