The Price of Gas and the Rise of the Beast

Last week, gas dropped to forty-seven cents in Michigan, prompting headlines that asked, “How Low Can Gas Go?”  Of course, the gas-war price in Michigan was not available nation-wide, but gas did drop to nearly a buck and a half elsewhere.  Filling the car has never felt so . . . cheap. Not since the 1990s, anyway, when I remember complaining about gas that crept up over a dollar a gallon. 

The last time fuel prices started dropping, I noticed a lot of people who felt liberated enough to resume purchasing new SUVs.  If I remember correctly, there weren’t many high-consumption vehicles selling when gas was over four dollars.  The price dropped however, and people started to think of them as affordable again. 

If that’s what motivated the SUV renaissance, it was somewhat short-sighted, because (of course) what goes down must come up.  Gas prices rebounded.  The future, however, always looks smaller and further away than reality might suggest. Remember the last time you promised to watch your neighbor’s kids at some future date? It was an easy promise to make when the date was six months away.  The week before, however, you may have found yourself regretting that decision because it was so much more real. 

The same seems to apply to Bible prophecy. Even though the prophetic forecasts of Daniel and Revelation have been entirely accurate to date, some turn to a passage like Revelation 13, which promises the loss of religious liberty, and they can’t see it happening in their lifetimes.  “We have so many different religious groups now,” I’ve heard people suggesting. “I just can’t see forced religious homogeneity in our lifetime.  Impossible.” 

Remember the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989?  That caught most of us by surprise, too.