LCG on Sony 2012 Movie

Ancient Mayan City of Palenque

Wallace Smith of the Living Church of God reported the following:

As my wife and I walked into the local cinema, before us stood one of the largest movie advertisement displays I’ve ever seen. It depicted a coastal city being completely ripped apart by unprecedented seismic activity—tossing vast swaths of the city into the sky and dumping entire neighborhoods into a hungry ocean. It was a scene of utter devastation that clearly would have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And it was a fitting advertisement for the movie 2012, the new End-Of-The-World epic written and directed by Roland Emmerich, coming out this November.

No stranger to such movies, with 2012 Mr. Emmerich is capitalizing on a growing public fascination: the idea that the world will end on December 21, 2012.

And a fascination it is…

Why 2012?

It seems the Mayans—the well-known and much-studied ancient Mesoamerican empire—kept many calendars, including one known as the “Long Count Calendar.” This calendar will reach the end of a 5,100-year-long epoch on—you guessed it—December 21, 2012.

Is there anything to the hype? Should we expect doomsday to come on 12/21/2012—or, perhaps, a New Age paradise?…

Given the state of things, today—with economic distress, terrorism, global instability, natural disasters of powerful intensity, and more—interest in what the future holds and concern for the direction in which the world is going is understandable. But the answer doesn’t lie in a date on an ancient calendar, the conjunctions of astrologers, or the hallucinations of drug-using “psychonauts.”

Rather, there is a proven source of knowledge about the future, and that source does speak of natural disasters—and supernatural disasters—of unimaginable scale and intensity. And it speaks, as well, of a soon-coming new age of peace and prosperity across the globe—a time without war or needless suffering, in which the nations have learned to live with each other in harmony. That source is your Bible, and not only does it have a proven track-record of accuracy, it does something that a mere date on a calendar or a “Galactic Alignment” could never do: the Bible tells you not only the amazing details about what is ahead, but it also tells you what to do about it!

Of course, the Bible shows that the world will not have the type of flood the movie and many others expect to happen on or shortly after December 21, 2012. The Bible is clear that there will not be another flood such as Noah experienced (Genesis 9:11-15), and while the movie does not go quite to that degree, what it shows simply will not happen then. Other scriptures show that the Great Tribulation and the related great earthquake (cf. Revelation 16:18) will not begin that early (see Can the Great Tribulation Begin in 2009, 2010, or 2011? for more details).

As I reported a year and a half ago (Sony Buys Script for Maya 2012 Movie), Sony spent big money for this movie. And while it is biblically inaccurate, it is likely to be a hit.

But while there can be some type of accuracy in non-biblical predictions, many are in conflict with scripture and all must be understood within the context of the Bible.

Those interested in learning more may find the following articles of interest:

End of Mayan Calendar 2012–Might 2012 Mean Something? Are there Mayan calendar predictions for change in 2012? Changes were centuries ago predicted by the Hopi Native Americans. Do Mayan/Hindu/Hopi/Buddhist/New Age/Nostradamus prophecies have any value here? Why might Satan have inspired this date? Does the Dresden codex show destruction of the earth by flood? Can the great tribulation start before 2012? How might Barack Obama be involved in 2012?
Do Certain Catholic Prophecies About Antichrist Warn Against Jesus? Will the final “Anti-Christ” be Jewish, insist on Saturday, be opposed to the trinity, and bring in the millennium? Catholic writings indicate this, but what does the Bible show?
Catholic Prophecies: Do They Mirror, Highlight, or Contradict Biblical Prophecies? People of all faiths may be surprised to see what various Roman and Orthodox Catholic prophets have been predicting as many of their predictions will be looked to in the 21st century.
Does God Have a 6,000 Year Plan? What Year Does the 6,000 Years End? Was a 6000 year time allowed for humans to rule followed by a literal thousand year reign of Christ on Earth taught by the early Christians? When does the six thousand years of human rule end?
Can the Great Tribulation Begin in 2009, 2010, or 2011? Can the Great Tribulation begin today? What happens before in the “beginning of sorrows”? What happens in the Gerat Tribulation and the Day of the Lord? When is the earliest that the Great Tribulation can begin? What is the Day of the Lord?