In the wake of the covid pandemic (or plandemic), we have often heard it said that “Normal isn’t coming back.” I think of those things with which we have become familiar: Most folks not wearing face masks, no news of a pandemic, persons going to dine in at restaurants or reporting to work or to school or in person and so on. Our frames of reference in life, our paradigms or worldviews, have been knocked out of whack, fading from view. But has it always been this way, change coming through lives and societies like a tornado, rearranging everything? Yes, as you see here:
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10: That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new”?
People see verses like these and are immediately puzzled. They say, “Cars and computers didn’t exist back then. We couldn’t fly or send people to the moon before modern times. How can this even be true, though it is in the Bible?” They even point to other Scriptures, noting that there are things which have not yet happened, seemingly contradicting Solomon’s narrative in Ecclesiastes:
Matthew 24:21: “For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.”
Since the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, it cannot be wrong and it cannot lie, therefore there is an underlying truth tying all these Scriptures together. The doubters who look at the passage from Ecclesiastes 1 “can’t see the forest for the trees,” so to speak. While much of the Bible is literal, there are other ways of speaking used in the pages of Holy Writ: generalizations, exaggeration, parables, and so on. What Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 does not literally mean that everything which is has always been. It is a general statement. One thing that has not changed over the course of time is the sinfulness of the human heart. The motives that drive people to do certain things have been and will continue to be there, and if you look carefully through the book of Ecclesiastes you will see that Solomon is speaking to the motives of the human heart, the actions they produce, and the consequences they bring, not to technologies or inventions. Even in the Matthew passage, where Jesus is telling of the great tribulation which will engulf the world once the Rapture has happened, the event may not have come yet but the motives of the human heart, augmented by the kingdom of darkness then as they are now, will be some of the drivers of this event, and again, these have been present since the Garden of Eden, so in that sense there will be nothing new. As you can see, there are no actual contradictions.
But what about change? This has been another constant throughout the history of mankind. The antediluvians (pre-Flood humans) had certain ways of life they were accustomed to. Even over the roughly sixteen and one half centuries from Creation to the Flood, things changed over time and persons’ frames of reference faded. Eventually the Watchers came, corrupting the human race so that by the time of Noah and his family, his was the only bloodline left untainted by these ungodly angel-human unions which produced the giants. The Flood literally drowned out the frame of reference for the whole world, as these ungodly people died along with their land animals. The giant landmass split apart into the continents and islands. The weather changed—real climate change, not the hyped version we see today! Yet another shakeup came sometime later with the tower of Babel incident, when people were scattered over the whole face of the earth with a sudden plethora of different languages. There came the development of various languages and ethnicities as a result.
Change continued. Nations and empires rose and fell. Some old languages died out while those which continued to survive changed over time. For example, Old English was more like German than the English we use today. The epic poem Beowulf, which many of you may have read in school, was originally written in Old English, probably between 975 and 1025 AD. Middle English is the language that the King James Bible is written in, ye olde blog readers. The first edition of it appeared in 1611; we use the 1769 edition with the 1611 English preserved in it. Along with the changing of languages and nations were ways of life and of governance. And yes, new inventions came along, some of them more impactful than others, changing the frames of reference that the peoples of old were familiar with.
With all these things being said, the frames of reference we in the modern world have come to know truly are fading in a way that those in earlier times did not. What in history may have been one of the catalysts? I submit that it was the invention of the printing press in Germany by goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around the year 1440. Even before him, other people had found ways to make copies of things such as writings apart from the use of scribes, but Gutenberg mechanized the printing process, enhancing the making of copies in a way not done before. Knowledge and information are power, and with a way to disseminate greater amounts of knowledge and information more quickly and efficiently, people began to learn more things.
The world has changed greatly between 1440 and 2023. We have seen industrialization, medical and technological advances, and many other things which have brought us to a place that would have been in the realm of science fiction just 40 years ago. In particular, the changes to the world beginning with World Wars I and II and the rebirth of Israel as a nation have some interesting implications. Look at this Scripture passage about an evil world ruler during the tribulation:
Revelation 13:16-18: He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.
