By Norris Burkes Nov 24, 2023
If you’ve been watching the news, then you know that the world is going to end soon.
No, I’m not talking about the recent election. I’m referring to the elusive deep-water oarfish.
Superstitious sailors have long considered the spotting of this rare fish a harbinger of bad news. And this past week, on the shores of Encinitas, California, it’s been spotted again. This makes three times this year in California and only 22 times in the past century.
Japanese mythology recounts the doom fish as a precursor to earthquakes and tsunamis. More than a dozen were found on Japan’s coastline just before Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, their largest recorded earthquake.
These kind of scarry indicators aren’t new. Televangelists have been capitalizing on them for years as they expounded on their version of catastrophic and world-ending predictions.
If you were born before 1960, you’ll likely remember that Hal Lindsey co-authored a 1970 best seller with Carole C. Carlson titled “The Late, Great Planet Earth.”
Some of us just laughed at him, while others tried to ignore him.
However, when the Yom Kippur War of 1973 sent gas prices soaring, we wondered if the Lindsey scenario was creeping into the nonfiction section. Many began taking Lindsey so seriously that they ran scared into the baptismal waters.
Had we been a little smarter, I’m wondering if we might have seen how religious history was on a repeating track with Lindsey’s approach. He was using the scare-the-hell-out-of-you technique used by centuries of religious thought.
It’s a thought expressed on the old bumper sticker: “The good news is, Jesus is coming back. The bad news is, He’s ticked.” (OK, the sticker doesn’t say “ticked” but this is a family newspaper.)
The real problem with Lindsey and people like him is that they characterize the Christian faith as a war between good and evil. Indeed, they demand that the faithful make a choice between spending eternity in a bottomless pit of eternal fire or going to church three times a week.
The fault in this thinking is that it forces faith into an all-or-nothing proposition. Faith isn’t that way at all. Real faith is relationship-based, not fear-based.
Faith is more like this: When I met my wife at a Southern Baptist Conference Center, I didn’t introduce myself by saying, “Marry me or you’ll burn.” If I had, she might have hit me with a flame thrower.
God doesn’t use that approach either. He doesn’t need to scare us into loving him. That’s because God is not trying to save us from this world. After all, he created this world for us.
Jesus made the same point quite well, saying, “God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help” (John 3:17, The Message Paraphrase).
God is all about helping us make it through our times of hurt and pain. He’s not about inventing painful situations just so he can play the superhero.
I suppose there’ll always be fortunes to be made by capitalizing on demise, death and destruction, but I will continue to place my faith in my relationship with our creator.
The Lindsey star eventually faded. The counterculture of the 1960s never became the main culture, and Lindsey’s predictions crumbled with the Berlin Wall.
These days, Lindsey is 94 years old, living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s still doing video, but now he’s predicting the final jihad that will come any day now. Same scared-as-hell program, just a different station.
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