The only way to make sense of what is happening around the world today is to know what is going to happen tomorrow. God has seen fit to tell us a great many things about the future. There are hundreds of yet-to-be-fulfilled prophecies in the Bible.
We reserve a few minutes Sunday morning to suggest news, or trends, that seem to be predicted by a literal, futurist reading of the Bible.
To avoid sensationalism, we are careful to use recognized, reliable sources for news.
We’re not saying the things we report are the fulfillment of prophecy. We’re saying that they are the things you’d expect to be happening in the build-up to the future seven year Great Tribulation.
The Mark of the Beast is easily the best known of the future prophecies. It will be some kind of personal identifier that will allow the global population to participate in society. We’re witnessing a push towards a digital, global society that sounds similar. One reporter commented, “Imagine if eating habits determined education choices, your vocation options, leisure options, your entrepreneurial ambition, your dating appeal, your income, mobility, and even your ability to protest or engage in activism.” That is the cashless future.
The Beast is a reference to the coming world leader commonly called the antichrist. At the mid-point of the seven year Great Tribulation, the Beast will demand everyone swear allegiance to him, worship him. Those who won’t will be cut-off from society, and they will be killed.
The way they will be killed is weird. An associate of the antichrist, called the second Beast, “[tells] those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the [antichrist]… He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed” (Revelation 13:14&15).
It sounds a lot like Artificial Intelligence, AI for short. Thus we expect advances in AI, and boy, are there ever things going on in that field. Scary things.
One article I read was titled, Chilling AI development means that robots can now talk to animals – and we might be able to next.
Excerpts:
Humans are one step closer to talking to animals as new technologies are allowing AI enabled robots to speak with different species.
Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, recently revealed this technology is being used to communicate with honeybees, dolphins and elephants, and offered up a warning regarding the development.
She pointed to the use of artificial intelligence to communicate with honeybees in Germany. “A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive,” Bakker said. “That robot is able to use the honeybees’ waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it’s able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source.”
The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth.”
At that point, Bakker emphasized that humans would have “an unprecedented degree of control” over those hives, basically “domesticating” them.
“This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there’s a long history of the military use of animals, so that’s one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells,” she said.
The ability to speak to other species sounds intriguing and fascinating, but it could be used either to create a deeper sense of kinship, or a sense of dominion and manipulative ability to domesticate wild species that we’ve never as humans been able to previously control,” Bakker said.[1]
Another article was titled, Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works.
Excerpts:
AI researchers are warning developers to focus more on how and why a system produces certain results than the fact that the system can accurately and rapidly produce them.
Roman V. Yampolskiy, a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville, wrote in his paper titled Unexplainability and Incomprehensibility of Artificial Intelligence, “If we grow accustomed to accepting AI’s answers without an explanation, we would not be able to tell if it begins providing wrong or manipulative answers.”
The risks are that the system may be making decisions using values we disagree with, such as biased (e.g. racist or sexist) decisions. Another risk is that the system may be making a very bad decision, but we cannot intervene because we do not understand its reasoning,” said Jeff Clune, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.
AI systems are already deeply entrenched with bias and are constantly reproducing such bias in their output without developers understanding how.[2]
AI could empower the Image of the Beast, and it would have the means to find and kill anyone who will not worship him.
I am not saying AI is what John saw.
I’m just reading my Bible and seeing technology that sounds a lot like what is coming.
We are witnessing the stage-setting for the seven year Great Tribulation that is described in the last book of the Bible. We will not, however, be on Earth during that terrible Time of Jacob’s Trouble.
The resurrection and rapture of the church are imminent. It could happen any moment; nothing needs to happen before it.
Jesus will come, in the clouds, and raise the dead believers of the Church Age. He will transform the bodies of living believers to glorified, resurrection bodies.
We will join Him in Heaven while the earth endures one final seven-year campaign of severe evangelism.
Are you ready for the rapture? If not, Get ready; Stay ready; Keep looking up.
Ready or not, Jesus is coming!