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Religous: Is 2012 really the end?
Pastor Pat Duffin
for South Peace News
Coming very soon to a theatre near you is Columbia Pictures latest disaster blockbuster “2012”.
The movie is based on what is purported to be an ancient Mayan prediction found on a stone tablet unearthed decades ago in Mexico. Supposedly it predicts that the world will end on 21 December 2012, at exactly 6:11 a.m. Alberta time.
The tablet is a long-count calendar that ends abruptly on that date and accurately predicts an astonishing number of other astronomical and other mathematical events. Therefore this tablet has fueled a firestorm of speculation on dire predictions of doom or New Age cosmic shift.
Unfortunately for the ancient Mayan people, even the best mathematical formulas and calculations could not factor in or figure out some highly unexpected variables - such as their own demise! However sophisticated their culture may have been in the arcane arts, the Mayans failed to foresee the arrival of Spanish mercenaries and their own subsequent destruction at the end of weapons they had never seen, and by diseases they had never encountered. Yet somehow their supposed ability to predict the future is instilling fear and giving many people nightmares today.
Incredibly, not even the Mayans make such clairvoyant claims for their calendar. Mayan Indian Elder, Apolinario Chile Pixtun, insists the belief that the calendar predicts the end of the world comes from modern Western mystics and is not at all part of Mayan thinking. According to modern Mayans, the long-count calendar, which was discontinued under the Spanish colonization, simply tracks more than 5,000 years, then resets to year zero and starts all over again.
Says Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor at Publishers Weekly, “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.”
According to Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Fla., “To render Dec. 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting, is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”
I totally agree.
Since the beginning of November at least four new books on 2012 have arrived in mainstream bookstores. Interestingly, each arrives in the wake of the 2006 success of ‘2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl’, which has been selling thousands of copies a month since its release and tallies more than 40,000 in print. The books also build on popular interest in the Maya, energized in part by Mel Gibson’s December 2006 film about Mayan civilization, ‘Apocalpyto.’
TV specials, books, DVDs, a major motion picture and increasing media coverage all spell a huge money making opportunity. Artificially generated by big marketing interests, through the use of hype and hysteria, they promote their manufactured product of deception and false reality so they can cash in on the naive and gullible.
And very profitable it is!
But I will say, from secularists to atheists to the religious including Christians as well as New Agers – we all sense that something big is in the offing. ‘Nuclear Winter’ has been replaced by ‘Global Warming’ in the public consciousness as the debate still rages over whether devastating climate changes will bring drought or floods to vast regions of the earth.
Art Bell, founder and former radio talk-show host of ‘Coast to Coast’, which features everything from science to the supernatural, to New Age, to Occult, to UFOs and aliens, to government and international conspiracies, has coined the phrase and written a book called ‘The Quickening’ where he details the convergence of cataclysmic events that seem to be leading up to some kind of calamitous culmination. We all sense it, and whatever it is we know it’s going to be bad.
But! We need to keep a Biblical view of where it is all headed and what it all means.
The only proven, reliable book of prophecy is the Bible. In it, the disciples asked Jesus in Mark 13, when the end would come and what would be the sign of the end. To which Jesus warned, “Take heed that no one deceive you.”
Why?
Because certain things must take place before the end. In addition to great deception, there will be wars and rumours of wars, nation goes against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes in various places, famines – and all these would be just the beginning of the birth pains!
Jesus went on to say that the Church would be persecuted and Christians would be hated by all and the Temple (which has not yet been rebuilt) will be desecrated by the Man of Sin (who has not yet come) at the midway point of a seven-year peace covenant. Since there is no temple, no peace covenant in Israel, and no “Antichrist” it’s not hard to see that the year 2012 will come and go long before these prophecies can be fulfilled.
Further, the Bible says there will be 1,000 years of peace after Jesus Christ returns to the Earth and before the heavens and the Earth are renovated into a new creation. Clearly, 2012 will not be the end of the world. Like Y2K it will embarrassingly fade away into the next day.
Christians should not be worried about the end. Participating in the Kingdom of God, rather than calculating and cataloguing apocalyptic signs and disasters is the true role of believers in Jesus Christ. Jesus has called his disciples - whether in the first century or the twenty-first century, to live fully and faithfully in the time which God has placed us. He will take care of that time called “the day or the hour of the end.”
By all means let us be wise and aware, correctly discerning the times. And, let us be prepared, not scared, “for in such a time as you think not the Son of man is coming (Luke 12:40); and which day that will be No Man knows, nor the angels, not even the Son, but the Father only” (Mark 13:32).
But, what a great day that will be for Christians!
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