Seldom in modern history has there been an avalanche of good news as we witness in the media these days. Newspaper headlines proclaim it, television commentators confirm it, and the people believe it. And why shouldn’t they? For the average Australian, American, and a few other nationals, things have seldom been better. The era of “peace, progress and prosperity” it seems has finally arrived.
“Dawn of a Golden Age.” “Shortly after the last Budget, Peter Costelo
saw a vision of the future, or rather a glimmer of a halcyon past. The Treasurer became convinced of the
proposition put by some of his top economic advisers that
A Brave New World? “Many investors in the
Onset of New Era?
“A STRANGE contagion is spreading across the land: the belief that
technology and globalisation promise unbounded prosperity and render old rules redundant has infected
“’US companies do much better then predicted.” “The economy continues to grow more rapidly
than people thought,’ said Mr Mark Vitner, an
economist with First Union Corp. ‘It’s all about the strength of the
And when the American economy is doing well, the whole world
breathes a sigh of relief. Given its
dominant position in the global economy, good news from
“Forget the chess match of Garry Kasparov v IBM’s
Deep Blue. A much more interesting battle between man and machine is playing
out in today’s media. In one corner is the Mars
Pathfinder and its roving companion, Sojourner, which slowly is prodding about
on the “Red” planet. And in the other, the Mir,
“No contest. For better and (largely, I’m afraid) for worse, victory goes solidly to the humans, who handily have trounced Pathfinder on the evening news and on front pages.
“Remember Pathfinder? When it reached the Martian surface on July 4, the intrepid spacecraft rightly was lauded as a triumph of a revitalised space-exploration program. The official Pathfinder Web site logged 80 million hits in one day. And Time and Newsweek made temporary stars out of NASA’s tech nerds. . .”
“Which brings us to Mir’s latest and most ignoble function, a stage for space tragi-comedy. By now, it is hard not to be aware of the staccato sequence of odd and sometimes pathetic mishaps that have struck the Russian space station this year. Unfortunately, the smirks and sad shaking of the head tend to distract from the larger lessons of Pathfinder v Mir. From its inception, NASA has been keenly aware of the enormous public relations advantage that manned missions have over unmanned ones. But Mir’s woes illustrate how easily that edge can turn against you.” (SMH, August 27, 1997).
To illustrate the success of the American science, we gleaned a few comments from a discussion panel analysing the Mars rover expedition:
“We are at the
beginning of another golden age.”
“If we are not looking for life, it is not worth doing it.”
(Newshour with Jim
Lehrer”, SBS TV,
The notion of a new
golden age extends beyond the economic and scientific fields. At a recent NATO Heads of State Summit,
President Yeltsin of
“Yeltsin’s
pledge on missiles stuns NATO”
“
“The End of The Cold War” “Boris Yeltsin’s announcement in Paris that Russia’s nuclear arsenal will no longer target NATO countries is a reminder of just how far the world has moved from the frightening days of the Cold War. ‘Today we can say the Cold War has definitely come to an end’, a NATO spokesman said.” (The Weekend Australian, May 31-June 1, 1997).
There was good news on the environment too. This year,
Then we had tremendously good news in the religious field too. The Pope went to Poland where he blessed that country with yet more ‘saints’; the head of the Anglican Church declared that he had no objection to women being ordained to the priesthood; the Presbyterian Church elected a new Moderator who vowed to make that church “relevant to the kind of society we live in”, and the ministers in the Churches of God rejoiced that our prediction about their impending doom did not materialise.
Which raises the question, where do all these things leave us? Up in the air, someone might say.
Year after year, for seven years now, we have preached that the world is heading towards catastrophe, yet what do we have now? Good news all around. Which explains why we have not been very popular.
The
prophets of doom have never been welcomed by this world. Virtually all of God’s people have had to
contend with mockers – people who did not believe in their prophecies. There is no better example of that than
Jeremiah the prophet. When his
prophecies about the impending doom of
“O LORD, You
induced me, and I was persuaded; you are stronger than I, and have prevailed. I
am in derision daily; everyone mocks me.
For when I spoke, I cried out; I shouted, "Violence and plunder!''
Because the word
of the LORD was made to me a reproach and a derision daily.
Then I said, “I
will not make mention of Him, nor speak anymore in His name.'' But His word was in my heart like a burning
fire shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it back, and I could not. For I heard many mocking: “Fear on every
side!'' "Report,'' they say, “and we will report it!''
All my
acquaintances watched for my stumbling, saying, “Perhaps he can be induced;
then we will prevail against him, and we will take our revenge on him.'' (Jer.
20:7-10).
Jeremiah’s contemporaries did prevail against him, and threw him into a muddy dungeon where he would have died if one of the royal servants, who believed in him, had not managed to save him at the last moment.
