Knowing Tomorrow Today

I’m not alone in a curiosity about the future. The futurist Stephan A. Schwartz stated that “there is no siren whose call is quite so exquisite as the music of the future. For as long as writing has existed, there are records showing we have sought to know its form.”7 Embedded in the human psyche is a powerful incurable thirst to know tomorrow. We have all wondered about what fortunes and future outcomes await us. We sense that the choices we make daily, for good and for ill, individually and collectively, are all coalescing and adding to the tapestry of a story that will manifest as our destiny. Today, in an attempt to read the tea leaves of their lives, many people consult horoscopes, tarot cards, or even fortune cookies. Others pay mediums, psychics, or fortune tellers. Some years ago, I read a fanciful story about an internet bot called Web Bot—a computer algorithm originally created to predict stock market trends that supposedly had the ability to predict the future. As it scanned and analyzed millions of news articles, social media platforms, forums, blogs, and other forms of internet chatter, it was suggested that perhaps this internet bot could use this data to predict future events. However, most critics agree that a computer algorithm infused with artificial intelligence or machine-learning capabilities would be no more capable of predicting a natural disaster than would a Google search.8 One thing though that this internet bot confirmed is that people are fearful and apprehensive about the future. Plagued by the many uncertainties of our complex technological age, most people would love to have an inkling of what lies ahead, to have even a glimpse of tomorrow today. Schwartz accurately infers that “in times of stress, when your relationship is changing, or your job is disappearing, or you are faced with a fateful choice, it would be extraordinarily helpful to get even a glimpse of what lies before.”9 We live in an age of great technological progress with daunting existential challenges, daily spinning beyond our capacity to solve. Writing in Fortune magazine, Quentin Hardy lamented, “What is going on here? We were, by almost any measure of space and time, a group others would kill to become … we are longer lived and with access to more knowledge and experiences than any other king or pope who has come before … this much luck should make us hug ourselves with delight … the daily advances in science and technology lend hope on balance things are getting better. Except that we do not feel that way.”10 But of course, we are not hugging ourselves with delight. A specter of uncertainty hovers over our collective futures. The moral fabric of society seems to be disintegrating before our eyes, and many people openly wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit with the downward spiral each generation seems to be taking. Ultimately, a desire to know the future speaks to a deeper, more powerful yearning that we all have for meaning, certainty, and continuity. We want to know that, somehow, our lives matter and that we will not be forgotten in the maelstrom and clutter of the human continuum. As he pondered his mortality, renowned Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book A Confession, “My question, the question that had brought me to the edge of suicide when I was fifty years old, was the simplest of question lying in the soul of every human being … the question was this: What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life … is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?”11 As we live, we subconsciously are seeking for an affirmation, an assurance that our brief time here and the contributions we make will live on if only in the memories and the storied record of those whom we leave behind. As we gaze deeper into the night sky sprinkled with its billions of gleaming galaxies and shimmering far-off stars, we are more than awed by the enormity and grandeur of the universe that hovers above us like a shining gallery with an intricately designed master work. We are at times almost overwhelmed by the thought that our existence on a minuscule planet in the corner of an average spiraling galaxy seems almost negligible in comparison to the unending vast expanse of space. We feel almost powerless as we sense that we are caught up in something that is infinitely beyond our capacity to control and maybe even to understand, ever! We observe that stars like our sun are born, shine for a time in all their radiant glory, and then as if taking their last gasp for breath, suddenly expand only to be dwarfed later by death. Like stars that are born and then die, we too have come to realize the transient nature of our own lives. We realize that someday we too will make the transition to death. Yet we hold out hope that perhaps one day, in some shape or form, we could truly be immortal. And so instinctively, we crave a sort of flash-forward to the future because we sense that these glimpses of tomorrow might just provide us with rational, cogent explanations for our purpose and destiny. Throughout the centuries, the Bible has come to mean different things to different people. There is perhaps no other book in history that has been more influential. As the best-selling book of all time, the Bible is a record of God’s acts in human history. Sir Isaac Newton, the man who invented calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravity, stated that “there are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history.”32 This was a profound statement, especially when we think of all the ancient historical masterpieces that have come down to us. Composed of sixty-six books and written by forty-four different men over a period of 1,500 years, the Bible is remarkable because of its cohesive unity and consistency. It can be trusted as an authoritative, authentic, and reliable record of God’s dealings with humanity. I have discovered, as have millions of others, that the prophecies of the Bible provide a clear and concrete roadmap of the future.