The dreaded Doomsday Clock now stands at a perilous two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, and world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking has cut mankind’s lead time to disaster down to a single century. Incredibly, he has a solution which may reflect exactly what the Jewish end-of-days has in store.
The Doomsday Clock was set up in 1947 by the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Science and Security Board to represent the likelihood of a human-caused global catastrophe. The clock was set at seven minutes to midnight at its inception and has been readjusted 22 times. In January, the clock was pushed a half a minute closer to midnight and now stands at 11:57:30 PM.
In a new BBC documentary called Expedition New Earth, Dr. Hawking listed a myriad of dangers that cut his thousand-year estimate down to a mere 100 years, including climate change, asteroid strikes, epidemics and overpopulation as the greatest dangers facing the world today. With multi-national militaries in Syria and off the coast of North Korea, many would add global war with nuclear overtones to the list.
Dr. Hawking has suggested two solutions to the impending doom. While one of his proposals defies mankind’s Biblical mandate on earth, the other actually comes surprisingly close to tallying with Jewish end-of-days scenarios – albeit not perfectly.
His first idea is that mankind “must continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” as he said at a lecture last year. “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”
Yuval Ovadia, an end-of-days lecturer and filmmaker, criticized Hawking on Biblical grounds for suggesting that the solution is to flee.
“This is the place God created for us to live, and no other place,” Ovadia explained to Breaking Israel News. “He also gave us the knowledge and wisdom to take care of the planet.”
And God blessed them; and God said unto them: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ Genesis 1:28
“This world is our responsibility,” Ovadia said. “To destroy the planet and run away would be a sin.”
However, the secular physicist’s second suggestion for dealing with humanity’s impending doom – the formation of a world government – ties in closely with an accepted Jewish tenet about the coming days of redemption.
Rabbi Yosef Berger, rabbi of King David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, explained that the concept of a world government is indeed essential to the end of days, but only in a religious context.
“The scientist made a reference to something, but he doesn’t know the deeper meaning of what he is saying,” Rabbi Berger told Breaking Israel News. “In the End of Days, there will be a New World Order: One Kingdom of God. The scientist is suggesting a single world order that is not from God but from Man.”
The rabbi cited the turbulent elections in the US, the notably young and inexperienced leaders in France and Canada, the change in leadership of Great Britain due to Brexit, and the near-coup of Turkish President Erdogan. A wave of upheaval named Arab Spring spread across the Middle East in 2011.
“You don’t have to be a physicist to look around and see that major world governments are falling apart as the world situation grows worse,” Rabbi Berger said. “But a person with a straight heart would also see the signs that the solution is for us to prepare for the real King, and not to run away.”
