Eschatology

Many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid learning the endings of films we haven't watched or books we haven't read. We get upset with friends who slip up and spill the surprise ending.

But a study from two researchers at the University of California, San Diego suggests that spoilers don't spoil stories. Instead, contrary to popular wisdom, they might even enhance our enjoyment of a story. The study ran experiments based on 12 short stories. The researchers found that the study participants preferred the "spoiled" versions of suspenseful stories. For example, in one case, participants were told before reading the story that a condemned man's daring escape is all just a fantasy before the noose snaps around his neck. That spoiler alert helped them enjoy the story even more.

Researchers have identified several reasons some of us like to find out what happens in a story before they’ve finished.

In an article for The Washington Post Olga Mecking says some people are happier knowing how the story ends. “After I became a mother, I developed a much lower tolerance for stress and tension. One way I deal with this is to embrace spoilers. If the action on the page or screen is too suspenseful, I go online to look up what happens next and release some of that tension.”

Researchers also explored tension in the 2011 study “Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories.” When study participants were told the outcome of the short story they were about to read, they reported being more satisfied with the overall experience compared with when they read a story unspoiled.

When so much in the world feels uncertain, knowing how a film or a book will end can give audiences a sense of peace and a feeling of control. We don't know what will happen in real life, but at least we can find out what happens in this story.

Possible Preaching Angles:

As followers of Christ, the Bible has many "spoiler alerts" about how the story of our lives or the world will end. Does this diminish our enjoyment of the story? No, the Bible's spoiler alerts can help us "focus on a deeper understanding of the story" and give us peace inside of worry.

Doom and gloom over the state and future of humanity is prevalent and pervasive globally. A New York Times piece by Tyler Harper gives an excellent summary and overview over our existential anxieties:

The literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour described the expectation of apocalypse. It is the sense that all history’s catastrophes and geopolitical traumas are leading us to 'the prospect of an even more devastating futurity' — as the quintessential modern attitude. It’s visible everywhere in what has come to be known as the polycrisis.

Climate anxiety ... is driving debates about 'the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.' Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic while we are told to expect worse contagions to come. The near coup at OpenAI, which resulted at least in part from a dispute about whether artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction, is only the latest example of our ballooning angst about technology overtaking us.

There are serious concerns that the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine could spark World War III. Apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption. That it is destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony is that this cynicism greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity?

Possible Preaching Angle:

This attitude of growing fear and societal decay should not surprise the believer. This is what Paul described in 2 Timothy 3:1-13: “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days … while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” But we have hope that we can share with the world (1 Pet. 3:15), Jesus is the “light of the world” (John 8:12).

There is a brilliant short interview on Patheos with Os Guinness based on his book, A Free People's Suicide. Guinness argues that America may be on the road to a slow death by suicide.

Guinness said,

The title [of the book] goes back to Abraham Lincoln. “As a nation of free men, either we will live free for all time or die by suicide.” Strong, free nations always bring themselves down. That's going to be America's problem. It won't come down from foreign challenges but by internal corruptions, and in this case by the corruption of freedom.

Guinness also adds, "This is explicitly not a partisan issue. ... The framers had a vision of freedom which … was not only negative freedom from but also a positive freedom to be. American freedom now is almost exclusively freedom from—freedom from interference or freedom from constraint."

Editor’s Note: See also historian Will Durant's observation that “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

History is filled with the evidence that nations which forsake godly principles and embrace sin will face severe consequences.

News and concerns about Artificial Intelligence systems like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Bing AI Chat are all over the media. These systems are an unprecedented technological breakthrough and the consequences still unknown. What's amazing is that even the creators of these systems have no idea how they work.

NYU professor and AI scientist Sam Bowman has spent years building and assessing systems like ChatGPT. He admits he and other AI scientists are mystified:

If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside, you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second, and we just have no idea what any of it means. With only the tiniest of exceptions, we can’t look inside these things and say, “Oh, here’s what concepts it’s using, here’s what kind of rules of reasoning it’s using. Here’s what it does and doesn’t know in any deep way.” We just don’t understand what’s going on here. We built it, we trained it, but we don’t know what it’s doing.

