Visions of the End

Abstract

Everywhere you look these days, you can find an apocalypse. Billboards scream the end of the world in May, June, July, August of 20XX; magazine articles proclaim the end of US world dominance or the end of Christianity; movies entertain total destruction of the world through meteors hitting the earth; and newspapers portend nuclear disaster. It is all over, they seem to say—if not the world, then at least the world as we know it.

When you see the ‘devastating desecration’ standing where it should not [the reader had better figure out what this means], then the people in Judea should head for the hills…But be on your guard! Notice how I always warn you about these things in advance. In those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give off her glow, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly forces will be shaken.

—Mark 13:14, 23–25