So how much is $100 trillion? In an interview this week, Bill Gross, head of Pimco (an investment firm that, according to CNBC, “manages $1.2 trillion in assets and runs the largest bond fund in the world”), suggested that “the US is actually in worse financial shape than Greece and other debt-laden European countries” (www.cnbc.com/id/43378973/). While the media have focused on our national debt of $14.3 trillion, little is being said about entitlement monies guaranteed to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (close to another $50 trillion), or about the debts the government incurred bailing out the financial system after the 2008 and 2009 crisis. Pull all that together, Gross maintains, and the money the government owes is “nearly $100 trillion.” Even if his numbers, based on government figures and estimates, are on the high side—the truth of the matter is that $100 trillion (or any amount of debt close to it) is enough to sink the most robust of economies. And “robust” our economy is not! Just like Greece.
So perhaps Bob Rodriguez will get more air time this time around. A friend of mine, an executive in the insurance industry, sent me a piece CNN ran on Rodriguez last week (www.finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/06/bob-rodriguez . . .). Here’s how it opens: “He’s the mutual fund manager with the best record in the past quarter-century, and he correctly predicted the last two stock market crashes. So why aren’t people listening when Bob Rodriguez says another calamity is looming?” Rodriguez is CEO of a $16 billion money management firm First Pacific Advisors. So accurate were his two previous crash predictions that Barron’s magazine called him a “prophet,” Wall Street Journal declared him one of the “doomsayers who got it right,” and MarketWatch labeled him one of the “four horsemen of the market.” CNN’s online piece goes on: “His new prophecy: If we don’t fix the budget—soon—the economy faces disaster. ‘I believe that within two to five years we’ll have a crisis of equal or greater magnitude of what we just went through’ he says. ‘And it will emanate from the federal level.’”
But why bother with the mounting financial warnings imbedded in our global headlines? Because we are an apocalyptic community of faith—and our mission is inextricably bound to the imminent return of Christ. The more serious the crisis earth is facing, the more earnest must become our witness to the Savior and our appeal to come to him while there is yet time. Wouldn’t it be the height of tragedy if the community assigned this mission were duped by the mirage of economic security?
No wonder the Apocalypse warns: “And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn . . . for no one buys their merchandise anymore: . . ‘The fruit that your soul longed for has gone from you, and all the things which are rich and splendid have gone from you, and you shall find them no more at all. . . . For in one hour such great riches came to nothing’” (Revelation 18:11, 14, 17). Trillions of earth’s fortune gone overnight. That isn’t the prediction of Bill Gross or Bob Rodriguez. It is the warning of God to a generation on the eve of Christ’s return. “In one hour” our economic house of cards is prophesied to collapse.
$100 trillion? Chump change really, when your heart is set on eternity. Which, come to think of it, is the only safe haven left for our meager holdings here below. Isn’t it?
The books are beside my bed and collecting around my desk - and I love it. Bill Hybel’s Just Walk Across the Room that I am hoping to finish is propped up next to my desk along with a collection of Robert Frost’s works and the History of the Reformation by J.H. D’Aubigne, who E.G. White quoted extensively in her volume The Great Controversy. The Great Controversy in turn is sitting by my bed on top of a stack that I am currently reading including Sanctified Life (that is just a great book to have handy), one of C.S. Lewis’ titles, Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and then one of my favorite collection of essays from Robert Fulghum. It is from this final book I got my idea of eating a chair.
