They say

They say, this is the year of the End.

They have made movies and documentaries about it, to entertain us, to enlighten us or to frighten us. They must think, ‘we’re on a roll’ and they roll with it, yes, all the way to the bank.

Ahmadinejad, the Mahdi, and Jesus. Were his hearers at the United Nations amused, as they listened to a man spout stories while deep underground in faraway Iran another story rumbles?

The all-knowing Maya anciently ended their calendar in this year we call twenty-twelve. No need to continue the thing, since the reason for counting time will have been worn out by then.

We never seem to run out of prophets of doom, whether geo-political, economic, or merely natural. In my short sixty-one years I somehow have survived half a dozen earth-ending comets.

Am I standing with the crowd of mockers who say, ‘Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’ I think not.

I profess the Symbol, ‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.’ And, ‘I expect the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.’

I notice there is no talking of the End in this confession, except to say what is real ‘will have no end.’ They know they would play with fire who mock the judgment, so they are silent about it.

Instead, they offer fantasy for sale, the kings of this world, and the prophets of the next, both false. They know which side their bread is buttered on. They know how to feather their own nests.

‘I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, but I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now, and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.’
(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ‘Song of Myself’)

No, the world will not end this year, and when it does end, it will not even be noticed by those who threaten or prophesy, who promise perfection or hell or heaven which they cannot deliver.

The end does not come like that, but in the way the blessed Revelator writes, ‘for the Time is near,’ yes, the Time is always near. Moment by moment it is not dribbled out. We are drenched in it.

‘There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now, and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.’

I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.

Revelation 1:8