Mankind's Changing Outlook
Over a century ago, the teachings of the psychotherapist Émile Coué gave rise to the popular saying, "Every day and in every way the world is getting better and better." People then were giddy with optimism that modern technology and government would soon erase the ills of mankind. They believed that progress was the normal flow of human history.
But as people today look about them, they see that the world is not getting better and better. It is getting worse and worse.
Mankind’s Predicament
Decline in economic security
Poverty is swallowing up new millions every year, especially in third-world countries.1 Even in developed countries, prosperity is becoming more elusive, as young adults find it increasingly difficult to join the middle class. The percentage of people in their twenties who enjoy a middle-class income has declined in the last fifty years from 70% to 60%.2 By far the greatest barrier confronting young people as they seek a comfortable place in society is the rising cost of higher education. This "has surged more than 538% since 1985. In comparison, . . . the consumer price index has jumped 121%."3 To pay for college, many contract a huge debt that may drain income for a whole lifetime.
The percentage of the whole population belonging to the middle class is also falling.4 And even for those with sufficient income to be considered members of this stratum of society, average income barely nudged upwards in the ten years preceding 2019, while many unavoidable costs rose sharply.5 House prices doubled between 1995 and 2017.6 One weight pulling down the middle class is the expense of healthcare. In the United States between 2008 and 2018, the portion of household income spent on health insurance premiums and deductibles climbed from 7.8% to 11.5%.7
The growing failure of modern economies to meet human needs is not limited to the downward slide of many individuals. Whole nations are moving along a road toward economic disaster. Irresponsible risk-taking by big corporations, their ability to shift resources and jobs across national boundaries, and deficit spending by governments are bringing the United States and other developed nations to the brink of financial collapse. The measure of national debt burdening the United States is in each new moment reaching a record high.8 As of 11/22/19, it stood at well over twenty-three trillion dollars.9 This amounts to more than $186,000 per taxpayer.10
Violence
And violence fills the earth. Whole societies, from Venezuela to Pakistan, are awash in blood. Parts of Africa are a battleground. Much of the Middle East is a war zone. Most alarming is the continuing existence of nuclear weapons in large stockpiles. The so-called nuclear club has for several decades been limited to nine members, but among them are the volatile nations of India, Pakistan, and North Korea.11 Striving hard to join the club is war-prone Iran.
Even in developed nations standing aloof from war, the media are filled with reports of terrorism, social unrest, serial murder, sick crime, and suicide. The spotlight of news often returns to madmen gunning people down.
Back in the 1980s, the United States suffered about one mass shooting per year. Since then the frequency of such horrible moments has risen steadily until now it equals about ten per year. The number of fatalities between 2015 and 2019 approached four hundred.12 Even sadder is the epidemic of suicide that has descended upon American young people. From 2007 to 2017, the suicide rate for persons aged ten to twenty-four soared 56%. The upsurge was especially pronounced in the youngest group, aged ten to fourteen. For them, the rate nearly tripled. Across this whole spectrum of ages, death by homicide was also becoming more common.13
We see similar trends in Europe. In late 2019, there were mass demonstrations in France to protest the recent outbreak of "femicide." In the previous year, a record number of women had been murdered by their current or former "life partner."14
Violence is also escalating in Latin America. In Mexico, for example, the number of homicides reached an all-time high in 2019.15 The risk of being murdered was about six times higher than in the United States. Yet it was even more dangerous to live in Panama, where the same risk was ten times higher.16
Diseases
Many new diseases are emerging from nowhere. Fifty years ago the only sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) of significance were syphilis and gonorrhea. Both currently are more common than ever before,17 but at the same time thirty-five new STDs have emerged to afflict millions.18 Altogether, twenty million new cases appear each year just in the United States, victimizing about one fourth of the young people between ages fifteen and twenty-four.19
A growing threat to the human race in this age of massive global travel is pandemic diseases, each caused by a new infectious virus. The latest, spreading worldwide in 2020, is COVID-19. It is inflicting a death toll that may yet surpass two million.20
Besides the new diseases appearing on the scene, many age-old plagues that mankind has viewed as nearly eradicated are making a strong comeback. Several new strains of the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis have appeared, each more drug-resistant than the last.21 As a result, the disease is gaining ground even in the relatively advanced nation of China.22