Bowman is concerned about AI's unpredictability:

We’ve got something that’s not really meaningfully regulated and that is more or less useful for a huge range of valuable tasks. We’ve got increasingly clear evidence that this technology is improving very quickly in directions that seem like they’re aimed at some very, very important stuff and potentially destabilizing to a lot of important institutions. But we don’t know how fast it’s moving. We don’t know why it’s working when it’s working.

Formerly the Religion Editor for the Atlantic, Sigal Samuel now writes about the future of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, and their "staggering ethical implications." She describes much of the hope for artificial intelligence as mimicking what Christianity and other major religions have been espousing for centuries. She writes:

Suppose I told you that in 10 years … you will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.

The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.

These technologists propose cheating death by uploading our minds to the cloud, where we can live digitally for all eternity. They talk about AI as a decision-making agent that can judge with mathematical certainty what’s optimal and what’s not. (It is) an endeavor that guarantees human salvation if it goes well, even as it spells doom if it goes badly.

Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety company Anthropic, recently wrote: “Sometimes I think a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture.”

Sigal Samuel summarizes the beliefs in this nutshell: "When we put all these ideas together and boil them down, we get this basic proposition:

• We may not have much time until life as we know it is over.
• So, we need to place a bet on something that can save us.
• Since the stakes are so high, we should ante up and go all in on our bet.

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged

U.S. politics continue to be a chaotic subject, and a new poll finds the majority of Americans are rapidly losing faith in their country’s leaders. Over seven in 10 people say there’s no one they trust to save them from an end-of-the-world event.

If you’re thinking of creating your own Doomsday checklist, researchers found that the most popular items people are stocking up on include water (41%), warm clothing (39%), and extra food (38%). Additionally, one in 10 think they’ll need some extra cash when the world ends.

To decipher which U.S. states are prepping for doomsday, surveyors examined the extent of Americans’ preparations and survival plans. Leading the pack, Nebraska emerged as the most prepared, with 51% of respondents indicating they’ve begun or are considering doomsday preparations. Montana and New Mexico also rank highly on the list of states preparing for catastrophic events, with 50% and 47% of their residents, respectively, making or contemplating preparations.

Financially, the majority of respondents invested between $1,000 to $4,999 in disaster preparations, with a few in states like Montana and New Mexico splurging up to $10,000. For those feeling the urgency to prepare, researchers emphasize the importance of storing water, food, shelter, medical supplies, and hygiene items.

U.S. politics continue to be a chaotic subject, and a new poll finds the majority of Americans are rapidly losing faith in their country’s leaders. Over seven in 10 people say there’s no one they trust to save them from an end-of-the-world event. Such problems only push the so-called “Doomsday Clock” to tick closer to end times.

Established in 1947 by a group of atomic scientists, the Doomsday Clock serves as a barometer for humanity’s proximity to global annihilation. It is a metaphorical measure of humanity’s vulnerability to cataclysmic events, such as nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, or asteroid impacts. The closer the clock’s hands are to midnight, the closer we presumably are to a doomsday scenario.

According to a survey of 6,200 Americans, 71% say they have no faith in the U.S. government to save them or prevent a doomsday event. Even more unnerving, many respondents believe Doomsday could come within the next year.

Over half the poll (56%) think Doomsday will come in the form of a climate change-related catastrophe, while a third believe another virus will sweep the globe, another third fear societal collapse, and a quarter of respondents fear the start of World War III. Another 15% are terrified of either an asteroid strike or a robot/AI takeover of the planet.

When it comes to the lack of faith in the U.S. government, researchers found that this growing distrust appears to be a bipartisan issue. Researchers found that a staggering 82% of respondents in the swing state of Arizona don’t trust the government to protect them from Doomsday. Moreover, 43% of these Americans have stored up supplies for a potential disaster.

Following Arizona, the top five states with the least amount of trust in the government include Kansas (78%), Alabama (78%), Pennsylvania (77%), and Oregon (76%).

In a recent segment on NPR’s Morning Edition, Rev. Cameron Partridge shared about an idea he developed during his years as a college chaplain. "You know, you've got the end of the semester. You've got finals. Preparation to leave for home. So, Advent barely got to be observed."

