Acts 2:19-20
People in the last days live in such a way that the spectacular and the amazing is mundane. The eye popping special effects of popular entertainment, the thrills of theme parks, the jolt of extreme sports of all kinds and the on demand access to a blizzard of social media and personal photography originating on billions of smartphones and websites is an immersive reality that so permeates our life that even the materialization into our natural world order of natural phenomenon that is completely beyond our control gets readily viewed, downloaded, oohed over and then promptly forgotten.
Eclipses, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and the like are predicted, observed and promptly filed away in the cultural POV as just another fireworks display in a perfectly predictable, orderly natural universe subject to human editing. "Natural phenomenon" seen in the skies are just light shows these days.
Yet it is this very thing that Christ said would be a herald of his Coming as the Scripture has said. And it has taken the past generation to develop the media machinery of mass communication that will shout it all down.
The coming total solar eclipse that will span our entire nation this August certainly qualifies. It's been turned into a teaching moment for kids in science classes and a cottage tourist industry. Skeptics of all varieties will snort mockingly that this stuff has been going on since this third rock from the sun came into existence .. just as the apostle Peter wrote in 2 Peter 3:3-6 prophetically almost two thousand years ago:
.. knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”
Watch a great example of this kind of human laxity in a couple of news spots on the recent approach of asteroids within miles of the earth and the general spirit of the day.
It's breakfast time patter and fill in to the next segment. However, as we will see, it can get very real and very fast when a sign from heaven departs from the script ..
And Jesus said it would be like this.
We're not ignorant of the very things He's warned us of. We're just bored with them. This is how the great "millenium" of human life is shaping up. The signs in the heavens are all around us. And we yawn as we talk about it.