Natural disasters
Besides the disasters that man is inflicting upon himself, every kind of natural disaster besets the world. Storms and floods and wildfires and droughts are becoming more frequent and causing more death and destruction. Already in 1999, the Geoscience Research Group sponsored by Munich Re, world’s largest reinsurer, reported that in the previous decade, the number of great natural catastrophes had increased by a factor of three since the 1960s.23 More recently, according to a report published in 2017 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the incidence of natural disasters had increased fivefold since the 1970s.24
One recurring story in the news has drawn public attention to the disastrous wildfires raging every year in many places, especially Australia, California, and the Amazon region. In California, both the number of wildfires and the number of acres burned have been steadily increasing during the last forty years, reaching a climax in 2018 at the conflagration known as the Camp Fire,25 which destroyed about 153,000 acres and 19,000 structures and left eighty-six people dead.26 It was the worst fire in state history.27
Another kind of natural disaster that often inflicts enormous damage is hurricanes. One recent study has demonstrated that the biggest and strongest hurricanes are 3.3 times more frequent in our day than they were a century ago.28
Global perils
Then there are the trends pointing to collapse of civilization. The amount of arable land on the planet will soon begin to shrink29 while global population will continue to grow.30 The fossil fuels which serve as energy source for the greatest portion of human endeavors are, as generally agreed, about half gone. Present reserves will not last much longer if we measure time in decades, and nowhere do we see any prospect of an adequate and affordable replacement.31
Extinction of other species, including many that are beneficial in some respect, is proceeding rapidly. According to a report from the United Nations, "At least 680 species with backbones have already gone extinct since 1600. . . . More than 40% of the world’s amphibian species, more than one-third of the marine mammals and nearly one-third of sharks and fish are threatened with extinction."32 Even more alarming, the life forms that could soon disappear include more than 40% of the world’s insect species, many performing a critical function in the maintenance of a local ecosystem.33 The beautiful monarch butterfly, a pollinator of many wildflowers,34 is currently being considered for classification as an endangered species.35 Also nearing extinction are several of the world’s species of bumblebees that serve as important pollinators.36 In the United States, even the population of honey bees is on a steep downward slope. A yearly decline evident since 2006 was greatest in 2018–2019, when the total managed population in commercial colonies dropped 40.7%.37
Perhaps the environmental crisis receiving greatest public attention is global warming. Whatever its cause, it is certainly a fact. The average surface temperature of Planet Earth during the decade 2009–2018 "was 0.93 ± 0.07 °C [about 1.7 °F] warmer than the pre-industrial baseline (1850–1900)."38 One result is that the ice sheets and glaciers of the world are melting.39 Although the Antarctic has so far gone opposite to the trend, the overall change in sea ice has averaged a loss of about thirteen thousand square miles per year since the late 1970s.40 Yet another result that will become more evident soon in man’s history is coastal flooding. In the twenty-one year span from 1993 to 2014, the global sea level rose 2.6 inches, and it is expected to continue rising at about one-eighth inch per year.41
God’s Book of Answers
No wonder that people today are anxious about the future. To what bleak end are all these troubles leading us? What is the outlook for the human race? Can anyone tell us what is going to happen? No scholar or soothsayer can give us the answers. In all the world we find only one reliable source of information about things to come. That source is the Bible, the book which the Creator Himself gave to mankind so that they might understand His workings in history. Fully one fourth of this divinely inspired document is prophecy. So, to find out what lies ahead, we need only consult the Bible.
The Man Who Was God
The main subject of the Bible is the man Jesus Christ. Who was He? He was a person of Jewish descent who lived two thousand years ago in the country of Palestine, then part of the Roman Empire. But He was no ordinary man. He was also God in the flesh. The Bible teaches that God is one Being in three persons named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The entire human race has estranged itself from God by choosing to live contrary to His will. Instead of fully obeying the moral laws inscribed on the human conscience and specified in the Bible, they all engage in sinful (that is, wicked) behavior, thus denying themselves the privilege of living with God after they die. Instead, they must go to hell, a place of punishment for sin. To remove sin’s penalty from you and me and everyone else, the Father appointed the Son to be our Savior, a role He could fulfill only by entering this world as a man. The man He became was unique in being fully human as well as fully divine, unique also in being wholly without sin.