Traditionally, the season of Advent is observed in the Christian liturgical calendar during the four weeks preceding Christmas. But Partridge decided to start it a few weeks sooner, in order to draw attention to the necessary, urgent themes of the season. He says the shift gave students "an opportunity to actually really be present together and to observe it together, which could be grounding in a time of great intensity."

And this seems of upmost importance these days, especially given the current extended conflict in the Holy Land. "We can't pretend that everything is fine," he says. "There is tumult in the world, and it is real and it is hard and it is deeply affecting people."

The current move to begin marking the season earlier began in 2005, when the Rev. William Petersen got together a group of clergy, professors, and church musicians who formed something that came to be called the Advent Project.

Petersen believes that Advent for Christians is as much about hope for the Second Coming of Jesus—sometimes called the Second Advent—that will usher in the reign of God as much as it is about commemorating the first coming of God in the person of Jesus in first-century Palestine.

Petersen says that tension is where we all reside, which is why Advent is what we need. "In its dwelling in the already and the not-yet, Advent can ground and strengthen us in all of that uncertainty and help give us an ability to connect."

Possible Preaching Angle:

The good news is not just that God came to the earth as a baby, but that by doing so, he signaled hope for his Second Advent in which the heartache, injustice, and death of our fallen world will be overcome by goodness, truth, and life.

Nearly four-in-ten Americans say we're “living in the end times,” says a poll taken against a stark backdrop of climate change, the pandemic, nuclear brinkmanship, and doomsday cults.

A Pew Research Center survey of more than 10,000 adults, conducted in April of 2022, found that 39 percent called these the “end times,” while 58 percent were assured that humanity was not careening towards catastrophe.

Researchers linked the high number of doomsayers to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed 6.65 million lives globally, and fears about living on a warming planet with fiercer hurricanes and wildfires. They could also add the threat of a war using nuclear weapons and greater political division and unrest.

Researchers added: “Periods of catastrophe and anxiety, such as the coronavirus pandemic, have historically led some people to anticipate that the destruction of the world as we know it — the 'end times' — is near.” Those fears relate to present-day realities as well as looking back to “sacred scripture” and the expectation among Christians that “Jesus will return to Earth after or amid a time of great turmoil.”

While nearly half of Christians say Judgement Day is closing in, there are big differences within the faith—63 percent of evangelicals call these the end times, but only 27 percent of Catholics agree.

There's also a political tilt—45 percent of Republicans see doomsday coming, against just 33 percent of Democrats. College graduates were more skeptical of the looming apocalypse than were those with only high school certificates.

On August 27, 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 a.m. when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 2,000 miles away in Western Australia and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean Island of Rodrigues. In all, it was heard in over 50 different geographical locations.

Think just how crazy this is. It’s like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Travelling at the speed of sound it takes a noise about four hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history.

So, what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang? A volcano on Krakatoa had just erupted with a force that tore the island apart, emitting a plume of smoke that reached 17 miles high. This explosion created a deadly tsunami with waves over a hundred feet in height. One hundred sixty-five coastal villages were entirely destroyed. In all, it is estimated the death toll was between 36,000 and 120,000 people.

The British ship Norham Castle was 40 miles from Krakatoa at the time of the explosion. The ship’s captain wrote in his log, “So violent are the explosions that the eardrums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.”

A barometer at the Batavia gasworks (100 miles away from Krakatoa) registered 172 decibels of sound pressure, an unimaginably loud noise. A jackhammer emits about 100 decibels while standing near a jet engine the level is 150 decibels. The human threshold for pain is near 130 decibels. The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source.

Amazingly, for as many as five days after the explosion, weather stations around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure recurring approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet. In all, the pressure waves from Krakatoa circled the globe three to four times in each direction.

Possible Preaching Angle:

When the Lord returns, the trumpet sound will be heard around the world. Everyone who has ever lived, both alive and dead, will hear and respond to the sound.

Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022, at the age of 96. But it turns out that Britain's longest-reigning monarch still has something to say. We just won't know what it is for another 60 years or so. That's because a letter that she wrote to the people of Sydney, Australia, is sealed in a vault with instructions not to be opened until 2085, about 100 years after it was written.

The Queen wrote the letter in November of 1986 on one of her 16 visits to Australia. She addressed the letter to "the just and honorable Lord Mayor of Sydney, Australia" with very specific instructions: "On a suitable day to be selected by you in the year 2085 A.D, would you please open this envelope and convey to the citizens of Sydney my message to them." She then signed the mysterious message, "Elizabeth R.”

