Well, it can blow up. Poof. Bang. Boom. All gone.
Some worlds ends suddenly. Our church caught fire in February, and suddenly that world was over. Permanently. The things we salvaged now sit in storage, awaiting the new world. Then again a sudden lay-off may bring a sudden end to the world. In 1992, I was in graduate school and working full time to pay for it.
One morning I went in to work, and suddenly I didn’t have a job. I dropped out school for the next seesion, and when I did return, everything had changed. I was no longer studying film. My focus had changed, and I was planning to return to ministry. When the world ends, those who survive go about starting a new world.
Another way the world might end is through decay. Stand amid the ruins of ancient Greece, and you can see a world that is gone. The Parthenon may impress but it is just a shell. A reminder of a world that once was. Oddly enough, the structures of a world remain long after the world has died. Some organizations survive from generation to generation but the world is dead. There is nothing there but the machinery that causes people to keep the skeleton cleaned.
A series of disasters can bring the world to an end. The medieval world suffered one devastating blow after another. The crusades, the great famine, the black plague and other disasters brought this world to an end. The survivors who remained built a new world that laid the foundation for the modern world.
Then again, a new world can be planted in the middle of the old world. Like yeast it can work its way out through every fiber of the old world, creating a new world in the midst of the old. When Jesus goes to the cross, he talks about a seed falling into the ground so that it can die, and yield a great harvest. A harvest that overtakes the old world and makes all things new.
Whether it’s a business, a dream, a project, a community, a country, or a civilization worlds end and new world are created. Who creates the new world? Created in the image of God, we create new worlds through our words and actions. Even as He works in and through His people to create a new world in the midst of a fallen one (but more on that later).