“JESUS IS COMING TODAY!” If you’re reading this on May 21, 2011, then that is precisely what the followers of Harold Camping are declaring today—Christ is returning to this earth at 6 p.m. (presumably Pacific Time, since Camping lives in Oakland, California). With his return approximately two per cent of this world’s population will be immediately raptured to heaven, leaving the rest of earth’s inhabitants to be destroyed. In an elaborate theological schematic (which I have purused on-line), Camping predicts the return of Christ on May 21, 2011, and five months later the Judgment Day destruction of earth and the universe on October 21, 2011. Harold Camping, a former civil engineer, is the 89 year old founder of Family Radio—a Christian broadcast network that now includes 66 stations globally. He is not a stranger to apocalyptic predictions, having announced that Christ would return on September 6, 1994. His post-September 6 explanation, as he recently told London’s Independent newspaper, is that “at that time there was a lot of the Bible I had not really researched very carefully. But now we’ve had the chance to do just an enormous amount of additional study and God has given us outstanding proofs that it really is going to happen” (
A dripping, blood-red X over the face of Osama bin Laden is the cover for the May 20, 2011, issue of TIME. Only four times in its publishing history has the magazine chosen to red-X the face of a notorious human being: Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and now Osama bin Laden. The press is still abuzz over the stunning surprise and speed with which “the world’s #1 terrorist” was hunted and killed last week. When late on Sunday night President Obama announced bin Laden’s death to the nation and world, jubilant crowds quickly amassed outside the White House and in New York City to celebrate the death of the September 11 mastermind. Seal Team 6 celebrates its precision execution of the raid—Pakistan protests violation of its sovereignty—and earth marvels over the United State’s relentless and finally successful pursuit of its most-wanted nemesis. And how is it with earth’s Christians? As I watched the jubilation of the crowds, read the editorials and followed the unfolding story, the irony of it all occurred to me—we have found reason to rejoice in the death of another. We party because our enemy has been slain. And who would renounce the strong sense of relief family members of the September 11 victims experienced with the news that the perpetrator of that heinous crime had met his own untimely death? “Justice has been done,” was the President’s somber pronouncement. But does God rejoice in the death of Osama bin Laden? King David fled for his life, when his rebel son Absalom lead a coup d'état in Israel to overthrow his father. But days later when the army of the father overpowered the army of the rebel son and Absalom was slain by a commando team, there was no party back at headquarters. Instead the father king wept: “‘O my son Absalom—my son, my son Absalom—if only I had died in your place! O Absalom my son, my son!’” (II Samuel 18:33) On hearing the king’s loud lamenting, Joab—David’s commanding general—burst into the royal chamber with the angry charge that the king’s inconsolable weeping was a disgrace to the nation. But was it? Could it be that David’s weeping was a shadowy representation of another Father King? Will God and the universe party when rebel son and fallen angel Lucifer at last suffers eternal death for his ruthless and unrelenting crimes against the kingdom? Or like David, will the Father of us all bow his head in his hands and weep, “If only I could have died in your place?” Will divine love love its enemies, its nemesis enemy, to the very end? Calvary is answer enough, is it not? “‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do’” (Luke 23:34). And that is why there will be only one death the universe will ever truly rejoice over throughout eternity: “And they sang a new song . . . ‘Worthy is the Lamb who was slain!’” (Revelation 5:9, 12). It is that death, the death of Christ our Savior, that compels us to love even our enemies. Which is why in the end the only dripping, blood-red X that will matter for any of us, for all of us, is the one atop Calvary. “And they sang a new song.”
“FEAR FACTOR OPENS NEW MARKET FOR SEEDS” That headline two days ago caught my eye. What in the world do seeds have to do with fear? I read on. “The news is unquestionably frightening: political turmoil at home and abroad; worries over oil, gas, and food prices; earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns . . . And that’s just in the last few months. Marketers are on high alert. Doomsday is nigh! they shout online and on late-night TV as they hype ‘survivalist seed banks’ and ‘apocalypse gardens’ to the nervous and fearful. More than a dozen companies offer deals of up to 94,000 vegetable seeds, stored in tightly sealed buckets and ‘ammo boxes,’ that will feed a family of four for years or decades” (
A friend of mine sent me a MoveOn.org communiqué. Please don’t judge my friend (or me) by that action! I realize it’s a bit risky even mentioning this national left-of-center organization of political activists. But I’m also going to risk alienating a generation of young activists (which most of “this generation” is—whether left-of-center, right-of-center, middle-of-center, wherever that is) by commenting on the particular cause-response for which this MoveOn.org email is recruiting.
