There is no such thing as normal weather. At least not in my part of the world. Perhaps this is what lures so many enterprising types into the weather forecasting field. We now have Environment Canada, The Weather Network, Weather Underground and Accu-Weather to name just a few. Most of them are fairly accurate at telling you what’s going to happen in the next few hours.

This summer we have been getting severe weather watches, alerts and warnings just about every day. There is a possibility of heavy rain, strong winds, severe thunderstorms, hail, funnel clouds, tornadoes and anything else that could possibly happen. Most of it doesn’t happen.

Of course we have had rain, wind, thunderstorms, pea sized hail that fell for a minute or two and didn’t really damage anything. Funnel clouds have been seen here and there, one actually touched down about 70 km south-east of us, ran along the ground for a few minutes and damaged a couple of storage sheds. Not much action for all the apocalyptic-sounding warnings we’ve had.

Years ago, most Protestants were of the Post Millennial persuasion: the world would get better and better until the millennium came and then Christ would return. In the first half of the 19th century, when hopes for the arrival of the millennium through natural progress began to dim, a new idea sprang forth: Christ would return before the millennium and establish it by divine force. There were many varieties of this thinking: John Nelson Darby’s dispensational pre-millennialism, Ellen G White’s Seventh Day Adventism, Charles Taze Russell’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, and yet more. None of them will admit it, but they were all lit by sparks from the same fire.

All teachers of this type of persuasion are specialists in apocalyptic forecasts about the impending doom of this world. Lewis Sperry Chafer, the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, wrote a book 75 years ago in which he named Benito Mussolini as the Antichrist. Shorty before that time, a well-known American preacher dropped in on a Baptist church in France one Sunday. He recounted to the pastor of this church his visit with Il Duce a few days earlier, in which he had showed Mussolini all the prophecies in the Bible that applied to him. The pastor of that French Baptist church, Robert DuBarry, was appalled, thinking that Mussolini did not need that kind of encouragement.

When I was a boy, my father listened to Canada’s  National Back to the Bible Broadcast every Sunday morning, in which Ernest C Manning would expound on Bible passages referring to Communist Russia and speak of the coming Battle of Armageddon.

Like the weather forecasts, the forecasts of Armageddon change with every shift in the wind patterns. Solomon had sound advice for us in these times: “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” (Ecclesiastes 11:4).