Gambling possible outcomes of prophecies

My father once told me a myth that perhaps he made up or someone told him. There was a nagging woman who was fed up with life and wanted to die. One day, Death paid a visit to her in response to the call. Trembling at the sight of Death, the woman pointed at her ill-stricken mother in bed, “Take her, she’s the one sick.” As funny as it may sound, that is exactly what happens to us; how much truth can we take from our own words in times of crisis?

Today, we still live in the aftermath of a global pandemic, a kind that was not the first and will possibly not be the last. Earth almost went under total quarantine. The global response to Covid-19 left everyone busy. From scientists to health workers, and from researchers to opinion leaders, no one had ever been so busy as they were then. Almost every sphere of life was affected, on both small and large scales. The crisis we faced was, and remains, an uncontested reality.

I continue to hear some say the virus was a biological weapon from a Chinese laboratory. That narrative framed the entire world as though it was in a global war. Another theory still circulates, claiming the outbreak was an attempt to reduce world population, citing the number of deaths since the outbreak. (A similar theory emerged during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa some years ago.) Circulating alongside is the popular theory that the pandemic was an attempt to curb global warming. One widely shared BBC article by Matt McGrath noted: “Levels of air pollutants and warming gases over some cities and regions are showing significant drops as coronavirus impacts work and travel.” Those who held to this latter theory at least had something tangible to believe. Not forgetting what seemed popular initially when China was the epicenter of the disease: that it was an American machination to undermine the Chinese economy. That theory quickly waned once the number of confirmed cases bloated in Italy, and soon America itself became the epicenter of the disease.

Right-wing radio host and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh said of the virus on February 24, 2020: “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons.”

Religion also played a significant role during the pandemic. Most religious sacred centers were locked for months. In my local church in Geneva, we had to make adjustments to meet certain needs. Services streamed online, and pastors adjusted to new technical means of ministry. All these were effective responses to show the severity of the pandemic.

Nevertheless, religion also became a hub for extreme peddlers to sow alarming fallacies. You may still remember hearing of the so-called “new world order” in a post-Covid-19 world. Within our own circles of Adventism, countless apocalyptic interpretations emerged. Before, I had heard of climate change as the done deal for a national Sunday Law. Then a blog post I read during the pandemic referenced Pope Francis’ call for a global prayer against Covid-19 as a supposed sign of the global supremacy of the papacy. These Sunday Law predictions were not new, especially to Adventists traversing through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Isn’t it time for each one of us, if not the church, to be cautious about sinister predictions that already have a track record of failures? We must choose to maintain a simple outlook through the words of Christ: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only” (Matt. 24:36). Otherwise, we spend our time in fanciful curiosity, inventing predictions out of a crisis, or nurturing extreme views that seem to hatch further false predictions.

How much do we take as truth, and how much should we reject as conspiracy theories? In some cases, silence can help us to avoid the error of gambling possible outcomes of prophecies. Job 13:5 says,“If only you would be altogether silent! For you, that would be wisdom.”

Straight to the point: it’s time to discipline our prediction behavior.