2012, the Bible, and the End of the World

2007

INTRODUCTION

In 2007 I was watching a news program in which a journalist was interviewing a scientist about the coming end of the world in 2012. As a serious student of Bible prophecy and eschatology (the study of last things), the discussion quickly grabbed my attention. A brief search of 2012 on the Internet opened up a new world to me. I suddenly realized that there is an apocalyptic subculture that seriously believes the world is going to end in 2012 and that this subculture has flooded into the mainstream. Web sites, articles, books, YouTube videos, and even major motion pictures are spreading the message of an imminent apocalypse.

It immediately became clear to me that I needed to understand what all the hoopla is about—why December 21, 2012 has been targeted as earth’s expiration date, and what people are expecting to happen. This book is the fruit of that search.

The tagline for the movie 2012 is Find out the truth…if you dare. I invite you to join me in taking this dare—to join me in an investigation of the evidence for whether the world will end in 2012, to find out if there’s any credence to the Mayan calendar theories about 12.21.12, and to search what the ancient prophecies of the Bible say about the end of days.

Mark Hitchcock

Edmond, Oklahoma

May 2009

1

12.21.12—THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?

Has the Final Countdown Begun?

The prophecies of Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, the Aztecs, the Hopi, the Maya, and others have sent reverberations of an unmistakable message throughout time. Separated by hundreds of years of history and thousand of miles of distance, all point to now.

GREGG BRADEN (FRACTAL TIME)

The 2012 deadline is the first time in modern history when so much is on the line for so many…The year 2012 has the mark of destiny upon it.

LAWRENCE E. JOSEPH (APOCALYPSE 2012)

Over the last few years, Americans have been bombarded with one huge concept that can be summed up by one little word: change. Both major political parties, and most Americans, recognize that major adjustments are needed in the economy, education, and health care. If one is to believe the political pundits, big changes are on the way. But few people are prepared for another kind of change that many are predicting—a change they believe has been bearing down on the planet for 5000 years, the colossal transformation of our solar system and our collective psyche that many say will happen on December 21, 2012.

Many believe that ancient prophecies indicate that change is coming. Big change. Predictions vary widely about what will happen. They range from total, all-out apocalypse to some kind of quantum shift in human awareness and consciousness. Yet they all agree that big change is coming for planet earth and the human race. And they all appear to focus on one specific year—2012. And in some cases even one specific day—December 21, 2012. Their conclusion, after gathering all the prophetic material, is simple: All the ancient sources agree the world will end in 2012. After all, they say, it can’t be sheer coincidence that so many primitive diviners, psychics, and astrologers agree. The bottom line is clear: Never before have so many people from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints pinpointed one day as the expiration date for human civilization.

Signs of the Times

People everywhere seem to share a collective sense that the world is getting near closing time. Apocalyptic thinking is in the air. According to the Pew Research Foundation, about one in five Americans believes that Christ will return in the current generation.¹ A U.S. News & World Report poll revealed that 60 percent of all Americans, from all faith backgrounds, believe the world will end eventually. And about 20 percent say earth’s life expectancy is just a couple of decades.² Newsmax observes: If you mix the morning headlines into the average American’s eschatology, you stir up a powerful, angst-inducing brew.³

Crises of alarming complexity are emerging and accelerating with frightening regularity—depletion of vital resources, a peak in oil production, food shortages, nuclear threats, economic meltdowns, vanishing species, potentially pandemic flu viruses, wars and rumors of wars, turmoil in the Middle East, record tsunamis, erratic weather patterns, unprecedented earthquakes, and the escalation of catastrophic storms. Life on planet earth over the last few years has been anything but business as usual. We live in a fragile, increasingly dangerous, interdependent world. We are seeing an amazing confluence of tipping points. And the world’s problems are multiplying. Is this all a buildup to some imminent cataclysm? The prelude to a grand finale of unspeakable destruction? Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock winds down to zero? A time of epic disaster? Was the warning of the earth’s demise indeed encoded in the Mayan calendar?

December 21, 2012 marks the end of the 5000-year cycle by the Mayan long count calendar. Were these ancient timekeepers giving us the time code for the end of days? A growing number of people are predicting that December 21, 2012 is the apocalypse deadline—history’s final day. The stroke of midnight. The galactic tipping point. The astronomical Grand Finale.

But haven’t we heard all this before? Setting dates for the end of the world is nothing new. There’s a long, tragic history of date-setting for the end of the world. But could 2012 be different? Or is it just another hoax to scare people and rake in a few dollars?

The Real Y2K?

You may remember Y2K. Many people were predicting that when the earth’s odometer rolled over from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, we would experience all kinds of massive computer malfunctions, government shutdowns, ensuing chaos, and even the end of civilization as we know it. I remember it well. Many were caught up in the frenzy of preparing bomb shelters and storing up enough dried foods and fresh water to last for months. One of my neighbors had a compound on some property he owned outside the city where he had enough dried foods, water, fuel, generators, and guns stored to support and protect his family for years to come. I always wondered what he did with all that stuff on January 2, 2000. One example of the Y2K hysteria comes from Gary North’s highly trafficked Web site:

We’ve got a problem. It may be the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced. I think it is. At 12 midnight on January 1, 2000 (a Saturday morning), most of the world’s mainframe computers will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data. Most of the world’s desktop computers will also start spewing out bad data. Tens of millions—possibly hundreds of millions—of preprogrammed computer chips will begin to shut down the systems they automatically control. This will create a nightmare for every area of life, in every region of the industrialized world.⁴

