Some continue to live, read, think, preach, and quote in the vein of yesteryear. They study the literature, sermon notes, quotations, authorities, statistics, and world conditions of a decade or so ago. But the world procession has moved inexorably on. What were impressive signs of the times in the days of our fathers are hopelessly outdated today. They are dwarfed into insignificance by the prodigious developments of the past few years, months, or even days.
The world has gone into high gear. Events that formerly would take years to eventuate are now packed into a few days. Everything seems to function on a scale and with a magnitude that makes obsolete all the facts, figures, and descriptives of the past. Present-day wars, famines, pestilences, atrocities, disasters, and crime waves have swollen to such size as to make former categories scarcely worth mentioning as signs of the times. This is a new thing under the sun.
World-sweeping peace talks and plans, and Utopian provisions, are paralleled only by unprecedented fears, suspicions, and catastrophic possibilities. And these have now been stepped up to dizzy proportions by the atomic bomb. Joel, Isaiah, and Micah have become the most vivid and modern of the prophets.
Unprecedented industrial warfare, through strikes, walkouts, threats, and tie-ups, have reached sweeping proportions never dreamed of before. Whole industries are disrupted. Others are stopped, and recovery is stagnated. Nation wide tie-ups and shortages are unprecedented, and governments seem helpless in the face of the capital-labor storm that is blowing toward hurricane proportions. And the end thereof is nowhere in sight. Spiraling prices, wages, shortages, and new costs mount before a coming crash. We have entered a new age of labor power and domination.
Furthermore, transformations of nations, such as have just taken place in Japan, are unprecedented in all history. Old customs, traditions, barriers, and inhibitions have crumpled. A new day and a new world are here, the strange pattern of which is not yet too clear, but the possibilities for the finishing of our message are portentous. On the other hand, papal strides toward former prestige and power can be seen and heard by all. On the political front new balances of power and giant
i shifts of control—as with Russia—make the future seem like a nightmare to statesmen and diplomats. This is indeed a transition hour defying all pat terns of the past.
As aids to bringing the prophetic significance of these world developments before their hearers on the evangelistic platform, over the ether waves, and through our literature, our workers have the weekly World Trends section of the Review, the monthly Our Times notes and quotations, the periodic visits of the Pacific Press Arsenal, occasional notes from our General Conference Bureau of Publicity, and the Religious Press and Religious World Trends sections of THE MINISTRY, as well as a succession of small current Crisis books. We need them all.
We, as workers, must keep our eyes and ears open, our minds alert and elastic, and at the same time keep our feet on the ground. We must not become sensation mongers and alarmists, but we should captitalize to the full upon these up-to-the-minute developments in order to bring the present-day picture before mankind in the light of divine prediction and inspired meaning. We are to be interpreters, not prophets. We are to point out the current developments and give the meaning but not attempt to predict the precise course of fulfillment. We need to deal with basic issues in stead of playing up surface details, dealing with the mighty gale itself, rather than with some straw in the wind.
These are tremendous times, and ours is a task that is awesome yet sublime. May God give us spiritual eyesight to see, a spirit of understanding to grasp the larger meaning of events, and power to portray them effectively to the world—and all with that balanced judgment and discernment which calls for more than human wisdom. Such is our task as heralds of the dawn in these momentous times.
L. E. F.
