Introduction
ULTIMATE SURVIVOR
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
PAUL VALÉRY
SURVIVAL IS BIG BUSINESS. Everywhere you look these days, someone is talking about survival. Entertainment outlets and the media have seized the survival craze.
The initial offering in the new survival genre, and reality TV, was the series Survivor, which premiered in the United States in 2000. The series features a group of strangers marooned at an isolated location where they have to scrounge for food, water, shelter, and fire. The show completed its thirty-fifth season in 2017. Survivor is the quintessential survivor in the media industry. Since Survivor, a steady stream of movies and series has focused on surviving in almost every possible predicament, including in a postapocalyptic world.
A spate of survival reality TV shows has also erupted. Consider these:
- Out of the Wild: The Alaska Experiment
- Extreme Survival
- Man vs. Wild
- Survive This
- Fat Guys in the Woods
- Survivorman
- Surviving Disaster
- Dual Survival
- The Wheel
Doomsday Preppers is another offering that demonstrates how to survive various doomsday scenarios. The survival business is booming online with all kinds of products designed to enhance a person’s ability to endure any conceivable disruption, from living off the grid to all-out apocalypse. You can learn survival tips and buy survival gear for any eventuality. Online you can find all kinds of survival gurus touting their tips for surviving everything from school shootings to nuclear holocaust.
What’s behind the survival obsession? Why are these programs, products, and pointers so successful? Because the future has never been more uncertain. Never more unknown. Never more unpredictable. We live in a world that seems to be on the verge of coming apart.
In 2017, a Las Vegas shooting spree at an outdoor concert left dozens massacred, a terrorist plowed through innocent pedestrians in New York City, and a gunman opened fire on a church service in a small Texas town, all in a little over a month. Evil is intensifying.
Political rancor and polarization in American politics has shifted to another gear. Both sides are so entrenched that for someone to give any ground or to compromise in the least is viewed as total capitulation, making that person an outcast from all groups. Even commonsense solutions seem unachievable. The anger and outright malice on cable news and social media is over the top. Increasingly, protests fill the streets. Violence and racial tension are boiling over. Anarchy threatens. The family is in dire trouble. Deadly diseases and viruses like Ebola and Zika erupt with frightening regularity and can spread globally very quickly. Cataclysmic weather events seem to be escalating in frequency and intensity.
Beyond these things, the once faraway threat of a terrorist attack has jumped into everyone’s life —the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, a subway in London, a train in Spain, a convention in California, a tourist hot spot in France, a nightclub in Orlando, a Christmas market in Berlin. No one seems safe anywhere. Millions of displaced, devastated people are fleeing their homelands, potentially giving terrorists cover to blend into and infiltrate Western nations.
Rogue regimes such as North Korea already have the bomb, and other nations like Iran are on the threshold. Barbaric terrorists threaten our safety and very way of life. Even as the caliphate is crumbling and ISIS is on the run, fleeing ISIS fighters are exporting their savagery to more locations. ISIS-inspired killers are hiding among us. There seems to be a collective, growing sense that things can’t go on this way much longer.
And then there’s the world economy, which, while doing well on many fronts, seems increasingly fragile, susceptible at any time to a geopolitical crisis. The United States is twenty trillion dollars in debt, and that number is climbing. The debt bomb must explode at some point, triggering financial Armageddon.
In addition to all these things, there’s an increasing indifference and malaise —and sometimes outright militancy —toward the central truths of the Christian faith and practice. Anti-Christian momentum is palpable. Hate and hostility toward Bible-believing Christians is on the rise. Christians are taking fire. Believers who dare even to question the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and gender fluidity are labeled “haters” and “homophobes.” Believers in Jesus Christ now find themselves playing in enemy territory in American culture, and the crowd is getting more and more hostile.
Pornography is metastasizing like a deadly cancer and infecting an entire generation of young men and women. The young are swallowing a deadly cocktail of toxic ideas in the name of love and tolerance. We have front-row seats to a moral freefall. We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. Time seems to be running out.
What can we do?
ARE WE LIVING IN THE LAST DAYS?
Many of us have probably asked ourselves at some point whether we’re living in the last days. Maybe we’ve asked it more often in recent times. When we ask about living in the last days, what we’re really asking is “Are we living in the final days before the apocalypse? Is this the end of the age predicted in the Bible?”
In the New Testament, the term “last days” (or “last times”) refers most often to the last days of the church on earth or this current age (see 1 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 3:1; James 5:3; 1 Peter 1:20; 2 Peter 3:3).
All the way back in the first century, the apostle Peter said, “The end of the world is coming soon” (1 Peter 4:7). Even in New Testament times the apostles “sensed that they had moved dramatically closer to the consummation of God’s plan for this world.”[1] The Old Testament age had ended; they were now living in a brand-new era. For the apostles, the end of the age was already a present reality. The Scriptures indicate that the first coming of Jesus Christ inaugurated the “last days” for the church. According to the New Testament, we are living right now in these last days: “Now in these final [last] days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he created the universe” (Hebrews 1:2).
