The omniscient God who created and transcends time is our best source for facing our fears of the future. He sees tomorrow better than we can see today. Our Father can therefore prepare us now for what comes next while shaping our unseen circumstances for his greatest glory and our greatest good. All the while, he transfuses us with “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” when we trust our fears to him (Philippians 4:7).

Can you think of something you were afraid would happen this year but didn’t? Or that you were afraid would not happen but did?

The sixteenth-century French “seer” Nostradamus was thought to predict for 2025 that “a great pestilence from the past returns, no enemy more deadly under the skies,” leading some to claim that a pandemic worse than COVID-19 would arise during the year. Others found in his writings a prediction of an asteroid impact with apocalyptic consequences.

He’s been wrong so far (though the day and year are not yet over).

A hundred years ago, other “experts” predicted that by 2025:

• People would live to be 150 years old.
• There would be only three nations: the United States, the “United States of Europe,” and China.
• The Earth would utilize one common language.
• New York City would build triple- and quadruple-decked streets to accommodate its traffic.
• There would be world peace, a common world currency, and universal free trade.

And a seminary professor in Pennsylvania had the audacity to claim that people would use a pocket-sized apparatus for communications to see and hear each other without being in the same room. What a crazy idea.

“The End of the World as We Know It?”

Speaking of communication devices, twenty-five years ago today, much of the world was focused on what seemed to be a calamitous threat. I remember well the “Y2K” (short for “year 2000”) scare: the claim that global computer and banking systems, power grids, transportation networks, and other critical infrastructure would fail when the year changed to 2000.

The reason: To save memory space, early computers used two-digit years (such as “97” for 1997), which could cause them to misread “00” as the year 1900 rather than 2000. No one was sure what might then happen, but there was no shortage of fearmongering. Time magazine ran a cover story titled “The End of the World As We Know It?” Survival guides proliferated. A movie imagined cascading Y2K catastrophes, from blackouts to nuclear meltdowns.

However, the day passed in relative calm, largely because governments and businesses spent an estimated $300 billion to $600 billion mitigating the glitch.

Now we have another computer cataclysm to worry about: Many older systems store time using a counter that maxes out on January 19, 2038.

Read More