As my wife and I walked into the local cinema, before us stood one of the largest movie advertisement displays I had ever seen. It depicted a coastal city being completely ripped apart by unprecedented seismic activity, with vast swaths of the city tossed into the sky and entire neighborhoods dumped into a hungry ocean. It was a scene of utter devastation that clearly would have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And it was a fitting advertisement for the movie 2012, a new End-of-the-World epic movie coming out this November.
As my wife and I walked into the local cinema, before us stood one of the largest movie advertisement displays I had ever seen. It depicted a coastal city being completely ripped apart by unprecedented seismic activity, with vast swaths of the city tossed into the sky and entire neighborhoods dumped into a hungry ocean. It was a scene of utter devastation that clearly would have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And it was a fitting advertisement for the movie 2012, a new End-of-the-World epic movie coming out this November.
The producers of 2012 are capitalizing on a growing public fascination: the idea that the world will end on December 21, 2012. And a fascination it is. The end of the movie’s preview trailer asks viewers to go to the Internet and search "2012." I did that at Google.com, and received 194 million hits.
Why 2012?
It seems the Mayans—the well-known and much-studied ancient Mesoamerican empire—kept many calendars, including one known as the "Long Count Calendar." This calendar will reach the end of a 5,100-year-long epoch on—you guessed it—December 21, 2012.
Is there anything to the hype? Should we expect doomsday—or perhaps some New Age paradise—to come on December 21, 2012?
The Mayans, themselves, said very little about it, though records show they certainly did not believe the world would end on that date. Many of their descendants today have complained that the current (and growing) 2012-related hysteria is simply a "gringo invention."
But this has not prevented New Age fantasists, astrologers and other occultists from latching on to the date with a passion. Some say it will be the end of the world, while others claim it will be the dawn of a new spiritual era. They point to (disputed) astronomical conjunctions claimed to occur on that day and to visions and theories "received" by mediums under the influence of psychedelic drugs and hallucinogens.
Yet the Bible powerfully warns against using astrology and other occult practices to divine future events (Deuteronomy 18:10–12; Jeremiah 10:2)—warnings that today’s 2012-obsessed individuals ignore, or perhaps have never heard.
Given the economic distress, terrorism, global instability and natural disasters of powerful intensity all around us, interest in what the future holds and concern for the direction in which the world is going is understandable. But the answer is not found in a date on an ancient calendar, the conjunctions of astrologers, or the hallucinations of drug-using "psychonauts."
Rather, there is a proven source of knowledge about the future—a source that does warn of natural and supernatural disasters of unimaginable scale and intensity. That source speaks, as well, of a soon-coming new age of peace and prosperity across the globe—a time without war or needless suffering, when the nations will have learned to live with each other in harmony. That source is your Bible, and not only does it have a proven track-record of accuracy, it does something that a mere date on a calendar or a "galactic alignment" could never do: the Bible tells you not only the amazing details about what is ahead, but it also tells you what to do about it!
2012 may make for an exciting movie, but the astounding real truth about the future is right there in the pages of your Bible, waiting for you to discover it!
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The above is adapted from one of the many commentaries, discussing vital topics facing our world, available at the www.lcg.org and www.tomorrowsworld.org Web sites.