The secret letter left by Queen Elizabeth II to the people of Sydney was written to honor the restoration of the Queen Victoria Building. This building was first constructed in Sydney in 1898 for the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, who was also the Queen's great-grandmother. The Queen chose to celebrate that restoration, completed in 1986, with her secret letter.

The letter is located in a restricted part of the historic building inside a glass case. The Queen did not even tell her personal staff what the message to the future contains. Only the Queen was aware of the letter’s contents and it’s to be opened by the city’s future mayor.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Bible; Word of God – The scriptures can only be truly read and understood by God’s people (Isa. 29:11-12; Matt. 13:11); 2) Prophecy; Secret – God has revealed many things in his Word--past, present, and future. But there are some things that God has sealed up until the proper time. God told Daniel to “seal up the vision for it concerns the distant future” (Dan. 8:26). At the proper time it will be unsealed along with the prophecy of Revelation for all to read “Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this scroll because the time is near” (Rev. 22:10).

Rabbis in Israel have spent many years searching for a qualified red heifer. Finally in September of 2022, a Texas man has delivered five red heifers to four Israeli rabbis so the young cows can be slaughtered and burned to produce the ash necessary for a ritual purification prescribed in Numbers 19:2–3.

Some Jews believe the ritual is a step toward the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Some Christians believe that “third temple” will set the stage for the Antichrist.

Editor’s Note: The red heifers must be monitored for defects by the rabbis until they are three-years-old. At that time, if unblemished, they would be suitable for use as sacrifices in the red heifer ritual. The Mishnah, which is a written embodiment of Jewish oral tradition, teaches that only nine red heifers were sacrificed from the time of Tabernacle worship until the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.

It was the height of summer in the UK and then the sky darkened. On the evening of July 21, 2021, hailstones the size of golf balls fell from the sky, smashing windows and battering cars.

While the hailstorm was unusual in its severity, it was mild compared to a hailstorm that struck Calgary in Canada in June 2020. Hailstones the size of tennis balls caused damage to at least 70,000 homes and vehicles, destroyed crops and left the area facing a $940 million repair bill.

And climate change is altering the pattern of hailstorms. In the last three years in Texas, Colorado, and Alabama, the records for largest hailstone have been broken, reaching sizes of up to 6.2 inches in diameter. Hail damage in the US now averages more than $10 billion a year.

Hail forms as droplets of water are carried upward into a thunderstorm. Updraughts carry them into parts of the atmosphere where the air is cold enough to freeze the droplets. Moisture from the air accumulates on the outside of the drops of ice as it moves through the air, causing the hailstone to grow in onion-like layers.

Hailstones of less than 1 inch diameter typically fall at 25-49 mph. But downbursts can feature vertical windspeeds of 156-179 mph with correspondingly destructive hail. The heaviest hailstone ever recorded fell in Bangladesh in 1986, weighed 2.25 lbs. The hailstorm killed as many as 92 people and injured 400.

But just how big can a hailstone get? Experts now estimate the largest possible hailstone at 10.6 inches across or "bowling ball sized.” Meteorologist Matthew Kumjian of Pennsylvania State University said, “Strong 'supercell' thunderstorms produce the world's largest hailstones. So, the strongest of these storms today is probably capable of producing a supergiant stone.” It's clear that the really big stuff is likely to still keep hurling down at us. All we can do is prepare, and find a decent shelter.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Throughout Scripture God has used hailstones as a form of judgment upon his enemies. This will be particularly true in the end times when hailstones weighing 100 pounds each will bring devastating judgment to the earth. “And men cursed God for the plague of hail, because it was so horrendous” (Rev. 16:21).

Biblical prophecy mentions huge numbers of horses in end time battles. Is this just a figure of speech or is there something more to it? A secular video produced by Not What You Think describes the practicality of using mules/horses in modern warfare. The video says:

Supply lines are crucial in modern warfare. Armies must supply their soldiers with weapons, ammunition, fuel, water, medicine, and equipment. Before you dismiss the idea of pack animals being used in modern battlefields, consider this: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent $42 million dollars developing a robot packhorse known as Legged Squad Support System (LS3). The LS3 was supposed to help marines and soldiers carry up to 400 pounds of supplies. But it turned out to be a flop. Not only was its range limited by fuel, it would constantly break down, and worst of all it was (very) loud (making a loud noise like a motorcycle).