He was lucky that at least one person believed in him, but who would save us if we were to face a similar situation? Of all the people we have contacted since the beginning of this work, not one has repented and turned to God.
We know of people who started a religion at about the same time, who have attracted thousands of followers by now. They preach doctrines which are demonstrably un-Scriptural, yet we, who preach nothing but what is in the Bible, have attracted no one. This work started with two people in 1990; seven years later two people are still doing it. But then, this was not entirely unexpected, for we knew what the Bible says about those who would do the work of God at this particular junction of world history: 1) They would be poor people (“clothed in sackcloth” as the Bible puts it), and 2) No one would help them.
How marvellously accurate prophesies which have been written thousands of years ago are proving out to be in our own time. And they say that there is no God, or that He does not care about what happens in the world at present.
Jeremiah’s prophecies proved true shortly afterwards, and those who disdained him paid with their lives in the end. The question is, could this also be the case with us? Could it be that those who rejoiced at our demise, did so a bit too soon?
WHAT YOU
SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU GET
“An astonishing
and horrible thing
has been committed
in the land:
The
prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule by their own power;
And My people love to
have it so. But what will you do in the
end?” (Jer. 5:30-31).
Few people have not heard
the song that says: “what you see is what you get, there is nothing more to
it”, or words with that effect. Well,
there is a lot more to it than meets the eye this time, because what you see in
the headlines and hear in the news is not what you get, nor the whole
truth. Let us look at those “good news”
again.
SCIENTIFIC NEWS
The American scientists who assured us that, “the solar planetary system could become our second homes”, seem to have forgotten that human beings have not even flown to the nearest planet let alone colonise the rest of the solar planetary system. And on which planet would they like settle if they could reach it? Would it be much of a life if they had to live in a space suit or in a closed environment all their lives? There would be no rivers, no trees, no mountains, no pastures, no roaming animals, nothing but barren wasteland. Would anyone call that a “golden age”?
Has it never dawned on these people that this planet was uniquely prepared and positioned to foster and preserve life on it, that no other planet in the whole universe is like it? It has the right distance from the sun, so that we neither freeze nor scorch ourselves; the right size, so that winters and summers are not decades or centuries long; the right gravitational field, so that we do not fall off the planet nor get squashed by its strength; the right length of days and nights, so that we can work during the day and regenerate at night; the right distance from the moon, so that the tides create just enough movement in the oceans to flush the shores without flooding the planet; it spins on its axe at the right speed, so that inertia does not send us into space nor flatten and disorient us; the list could go on and on. Everything is just right on this planet, and there is no scientific or religious reason to indicate that any other is like it in the whole universe.
Our scientists can search for life in the outer space all their lives, they will never find anything anywhere. That is because this planet, and this only, has been created for the purpose of sustaining life, and all the other astral bodies have been placed in the sky for no other reason than to be signs and wonders for this world. That is what our Creator God says, and that is the truth, believe it or not.
The assertion that humanity is on the brink of colonising other planets reminds me of an environmental poster I had in my school library. It showed the globe with the caption: “When we are finished with this planet, we have a whole galaxy to choose from”. Indeed, why should we stop at the solar system when we can colonise the entire universe? Given our prolific rate of reproduction, before long we would run out of space in this planetary system too, so we should not limit ourselves to just one planetary system, or just one galaxy.
The scientists - the people who are telling us that humanity is on the brink of making the solar system our second homes - are the same ones who are telling us that humanity created itself, that God had no role to play in creating the world or life on this planet.
Does that thrill you? Does the thought that 50, 70, 100 or 150 years, is all there is to human life? Would you rather believe that your life is nothing but an accident of nature, than that there is a higher purpose to life, and something exhilaratingly beautiful and promising beyond this temporary existence?
Science does not operate at the spiritual level, the one that reveals the existence of God and a wonderful purpose to human life. Of course, the handiwork of God can be seen at the physical level too, but only if you open your heart to the sixth sense, the inner voice that reveals realities that cannot be accessed through the five senses.
You are doing yourself a great disservice by looking at one side of the coin only. If you come out of your shell and look through history, and acquaint yourself with what the great thinkers of mankind have said, you will discover truths that make you heart jump with joy. Things that can hardly be uttered or explained by human beings.
Those people have given their lives rather than miss out on the things they have discovered through the exercise of all their faculties, not just the five senses. Yet, for some extraordinary quirk of nature, and reasons which only they can explain, scientists are now telling us not to believe anything that is not “logical”; nothing that cannot be detected through the five senses, or cannot be confirmed through empirical research and experiments. The world has taken that as the new gospel. The world is much the poorer for it.
ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS
A United
Nations report presented at the Second Earth Summit said that conditions in the
world are now far worse than they were five years ago at the first Earth Summit
in
The warming of the planet as
a result of the greenhouse effect is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact. This realisation came frighteningly fast upon
the world. We have played our role in
this too. When we
started this work seven years ago, no one, outside a small circle of
scientists, paid much attention to the greenhouse effect. Yet, there has
not been a single edition in which we have not dedicated page after page of
proofs of environmental degradation, of the greenhouse effect, of warming of
the planet, etc. We said all along that
things will get worse, much worse, and they did. Now how did we know these things? From watching world developments and
correlating these with the biblical prophesies.
In other words, we have done what our Lord told us to do:
“Watch therefore,
for you do not know when the master of the house is coming-- in the evening, at
“And what I say to you, I
say to all: Watch!'' (Mark 13:35-37).
""But as
the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they
were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that
Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all
away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Matt. 24:37-39)
And what did the world
leaders do with all those facts, what decision did they take at the Second
Earth Summit? To
recommend a reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent of their
1990 levels by the year 2010. Now
what exactly do they think they will achieve with that? The natural absorption
cycle of carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the greenhouse effect, is between
one hundred and two hundred years. Which
means that what we see in the world right now, is not the result of gas
emissions accumulated in the last few years, nor
indeed in the last few decades, but the effect of carbon dioxide emissions
since the beginning of the industrial revolution, which occurred in the middle
of the last century.
And you know what? They could not even agree on that. In the end, they settled for a reduction in
these gases of under ten per cent. And not all the countries agreed to that
either. You can be absolutely sure that
they will keep these promises just they kept the ones they made at the First
Earth Summit in Rio.
“Greenhouse gap
too wide for bargains” “The 1992 Rio Environmental Summit, which committed nations
to try to stabilise emissions at 1990 levels by 2000, has been an abject
failure – with virtually every nation substantially increasing greenhouse gas
output since then.” (The
Australian, October 24, 1997).
ECONOMIC NEWS
We can do no better on this
topic than to quote world leaders on their view of the future.
“YOU’RE SACKED” WORLD-CLASS dreams are at home in
At this site steeped in history, the
man welcoming the world's elite in late September 1995 is one of the few who
has himself made history: Mikhail Gorbachev.
When the Cold War came to an end, American patrons gratefully fitted out
a foundation (with Gorbachev of all people as president) on an abandoned
military area south of the Golden Gate.
Now he has flown in 500 leading
politicians, businessmen and scientists from every continent - a new
"global brains trust", as the last president of the Soviet Union and
Nobel prize-winner calls it, which is supposed to point the way to the
"new' civilisation" of the 21st century.
Such experienced world rulers as
George Bush, George Shultz and Margaret Thatcher are here meeting the new lords
of the Earth - men of the likes of CNN boss Ted Turner, who has merged with
Time Warner to form the largest media business in the world, or the South-East
Asian magnate Washington Sycip. The idea is for them to spend three days in
intensive discussions with the global players in computers and finance, as well
as with the high priests of theoretical economics from Stanford, Harvard and
Oxford. Emissaries of free trade from Singapore and (naturally) Beijing also
want their voices to be heard when the future of humanity is at issue. . .
No one has come to brag and bluster.
No one is allowed to stop the participants from speaking freely and the hordes
of journalists have been screened off at considerable, expense. There are
strict rules designed to minimise rhetorical ballast: those introducing a
subject for debate, are given just five minutes and no contribution is supposed
to last for longer than two.
Not a murmur passes through the
room. The prospect of previously undreamt-of armies of the unemployed seems to
go without saying. None of the highly
paid career managers from the company divisions of the future believes there
will be enough new, regularly paid jobs in any sector of the economy in the
technologically demanding growth markets of hitherto affluent countries. . .
The Fairmont pragmatists sum up the
future in a pair of numbers and a concept: "20 to 80" and "tittytainment".
In the next century, 20 per cent of the population will suffice to keep
the world economy going. "More manpower won't be needed,” thinks Sycip. One-fifth of
all job-seekers will be enough to produce all the commodities and to furnish
high-value services that world society will be able to afford. This 20 per
cent, in whichever country, will actively participate in life, earnings and consumption--to
which may be added another I per cent or so of people who, for example, have
inherited a lot of money
And the rest? Will 80 per cent of those willing to work be
left without a job? "Sure," says the American writer Jeremy Rifkin,
author of The End of Work. “The bottom 80 per cent will have almighty
problems." Gage stirs things up
again and refers to his business head, Scott McNealy. The question in the
future will be "to have lunch or be lunch".
