Michael Youssef - Is The End Near?: What Jesus Told Us About the Last Days

INCREASINGLY PEOPLE BOTH within and outside the church are asking the same question: Is this the end of the world? Christians phrase it differently, of course: Are we in the end-time? But both Christians and non-Christians are watching current events and coming to the same conclusion: history appears to be drawing to a culmination.

In July 2021 The Nation published a story titled The End of the World Is Closer Than It Seems. In that piece author Tom Engelhardt wrote that he worries the world will end in a nuclear holocaust. Even as a pandemic killed millions in 2020, nine nations, he points out, were growing their nuclear arsenals. More than half of the expenditures for new nuclear weaponry$37.4 billionwere laid out by the United States, including $13.3 billion for the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. In total the nine nuclear-armed nations spent about $137,000 per minute to update a global nuclear arsenal that, Engelhardt writes, could end history as we know it.

That same month, in the Telegraph of Great Britain, columnist Janet Daley wrote, Is this the end of the world? Every time I turn on the television news I am confronted by an apocalyptic panorama of fire, flood and never-ending plague. Though Daley didnt believe the world would end in fire, flood, or plague, she worried that a frightened humanity might be stampeded into accepting an authoritarianism that presents itself as benign but inevitably proves to be tyrannical. If you have read the Bible prophecies of the Antichrist, you know what this authoritarianism would look like.

Also in 2021 the Chicago Maroon, the independent student newspaper of The University of Chicago, published a story titled Is This the End of the World?, in which authors Milutin Gjaja and Laura Gersony trace the origin of the Doomsday Clocka warning symbol of global catastrophe. The clock was created in 1947 by the scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in World War II. Their publication, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has shown the Doomsday Clock on the cover of every issue. The clock, housed at the University of Chicagos Harris School of Public Policy, illustrates the scientists assessment of the extinction threat to humanity.

On the Doomsday Clock midnight symbolizes ultimate doom, the end of humanity. The first cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in 1947, showed the clocks hands at seven minutes to midnight. Over the years, those hands have sometimes moved closer to midnight and sometimes farther away, based on the assessment of experts. The clock moved to two minutes before midnight in 1953 after the development of the hydrogen bomb and swung to seventeen minutes before midnight at the end of the Cold War, in 1991.

Gjaja and Gersony listed numerous threats to humanity: a global pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes, climate change, and even swarms of locusts of biblical proportions that decimated crops in East Africa. These disasters seemed to explode at the beginning of the 2020s. As I write these words, the Doomsday Clock displays a sobering one hundred seconds to humanitys midnight. In the estimation of these experts, the threat to humanity has never been greater than it is right now.

In the coming pages were going to look at some of the horrors and catastrophes that threaten the human raceand that Jesus told us would come upon the world before His return. If you are an unbeliever and you are looking realistically at the state of the world right now, I honestly dont know how you can sleep at night. But if you are a genuine follower of Christ, you can face the future without fear. You dont need to cower under your bed, because God is in control of this worldand He is in control of your life.

The book you hold in your hands is not intended to frighten you but to encourage you, give you hope, and magnify your joy. It is almighty God, not the atomic scientists, who holds the future in His hands. His timetable never moves forward or backward with changing events. In His Word, God has given us a reliable and reassuring guide to the future. Jesus has told us what to expect in the days before His return, and He has told us not to be anxious or afraid.

What events did Jesus foretell? As we are about to see, He prophesied that false messiahs would come, deceiving many. Wars and rumors of wars would spread around the globe. Nations, political rulers, and ethnic groups would rise up against one another. Famines would decimate populations, and earthquakes would shake the earth. Jesus foretold all these horrorsand they are coming to pass as I write these words.

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, people have become complacent, assuming that it was unthinkable that one nation would invade another nation, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland, France, and other nations in World War II. Then, on February 24, 2022, after amassing a force of 190,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, Russia brazenly attacked Ukraine, bent on slaughtering civilians and swallowing up the entire country.

Russian atrocities against the Ukrainian people included the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, acts of rape and pillaging by Russian soldiers, and the deliberate targeting of a bomb shelter in Mariupol that was clearly marked Children. Three hundred Ukrainian civilians, including many children, died in the attack.

A viral video from Ukraine shows a little girl with a message scrawled on her bare back. As bombs and artillery shells rained down upon this childs neighborhood, her tearful mother took a marker and wrote the childs name and birth date, along with the phone numbers of her parents, on her back. Many Ukrainian mothers and fathers have had to prepare for the unthinkablethe very real possibility that they and their children might be separated or killed as war engulfs their country.

Even before the war in Ukraine, the world economy was staggering from the effects of more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic had scrambled the supply chain, bankrupted businesses, and fueled uncontrolled inflation. In 2020 David M. Beasley, executive director of the UNs World Food Programme, predicted that the pandemic would cause famines of biblical proportions in more than thirty developing countries. This is truly more than just a pandemic, Beasley said. It is creating a hunger pandemic. This is a humanitarian and food catastrophe.

What Beasley didnt know and could not have foreseen was that the food catastrophe of 2020 would be made many times worse by the Ukraine war in 2022. Russias invasion of Ukraine prompted the United States and Europe to boycott Russian oil, gas, grain, seafood, and other exports.

The global boycott of exports from Russia and its ally Belarus had a devastating impact on global food production. Before the war, Russia and Belarus supplied much of the worlds agricultural fertilizer needs, including more than 40 percent of the worlds agricultural potash, 22 percent of the worlds agricultural ammonia, 14 percent of the worlds urea, and 14 percent of the worlds monoammonium phosphate. These fertilizers are essential to growing corn, soy, rice, and wheat. From Canada to Brazil, from Africa to China, growers faced shortages of essential soil nutrientsand populations faced famine. In just one month following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global wheat prices climbed 21 percent, barley prices 33 percent, and fertilizer prices 40 percent. Tony Will, CEO of American fertilizer producer CF Industries, told Reuters, My concern at the moment is actually one of a food crisis on a global basis.