Is Armageddon coming?

We’re thinking again that we might be living in the End Times, the prophetic final curtain for humanity when world war three will be rebranded as Armageddon; the climactic conflict between the forces of good and evil that will presage the Second Coming of Christ to separate the saved from the damned.

That, in every sense, is one hell of an opening paragraph. Events in the UK this week, such as shots fired from a Russian frigate over the heads of a retired couple in their pleasure boat in the English Channel, or the possible coming of a political messiah in Makerfield, a suburb of Wigan, hardly seem to do it eschatological justice.

But the world line-up of “principalities and powers” (see Ephesians 6:12, KJV), the biblical phrase for the demons who will trigger the battle at the end of the time, is far less encouraging: Putin, Netanyahu, Khamenei, Xi, Trump, to name just five.

We’ve been here before of course. Actors in world war two included Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and Hirohito. Though, in fairness, we also had Roosevelt and Churchill. Difficult to see where their equivalents are now. Carney (Canada) and Albanese (Australia) perhaps, but having to put the countries they lead in parenthesis says it all really.

Prophecy and divine intervention

I have two things to say about the apparently coming apocalypse: The first is about prophecy and the second is about divine intervention. The prophecy principally comes from the last book of the Bible, usually abbreviated to the one word ‘Revelation’, although its full title - The Revelation of Jesus Christ to St John the Divine makes it clear that the writings are a series of visions given to St John.

There are any number of signs that the end is nigh - perhaps too many from social media posts that have conflated St John with Nostradamus - but there are (predictably) seven widely held prophetic indicators (see Matthew 24:6-14, Revelation 6:1-17, 14:6). The first one is rather cheerful, for the Pope at least, in that the Christian gospel will have been spread and preached throughout all the nations of the world.

The other six are rather more woeful: Wars and political turmoil; famines and plagues; natural disasters - including but not exclusively climate catastrophe - false prophets and those claiming to be the Christ (as Trump demonstrably has); a decline in faith and morality; and cosmic and heavenly signs - which may or may not include billionaires showing off their weightlessness in space on YouTube.

Other than the ones I’ve expanded upon above, we can chillingly tick all those boxes. But here’s the comforter again: When have we not been able to? Famines are still a scar on and scourge of humanity, but fewer than they were in earlier ages, as are wars. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis (floods) are as old as the hills. Plagues kill radically fewer than in the pre-medicinal world.

We should also be wary of millennialism, the rather more rosy and complacent idea that the apocalypse will either follow or precede 1,000 years of blissful peace on earth and goodwill among all peoples. Life on earth is more complicated and messier than that.

Evil and humanity

Which is the second point I wish to make. The powers and principalities were traditionally understood as demonic forces of darkness, fallen angels from the great battle of heaven, that would be expunged from the world by the Parousia (a fancy word for the Second Coming).

World leaders who want to start another world war aren’t possessed by malign demons or fallen angels. They are, like the rest of us, fallen human beings. Truly evil humans are mercifully rare – more commonly, the politically powerful are simply empty. Of empathy, compassion, love, emotional intelligence. It’s incumbent on us to remove them from office by not voting for them, or by force if necessary.

And that brings us to the nature of divine intervention. We really shouldn’t be awaiting the arrival of a Clint Eastwood figure, a Man With No Name, to sort us out (literally, wheat from chaff, as it says in Matthew 3:12). We’re called, albeit with God’s help, to do that ourselves. The eternal question that arises is how we do it - and, apparently, the answer that has eternally come back down the ages is: by prayer.

But these people aren’t in power because we’re not praying hard enough and to suggest so is, in my understanding, to misunderstand the nature of prayer. It doesn’t persuade God to act, because God is unchangeable. It’s our tapping into the fount of all goodness, the love arising miraculously from the immaterial, that always, every time, changes us.

It’s humanity that overcomes powers and principalities. We can’t do it alone, but we can do it as one body, and there’s no need to wait for the end of time. That’s a cop-out. We can start right here, right now, and build the heaven that we’ve been gifted.