The Truth About 2012

Sunday, April 18, 2010 – AM

By Pastor James May

A lot of you, I am sure, are aware of the fact that in recent weeks there has been an upsurge in the news concerning the 2012 and the prediction of the end of the world. I spoke on this, or at least started to, several weeks ago, but this morning I believe that God wants me to talk about it again.

There is popular movie out right now that depicts the events of the end of the earth with truly outstanding graphical effects. Of course they depict it as though it is not really the end, but a series of tremendous natural disasters that encompass all of the things that scientists have been saying about global warming, earthquakes and other things. In the end, man is able to save himself from annihilation and is able to begin again to build a better world. It’s man saving himself as usual and God has nothing to do with it in the movie. But how much of what we are hearing can we believe? Is 2012 a date that we should be preparing ourselves for?

First let’s establish what the real hoopla of 2012 is all about. According to an ancient civilization of Mayans, a tribe of superstitious people who lived in what is now called the southern part of Mexico about 1000 years ago, we are nearing the end of the world as we know it. The Mayans are famous because they managed to create a written language and accomplish some pretty amazing engineering marvels long before any other people in the western hemisphere. Of course, all of these skills had been accomplished thousands of years before in Israel, Egypt and most of the Eastern Hemisphere.

The interest in the Mayan calendar, and the fact that so many people are concerned over what the Mayans had to say, is baffling when you consider that the prophecies of the Word of God existed in Hebrew and Greek scrolls many centuries before the Mayan Calendar, or the Mayan civilization reached its potential. Yet man would rather believe something that man has figured out, rather than to believe in the Word of God.

According to the Mayan Calendar, which is confusing, contradictory, and requires many hours of study to interpret; the sun, moon and planets will all come into perfect alignment of some sort and will trigger some ethereal cosmic energy that will mark the dawning of a new day for mankind.

I’m here to tell you that every day is a new day for mankind; and the power and energy that brings the day forward is the awesome power of God and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t need some ancient Mayan Priest to cut the head off a chicken, or throw a set of bones, or stare at the sun for hours to tell me that. All I have to do is read the Bible.

In the beginning God created the earth, brought forth the sun and moon, created day and night, and started the cycle of seasons, months and years that has continued to this day.

After creating all things, God said in Genesis 8:22, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." So it isn’t some great mystery to know that, should the earth remain, tomorrow the sun will rise again.

But the Mayans had never read the Bible and so they had to rely only on what they could see of the natural world around them to try to interpret the future. Since they were very much into early forms of astrology and astronomy, they began to develop a whole system of life and of worship based on the positions of the stars and planets at given times of the year. That’s how they established their calendar for planting, harvesting and daily life. They noticed things like eclipses and how the moon and star alignments would change with the passing of the night all during their year. Some of them sat gazing for months on end and they began to see slight changes in the positions of the stars of the night over a long period of time. And so they used this new found knowledge to establish their calendar.

Now we all know that God set the stars in the sky and with the passing of the months and the changes in the seasons, the positions of the constellations change. As each pattern of stars moves across the sky, God has laid them out in specific patterns that show the story of the coming of the Messiah and of the Kingdom of God.

Psalms 19:1-4, "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handy work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,"