By

Gary Scott

We stood upon the proverbial mountain, looking out over a dystopian world.
We were looking for a light, but it was mostly dark as night,
we searched for brightness but found only deep shadows unfurled.

To be sure, there were pockets of light scattered few and far between,
lighting the way, driving the shadows away,
but as soon as they had passed,
the shadows returned and darkness again dominated the day.

Like the blind, we groped along the wall,
walls of separation, walls of desperation,
arms outstretched, feeling our way like those without eyes to see,
too blind to see the wood for the trees,
stumbling about at midday as if it was the twilight of dusk.

So we moaned and groaned, mournfully as doves whose hopes were fading away.
We growled like bears, furious at our circumstances,
angry as bees whose hive has been poked too many times.  
And then we mourned and moaned some more,
as we searched for justice but found none,
deliverance a distant memory fading like the light after sunset.

So we called for justice, but no one heard our cry of perplexity.
There were none among the leaders, to plead a case with integrity.
Instead, they posited arguments empty of truth.
Wrong became right and right became wrong,
 turning the world upside down,
conceiving lies as truth and giving birth to evil and strife.

So the spinners arrived like spiders crawling out of the crevices,
spinning deception, half-truths mixed with falsehood,
entangling the people in their webs of deception.
But, for those with open eyes, their cobwebs were unable to disguise their deeds.

Alas, justice, real justice, and just justice is like a long-forgotten dream,
a figment in our imagination.
Righteous judgements are now a distant memory fading.
 Justice has become the weapon of the mighty,
 the powerful, and those in command,
a tool to enforce compliance and conformity in an increasingly elitist world.

“Follow our ways,” they demand.
“Conform to the pattern of this world that we have created,” they order.
Truth, objective truth, true truth has fallen in the streets, nowhere to be found.
The new truth, the untruth, as false as sunshine in the midnight skies, is everywhere.
Whoever shuns this evil is fair game to be preyed upon.

And so some of us shed buckets of tears, raining down our faces,
floods of sorrow rising above our heads,
slowly drowning in thoughts of despair as the world rushed into wickedness.

Filled with perdition, the blood of innocents was swiftly shed,
and violence became the norm in pursuit of evil schemes.
The way of peace gave way to wars and rumours of wars,
endless wars,
money-making wars,
information wars,
economic wars,
food wars,
water wars,
religious wars,
social wars,
family wars.

And so we wept some more.
 So much bloodshed in the past century, more than all previous centuries combined,
 a modern world defined by the shedding of blood.

We got so used to seeing it in the movies that we hardly recognised the horror of it all.

The earth is groaning, reeling like a drunkard,
lashing out in fury, hot fury.
It is screaming in agony in its stormy atmosphere,
as it lashes out gasping for breath,
trembling in anger,
shaking in rage.
Tears of heaven flood the land.

Life on earth has lost its equilibrium.
Animals walk in strange circles for days,
flocks of birds fall to the ground all at once,
and schools of fish float belly up in their millions.
Man has gone to war against nature and nature is slowly committing suicide.
The world is falling apart like an old worn-out garment.

Man has gone to war against God, shaking their fist at the Almighty,
they rise to dethrone Him in their midst.
Their hatred of Him trumps their hatred for one another and
powerless against Him, they gather His followers for the slaughter,
Deicide by proxy, ‘God is dead, He is dead,” they cry as they commit genocide.

As in the days of Noah, so these days,
they laughed in those days, they scorn in these.
“Where is the promise of his coming,” they mock,
“Everything remains the same,’ they giggle,
“our  forefathers still dry bones in their graves.”

He does not exist, they insist,
we are biological miracles, the substance of some primordial soup,
highly designed but without a designer,
creatures of wonder, formed by some blunder.
Sheer arrogance through ignorance in how we were made,
mere dust that gives way to rust,
like flowers in the field, here today, but gone tomorrow, we fade.

Godlike, but so unlike God,
mankind displays its twenty-first-century madness,
no longer man and woman,
but rather a gender-bender polyglot of its and bits,
and Bob your aunty is non-binary.

And soon, so very soon, sooner than you think,
they will wire you up,
a genetically engineered WiFi hotspot, connected
to the AI Matrix Mind and the Universal Soul.
Eating bugs, you will own nothing, except your social credit score,
 and be happy,
with your de-spiritualised, soulless, crappy life.

So, I looked across the fields at the towns along the way,
crumbling edifices destroyed by earthquakes and bombs,
soldiers and civilians are strewn everywhere,
like sacrificial lambs at a great slaughter.

I wept as the pandemic of wars escalated,
man against man, man against God
man against nature, nature against man,
father against son, daughters against mothers,
ethnicity against ethnicity, nation against nation.

And the pandemic of evil became endemic,
every twisted evil, now normalised.
Something had to break, something had to give!

And then,

BANG! Bang, bang, bang bang bang!
the awful sound echoed across the world,
the man-made vaporising fires of hell were unleashed,
the toxic clouds spread far and wide

And then

the prince of darkness, clothed in unnatural light,
the man of lawlessness, the fullness of sin, arose,
bringing peace, a kind of peace, not real peace, for sure,
but fake peace enforced peace and the absence of war.

How beguiling, his dazzling smile, piercing blue eyes,
he swayed and cajoled with his charismatic way,
the wolf became the shepherd, deceiving the world,
down paths of unrighteousness, he led them astray,
so they worshipped an abomination with desolation within,
gave allegiance to the Son of Perdition, the Man of Sin.

And so, the God of Heaven and Earth, with the last trumpet blown, sent
his Son on the Clouds to gather His own,
and after His own were taken away to that glorious place,
He clothed himself with vengeance, all power and might,
all the people left behind fled underground,
calling on the rocks to fall and hide them from his face.

And so the history of the wicked world,
will wind down to its end,
tears will be wiped away,
as all the sadness,
the sorrow,
the fear, the terror,
depression, anxiety,
loneliness, hopelessness, despair,
illness, sickness, disease’
and even death itself,
banished forever and ever.
Oh what a day!