North’s Web site had links to more than 3000 places where you could read similar doom-and-gloom predictions about the Y2K crisis. He grimly told visitors to his Web site that they had better heed these doomsday warnings, or they would certainly regret it. He said,

It took me from early 1992 until late 1996 to come to grips emotionally with the Year 2000 Problem. You had better be a lot faster on the uptake than I was. We’re running out of time. I don’t mean that society is running out of time to fix this problem. Society has already run out of time for that. There are not enough programmers to fix it. The technical problems cannot be fixed on a system-wide basis. The Millennium Bug will hit in 2000, no matter what those in authority decide to do now. As a system, the world economy is now beyond the point of no return. So, when I say we, I mean you and I as individuals. We are running out of time as individuals to evade the falling dominoes…We are facing a breakdown of civilization if the power grid goes down.⁵

Of course, nothing out of the ordinary happened on January 1, 2000. The new millennium came in with a whimper, not a roar, and as expected, very few, if any, of the prophets of doom admitted they were wrong or apologized to the millions they led astray. So could it be that the whole 2012 thing is just another case of Y2K insanity? Or is it the real thing?

Serious 2012 watchers are calling 12.21.12 the Mayan Y2K or the Real Y2K. It’s even been called A Y2K for the New Age.⁶ Those who are 2012 believers maintain that Y2K was just a warm-up or dress rehearsal for the real show. They contend that momentous change (there’s that word again), an era of quantum transformation, is coming at the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere in the year 2012.

Fueling the hype is the fact that December 21, 2012 falls on the winter solstice and allegedly marks the first time in more than 5000 years that the galactic alignment of the sun and the earth with the center of the Milky Way Galaxy will occur. Many believe this crossing of the great galactic equator could cause the earth’s poles to reverse, which would obviously be a very bad thing.

For some people, December 21, 2012 spells doomsday with disaster scenarios including volcanic eruptions caused by solar storms, massive earthquakes, cracks in the earth’s magnetic field, and mass extinction brought on by a nuclear winter. Predictions abound of extreme weather pounding the planet and of the eruption of supervolcanoes, which are as powerful as 1000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs.⁷

For others, 2012 marks the opportunity for a new beginning, a new phase of human growth, or what they sometimes call The Shift. And for many, 2012 helps provide answers for all kinds of unsettling developments ranging from hurricanes, floods, and the disappearance of bees.

2012 Hits the Mainstream

For several years there’s been a burgeoning apocalyptic subculture that has been warning the world about a coming catastrophe in 2012. The man who put 2012 on the map is José Arguelles, who authored a book in 1987 titled The Mayan Factor. He also established the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. It was a peace initiative that occurred on August 16-17, 1987. People all over the world gathered at allegedly sacred sites to awaken the energy grid and bring in a 25-year era of spiritual growth that will culminate in 2012. For Arguelles, 2012 is a marker, a wake-up call in our DNA, and the cycle will culminate during June-December 2012. After the Harmonic Convergence, the 2012 apocalyptic subculture began to emerge. They began a 25-year countdown to 2012. The 2012 movement has remained under the radar for almost 20 years, but has suddenly exploded into the mainstream. Many people today are what’s being called 2012 curious. And we can expect this curiosity to grow exponentially as the date draws near. A whole new area of study known as 2012ology has erupted, and 2012 conferences are being held all over the world. According to many, a gold rush of ‘2012ology’ is underway.⁸

The first major conference on 2012 was held in Hollywood on March 1, 2008. Another conference, with about 300 attendees from as far away as Europe, was held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco on November 1-2, 2008. It was dubbed the Shift by the Bay, and the conference’s slogan was: Shift happens. The conference organizer, Christian John Meoli, plans to schedule twelve 2012 conferences in various places around the globe to prepare for the big day. According to Meoli, the final grand hurrah conference will be held appropriately on December 12, 2012, and is scheduled to take place on site at the Mayan pyramids. Everything about the conferences focuses on 2012. In fact, the entry fee at one of the conferences was…$20.12!

Describing one of these conferences, the Los Angeles Times reports:

In these times of economic distress, participants shelled out $300 each to attend the sold-out 2012 Conference, where astrologers, UFO fans, shamans, and New Age entrepreneurs of every stripe presented their dreams and dreads in two days of lectures, group meditations, documentaries and, of course, self-promotion. Normally, New Age platforms attract the interest of only the narrowest group of enthusiasts. But this one has been generating wider audiences because it so forcefully underscores the turmoil of the times, as indicated by the stock market plunge, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Sept. 11 attacks, global warming and the possibility of a magnetic pole shift and stronger sunspot cycles.⁹

All the mounting crises in the world are feeding the popular notion that the end may be near.

You Might Want to Circle This Date on Your Calendar

In 2008, 16 percent of Americans answered yes when asked, Do you expect any apocalyptic events to happen on December 21, 2012?¹⁰ That’s one out of every eight Americans. And that was before there was very much information available about 2012. Just wait until movies about 2012 and television programs about the end of days begin to flood into the popular culture. That number will surely go up. People everywhere are going to be talking about 12.21.12 and wondering what’s going to happen. Writing in Newsweek, Lisa Miller notes, "The belief that the year 2012 will mark a global transformation is