Mules are often called the AK-47s of logistics for their rugged utility. A mule costs only a few thousand dollars compared to ground tactical vehicles that can cost $350,000 dollars apiece. Pack animals can reliably carry hundreds of pounds of water, fuel, munitions, and equipment in terrain that is too difficult for motor vehicles to traverse. Compared to vehicles, mules are also harder to detect either optically, or with radar or infrared. Pack animals have been used for thousands of years. For example, during World War II, German logistics were supplied by more than 600,000 horses.

A big problem for ground vehicles is that they require fuel. And a lot of it. A defense science board estimates that by tonnage, as much as 70% of supplies needed to sustain army operations is fuel. And that’s a big problem. Modern weapons, such as drones and portable guided missile systems can destroy supply convoys in no time. The Russian experience in Ukraine is a perfect example of this. Pack animals don’t need fuel, as they can survive on water and forage for food in their environment. Relying on pack animals also reduces the need for spare parts and costly maintenance of ground vehicles.

The warfare of the future calls for simple, cheap, and portable platforms that do not need a decade to be designed and tested. The plan that is currently in the works is calling for the use of pack animals, such as mules and horses. Pack animals might be the best option for supply logistics in mountainous and wooded regions. Currently, the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center teaches marines and army special forces how to employ and care for pack animals. There are growing calls within the Pentagon to expand the use of pack animals in the future.

You can view the video here (time marker 4:23 to 7:56).

Possible Preaching Angle:

This interesting video supports the Bible prophecies that indicate that the battles of the end times will be carried out using horses (Rev. 19:18-19) and ancient weapons, such as bows and arrows and swords (Ezek. 38:4; 39:3, 9-10). Some Bible scholars believe that these references may simply be the best description the ancient prophet could give of modern warfare. But others say that these prophecies may indicate that due to the Antichrist’s peace treaty (Dan. 9:27, etc.) there will be universal disarmament (“unwalled, defenseless villages” Ezek. 38:11) and that the warfare of the last days will utilize non-tech weapon systems.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that it had confirmed two new mind-blowing lightning “megaflash” records. These findings came after careful data-checking and rigorous certification processes.

On April 29, 2020, a sprawling mass of strong to severe thunderstorms produced a 477.2-mile-long lightning strike over the southern United States. It stretched from near Houston to southeast Mississippi. The record beats out a 440-mile-long megaflash that occurred over southern Brazil on Halloween of 2018.

Megaflashes dwarf ordinary lightning strikes. As Earth dwellers, we’re accustomed to seeing what’s going on near the ground, including conventional cloud to ground lightning bolts. Hundreds or thousands such strikes might accompany a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm on a summer’s afternoon.

Megaflashes are different. They’re enormous. They snake through regions of high electric field and can travel for hundreds of miles while lasting more than 10 seconds. Since most storm clouds are fewer than 10 miles high, lightning can’t grow terribly long in the vertical direction. But megaflashes have plenty of space to sprawl in the horizontal.

All megaflashes accompany clusters of thunderstorms that often rage overnight and can occupy an area the size of several states, last for hours, and stretch hundreds of miles or more end-to-end. They’re a staple of the spring and early summer across the southern and central United States, and are also common in South America.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This, and other, record-breaking lightning flashes will shrink into insignificance compared to the most significant lightning display seen by the whole world. It will happen on the Day of Judgment prophesied in Scripture. “For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day” (Matt. 24:27, Luke 17:24).

Many Jerusalem residents believe not only that the Messiah will return, but that his arrival is imminent--so imminent they have taken legal precautions to ensure they can return to Jerusalem immediately upon his return.

In apartment contracts around the city, there are clauses stipulating what will happen to the apartment if or when the Jewish Messiah comes. Using something called a “Messiah Clause,” the contracts stipulate that, in the event of the coming of the Moshiach, or Jewish redeemer, the lease “may be immediately terminated at the will of the landlord.” The owners, generally religious Jews living abroad, are concerned that he will arrive, build a third temple, and turn Israel into paradise--and they will be stuck waiting for their apartment tenants' contracts to run out before they can move back.

