The Day After the End of the World

I'm writing this on October 20, 2011, and Harold Camping says that the rapture is supposed to happen tomorrow, so if you're reading this, you either got left behind and should be looking out for a guy named Nicolai Carpathia who is about to take over the world, or the rapture didn't happen. Maybe we're about to hear that the world is actually going to end in 2012 like the Mayans predicted. In that case, we have a little time left.



With all the people who have falsely predicted the end of the world throughout history, it's interesting that people even still believe the world is going to end. No one has been able to guess it, and everyone who has tried has been wrong. If I believed that I knew when the world was going to end, the last thing I would do is tell anyone about it. In fact, given the pattern of all those guys throughout history, I'd probably just assume I was wrong. That's probably good advice for everyone from this point forward who suddenly believes they know when the world is going to end.

The belief that this world is someday going to come to an end seems to be instinctive. So how do we survive the end of the world? Surely, we can survive it, right? All the movies seem to center around a group of people who somehow figure out how to survive the end of the world. Think 2012 and the massive ships carrying the world's elite. I'm thinking, though, that if we could survive the end of the world, then it wasn't really the end of the world.

Revelation 21 tells us a different story about the end of the world. After all the wreckage of an apocalypse that no one could survive, the world doesn't end. It's restored. Stripped of all that caused pain and destruction and injected with all the pulsating creativity of a perfect and loving God, forever.

The world as we know it will end. No one knows when, but it's coming. So what do we do in the meantime?

Love relentlessly until the end of the world. Love your wife. Love your husband. Love your children. Love your parents. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. Love, because it's the only thing that will lead people close to the heart of God, which is the only way to survive the end of the world.

What is the most interesting way you can think of for the world to end?

Photo Credit: Michael Lehenbauer on Flickr Creative Commons