Peter Novochekhov. About prophecies of cataclysms in the USA

· Analytics, On Emigration, Salvation, USA

— “Have you heard that a terrible disaster is expected in America?” a good Russian Christian living in the USA asked me recently.

— “Do you mean something like an earthquake?” I clarified.

— “Something like that,” he confirmed. “There will be no electricity, no water, no groceries in stores for several days, maybe even weeks. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some supplies.”

— “Of course, that wouldn’t hurt,” I agreed, and I remembered how three years ago I had seen large packages at a wholesale store—special emergency kits with essential food and first-aid supplies. This was after Hurricane Katrina, and those kits looked very logical.

However, my conversation partner had something else in mind. Not the occasional floods, snowstorms, or earthquakes, but events of apocalyptic proportions. In the Russian-speaking Christian community, predictions have begun actively circulating about unprecedented natural cataclysms ready to shake the earth.

And then, as if on cue, in early March 2011, a monstrous disaster struck Japan: an earthquake and tsunami. “Here it is, it’s approaching…” Facebook posts were peppered with words like “the last days.” It turned out that back in 1973, the famous New York preacher David Wilkerson had predicted that before a colossal earthquake in America, a similar one would happen first in Japan. The needle of the apocalyptic barometer started going off the scale. I decided to look into these prophecies once more.

So, in 1973 Wilkerson had said: “In the not-too-distant future, the largest earthquake in history will occur in the United States… It will be preceded by a very powerful earthquake in Japan.” “Well, this must be it,” I thought. Then I began to dig deeper for more details. It turns out, long before this recent earthquake in Japan, in 1995 an even stronger shaking of the earth’s crust took place around the city of Kobe, taking the lives of 6,000 people and injuring 415,000. But to be fair, it didn’t match the most disastrous earthquake, that of 1923, which cost 100,000 Japanese lives. In the United States itself, one of the most devastating catastrophes happened in 1994 in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Yet again, in fairness, an even stronger earthquake occurred in California two years earlier, but since it affected a desert area, there were far fewer casualties. The more I tried to figure out what the prophet meant, the more tangled I became. If you look at the statistics from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), since 1973 there have been dozens of earthquakes in the western United States alone, ranging from magnitude 5 to 8: one in 1976, two in 1979, as many as seven in 1980, three in 1981, two in 1983, three the following year, four in ’86, six in ’92, and one each in 1993, 2000, 2003, and 2004.

The frequency of natural disasters is impressive, but only until you become acquainted with the fuller statistics. It turns out that in recent decades, seismic activity has been no higher than in earlier ones. Far more dramatic events have happened before. Does this mean they cannot happen in the near future? No, it does not. We do not know the future even an arm’s length away, let alone years or decades. But amateurs’ speculations about the likelihood that terrible natural disasters might occur soon are one thing, and prophecies in the name of God about natural cataclysms that will happen “in the not-too-distant future,” to use Wilkerson’s expression, are quite another. In one case, the worst that can happen is we scare our children into sleeplessness; in the other, the very biblical idea of prophecy is discredited.

That same Wilkerson promised in 1992 a thousand fires raging in a New York engulfed by racial riots; in 1994 he predicted the disappearance of Christian television within five years (hello to Maksim Maksimov!); and in 2000, a global economic collapse.

And the point isn’t even that Wilkerson is a false prophet, possessed by an idea to turn people away from God. He is driven by a desire to draw people to God, to turn them away from sin, to convince them to live righteously. Weren’t the prophets of the Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses driven by the same motives when they predicted the Second Coming—one group in 1844, the other in 1914? And what did those prophecies bring the world except dishonor?

Many people are prone, to one degree or another, to eschatomania—a subconscious conviction that the end of the world will arrive by a certain year. When I was young, the year 2000 seemed to me like the limit of humanity’s earthly existence. Well, fine, I was a foolish boy—but grown men seriously reasoned that because the Bible says that with God one day is like a thousand years, then by the year two thousand the sixth day of the six-thousand-year history of the Old and New Testaments would end and “the end of all things would come.” Alas, if anything did come to an end in the long-suffering year 2000, it certainly wasn’t the ineradicable craving of Christians to know more about the “end of the world.” And when you try to call believers to common sense, you hear in reply: “Do you not believe that this is the last time?”

Time and again I marvel at the divine wisdom of the Bible. Who would have thought that two thousand years ago the apostle John would write to Christians: “Children, it is the last hour!”—and thereby spare us from agonizing anticipation of the “end of the world” and from calculating dates and times. Listen, if the last time has already stretched on for two thousand years, why couldn’t it last yet another thousand?! What difference would that make to our lives and our relationship with God? Can that cool our faith, when any one of us can leave this earth by dying at any minute—without having read the last chapter, without having written the final line?

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