The entire world is in recession. It started in the U.S. as the result of greedy people ignoring huge risks and has spread all over the world. I think that this crisis might be a preview of what will happen when the end time comes.
Human history will eventually come to an end. We humans don’t know when and how the end will come. But God, the main actor in human history, foretold through His prophets what will happen in the end times. There are many different interpretations of the Biblical passages concerning the end times. Let me describe what I think is the most likely scenario:
Some sort of disaster shakes the stability of the entire world. Threatened by the crumbling world order, people seek a charismatic world leader, and one emerges according to their wishes. Political and religious leaders rally around him to prevent civilization from collapsing. This leader does not believe in God. To him and his cohorts, Christians are enemies because they seem to refuse to cooperate, sabotaging their efforts to save the world. So they persecute Christians, and many Christians abandon the faith as a result. But the world order still goes from bad to worse, punctuated by famine, wars, and pestilence. (The popular theory that Christians will be raptured before this difficult tribulation lacks Biblical support in my view.) Then God starts working through a small remnant of Christians who endure the persecution, and through them sparks a worldwide revival. People all over the world (including Jews) come to accept Jesus as their Savior.
The disaster that triggers this sequence may be an economic one. The global economy today is built on trust, since every nation adopted a fiat money system after the gold standard collapsed prior to World War II. If this trust is destroyed, the world economy system goes down.
I have a feeling that the current economic crisis will be over in a year or two. But an even bigger event may follow, causing mistrust among people and nations and making the world economy crumble, setting the stage for the end times.
Future persecution against Christians might also be economic. The idea of political persecution is almost romantic; economic persecution is more difficult because it involves the family’s survival. If the persecution of the end times is indeed economic, we Christians must refuse to let money rule us and learn to depend only on God to meet our needs by seeking His kingdom and righteousness first.
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