The World of the End
Do the many problems of today’s world reflect end-times prophecies?
In a 2022 interview of Pastor David Jeremiah by Decision Magazine, he said that “while we cannot predict the end of the world, we seem to be living now in ‘the world of the end.’” In other words, he’s saying there are several preliminary signs that the stage is being set for the rise of the antichrist, then a period of tribulation, and afterward, the return of Jesus – all in the not-too-distant future.
A major sign Pastor Jeremiah mentions is the globalist/socialist movement, which has led to the curtailment of freedom in many once free countries – creating favorable conditions for the antichrist. An example is Canada, once a country as free as any in the world, and now a socialist bastion in which government has incrementally used the covid pandemic, LGBQ etc. issues, abortion “rights,” and overall press and speech censorship to come down hard on freedom lovers, especially Christian churches and pastors. According to author and educator Dennis Prager: “Canada is a moral embarrassment [but] apparently most Canadians are perfectly content to live in a country moving toward dictatorship.” Indeed, at the time, some 4000 Canadian pastors were protesting a new law that banned conversion therapy and, in so doing, referred to Biblical morality as myth.
Another example is Australia, which is especially surprising to me because in 1980 I spent five weeks working in the Melbourne area, where I met many great patriots – the kind of people who, if you’re in a war, you want alongside you in the trenches. Now, not only have most Aussies compliantly turned in their firearms to a progressive government, but they acquiesced in widespread covid lockdowns, heavily restricted travel, closed schools, covid concentration camps for the unvaccinated, and censorship aimed primarily at Christian doctrine. Predictably, New Zealand marched in lockstep with Australia.
Other examples of western countries that were relatively free up to the year 2000 but have now moved toward socialistic dictatorships include Austria and the Netherlands (now considered the two least free Western European countries), France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Here at home, we are still relatively free, but the fight is on. Key watchwords from the American left are consolidation, compliance, and conformity – based mostly on misleading or false information and indoctrination, and with total control of the populace as the ultimate objective. To quote Pastor Jeremiah again:
“…[S]ocialism is an attempt to draw everything together under very concentrated leadership, so that’s why in this country, socialists want people to be totally dependent upon the government and the government to control everything. That’s tailor-made for the Antichrist….”
Take, for example, the various “voting rights” acts the left has been trying to pass in Congress the last few years. Currently under the Constitution, the states make their own (state and local) election laws and rules, but the leftist proposals would place all election laws, rules, and protocols under federal control – ultimately putting the feds in a position to regulate outcomes by specifying who can vote (including illegals, felons, and maybe some dead people) and who can’t (eventually, maybe Christians).
Another example was the proposed PRO Act, which fortunately did not pass. Presently, there are some 60 million flexible workers in America, full-time or part-time – that’s 35% of the workforce. The left’s claim is that much of the compensation paid to these workers is below union pay scales, and some may be paid “under the table” to evade taxes. But of greater concern to them is the relative independence of nearly 9.5 million unincorporated self-employed Americans – consultants, freelancers, contractors, etc. These typically higher-earning people are not subject to withholding. Instead, they pay estimated taxes in advance, with lots of leeway for timing (and for understating income – we are inherently evil, after all). In addition, these self-employed people often hire from the flexible worker group and sometimes pay them under the table.
Under the guise of protecting workers’ rights, the PRO Act would have changed virtually all that. First, it would have eliminated all state right-to-work laws that now give workers the right not to join a union – in effect making all labor subject to forced unionization. Moreover, its rules would force the great majority of now-independent contractors, consultants, etc. into employee arrangements. Indeed, a former Obama Labor Department official has expressly supported strangling such small private businesses by government regulation. Said he in 2007: “Regulatory systems provide the government with tools to change private behavior, and those tools are usually related to enforcement activities.”
Some issues may call for getting sufficient conformity before enforcing compliance, to avoid sudden firestorms of protest. To do that, they may first divide the people – e.g., as they did with the covid-19 vaccines, creating an antagonistic division between the vaxed and the unvaxed, and then (with public support by the vaxed) enforcing compliance by many of the unvaxed with mandates. SCOTUS shot down the mandate for private businesses but let it stand for health care institutions receiving federal funds.
Besides the many severe reactions from these experimental vaccines, they have often failed at preventing infection and haven’t been much more than a mitigating treatment in many “breakthrough” cases. But the government made it difficult or impossible for people to try alternative treatments that have been shown to be effective. As noted by historian Victor Davis Hanson: “Many doctors [have] kept hammering at the need for therapeutics…The use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin was widely ridiculed, despite continuing studies from abroad attesting to their usefulness.” Any sensible person can see there was no purpose for such restrictions other than control.
One more example of the national and global quest for control is the climate change issue, which most western countries have signed on to. Joe Biden, who had never learned the leftist art of euphemism, had ham-fistedly illustrated the illogic and madness of this movement by his moves and pronouncements – e.g., he halted a large part of our energy-producing capacity (Keystone, oil and gas leases, etc.), and at the same time he waived the sanctions Trump had imposed on Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline. He then begged OPEC to pump more oil to keep prices down, and when they refused, he tapped into US emergency reserves. In terms of “saving the planet,” did he think it made a difference what country pumps the fossil fuel? So, was Joe evil or simply incompetent? Either way, he was definitely not antichrist material.
Speaking of which, Scripture indicates the presence of several antichrists in the world at once at any given time (e.g., 1 John.2:18; 2 John:7). Right now, we have several leaders and notables who could qualify as “lesser” antichrists – Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and George Soros, to name a few. But none of them is probably the overall “antichrist-in-chief” who rises to the top and unifies the others. So is there anyone on the horizon who could fill that slot?
Emerging from the shadowy globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland is one individual many refer to as the Davos man, or the man from Davos. His name is Parag Khanna, fiftyish, an American citizen born in India. He is a confirmed technocrat and is described as a geopolitical futurist who explores how megacities, supply chains, and connective technologies shape the world. He is a principal in at least three futuristic internet companies, including AlphaGeo, and most of his output reflects the thinking of the WEF.
Chronicles magazine once described him as a “silver-spoon globe-trotter, a specialist in globalization, [who] wants to change the world forever, openly advocating a mix-and-match ‘Civilization 3.0’ under a world government…He exudes intellectual superiority and utter indifference to a traditional sense of the sacred.” He has published several books, including “Connectography–Mapping the Future of Global Civilization,” and wants to redraw the map away from states and borders. He appears to be a master of the euphemism, able to make the radical sound to many like just what we need.
Khanna’s basic idea for “Civilization 3.0,” according to Chronicles, is to relocate several billion people (not the elite) and program them as the new working class, happy to “live in electric RVs or converted shipping containers as needed.” He has also said that the pandemic proved that only technocrats can save the world.
Although Khanna’s ideas sound outlandish to normal people, many world elites are listening. So while believers should keep a weather eye on the man from Davos, we must maintain a laser-like focus on the Man from Nazareth. Only He can save us.
Norbert J. Kuk