In his famous poem called The Hollow Men, T.S Eliot tells us how he things the world will end. As a writer from the Modernist period, his outlook on life was rather bleak and he concludes that the end of the world will be pretty insignificant. Eliot even uses the nursery rhyme format to show the absurdity of human existence and that our end might be nothing special. The final lines of The Hollow Men read,
This is the way the world ends
From T.S Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Many poets, artists and scientists have their own ideas about the end times. In the movie Terminator, the end of the world is a nuclear apocalypse. Some films, like Resident Evil, suggest that a lab-bred virus will turn everyone into zombies. Then there are many films about natural disasters, like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. These ideas don’t spring only from human imagination, but many prophecies about the end times can be found in the Bible. In this post, let’s look at some of those prophecies and try to understand what the end will really be like.
Sarah Connor’s vision of the world going up in flames in Terminator echoes prophecies of Jesus coming with fire to burn up all the wicked and unrighteous:
7 and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
2 Thessalonians 1:7-8
Similarly, ideas of the dead rising and living forever, like the zombies in Resident Evil, can also be found in the Bible. When Jesus dies on the cross, the Bible says that,
51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.
Matthew 27:51-52
The Bible also professes that when the Lord comes again, people will resurrect from the dead. Those that have died over the past 2000 years will all come back to life to face judgment:
28 “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice 29 and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.
John 5:28-29
Finally, the Bible also speaks about many great natural disasters, similar to those in The Day After Tomorrow. Matthew 24 is the famous “Last Days” scripture where Jesus explains everything that will happen at the end. Let’s look at some key verses; Jesus says when he comes back,
7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
Matthew 24:7
Here Jesus speaks of wars and great natural disasters all over the world. Jesus continues to say that because of all these disasters,
21 For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.
Matthew 27:21
From these scriptures, we can clearly see where humanity gets their ideas of the end times from. In addition to these types of scriptures, there are also very specific prophecies. One of the prophecies is that Jesus will come riding on the clouds and take the believers to live with him in the air forever, which we discuss in another post.
30 “Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.
Matthew 24:30
Next, we will look at one of the strangest Last Days prophecies in Matthew 24 and try to understand what it might mean.
One of the most distressing prophecies of the end of the world talks about the sun darkening and the stars falling from the sky. This is another prophecy Jesus makes in Matthew 24 when he talks about the end days:
29 “Immediately after the distress of those days
“‘the sun will be darkened,
Matthew 24:29
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’
This prophecy seems to indicate a total Armageddon. If the sun were to lose its light and the stars were to fall from the sky, all life on earth would cease to exist. It would then make sense that there would be earthquakes and natural disasters unequalled since the beginning of time.
What makes this prophecy confusing though is that it also appears in the Old Testament. Most Bible translations indicate in a footnote after this scripture that similar prophecies can be found in two places in Isaiah. The first is in Isaiah 13:
See, the day of the Lord is coming
Isaiah 13:9-10
—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—
to make the land desolate
and destroy the sinners within it.
10 The stars of heaven and their constellations
will not show their light.
The rising sun will be darkened
and the moon will not give its light.
The second is only a few books later, in Isaiah 34:
All the stars in the sky will be dissolved
Isaiah 34:4
and the heavens rolled up like a scroll;
all the starry host will fall
like withered leaves from the vine,
like shriveled figs from the fig tree.
The scripture from Isaiah 13 is repeated in Matthew 24 almost verbatim. Isaiah 34 similarly speaks of the stars dissolving and the sky being rolled up like a scroll. Since Isaiah is a prophet that testified a lot about the coming of Jesus, we can assume that these prophecies refer to what will happen at the First Coming. Indeed, as it states in the Gospel of Matthew, the Old Testament prophesied until John the Baptist:
13 For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John.
Matthew 11:13
This means that when Jesus was here, these prophecies should have been fulfilled. Of course, we know that the world did not end 2000 years ago when Jesus came because we are still here. In the same way, the sun, moon and stars have been in their places since billions of years ago.
From these scriptures we can see that throughout Biblical history, prophets continually spoke about the end times. Not only was the end of the world mentioned, but it has supposedly happened many times already. For example, at the time of Noah’s flood, God said that he will destroy the world:
13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
Genesis 6:13
But after the flood, Noah and his family survived and humanity continued to spread and prosper. A few hundreds of years after Noah, the prophet Ezekiel also proclaims that the end of the world has come:
The end has come!
Ezekiel 7:6-7
The end has come!
It has roused itself against you.
See, it comes!
7 Doom has come upon you,
upon you who dwell in the land.
The time has come! The day is near!
There is panic, not joy, on the mountains.
In the same way, after Ezekiel’s proclamation, humanity continues on and God does not destroy the world. What these scriptures point to is that perhaps the end is not simply the destruction of the world. The end of the world, in terms of God’s language and expression, might indicate something deeper. After all, why would God destroy what he spent billions of years creating?