The western media have begun to banter about the suggestion that this winter’s political upheaval in the Middle East is like a spring thaw, warming heretofore rigid dictatorial or monarchical governments into pliable, receptive fields for democracy. The “Arab Spring” they call it. First Tunisia and Egypt—now Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Jordan and possibly Libya. Is it an Arab Spring, a new opportunity and season for the will of the people? Allah akbar! (“God is good!”) is their cry. But nobody is calling the calamity that descended upon Japan three weeks ago a “Japanese Spring.” While it’s true their famous cherry blossoms have begun to flower up and down that crippled nation, the immensity of their earthquake-tsunami cataclysm has only been compounded by the nuclear hemorrhaging at their Fukushima power plant. Will there be a “springtime” in Japan’s future? Given their dogged industriousness and national determination (Gambari masho! [“Let’s take courage together!”] is the historic Japanese cry in the face of a massive challenge) it is hard to imagine otherwise. But then again, maybe in Heaven’s perspective, it isn’t an Arab Spring or a Japanese Spring. Could it be that in God’s eyes we are poised upon an “Earth Spring”—an entire civilization simultaneously being brought to an historic openness to Christ and the everlasting gospel before he returns? On this International Student Sabbath here at Andrews University, could it be that the operative cry of Holy Scripture is this passionate appeal of God: “‘Look to Me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other” (Isaiah 45:22). And if this is an Earth Spring, then wouldn’t this be the unprecedented season in earth history for the mobilization of an entire generation of Seventh-day Adventist young. New, bold, radical missionaries “into all the world” for the Kingdom of God. The Radicals. There never will come a season when they are not God’s most strategic endgame, will there? Are you still mentally debating whether or not God has called you personally to “go into all the world” for him? You watched as 283 others made that commitment a few Sabbaths ago. But you’re still not sure God means you? Here are two suggestions for dealing with your inner struggle: (1) find someone you trust to talk to and pray with—sometimes a listening ear and a wise heart are just what you’re needing to come to a personal decision; and (2), put your finger on Isaiah 45:22 and ask God how he would have you help him fulfill his passion for a saved world. If your heart is open to God and willing to follow wherever he leads, then you needn’t fear that he’ll leave you hanging in limbo indefinitely. Sometimes the very struggle is a part of Christ’s strengthening your own commitment. Who knows—this may turn out to be your own “Spring,” too.
"O God, Japan!" The 9.0 magnitude earthquake and thirty-foot tsunami that decimated northeastern Japan’s coastal cities (just as spring break began here on campus) is not only the sixth strongest quake on global record, but is also the most costly natural disaster in earth’s history. However, it is the human toll that has broken our collective heart. Born to missionary parents in Tokyo and having spent the first 14 years of my life in the Land of the Rising Sun, I have felt the anguish of displaced Japanese who from afar have wept over the numbing television and computer screen images streaming out of the devastation. Haven’t you cried, too? How can we not, when this land of stalwart, industrious, orderly, polite and gracious almost to a fault people collectively cry out to their gods—to anyone who will listen, really—their unabashed pain and sorrow? In California last week with my mother, I stared at the black and white front page newspaper photograph of a Japanese woman sobbing over the lifeless hand of her mother, protruding from the tsunami wreckage of what was once their home. Doesn’t God weep with those who do? What can we do, we who returned rested from our break to face the glory and joys of a new springtime across this campus? We must do something, mustn’t we—if we would not fall victim to what psychologists describe as “frozen emotions,” deep feelings prompted by television images, but never acted upon? You may give on two fronts. ADRA International (the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, now headed by our own Rudi Maier) has mobilized its disaster response team in Japan to the crisis centers. ADRA Japan is coordinating its relief efforts in evacuation centers with the Japanese Department of Social Services. You can make your gift, as I did, at