Interesting!   Driving through town yesterday I passed two teenage girls standing on the footpath waving placards that read, “The End is near”.   I wondered whether I should join them and add my own placard, “Prepare to meet your God”.

This morning I’m writing these lines on the day when the Mayan calendar ends and many people therefore believe that the world will end – today.

I confess I’m underwhelmed.   In my lifetime of three-score-plus years I’ve heard so many of these predictions – often from people claiming the name of Christ.   Remember “Family Radio” founder, Harold Camping?   He predicted that the world would end in October last year.

What concerns me is not the date-setting.   I’m sure people will continue to predict that the world will end on a given date.   What bothers me is people’s gullibility.   Christians shouldn’t be gullible because Jesus said that no one knows the day or the hour of His return.   Camping is now a wiser many because of his failed predictions.

But the gullibility of non-Christians is of greater concern.

As I write these lines people are gathering in Mexico and Central America at significant Mayan sites such as the t emple of the serpent god Kukulkan, an imposing 30-metre pyramid in southern Mexico.   These pilgrims are there because the Mayans themselves don’t believe it is the end of the world but rather that a new phase of history is beginning which will see a new age of enlightenment – or what they call “the dawn of a new consciousness”.

Half a world away in a tiny mountaintop hamlet in France people are gathering there because they believe it’s the only safe place to be when the world ends.   These New Age believers expect the mountains to open and that alien spaceships will emerge to save a small human remnant from the Apocalypse.   Others believe that this tiny village has a secret door to another world.

These examples of human gullibility show us the truth of what GK Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything”.

The fact of the matter is that one day the world will end.   In this season of Advent we focus our thoughts on the coming of Jesus.   But Christians always look beyond His first coming to His return on the clouds of heaven.   We can be sure that this will happen.   Jesus promised it.

But the secret is not: knowing the date.   The secret is: being ready for when that event takes place.   Readiness does indeed mean “the dawn of a new consciousness”.   But not in the way that pilgrims in Mexico understand that – rather the new consciousness that Paul spoke about when he said that Christians have the mind of Christ.   Readiness does indeed mean being ready to be snatched away to another world.   But not as the people in the village of Bugarach believe – rather Jesus coming to take those who are His into the glory of renewed creation.

Let’s not allow ourselves to be unsettled by futile predictions of the end of the world.   Instead let’s live in the readiness that when Jesus returns He will take home all those who trust in Him alone for their eternal salvation.