Mark Hitchcock - The End Times Survival Guide: Ten Biblical Strategies for Faith and Hope in These Uncertain Days

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The End Times Survival Guide: Ten Biblical Strategies for Faith and Hope in These Uncertain Days

Copyright 2018 by Mark Hitchcock. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hitchcock, Mark, date- author.

Title: The end times survival guide : ten biblical strategies for faith and hope in these uncertain days / Mark Hitchcock.

Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017913 | ISBN 9781496414090 (sc)

Subjects: LCSH: Hope--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Christian life. | End of the world.

Classification: LCC BV4638 .H58 2018 | DDC 234/.2--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017913

ISBN 978-1-4964-2763-2 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4964-1410-6 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-2764-9 (Apple)

Build: 2021-04-21 14:02:46 EPUB 3.0

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

PAUL VALRY

S URVIVAL IS BIG BUSINESS. Everywhere you look these days, someone is talking about survival. Entertainment outlets and the media have seized the survival craze.

The initial offering in the new survival genre, and reality TV, was the series Survivor, which premiered in the United States in 2000. The series features a group of strangers marooned at an isolated location where they have to scrounge for food, water, shelter, and fire. The show completed its thirty-fifth season in 2017. Survivor is the quintessential survivor in the media industry. Since Survivor, a steady stream of movies and series has focused on surviving in almost every possible predicament, including in a postapocalyptic world.

A spate of survival reality TV shows has also erupted. Consider these:

• Out of the Wild: The Alaska Experiment
• Extreme Survival
• Man vs. Wild
• Survive This
• Fat Guys in the Woods
• Survivorman
• Surviving Disaster
• Dual Survival
• The Wheel

Doomsday Preppers is another offering that demonstrates how to survive various doomsday scenarios. The survival business is booming online with all kinds of products designed to enhance a persons ability to endure any conceivable disruption, from living off the grid to all-out apocalypse. You can learn survival tips and buy survival gear for any eventuality. Online you can find all kinds of survival gurus touting their tips for surviving everything from school shootings to nuclear holocaust.

Whats behind the survival obsession? Why are these programs, products, and pointers so successful? Because the future has never been more uncertain. Never more unknown. Never more unpredictable. We live in a world that seems to be on the verge of coming apart.

In 2017, a Las Vegas shooting spree at an outdoor concert left dozens massacred, a terrorist plowed through innocent pedestrians in New York City, and a gunman opened fire on a church service in a small Texas town, all in a little over a month. Evil is intensifying.

Political rancor and polarization in American politics has shifted to another gear. Both sides are so entrenched that for someone to give any ground or to compromise in the least is viewed as total capitulation, making that person an outcast from all groups. Even commonsense solutions seem unachievable. The anger and outright malice on cable news and social media is over the top. Increasingly, protests fill the streets. Violence and racial tension are boiling over. Anarchy threatens. The family is in dire trouble. Deadly diseases and viruses like Ebola and Zika erupt with frightening regularity and can spread globally very quickly. Cataclysmic weather events seem to be escalating in frequency and intensity.

Beyond these things, the once faraway threat of a terrorist attack has jumped into everyones life the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, a subway in London, a train in Spain, a convention in California, a tourist hot spot in France, a nightclub in Orlando, a Christmas market in Berlin. No one seems safe anywhere. Millions of displaced, devastated people are fleeing their homelands, potentially giving terrorists cover to blend into and infiltrate Western nations.

Rogue regimes such as North Korea already have the bomb, and other nations like Iran are on the threshold. Barbaric terrorists threaten our safety and very way of life. Even as the caliphate is crumbling and ISIS is on the run, fleeing ISIS fighters are exporting their savagery to more locations. ISIS-inspired killers are hiding among us. There seems to be a collective, growing sense that things cant go on this way much longer.

And then theres the world economy, which, while doing well on many fronts, seems increasingly fragile, susceptible at any time to a geopolitical crisis. The United States is twenty trillion dollars in debt, and that number is climbing. The debt bomb must explode at some point, triggering financial Armageddon.

In addition to all these things, theres an increasing indifference and malaise and sometimes outright militancy toward the central truths of the Christian faith and practice. Anti-Christian momentum is palpable. Hate and hostility toward Bible-believing Christians is on the rise. Christians are taking fire. Believers who dare even to question the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and gender fluidity are labeled haters and homophobes. Believers in Jesus Christ now find themselves playing in enemy territory in American culture, and the crowd is getting more and more hostile.

Pornography is metastasizing like a deadly cancer and infecting an entire generation of young men and women. The young are swallowing a deadly cocktail of toxic ideas in the name of love and tolerance. We have front-row seats to a moral freefall. Were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Time seems to be running out.