The story of His life appears in the four New Testament books called the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They tell us that His ministry as a prophet and teacher began when He was about thirty years old, and that for the next three and a half years, He walked throughout the land and challenged the people to seek the kingdom of God. Also, He presented Himself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies foreseeing that God would send into this world a sinless man—in Hebrew known as the Messiah, in Greek as the Christ—who would provide a full remedy for the sins of other men. In proof of His claims, Jesus performed many astounding miracles. On several occasions He raised the dead to life. Once, in the presence of thousands, He multiplied a few loaves and fishes into a meal sufficient for them all. Rather than deny His ability to perform wonders, His enemies accused Him of being a sorcerer (Matt. 12:24).
Yet the mobs who followed Him at the beginning of His ministry soon turned away when they discovered that His mission was essentially spiritual, not political. They wanted a deliverer from Roman oppression. The leaders of the Jewish nation likewise rejected Him. Regarding Him as a threat to their own power, they brought Him before the Roman governor, Pilate, and falsely accused Him of trying to make Himself king (Luke 23:2), a capital offense. Pilate bowed to their will and condemned Him to die by crucifixion, one of the cruelest ways of killing a man ever devised.
In His last hours, Jesus went through agony beyond our conception. As He hung upon the cross, He bore upon Himself all the sins of mankind (1 Pet. 2:21–24). Therefore, to the suffering of His body on the cross was added the suffering of His soul when God the Father turned away from the sin-bearer and suspended the infinite love that had bound them together throughout eternity past (Ps. 22:1; Mark 15:34). Altogether, Jesus’ suffering amounted to full punishment for all the sins of all the people who will ever live on planet Earth. In other words, He endured a sum of pain equal to a just penalty for the entire mountain of human sin. Yet He made no attempt to escape, He uttered no complaint, and as He looked upon His crucifiers, He prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).
We can be glad that the story of Jesus does not end at His death. During His ministry, He had taught that after lying in a tomb for three days, He would rise again. And the prophecy came true. Beginning on the third day after the Crucifixion, He was seen alive on numerous occasions, once by no less than five hundred people (Luke 24; John 20–21; 1 Cor. 15:4–8). After another forty days, He left this world and sat down at the Father’s right hand in heaven. Many of His disciples witnessed His departure, known as the Ascension. As they stood amazed, He rose out of their sight into a cloud (Acts 1:4–11).
Then, according to Jesus’ instructions, they returned to Jerusalem and waited to receive the Holy Spirit, for they could accomplish nothing without the Spirit’s power. On the Jewish feast known as Pentecost, the Spirit descended with supernatural signs of His presence (Acts 2), and immediately the disciples began to preach the gospel—the message of salvation through Christ—with great success.
What did the gospel lay down as the requirement to be saved from sin’s penalty? The requirement is very easy to understand and very easy to satisfy. It is only to be sorry for sin and to believe that Jesus is Savior and Lord. Following genuine belief, also known as faith, a person is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and enabled to change steadily into the likeness of the sinless Christ. The great benefit of faith is that it brings the privilege of living forever in a perfect world governed by an all-powerful, loving God (John 3:16).
The gospel quickly spread far and wide. Within the next generation, Christian preachers carried it throughout the Roman world and beyond. Wherever people responded with faith, the new believers met regularly for prayer, study of God’s Word, and fellowship. The first local assembly of believers, the one in Jerusalem, was known from the beginning as a church, and the same term was used for the assemblies that sprang up in other cities. The entire body of believers everywhere was known as "the church" (Eph. 5:25).
The Second Coming of Christ
Yet despite God’s gracious provision of salvation through Christ, the majority who have come under the preaching of the gospel in the last two thousand years have refused it. What then is man’s future? Bible prophecy informs us that someday Christ will return to planet Earth and stop all the wickedness that is steadily worsening. Also, it gives us a detailed picture of the world at the time right before the coming of Christ. When we compare that picture with today’s world, we find a perfect match. Everywhere we look, we see developments in line with prophecy. Each is a sign that our age, dominated by evil, is drawing to a close.