The apostle John even calls this present age “the last hour”: “Dear children, the last hour is here. You have heard that the Antichrist is coming, and already many such antichrists have appeared. From this we know that the last hour has come” (1 John 2:18). According to the New Testament, the last days commenced with Christ’s first advent and will close with the return of the Lord to catch his bride —the church —away to heaven. Therefore, the entire current age, commonly known as the church age, is known as the last days.
Labeling this age as the “last days” is a vivid reminder that Christ could come at any time. Every generation since the death and resurrection of Christ has lived with the hope that it might be the final generation and that Christ could return at any moment. There are no prophecies that must be fulfilled before Christ can come. We are living in the last days and may be living in the last days of the last days before Christ’s coming. As the end approaches, the enemy is ramping up the attacks in a final onslaught.
THE ULTIMATE SURVIVOR
Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, and others warn of an unprecedented increase in demonic deception, moral corruption, doctrinal error, and spiritual lethargy in the last days. Believers today face unparalleled spiritual danger. These are treacherous times. As Erwin Lutzer notes, “The day of the casual Christian is over. No longer is it possible to drift along, hoping that no tough choices will have to be made. At this point in American history, any moral and spiritual progress will have to be won at great cost. The darker the night, the more important every candle becomes.”[2] We need to stand firm and shine brightly in the darkness.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, triggering the Gulf War. When she heard of the invasion, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the United States. She described her initial thoughts in an interview with PBS’s Frontline: “I went out for a walk, always lovely in the mountains, and got things worked out in my mind, but it was perfectly clear, aggression must be stopped. That is the lesson of this century. And if an aggressor gets away with it, others will want to get away with it too, so he must be stopped, and turned back. You cannot gain from your aggression.”[3]
Toward the end of her tenure as prime minister, Thatcher helped spur President George H. W. Bush to intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion. Urging President Bush to join the fight against Saddam, Thatcher famously declared that “this is no time to go wobbly.”[4] The same is true for us —this is no time to go wobbly.
But how can we stand strong in perilous times? How can we shine brightly in the darkness? How can we keep from “going wobbly” as the end of the age draws near?
GIVE ME THE TOOLS
Winston Churchill was prime minister of Great Britain during the trying days of World War II. Despite his massive influence, he often downplayed his own part in winning the war. He gave credit to the people, saying after the war had ended that they “had the lion’s heart,” and he merely “had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” In February 1941, Churchill delivered one of his most lauded wartime speeches. He claimed that in wartime, what mattered was “deeds, not words.” After walking listeners through what had already transpired in the war, he urged US President Franklin Roosevelt to get involved in the fight rather than sitting on the sidelines. He said, “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”[5]
There’s no doubt the church of Jesus Christ is locked in a deadly spiritual war. Sitting on the sidelines is not an option. The war is multiplying on numerous fronts. The good news is that God has given us the tools, or maybe it would be better to call them the truths, that we need to finish the job as we await Christ’s coming. God has given us sufficient resources to effectively encounter and engage the world we’re facing.
Many have wondered in recent years why the apocalypse craze in movies and video games appeals to people so strongly. One answer is “because they show people returning to the fundamentals of existence.”[6] In the same way, I believe what’s happening in our world today is moving believers to return to the foundations of our spiritual existence. Believers everywhere must get back to what matters most. We must always remember that our battle “at the most basic level is spiritual, not political or even moral.”[7]
Some Christians today are carefully preparing physically for the apocalypse —hoarding cash, gold, weapons, and food. To one degree or another they’re the ultimate “doomsday preppers.”[8] There’s nothing wrong with reasonable preparation for disruptions in basic services that could occur in our complex world; however, the most important “prepping” for every believer should be spiritual. Whatever view we may hold concerning the apocalypse or the end times, our focus should be on spiritual survival. That’s the consistent focus of Scripture.
So, what are the spiritual tools, the spiritual truths, Scripture tells us we must understand and use as the end draws near? How can we be spiritually prepared for today and for what lies ahead?
In the pages that follow, you will discover ten spiritual tools the Bible relates directly to our spiritual preparation for the Lord’s coming —ten biblical survival strategies to live out these last days so you and your family can prosper in an increasingly decaying, darkening world.
These strategies won’t guarantee your physical or financial well-being, but they are guaranteed to bring life and vitality to your spiritual health and welfare as you cling to the immovable rock of God’s Word. The truth is that even if you survive physically and prosper financially, your deepest need —and mine —is spiritual survival and stability. When life is whittled down to its essence, the real issue is our spiritual condition before God.
My prayer is that God can use these basic, biblical tools and strategies to help you survive and thrive as you await Christ’s coming.
Mark Hitchcock
JANUARY 2018