“When disaster strikes, life becomes like molten metal…Old customs crumble, instability rules.” – Dr. Samuel Prince (“Catastrophe and Social Change”) All signs point to Jesus’ return in 2030. And though this event will be a day of great joy and excitement for His faithful followers, getting to that day without going apostate will prove difficult – even impossible for many. Why? Because they will be ill-prepared and equipped to endure the epic levels of craziness, scariness and confusion that will become our world in the years or days prior to His return. In short, those people will not possess what is known in the fields of psychology and sociology as “disaster behavior.” To avoid becoming one of those people will therefore mean learning and applying those principles necessary to possess it. The following points represent those principles -or how to prepare for the end of the world: 1. Prepare according to the predictions. 1.1. The death rate from natural disasters has significantly dropped over the last hundred years due to our ability to predict (forecast) when these events will happen. For example, in 1927 when nothing existed to predict natural disasters, the global death toll exceeded 3.5 million. Since the 1970s and the creation of devices for predicting such things, that number has consistently stayed below 500 thousand. 1.2. The lesson (then) to be learned? If we want to increase our chances of survival, we need to prepare according to the predictions, we need to follow the forecast and be on the alert. 1.3. Jesus agrees (Mat 24:37-51) – Besides the obvious, there are two things worth noting here: 1) If you are gauging your urgency to get ready or take seriously Christ’s return based on the world around you, then you are going to miss the boat (just like they did in Noah’s day). You won’t be ready when Jesus comes because you refused to act according to the forecast – the predictions of His coming. 2) Being alert (or following the forecast) means being responsible with your life in the time you have remaining. IOW: this isn’t the time to be less committed in your walk with Christ or with the potential He has given you for advancing His gospel and Kingdom. To use a football analogy, we have hit the two-minute warning. Whatever you’ve got left, you need to leave it on the field – otherwise you may lose the game. My advice: plan exactly what you are going to accomplish for Christ over the next five years and start working that plan. Like Jesus says about the faithful slave, He needs to find you productive when He shows up – otherwise you will be “cut to pieces and assigned a place with the hypocrites…that place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (i.e., hell).”1.4. BTW: the reason Jesus mentions hell as the place of hypocrites is because that is ultimately why people end up in hell. They go to hell bc their choices in life created a double standard (one favoring them). As a result, they are hypocrites (approving for themselves what they condemn in others). The only way to avoid such hypocrisy is by following God’s Law. It is the only law that always creates equity (impartiality/fairness) - the opposite of hypocrisy (Mat 7:12 “treat others in the same way as you would want them to treat you”).2. Get through the denial phase as quickly as possible.2.1. Those who study disaster will tell you that the first phase in the survival arc is denial. When disaster strikes we tend to suppress the truth of the event – or what’s happening to us. We respond in denial. Denial is just another word for disbelief/unbelief. Which means we have a hard time believing things when difficulty or disaster strikes. In our case, what the Bible says about Jesus’ return and the urgency that will be necessary to stay faithful. As a result, we will delay to act – or fail to act at all, sealing our fate.2.2. The National Research Council found that when disaster strikes – as in the example of a fire, “people are often cool…delaying their response.” 2.3. The average response of the World Trade Center survivors was six minutes after realizing what had happened. Some waited as long as forty-five minutes before acting. About one thousand individuals spent time shutting down their computers before leaving the collapsing towers. A person on a floor in the upper sixties stated that “the building started to sway and everything started shaking” and that they “knew something was wrong.” Yet instead of immediately leaving, they ran to their desk and made several calls to relatives trying to figure out what was going on.2.4. Scientists believe the reason we tend to fall into the denial phase is four-fold: 1) we have a “normalcy bias.” IOW: we think that disaster only happens to other people, but never us (our lives are too normal; e.g., Survey of one thousand Americans after 9/11: most believed they only had a 21 percent chance of being in a ...