I am not going to detail or discuss what 666 could mean. What I am getting at is the ability of someone to rule the world and be able to mark everyone. By the way, those who will not take the mark will be beheaded (Revelation 20:4). The book of Revelation was written no later than 95 AD by the apostle John, author of the Gospel of John as well as 1, 2, and 3 John. In his days, “the whole world” would mean all of the world then known to someone living in a particular area. Rome ruled much of the known world in John’s time, so if he had thought of a ruler causing all to have received a mark, he obviously would have done so by envisioning the things people in his days were familiar with: Horses, armor, swords, branding irons, and so on. There were large parts of the world that many, including John, did not even know existed. But the Holy Spirit knew, and His message was to all people for all times.
In today’s world we truly are becoming a global community. Air travel has reduced the lengths of journeys to the most distant parts of the world to less than a day. The internet enables us to communicate with people all over the globe as effortlessly as we pick up a glass of water to drink. Out of the debris of WW I with Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations came WW II. Out of WW II came the United Nations, which figures prominently in a lot of literature and entertainment pertaining to the end times. The rebirth of Israel fulfilled prophecies which had been wrestled with for many centuries. The picture of the last days suddenly became more clear than ever, and since the late 1940’s changes have been accelerating at a rate never seen before.
The U. N. was born in 1945, the same year that the Atomic Age began. In 1947 there was the start of the modern hoopla over UFO’s. In 1948 Israel was reborn. The Space Age began in 1957. The first handheld mobile phone prototype was produced in 1973, and a practical internet was functioning by the middle and late 1990’s. Satellites can track cellphones and GPS monitors alike. The U.N. has been increasingly vocal in world affairs, particularly with the advent of covid. There is a lot of discussion going on about cryptocurrency, and there has even been talk of such things as a national digital currency and a global electronic currency. Klaus Schwab and other rich, powerful men at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, have spoken about a global reset, even noting how the covid pandemic afforded an opportunity for such a reset.
There are blocs of nations such as the European Union, the African Union, and others which have collaborated on a number of things, either with or without a primary governing body. Technologies exist to put computer chips not only in pets for tracking but also in humans for scanning, these chips containing anything from passwords to one’s medical history. In 2015 the U.N. had a meeting to set up its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and the objective is to achieve all of them by 2030. They can be viewed HERE. People around the world are becoming crueler and less loving. Although there are regions of the world where Christianity is thriving, and although there will be a great revival before the Rapture (Joel 2:28-32), many people everywhere are turning their backs on God, either embracing false religions or else doing whatever they please, usually of an immoral nature in some way or other (illicit sex, the pursuit of money, drinking and drugging, etc.). Jesus warned of this:
Matthew 24:12: “And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.”
Others, such as the apostle Paul, also warned us of the last days (2 Timothy 3:1-9). If you are not already aware of it, those days are here. Long gone are the earlier days of my life. Early on we even still had dial phones and pay phones. Computers were not something you would find in homes, unless it was a calculator. Although the government had corruption even then, it was nowhere near the government our founding fathers warned of that it has become now. The racial divide was being bridge, the wounds being healed. There was still a degree of respect for Christianity. Things changed as I grew older, but the aggressive progressivism of the last decade and a half, the covid trainwreck, and the global reset proponents have caused everyone’s frames of reference to fade, and folks, they are not coming back. Normal isn’t coming back.
We now have the technological means to build a one-world government. Fear and propaganda are being used to bring the people of the world into compliance with the vision the reset gurus have for us, a vision which sounds too good to be true because it is. We are being promised a Utopian future where everyone’s needs will be met and everyone will have a place in the world. Don’t believe it! There has also been talk of doing away with the old ways of life and of doing things, and one of those old ways is Christianity. The real truth behind this idyllic canard is that you don’t conform, you will be “reconditioned” (brainwashed), and if that fails, you will be executed. What we are seeing is the beginnings of a setup for the evil end-times ruler, the Antichrist, to rule the world with unequalled cruelty.
While changes are happening and our frames of reference are fading into the sunset of a sin-sick and dying world, there is one thing which does not change: The Word of God. While more and more of the evil inherent in the heart of sinful man is being permitted expression, there is One who is all-good and unchanging: God. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). If you do not know Him as Savior and Lord, do it today. Tomorrow may be too late! No matter what people try to say about the Bible, for even some Bible scholars are beginning to doubt it, you, fellow believer, hold on to the true, inerrant Word of God with all your might. Read it, memorize Scriptures, live it, and share it. Never, ever let anyone convince you that Jesus isn’t real and that the Bible isn’t trustworthy no matter what “evidence” they throw at you to make their false cases. Be Rapture-ready, folks. Be ready to be taken out of here by God when Christ returns. He will come back, and woe unto you if you are not prepared!
