The Sky is Falling, The Sky is Falling!
Why it probably is not
It is not unusual to see various forms of doomer imminent end-of-the-world posts by various people on social media. In my opinion, the seemingly perennial human instinct to fear the imminent end of the world is the result of the knowledge written on our hearts that we are out of fellowship with God and deserve His judgment.
Even anti-Christian worldviews such as environmentalism develop their own form of immanent millenarian catastrophe. “Climate change is going to kill us all and drown our cities!”
Lately, the idea of ancient and imminent pole-shift catastrophes has come into vogue. For example, this post on X:
https://x.com/OMApproach/status/1957167174407331859
Let me address TWEETER-X’s Chicken Little story from a Christian worldview.
TWEETER-X begins with the assumption that we know a history of past geomagnetic excursions and mass extinctions, which he certainly does not.
What we do know is:
There was a Global Flood in 2348 BC, which was the first and greatest mass extinction event (and which accounts for nearly all of the imagined ones he is talking about).
There was an Ice Age that lasted from shortly after the Global Flood until about the time of the Exodus in 1491 BC. This wasn’t really a catastrophe, as the climate was quite nice near the oceans, which even allowed hippopotami to live along the Arctic coastlines of North America and Asia.
There was some kind of catastrophic event referred to as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which coincided with the general time of the Exodus. A comet or asteroid appears to have shattered the North American and Baltic Ice Sheets circa 1520 BC. This caused the mass extinction of Ice Age megafauna in the northern latitudes. It also led to:
The build-up of glacial meltwater in a massive freshwater lake in North America behind an ice dam, which suddenly breached around 1451 BC, produced three or four of the following historical disasters. The sudden rise of the sea level by about 100 feet in 1451 BC was at the same time as Joshua's conquest of the Holy Land, the Flood of Dardanus in Greece, the sinking of Dwarka beneath the sea in India, and the drowning of the Tamil School in Sri Lanka.
Since the Flood, there have been various famines and cold years caused by large volcanic eruptions and rarer comet or asteroid impacts. None of these really caused mass extinction events. But they did cause local human disasters like starvation and war.
There have been warm and cool periods since the Flood, largely driven by the Sun’s magnetic sunspot cycle, which has caused Grand Solar Maxima and Minima.
The cold years without Summers caused by some of the phenomena in #5 and #6 above have often led to wars and mass migrations, such as the ones that occurred at the end of the Roman Empire.
That's about it.
The idea that the pole suddenly shifted is mostly baseless, with one exception.
Joshua's Long Day could have been a pole shift or Dzhanibekov Flip caused by a very large amount of dammed-up freshwater on the continent of North America breaching its dam and flowing into the sea, causing the Atlantic to overtop Gibraltar and refill the Mediterranean. The enormous transfer of oceanic mass from high latitudes to lower latitudes may have caused the pole flip and long day.
Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea. 9 They went up on the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. 10 The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are. And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
— Revelation 20:7-10
The Bible promised that the Dragon and his final rebellion army will be destroyed by fire from heaven. This explains the current obsession with predicting asteroid strikes and preventing them by developing anti-asteroid weapons. Satan knows it is coming, or thinks he does.
An alternative interpretation of that passage is that "fire from heaven" was the ancient word for meteoric iron, which was hammered into iron and steel swords. The final rebellion could conceivably be defeated by the cold steel of Christian Kings. The heavy iron of Christian kings could be viewed as “fire from heaven” in the ancient understanding of that word.
In conclusion, it is highly unlikely that the world is in any imminent danger of a global catastrophe caused by the magnetic north pole wandering, or that such wandering could even cause a catastrophe in the first place.
However, the formerly Christian nations of the world that have rejected the Law of Christ and chosen to embrace and export every abomination prohibited by God do put the entire world at risk of temporal judgments from the hand of God. These may take the form of wars, famines, earthquakes, asteroid or comet strikes, famines, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and any other “natural” catastrophe in God’s arsenal of ways to chastise errant humanity.
Rather than worrying about pole shifts, we should fast, pray, and repent of our sins and encourage our neighbors and our leaders to do the same.
Kenneth, you have always had a better overall historical sense about when global biblical events that we both agree occurred happened than I. To give an actual date of the global flood is more than I have been willing to do. Is your date based on “Bishop Usher’s work. I read all of Immanuel Velikovsky’s books years ago and I don’t remember now if he was even a believer but he felt compelled to try to explain biblical events such as the flood, Joshua’s long day and the darkness over the world when Christ was crucified by conventional ( non- miraculous) means because while his historical research indicated that these events happened he was not completely willing to hand them over to the hand of God. On the other hand, like the creation itself, there need not be a scientific explanation for the occurrence of these events. Another example is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Paraphrasing scripture “and the Lord rained down fire from the Lord in Heaven.” To now, explain what happened as a freak meteor storm is to rob the event of the agency and intent of God. So I’m torn between finding a “natural” explanation and just knowing that God did it. Chris Parker.