From this point on, the top-class
group discussing "the future of work" concerns itself with those who
will have none. The firm conviction is that these will include tens of millions
who have so far probably felt closer to the everyday bliss of the
Bay
area than to the struggle to survive without a secure job. A new social order is being sketched out at
the
“In any event, the business leaders
expect that, soon, in the industrialised countries,
people will again be sweeping the streets for nest to nothing or finding a meagre shelter as household helps. For futurologist John Naisbitt, the industrial age and its mass prosperity will
eventually become no more than a "blip in economic history". The participants in these three memorable
days at the
So, “on the road to a new civilisation
. . . the question will be ‘to have lunch or be lunch"”. A golden age and a brave new
world indeed. And
now some “good news” on the American economy.
“Icemen come in
with the cold. Stephen Roach of Morgan has argued that the
idea that the
Ultimately (early in 1998 according to Roach) inflation would come surging
through, forcing the US Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy, with
adverse implications for equity prices, and the non-financial economy.
On the other hand there are “icemen" such as Martin Barnes, the
managing editor of Montreal-based Bank Credit Analyst, who believes the new
paradigm style of market commentary has "been on a par with the 'What, Me
Worry?' of Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman". Barnes has in the past focused on the
overvaluation of US equities as a result of treating on off factors such as
reduced taxes, low interest rates and reduced depreciation as being recurrent
in estimates of forward earnings. He now sees the recent global sharemarket upheaval as a symptom of gathering deflationary
forces that will worsen the inevitable correction to Wall Street. Those forces are already at work in
While Yardeni is concerned about
So, is it going to be a
golden age and an era of
“peace, progress and prosperity”, or “the forces of Deflation and
Darkness?” We shall see, but I wouldn’t
count on the first. Not in the short
term anyway. That is, not before the
Millennium.
INTERNATIONAL
NEWS
But, not to worry, we can
always count on “good news” at the international level. After all, who can deny the “good news” that
came from President Yeltsin? No one,
that is, except President Yeltsin himself.
“The
Russian President, Mr Boris Yeltsin made clear yesterday that Russia would no
longer target nuclear missiles at NATO countries, recovering from an apparent
slip of the tongue at the signing of the Russia-NATO pact in Paris when he told
Western leaders that Moscow’s missiles warheads would be removed, effectively
disarming his nation. “In order to strengthen the atmosphere of trust, I took
the decision: Russian rockets will no longer be aimed at NATO countries,” Mr Yetsin said in a radio address to the nation.” (Reuter, SMH, May 31, 1997).
Now why did he
change his mind when his promise drew so much universal approval? This is why.
“The
Yeltsin announcement came as a surprise in
The
Russian decision comes just days after
Do you see now what
we mean by “what you see is not what you get”?
People go to bed content in the belief that the Cold War is over and
there will always be a world tomorrow, when in fact we are now closer to a
nuclear catastrophe than we have ever been.
“Yeltsin’s offer does not mark end of the Cold War” “To bill the agreement signed between the
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Russia as “the end of the Cold War”
(Yeltsin Ends Nuclear Threat, 28/5), is a nice bit of spin, but, as usual, the
spin is pretty close to 180 degrees from reality.
In
fact it’s probably misleading even to refer to the initiative as a “security
agreement”.
Based
on the work carried out by my organisation’s affiliates in
Despite
making a spur of the moment gesture on disarming weapons aimed at NATO States
(in reality he meant de-targeting, an action that takes minutes and a few
strokes on a commander’s keyboard) Mr Yeltsin had only weeks earlier been
talking about the conditions in which Russia would consider a first use of
nuclear weapons.
What
exactly is NATO thinking? If the Cold War really is over, why continue to
expand a military alliance designed to counterbalance
What happened to the bonhomie
that was evident at the recent meeting between the leaders of the seven leading
industrialised nations also attended by President Yeltsin?
“The
Cold War may be over, but there is no shortage of conflict about the expansion
of NATO and the degree of influence
But
this week, even though Bill and Helmut and Jacques and Tony were at a summit in
For
this was a NATO summit, and as far as Russians are concerned, despite the end
of the Cold War, NATO is still Lucifer incarnate. It used to be capitalism
ganging up against the
Apart
from the populist opposition to NATO expansion on the grounds of cost, there is
the intellectual opposition on the grounds of diplomatic good sense. George Kennan, a former ambassador to
Dr
Paul Cornish, a lecturer in defence studies at King’s College,
“I
think that enlargement has been, is, and will be a very risky undertaking,
simply because
Alexander Lebed,
former general and presidential candidate, said this about the Russia-NATO
accord:
“
And Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Communist Party, the
largest in the Russian Duma, and another presidential
candidate, called it an “act of treason”.
But it is not only the Russians that have changed their
mind abut the
West.
“Reds are back under the bed.” “When