Get Ready for the Great Reset (Part 3)

Read the series.

We have been considering the potential importance of the Great Reset, which has been promised to the world for this year of 2021, and is being discussed this week in virtual meetings for all who care to watch the proceedings unfold.

The Reset is a production of the World Economic Forum, and is backed by many leading figures from around the planet. Its planks include nearly every item that any globalist or climate-change activist could dream of placing on a wish list.

It is worth noting that—at one level—the gurus of the Reset have already foiled their own efforts by making such ostentatious guarantees that the movement could never live up to all of them. But perhaps they have already taken that into account—and are just trying to catch our attention.

Prof. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF, has invested his life in this defining moment, and offers the following admonition—which sounds much more like a warning than a promise:

People assume we are just going back, to the good old world which we had, and everything will be normal again, in how we are used to normal, in the old fashioned. This is, let’s say fiction, it will not happen….¹

How should we as Bible-believing Christians—especially if we love Bible prophecy and approach it from the perspective of dispensational premillennialism—react to such ominous schemes and the pretentious people who envision them?

Well, we must commend them for their ambition, although certainly not for their embracing of the “doctrines of demons” (1 Tim. 4:1).²

Beyond that, however, what should we do? Specifically, can we say that such developments indicate that “the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor. 10:11)?

Here, first, a word of caution is in order, as there is peril in running to the other extreme from the danger we examined previously—which we might sum up by the term last-days lethargy. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find those overly zealous souls who are ready to make radical predictions—“beyond what is written” (1 Cor. 4:6) for us in Scripture—based on the assumption that the return of Christ must take place soon.

One sure-fire means of recognizing such a person is by watching for their affinity for date-setting. This is a most unfortunate ritual, which has reappeared more times throughout church history than we would care to admit—in spite of our Lord’s clear declaration in Mark 13:32:

But of that day and hourno one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only theFather.

For some Christians, however, the sense of unction to speak is too great of a burden to bear.

Such was the case with William Miller, a Baptist preacher whose zeal led him to schedule the return of Christ for Oct. 22, 1844. The resulting embarrassment—remembered in history as the Great Disappointment—led to the establishing of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Other, more contemporary examples of date-setting are equally embarrassing. However, before we exercise too much righteous laughter at their expense, we might reflect on the fact that no less a figure than Martin Luther—the great Reformer himself—is referenced approvingly in this regard by Seventh-day Adventist theologians, one of whom stated:

… Luther was so impressed by the impending doom that he opined that the end might come in the midst of the sixth millennium. According to Luther’s computation, the world was 5,500 years old in the year 1540, which was to be about the right time for the end of all things to occur.³

But we as believers today possess no such knowledge. We are only “to wait for His Son from heaven” (1 Thess. 1:10)—living in the hope that Christ could return at any moment to catch the true church up to heaven, to be with Him forever. This is our great and “blessed hope” (Tit. 2:13)—for which we long, but which we must never predict.

Thus, we are left asking if something like the Great Reset really provides any evidence at all regarding the nature of the times in which we live.

That will be the subject of our next installment.