“Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.”
Matthew 24:12
Blood moons, massive earthquakes and the ever-increasing possibility of thermonuclear war, these reoccurring apocalyptic signs were always thought to be the harbingers of the imminent return of Christ for fanatic prophecy buffs. Rapture chasers speculate year-after-year that the doomsday clock has to be near the zero-hour, even one prophetic website believes we are mere seconds away from the harrowing events that are found in the cryptic pages of the book of Revelation.
When I was a young Christian I would live on the edge of my seat believing that “today could be the day”; every time California had a tremor or some purple-haired prophet on the Christian television station shared another fascinating cross sighting in some faraway galaxy by the Hubble Space Telescope, I would get on my knees and pray to make sure Jesus didn’t forget about little ole me as he galloped down on his white horse from heaven as he came to collect his own.
But every time one of those outlandish predictions caused yet again the emotional turn of the proverbial prophetic screw, I grew tired of being played by all the evangelical hucksters who were making bank on people’s fears as they bought buckets of macaroni and cheese and dehydrated beef-stew to put in their end times fall-out shelters. And then when the movie “Left Behind” starring Kirk Cameron and his schmaltzy smile came out it was the final straw, I was finished with my zealous speculation. No more wild end-times storm chasing for me, even if John Hagee predicted a thousand more blood moons during the solar eclipse of Rosh Hashana as it appeared over the finished building of Noah’s Ark by the creation research team in Kentucky’s holy bluegrass promised land.
So I determined to stick to the simple “gospel” only, and I finally gave consent to Jesus’ warning that he will come like a thief in the night where no one will know the day or the hour. Not only was it much more relaxing not having to match every newspaper headline with some scary beast in the book of Daniel, but I found that I was saving some good money not having to buy the next end of the world book that Zondervan was publishing, even if it was concerning the tantalizing new finding of the hair color of the anti-Christ.
So have I given up on looking for the return of Jesus? Well, to be honest, once you are bitten by the prophecy bug, you always have a hankering to look up in the sky and see if any meteors or blood hail are fixing to fall while you are walking your dog out in the woods. But truth be told, there always has been one portion of scripture that has secretly fascinated me because it is not based on spectacular speculation as much as monitoring plain human behavior, something that for me is easier to gage. The passage that always causes me to pause and ponder his return every time I read it is 2 Timothy 3:1-5:
“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.”
When I have read this passage in the past it didn’t have much of an effect on me because I knew that most of us have a tendency to be selfish clods. So in some ways, this passage didn’t really reveal much. “Sure,” I said to myself, “all people to some degree love themselves, money has always been a pretty handy thing to have, and who does not give their parents a tough time now and again?” So I never took it too literally. But over the last three to five years, I have seen how these words may have been meant to be taken more at face value than I ever would have imagined.
Let’s just take a look at the phrase “lovers of selves” for a second. What if we would take it as literal as we could, even try to be a bit ridiculous in our rendering. Here is what I might say just for fun, “Hmmm, ‘lovers of selves’ could be people who would fall in love with their own image in the mirror. Maybe they would be so taken with it that they would want to date themselves, write notes to themselves, even, God forbid, want to marry themselves?” And then my sensibilities would naturally kick in, “Nah, no one is that silly, stupid and sick minded.”
But to my horror and shock, I am finding out that this is exactly what people in some communities are contemplating and no one finds it outrageous. Just this week Emma Watson, the famed actress from the Harry Potter series, has decided to “self-partner” with herself. She intentionally is going to date and live in partnership with herself. She makes it sound like she is going to attempt to do something that has never been done before, but to my chagrin, I realized I lived exclusively in partnership with myself for 23 years before I met my wife. Or is that the same as being single. Oh no, heaven forbid you dare mention that word! No one wants to be known as a single because you sound like a loser. So instead of living in loneliness, the brave and adventurous thing to do is to “self-couple.”
Have you ever heard of Sophie Tanner? I never have until I did some research on how far this “lovers of selves” thing goes and found that she started a new movement called “sologamy”, marrying yourself. That is a step past the Japanese woman who last year made a hologram of herself and married it. Now you can look in the mirror and if you have a pastor or justice of the peace who will preside over the ceremony, you can say “I do” to your reflection, and the new life together with yourself begins. But if you choose to do this, I warn you, you will be stuck with yourself “For better for worse. For richer and for poorer. In sickness and in health. Till death do you part.” Are you sure you want to take that risk?
But look on the bright side, “self-partnering” and “sologamy” could be the new cure for suicide. Just think, If you decide to try to kill yourself you will no longer receive the sympathy that suicide once received. Instead of having compassion for someone who is working through mental illness, now after this brave new world of “self-love”, attempting suicide will be seen as domestic abuse. Attempting to kill your partner, and no one has compassion on that.
I don’t see this trend of “self-love” slowing down anytime soon. With selfies and plastic surgery and sappy songs by Selena Gomez about “Lose You to Love Me”, human navel-gazing is soon going to reach epic proportions.
No wonder people don’t like to meet new friends or join healthy communities. They have their iPhones and Instagrams. There is nothing more stimulating for selfish people than to spend all day looking at themselves on digital screens – – it has replaced the romantic candle-light dinner dates and venturing into a singles bar. Why face the possibility of rejection when you are already obsessed with your own smile?
Jesus says one of the signs that we will be getting close to his return is that the “love of most will grow cold.” This means self-love will extinguish the hot love we once had for one another. And as I look outside on early snow in November, a small shiver of icy cold shot up my spine. Not because of the frigid air, but I can feel the love of most “growing cold.”
Baby, it is getting cold outside!
