Reflections for a Sunday: Don't worry, the news has always been bad

Nothing should surprise us with the way things are going. We shouldn’t need influencers to tell us the "truth" because their influence is just another form of control. All we need is the Word of God.

Original tablet as translated in the recent study. Photo: courtesy the British Museum.

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You can listen to me read this essay here:

We tend to think that nothing has ever been as bad as it is right now. But it might be encouraging (I suppose in a morbid sort of way) to know that people have always thought like this.

Thanks to AI (because although I mostly talk about the dangers of AI, it has a good side, too), a set of 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablets have finally been deciphered. The tablets are believed to be from Sippar, a prosperous city on the banks of the Euphrates, in what is modern-day Iraq.

In its heyday, Babylon was a beacon of knowledge, housing the vast Library of Ashurbanipal, filled with thousands of cuneiform tablets from all corners of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by stories of ancient civilizations and especially of Babylon with its hanging gardens, written about in the Bible. I loved nothing more on a rainy afternoon than going into my dad’s study, taking a book about history off the shelf, lying on the floor and losing myself in the past.

Being a Christian family that read the Bible every morning and night, went to church Sunday mornings and evenings, as well as Wednesday Bible study and prayer, I learned all about the destruction of Babylon:

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.

And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

~ Isaiah 13:19-22

The recently deciphered tablets illustrate the fear the inhabitants of this mighty civilization had that all they had built would be destroyed, and them along with it.

One could say that the tablets were among the first newspapers, dealing mainly with the topic of lunar eclipse omens. The tablets reveal an intricate system to predict omens, using the time of night, movement of shadows and the date and duration of eclipses.

Much like today, the news of ancient Babylon was mostly bad and much sensationalized, peppered with the occasional signal of destruction upon Babylon’s enemies, ensuring the populace received a ray of hope every so often amongst the doom and gloom.

“Omens arising from lunar eclipses were of great importance for good statecraft and well-counseled government,” the authors wrote in a paper recently published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. “In later periods there is ample evidence to show that astrological observation was part of an elaborate method of protecting the king and regulating his behavior in conformity with the wishes of the gods.”

Control over government officials by elites is as old as recorded time. Astrologers were the influencers of those times, with astrological divination being taken seriously by rulers and subjects alike. If one could read the signs in the heavens, one could foretell the fate of empires and in turn, the fate of its subjects. As a result, astrologers were followed with the same religious dedication that people follow their favorite influencers today.

Examples of predictions ranged from inclement weather, with the warning “the deluge will occur everywhere”; to famine, as in “people will trade their children for silver, there will be a reduction in population”; to general chaos, cautioning “there will be evil in the land, its bounty will disappear.” (1)

We are all now obsessed with “doom scrolling”. We talk constantly about falling down the rabbit hole. Pundits continuously are making predictions and few of them are rosy.

The fear is that cities like New York will turn from this…

…into this:

…or, more likely this…

Civilizations have come and gone. But within all those comings and goings, Western civilization continued to rise above all others. That is now in jeopardy.

The difference now, is that if Western civilization falls, there’s a good chance everything will fall with it. Whereas once a great civilization like Rome or Babylon fell in wars, now, wars are fought across the entire world, even space, with the potential to destroy not just one civilization, but every person, every living thing upon this planet.

The next war could well be our last. Not because we will have learned our lesson and stopped fighting one another, but because we took all that fear that we were fed and the doom and gloom scenarios and turned it into reality.

We always look toward some future apocalypse and forget that billions of people who have lived and died experienced their own personal apocalypse. Just because it hasn’t happened to us yet, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened to others—or that it isn’t happening to millions of people right now.

You cannot tell a child in Nigeria who has been captured by Boko Haram terrorists and sold as a sex slave while her parents were hatched to death, “oh, don’t worry, we aren’t in the apocalypse yet”. She is in the middle of one.

You cannot tell the young Israeli hostage captured on Oct 7th, whose hand was blown off and lived in agony and terror in tunnels beneath Gaza only to be executed shortly before he could have been rescued, that he wasn’t living in his own personal apocalypse. Or how about the Gazan mother whose home has been bombed and whose baby was killed while Hamas leaders hid in those tunnels with the hostages instead of protecting her family. You cannot tell her she isn’t living her own personal apocalypse.

I could go on and on, but it would take more than a billion lifetimes to tell all the stories of pain and suffering.

At the risk of indulging further in doom and gloom, we all know it’s getting worse, and we all feel helpless to stop it. We see the dangerous posturing between NATO and Russia. It wasn’t that long ago that Europe was devastated by the second world war, a war that was ended in large part due to the dropping of nuclear bombs.

And yet, here we are, with Zelensky dangerously close to launching long range attacks deep into Russia, even as Putin threatens to use nuclear weapons against Europe if that happens.

There is only one hope in all of this. But it is a hope that we are told we must reject. It is the hope upon which Western civilization was born, our Judeo-Christian foundation imparted to us in the Old and New Testaments. Yes, our civilization has gone way off the track and those who lusted after power, believing the lie of Satan that they could be as God, twisted the truths of Christianity to suit their purposes, causing enormous suffering and devastation as a result. But that does not discount the truth of the God’s Word, rather, it proves it. The greatest good is always set against the greatest evil. The two continually battle one another. Just as there are physical laws of balance, there are spiritual laws. That spiritual battle is being waged in ever increasing intensity before our very eyes.

Many would say the stories of the Bible have been debunked by modern intellectuals. We are too smart for all of those myths now. We make fun of faith, of the Garden of Eden, of Jesus death and resurrection. We discount the truths that these stories teach us.

I encourage everyone to watch this short excerpt from a debate between former atheist and new Christian Ayaan Hirsi Ali and avowed atheist Richard Dawkins. She puts his disdain of Christianity to shame.

Instead of admitting our fault and repenting of our sin, yes, our sin, our leaders who want to unseat the one true God and becomes gods themselves, push us to forget that we are responsible for our own decisions, our own mistakes, and that we have the ability to turn our own lives around. Each one of us personally. No, we can’t “change the world” What we can do is change ourselves. Our own hearts.

There is a reason why the stories of creation and the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection are the most powerful stories ever told. I believe them. But you don’t have to believe them to acknowledge how important they are in keeping civilization on the right path. There is a reason why parts of these stories and variations thereof are told in all civilizations, no matter the time in history, no matter the corner of the earth. These are the truths that unites us, that resonate with us all. If we take that away, we are left empty and lost. There is no hope if our hope is not in our Creator, in something more than just this mortal plane. For me, as a Christian, that hope is in Jesus, God’s son.

I should add that it is never my desire to preach at anyone or to tell others what they should believe. All I can do is put my faith out there. I share it because I see so many lost and unhappy souls and my faith has, quite literally saved my life. I have no reason to be in despair, no matter the news around me.

So, in closing for this Sunday, whereas the Bible warns us of the doom and gloom in Isaiah (and many other places), it also gives us the hope that we have, once again from Isaiah:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

~ Isaiah 11:6-9

I encourage everyone to pay attention especially to that last part: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

This is what we should fill our hearts with, the knowledge of the Lord. This is what will sustain us in these dystopian times. Without hearts full of this knowledge, we are bereft of hope, of joy, of peace.

Nothing should surprise us with the way things are going. We shouldn’t need influencers to tell us the “truth” because their influence is just another form of control. All we need is the Word of God.