Postmodern Hell (Not with a bang, but a whimper)

So how will the world eventually reach perdition? The theories abound and most of them involve some cataclysmic event. A Captain Trips Plague, an alien invasion, a thermonuclear ball of fire or a climate gone haywire all serve as secular stand-ins for the ending fortold in Revelations.

As my cynicism gets worse, my faith gets fundamentally challenged. I no longer believe there will be a clear demarcation between grace and perdition. It will work more like the death of a star that's passed the supernova stage. It gradually cools and one by one the thousand points of light go dark until nothing else remains illuminated.

There will be no asteroid to strike the Earth. We will bleed to death slowly from a couple of thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. Eventually, we will find our world as dark and eternally gloomy as the afterlife that awaited Gilgamesh and we won't even know how we got there. To borrow a book title from Robert Bork, we will all slouch towards Ghamora.

Postmodern Hell will not only be a gloomy place, it will be a place that we won't even realize we've arrived at until there is no escape. It will work like the Hotel California, we can check out anytime we like, but we can never actually leave. Postmodern Hell may even be modern America. It will be a comfortable prison where our libertine vices are sated, but our true satisfaction lies inches beyond our outstretched fingers.

I feel some days like we are all being fattened. Fattened like pigs; raised to be harvested. But we won't go with a bang, we'll just be liquidated; like the bodies plugged into The Matrix were, once they'd outlived their viability.

The signs of it surround us when we turn on the news and see Abu Ghraib prison. We then see how our leaders react to Abu Ghraib prison. We then see how little those leaders really care that a young man who took a remarkably dangerous job, to put himself on the line rebuilding Iraq got his head chopped off in what could have been a butchery scene from a B-Grade samurai movie.

The Postmodern Hell has no sense of community, no sense of belief, and no ties that truly bind. Briefly, like Gilgamesh, we get the opportunity to slay Marduk in Afghanistan or Iraq. Then the whole thing just fades to black, the scene just disappears. We're left sitting in the theatre thinking we've just seen the most anti-climactic movie ending Hollywood ever wrote. We've all got what we want in the end, but did anyone get what they needed?

Perhaps my view of how the world will end is best summed up by a Pink Floyd lyric off of the Dark Side of the Moon album.

"One day you'll find, Ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run You missed the starting gun."

And there I feel like I stand. Waiting on the blocks, trapped in a Postmodern Hell, with no one but myself really left to blame.

I can understand your cynacism. Peter records that mockers will come in the last days saying "Where is the promise of His coming?". But Peter also goes on to say the apostles didn't develop "cleverly devised tales" but were "eyewitnesses". So much so he was willing to die upside down on a cross and all the apostles were willing to sacrifice their money and their lifes for our Lord Jesus.

Hell is very real.

When they had gathered together they asked him,"Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" He answered them, "It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Why so concerned with how things end? If the gospel does not engage the culture through witnesses, the gospel falls silent. You received your faith for a purpose. The gospel needs witnesses in the world.

Why the obsession about the details? Trust in God.

“Cast all your care upon God.” You are to cast all care away; if you do not cast all care away, you retain it and do not become absolutely joyful. And if you do not cast it absolutely upon God, but in some other direction, you are not absolutely rid of it. In one way or another, it returns again, most likely in the form of a still greater and more bitter sorrow. For to cast care away, but not upon God – that is distraction. But distraction is a most doubtful and ambiguous remedy.

Anxiety for the next day is commonly associated with anxiety for subsistence. This is a very superficial view. The next day – it is the grappling-hook by which the prodigious hulk of anxiety gets a hold of the individual’s light craft. If it succeeds, he is under the domination of that power. The next day is the first link of the chain that fetters a person to that superfluous anxiety that is of the evil one. The next day – it is strange indeed, for ordinarily when one is sentenced for life the sentence reads, “for life,” but he who sentences himself to anxiety “for the next day,” sentences himself for life.

The gig's pretty much up when the total quality management movement, which has already destroyed business and education (under the heading of "academic assessment"), starts to move into the churches. When that happens, America will become a Satanic morass for sure.

we are warned not to try to figure out the time and hour, for that is Gods business,

but reading revelation 17 and 18, does not take a strech to find similarities between the "harlot"/"babylon" and the direction the US is headed.. to concentrate on it would be a waste, but I cant help being sadden

Just keep fighting to make the world a place that God would be happy with. We know from the Bible that we will not be able to succeed fully against this world until He comes, but God still wants us to fight (remember Christian soldier). Never be saddened for Christianity should bring optimism. We are saved through Christ Jesus, and know that God is in control and will lead us to whatever His perfect Will decrees. With God in control we need not worry. What we can't do, He can.

My post was meant to be humorous, but I've been reading a book pushing a "historicist" interpretation of Bible endtimes prophecy, which leads to the theory that the endtimes (that would be now) will feature the USA united with the Vatican as the bad guys. Not sure I buy it, but knowing what's going on in the world around us, who can tell?

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