The end of the world?

Hello all,

Here’s more from my interview with the Rev. Mark Hitchcock, author of the new book “2012: The Bible and the End of the World.”

Hitchcock is pastor of Faith Bible Church in Edmond. The majority of my interview with him is featured in today’s LIFE section of The Oklahoman. His book gives a biblical perspective about a Mayan prophecy that says the end of the world will occur on Dec. 21, 2012. The subject is so compelling and there was just too much to get in print, that we thought we would offer the rest of the interview in this venue:

Mark Hitchcock: “I think it’s OK. Remember in Matthew 24, the disciples asked Jesus what is going to be the sign of your coming at the end of the age and Jesus didn’t say don’t worry about that. He gave them signs, so I think we should be looking for things. What I think we should be looking for are things like the regathering of the nation of Israel and the world focus on the Middle East. The whole world is focused on the Middle East. That’s going to be the staging grounds for the events of the End Times. Also globalism. The Bible predicts a one-world economy and a one-world government in the end. Well, we see a move in that direction. 

So what I would say is that we can look around in our world and see the stage being set. None of us know when the stage setting is finished, so we don’t know when the Lord’s going to come. But we can see the things that are setting the stage for the events of the End Times that do lead us to believe, I think rightly, that the Lord’s coming could be near.

Jesus, when they asked him about signs, He gave them some. One of the main signs He gave in Matthew  24: 4, he said see to it that noone misleads you or deceives you and I think this 2012 stuff is deception. It’s part of the deception that He said would come.

Really, the whole 2012 phenomona is the New Age eschatology and I like to call it the Mayan Y2K. It’s like Y2K all over again but I think it’s going to come and go again.

I like to mention that there could be some things that happen in 2012 that are strange and bizarre. I don’t know what’s going to happen that year but it won’t be the second coming of Jesus and it won’t be the end of the world.  That I can say with confidence. In my understanding of the End Times, the second coming happens after a seven-year period called the Tribulation. If the second coming is to happen in 2012, the Tribulation would have had to have started in 2005 and we are not in the Tribulation.”

 

Mark Hitchcock:  “I have seen the trailer. I think  there are going to be several diffferent responses. I think some people are going to see it as more just science fiction stuff. It won’t really concern them. I think there will be another group of people at the other end of the spectrum who are really going to start wondering about them. It’s going to cause them a lot of anxiety and they are going to really wonder because we see a lot of things in our world today that are scaring a lot of people. That’s why I think this whole 2012 thing is really going to catch on. People look at our world and they see terrorism. They see hurricanes, volcanos and threats of global pandemics, nuclear weapons and all this kind of stuff. People look out there and see all of this, so it’s not real hard to get people to thinking about the end of the world. It appeals to this fear that people have. There probably will be a majority that will be in the middle. They’ll say, ‘there could be something to this but I’m not really that afraid.’ It will get them thinking about it.

 

There are a lot of 2012 books out there. The reason that I wrote my book is that I wanted to write a biblical response to 2012.

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Readers, Hitchcock has DVD’s of a two-part presentation regarding the 2012 prophecy that he gave at his Edmond church. Call the church at 340-1000 if you are interested in purchasing a copy.

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