Is There Hope for World Peace...Continued from page 1

The World Is Not Going to Evolve into World Peace.

If any Christian believes that peace on earth will just keep gradually increasing until we have a kind of golden age, that person has not read his Bible well. The Bible predicts that things will get worse instead of better.

Though our technology is growing by leaps and bounds, though the level of literacy is increasing worldwide, those trends do not create world peace. Why not? Because the basic problem is evil in human hearts.

Just think about it. The only world peace we have known has been the brief periods between wars when nations paused to reload. Jesus would have agreed with this statement by Plato: “Only dead men have seen an end to war.” 1

In Matthew 24, Jesus gave us a preview of what the world will look like just before the end of time. He predicted that certain trends would be apparent as the end time draws near. He called these trends "birth pangs," sort of like the contractions a woman feels before childbirth. As we consider these signs of the end-time, you may agree with me that all of these signs are ominously present right now.

In verses 5 and 11, Jesus tells us that many false messiahs and false prophets will appear to deceive many people.

Just think about Jim Jones and David Karesh and all the people they led astray. If you turn on your television on a Sunday, you can hear the genuine gospel proclaimed. But you can also hear some false gospels presented. You can hear someone declaring that God’s aim is to help you get rich. That’s called “the prosperity gospel.” You can hear someone else declaring that there is no heaven or hell, that this world is all there is. Someone else on TV will guarantee to heal you if you send a contribution. False prophets and false gospels are all around us.

In verses 6 and 7, Jesus predicted that there would be wars and rumors of wars until the very end. Some people thought that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a golden age of peace would prevail. But they did not take into account the evil in the human heart. Today there are wars or rumors of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, and Palestine, just to name a few places.

Recently USA Today reported that trafficking and mishandling of nuclear material has more than doubled in the past ten years. Nuclear material is becoming a marketable commodity. (2)