It is prophesied in the Jewish scriptures that there will be no more war, murder, or theft, the Jerusalem Temple will be rebuilt, and all the Jews will return to the land of Israel upon his arrival.

There is no count of how many leases in Jerusalem contain such a clause. But although not standard, the Messiah clause is requested enough that every Jerusalem property manager and real estate lawyer contacted by reporters had heard of it, and all except one had dealt with it firsthand.

The fact is, with only biblical prophecy and the conjecture of religious leaders upon which to rely for sketches of the next world, the level of zeal surrounding the associated legal and spiritual preparations is astonishing. Perhaps it’s all a safety net, just in case the scriptural forecast ends up being correct, but what a statement of faith, nonetheless.

The opinion among the property managers and real estate lawyers was unanimous that their clients would know the Messiah when they saw him. Sarah Eiferman, a real estate agent said, “When he comes, we’ll know. It’s in the Old Testament.”

The end is near, and it's coming to a theater near you, or right into your own living room. As of this writing (2024), over 400 end-of-the-world movies have been produced. The pace of apocalyptic drama shows no sign of slowing down. The number of apocalypse-themed movies from 2000 to 2009 (72) doubled over the previous decade, nearly doubled from 2010 to 2019 (123), and in four years between 2020 and 2024 has seen 40 movies produced.

The first end-of-the-world movie was the appropriately named 1916 Danish film, The End of the World, featuring a near-miss by a comet which triggers worldwide natural disasters and social upheaval. The "doom-from-space" theme got a re-start in When Worlds Collide (1951), with the planet-killing heavenly body being a rogue star on a collision course with Earth. The asteroid apocalypse concept then lay relatively dormant until Deep Impact and Armageddon. A variation of the doom-from-space scenario, the "alien invasion apocalypse," got a classic start in 1953 with the film version of H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. Spielberg helped remake that film in 2005. Then there was the blockbuster Independence Day (1996), which features a horde of alien barbarians, roaming the galaxy to plunder planets for their resources.

The most popular world-ending scenario for the last few years has been the "zombie apocalypse, but there also has been Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, Brad Pitt's World War Z, and the list goes on and on.

Editor’s Note: You can see the most current list here

Possible Preaching Angles: Could it be that deep down we know that our history has its appointed conclusion, that the end of our story has already been written? Perhaps it is no accident that the recent increase in the number of apocalypse-themed films has coincided with the rise of increasingly chaotic geopolitics. We look to movies and TV—the way we used to look to the Church and worship—to tell us who we are and where we are going, even unto the end.

Two stories were written in the twentieth century that share the same title: The Door in the Wall.

One of them won the Newbery Medal for children's literature. The ten-year-old son of a medieval knight become ill and crippled. He is separated from his parents by a cruel enemy army and cared for by a friar named Brother Luke. He is ashamed and disappointed by his legs—others call him "Robin Crookedshanks." He feels that his life will always be insignificant with him unable to serve and having no chance to show courage or do glorious deeds. But the friar takes him to his monastery, teaches him to read and swim and carve, and teaches him to pray for the faith that a fine and beautiful life still lies before him, "Always remember," the friar says, "thou hast only to follow the wall far enough, and there will be a door in it."

At the end of the story, it is his disability that leads to his opportunity. His crooked legs cause the enemy to under-estimate him. The resilient spirit he has grown in response to his challenges keeps him going. He alone finds the door in their fortress wall. He ends up against all odds being the rescuer who can steal unsuspected through enemy lines and save the people he loves. It is his faith in the old friar's words that keeps him going.

The other story was written by H. G. Wells, best known for his science fiction works like The War of the Worlds. In Wells' story the promise of the door in the wall is a cruel hoax. A man is haunted all his life by the memory of a door that leads to an enchanted garden that contains all he ever longed for. He searches in vain for that door his whole life. At the end of the story his dead body is found—fallen off a construction site behind a wall marked by a door that looks exactly like the one he has been seeking.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Hope—in this life—When you're going through difficult times, do you know that God has a door of hope waiting to open for you? (2) Hope—in the life to come; Eschatology—Those who hope in Christ know that there is an open door at the end of history and the end of their lives.