Did you watch the scenes from Afghanistan this past week? Awful, right? People hanging on US Air Force jets as the jets took flight, and the people fell to the ground. How about the destruction in Haiti because of the earthquake? More than 2000 dead. How is it that Haiti has one horrible disaster after another? Then there are the devastating wildfires in the Western USA and Siberia. Do you ever watch the news and think that the end of world must be near?

Maybe an asteroid will hit the earth. A big one made the news recently, passing by on July 25th. The scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab watch asteroids, and they log them on their website. Look it up, it’s called Asteroid Watch. There are big ones flying by every day. A 2,000 footer passes by tomorrow. While these huge asteroids are classified as near-earth objects, their trajectory only puts them a million miles from us at the closest. The 2,000 footer tomorrow, for example, will pass by 2,130,000 miles away, which is nearly ten times farther away than the moon. So maybe global warming will get us first.

Is all this stuff just hype? Have you ever thought that it’s just hype? Or have you wondered if the end is near? People talk like that. They say the end is near. But people have claimed we’re in the end times for decades. Year after year goes by, and the world doesn’t end.

Ezekiel once said the end is near. Remember that in Ezekiel chapter 7? It was a big bold prediction of disaster. But nothing happened. Was Ezekiel’s prophecy false? When a prophet’s words don’t come true, they are considered to be false prophets.

This week we continue our study in Ezekiel, having arrived at chapter 12, and there we’ll meet people who thought Ezekiel’s prophesy was hogwash. The way God describes those people is really interesting, and he gives Ezekiel another strange skit to try to reach them. What we will learn has very important implications for us in 2021.