I was watching the History Channel recently. It was showing a full week of two-hour shows exploring the apocalypse and armageddon.

You don’t have to watch television “entertainment” shows, however, to have your thoughts focus so dramatically on those themes. We hear so many news stories that draw our attention to the possibility of catastrophic conflict or even the end of time. Iran seems to be fomenting the war between Palestine and Israel. Syria sends weapons into Lebanon. Instability increases in Afghanistan. Pakistan and India are at each other’s throats, and they both have nuclear weapons. An increase in the number of earthquakes may foreshadow the eruption of a super volcano in Yellowstone. A cholera epidemic kills thousands. Millions are starving. People are rioting in cities around the world. And we are in the midst of a global economic collapse. Any reasonable person might say, “It’s time to panic!”

Or is it? Granted these current events all seem to reflect the general signs of the end times that God has given us in Revelation. Yet haven’t all of these events occurred before? How can we tell if this time it is the real thing—the end of the world—or if these are just more precursors?

God’s Word has convinced me—it doesn’t matter! Not, that is, if you are ready.

We worry during troubled times

During a recent Bible study of 1 Peter, our pastor told us to read through the book and choose one passage to memorize. This is a good way to read and study any book of the Bible. It permits you to focus on a particular element, rather than trying to thoroughly digest every nuance in the book.

So I read. The problem I ran into was that there are so many words of wisdom in 1 Peter that I found it hard to choose which one to memorize. Then I read 1 Peter 4:7. I was compelled to read it again. And again. “This is it,” I thought. “This is what I need to remember.”

In this passage, Peter says, “The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.” How imminent did Peter think the end of the world was? Peter thought it was near. But from our perspective, it obviously wasn’t all that near. We’re still living our lives as we always have.

Perhaps that’s the problem. We’re still living our lives as we always have. So when something bad happens, especially if life hands us one bad “something” after another, we most likely do what we are conditioned to do—panic!