1 December 2012
The End of the World As We Know It
For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes even to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be. (Matthew 24:27)
The verse from the Bible says that the end of the world begins when God comes to Earth. But, when the world ends, will creation of all really end or just the world as we know it? By understanding biblical end of the world it is possible to come to understanding of the values the Bible creators meant. Before we start developing the meaning of biblical apocalypse it is necessary to understand why people from all over the world believe in the end of the world and how do they react on such occurrence?
Judgment day is a central message of early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religion. The Christian belief in God that will come to the Earth and Doomsday, sometimes called the Day of the Lord, will become. Christian belief that this world will end, the dead will be raised up and the living and the dead will be judged by the Lord. The sinners will be departed to hell and the righteous will live in heaven. These concepts can be found in Jewish apocalyptic speculation. Thus, Doomsday is believed by early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic believers.
Such speculations can be observed in modern texts and multimedia products. In science fiction, the world ends by many different disasters, such as earth plague, cosmic accident or nuclear war etc. The most of the tales of the end of the world reflect the evil as a part of human`s nature. For instance, the War of the Worlds written by Herbert George Wells shows a war between Marians and human beings in England. In fact, in Wells` novel Earthmen were illustrated as Englishmen, so that Martians were compared to Indians settlers; the episode that symbolized evil in Wells` novel can be compared to historical episode of the evil that Native American Indians identified with British settlers. Therefore, classical writing compared the end of the world to actual historical occurrence. The writer showed human sins and presented his own version of Doomsday in a plot
Another important aspect of the end of the world issue is a comparison between a world people live in and the world after an apocalypse occurred. In tales of the end of the world as we know, a world destroyed always seems as uninhabitable place where civilization cannot exist. It must be said that the world after apocalypse looks differently in the Bible. The hope of the world under Noah`s rainbow is much brighter than it could be seen before the flood. Thus, this difference shows that the apocalypse might not always be the end of the world as we know it, but the world we have never known before and devastation of civilization at the end is not required.
Every apocalypse can be explained as a sequel of a work which follows another …