End of a Period
In the first week of June 2007 a meeting of the ‘G-8’ was held in Berlin, participated in by the heads of some of the developed countries. An important issue in the conference’s agenda was global warming. But despite long discussions on the subject, no programme was able to be decided on. A report on this important issue was published in The Times of India (New Delhi, June 10, 2007) with the title ‘Too broke to save the world’.
These days, the media is flooded with news, almost on a daily basis, about global warming. Scientists from across the world are saying that the world’s climate is dangerously changing. The Earth’s life-support system will soon be so badly damaged that there might no longer be any possibility for life to remain on the planet. The time has now come very near when the present period of life will come to an end, in accordance with God’s plan, and the second phase of life, the world of the Hereafter, will begin.
God had made this present world as a preparatory ground for man. Here, all those things were made available through which man could make himself worthy of Paradise in the next world. Everything in this world was a means for man to prepare for the Hereafter, rather than being simply a means to draw comfort and ease from. But man’s actions did not conform to God’s creation plan. He took the present world to be an abode for pleasure, fun and frolic and invented this formula for his life: ‘Eat, drink and be merry!’
In this way, humans deviated from God’s creation plan, so much so that they created modern consumerist civilization, which is based in the fullest sense on the above formula. God waited for thousands of years so that people might rethink their conduct and pattern of life, that they should stop pursuing their personal agenda in God’s world, that by reforming themselves they should live in accordance with God’s creation plan, that they should use the opportunities of the world to become a person desired by God, whom God would choose to settle in His eternal Paradise.
But man did not show that he was prepared to re-examine and change his behaviour. Man has now lost the justification on the basis of which he had been settled on Earth. Present-day global warming is actually an advance warning of this fact.
In this situation, it was the duty of followers of all faiths to make people aware of the terrible dangers that loom ahead, to tell them that the final opportunity for making preparations are soon going to get over, that they should make no delay and immediately set about trying to live in line with God’s creation plan. But people of all faiths are waiting for a saviour to come in the future. They all think that some person who they expect will mysteriously appear through some miraculous power and will perform all the tasks needed to set the world aright. But this is a grave misconception. The fact is that no such mysterious being is going to come. What is going to come is only the Day of Judgment. And when the Day of Judgment comes, it will make no concessions for anyone at all!
