Watch For Falling Rocks

Duck!

I saw a fireball once.

In 1992, I was at my home in Wheat Ridge, Colorado when I looked out the front windows toward the northwest around sunset in the evening. Almost immediately, I saw a streak of fire hurtling down so fast there was no time to react. It was much faster than anything I had ever seen before. It was the speed of a shooting star, which I've seen often enough, but much longer. It looked like it was between me and the mountains and that it could just as easily have hit the earth as burned up.

In a few seconds I realized that what I had seen was a meteor. The fireball's trail dissipated very quickly, so that when I went outside, I couldn't see any discernible trail. I almost wondered if I actually had imagined it. Yet, a day or so later, I saw reports in the local news that other people had seen it in the skies over Boulder, the same location I had seen it. Sadly, the only visual record is locked in my memory.

Yet, it's not without impact on me and surely on others who have such memories. Not unlike a satellite or meteor dropping through the sky, scientists and warriors have designed MIRVs, nuclear warheads, to drop through the sky and, instead of winking out of existence like my meteor, exploding over it's target with the estimated force of thousands to millions of tons of explosives. Seeing something akin to my fireball may be the last thing someone would see before witnessing the end of their own life and that of thousands or millions of others. It is a horrifying thought for any human being, one that this child of the cold war who had studied the logistics and effects of a nuclear war has thought about time and again. The abject horror of the thought does not grow easier with time, either.

Such destruction would not have to be caused by man, however. Victims of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor blast and witnesses of the 1908 Tunguska blast know that such power does not solely rest with human beings. The blast of a rock, or in a worst case scenario, metal asteroid slamming first into the atmosphere and then into the crust of the earth is likely to have caused planet-wide destruction on more than one occasion, something humans cannot claim, yet, and hopefully never will.

Apocalypse Pow

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If you believe the Bible  as I do, a meteor or comet apocalypse is not only likely to happen at some point in humanity's future, it's actually prophesied. Right smack in the middle of Revelation, John the Beloved's prophetic letter to seven churches and the last book in the Bible, John writes of angels blowing trumpets, releasing events on an unbelieving generation of humans to call them to repentance and relationship with God. The third of seven trumpet blasts releases a celestial event.

Then the third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from the sky, burning like a torch. It fell on one-third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star was Bitterness [in Greek, literally "wormwood."] It made one-third of the water bitter, and many people died from drinking the bitter water. Rev 8:10-11 NLT

It's a roughly 1,920 year-old book, and a lot of the imagery can be taken symbolically, as Matthew Henry's Commentary does, or at least in the spirit that a person from our time might use to describe the events and technology of people from the year 3814 AD. And yet, meteors are still referred to as falling stars. Meteors or comets weren't unknown to stargazers of John's time. Yet anyone of his time would be puzzled to see the effects of radiological contamination. John does us a bit of a favor by not speculating on what he saw, and instead simply stating what he saw in his vision and leaving it at that.

Assuming John was being literal at this point, what could the source be? A failed nuclear-powered satellite? Radioactive cesium? Nuclear fallout? There are many possibilities, and not all of them fall under radiological causes. Nonetheless, radiation would be a prime suspect for wormwood's bitterness. And a third of the earth's freshwater going undrinkable would cause massive casualties in any generation, but especially from here on as the world's freshwater sources are largely already claimed for use.

Incidentally, chapter 8 is a pretty rough chapter for the people of earth. A firestorm of hail and fire mixed with blood, (possibly nuclear war), sets a third of the earth's trees on fire and destroys the green grass. That doesn't just mean no more lawn mowing or golf games. Grass is what much of the earth's livestock live on. That food chain would likely begin to fail. Further complicating that is the fourth trumpet that reduces all light reaching the earth by a third. That is Sagan's nuclear winter, folks, and food production would grind to a halt in less than a year. Considering how we eat fresh food much more than stored or canned food, this does not bode well for survivors of wormwood and the other events.

If you'd like to know more, let me know personally. I'd be glad to give you my take, but really, God will do the speaking Himself when the time comes. I hope that I and those I love are not there to witness the results. Regardless, if we are, I know that through the pain, we will push through as long as we can to give those who need God's love and grace all that we can. That's what His kids do.

Falling Like Lightning

Instead of an apocalypse, my memory of the fireball actually brings something else entirely to my mind. Preserved through 2 millenia are these words, "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning!" It was Jesus' exclamation in response to His disciples as they told about their experiences once they had returned from their mission to go and tell people the news about God's kingdom. Jesus was telling them of the impact their mission had in the spiritual realm.

Just as that meteor streaked across the northwestern sky and caught all sorts of bystanders' attention that day over 20 years ago, so too can the disciples of God's kingdom have the impact today of dethroning the prince of the power of the air by speaking and acting in line with in Holy Spirit.