[Darris McNeely] God told the Prophet Habakkuk to stand aside and to watch what he was doing. The Prophet was very concerned about what's happening to his own nation of Judah and what was happening among the nations and what God was doing. In Habakkuk 1:5, God said to this prophet, "Look among the nations and watch. Be utterly astounded, for I will work a work in your days, which you would not believe, though it were told you." And the Prophet had to live with that. "Be astounded. I will do a work among the nations that will astound you" is what God said.

When we stop and look at our world today, as I'm speaking here today, we are basically coming out of this more than a year-long pandemic of COVID-19. Masks are coming off. Everything's opening up, people are getting back together. The nations, it seems now are opening back up to travel. In fact, in a few days, I'm taking off for a trip to the Middle East myself. And so, things are getting back to a little bit of normal, or are they?

There's no question major things have taken place. And we are living through a time where there have been some big changes. In fact, as I read and try to sort all this through for our readers of Beyond Today and our programming about everything that I turned to people who understand what's going on in the world today, they realize that we are going through a cultural transformation that is epical. It is a long one that, as one writer put it, it's a 500-year type of change that is taking place. I know. Kind of goes beyond our way of thinking because we don't live 500 years. We get threescore and 10 if we get what God gives to us there. And if we're not students of history, we're not thinking it all through. But these are big times and big events. And it's overwhelmed a lot.

As I read through a lot of the reports that I studied to, again, try to get a handle on this, people break it down into about four different areas that are affecting the world, great geopolitical shifts that are taking place. China's coming on. Europe is being reconfigured. We still have problems in the Middle East. America, Great Britain, English-speaking peoples, their roles are changing. We also have secondly an ideological shift that are taking place. We have seen the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter, what is called Wokeism, and critical race theory that are transforming the way people look at themselves, their identity, their race. The sexual identity issues are transforming, again, so much of our culture. So these large ideas are abounding in the land right now.

And then thirdly, there's the technological changes that are transforming our life. I was just listening to something on a podcast this week that started to talk about the fact that within a generation, that of my grandchildren, likely, they think, people will be able to engineer immortality into the human body by bioengineering. At least that's their thinking. The technological changes and advances that are taking place are reshaping our world and much of what we think can see as well.

And there's a fourth area, and that is the spiritual, the spiritual. Major spiritual changes are taking place. All of these tie into the Bible prophecy. All of these tie into our purpose and our understanding of life and what's taking place. All of it must be understood, can only be understood from a proper worldview that we call on Beyond Today, a Biblical worldview, where the Word of God, the mind of God, the purpose of God, informs us, shapes our thinking, helps us to react to and understand what we should think about all of these major historical events, these cultural trends, these ideas that are out there that are shaping the way we think about each other and about ourselves, about our own sexual identity, and what does lie ahead for the future of mankind.And certainly, the spiritual implications of all of this, the Bible speaks a great deal to that.

There's another prophet that God spoke to. He was actually a contemporary of the Prophet Habakkuk that I started with here. And that is the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah also lived at a time when Habakkuk did, when there was a great change taking place in the world, not just the nation of Judah in the Biblical story, but the world of his time. And God made a statement to the prophet in the first chapter of Jeremiah that fits in with this. God said to Jeremiah, "See, I have this day set you, Jeremiah, over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant."

What is got to be understood and what God was saying to Jeremiah is that there was rooting that was taking place, rooting up. Nations were being uprooted and changed. Societies, culture was changing then. And this was the 6th century before Christ. This was a long time ago, more than 2,500 years ago. And God was changing the configuration of the nations and the way people looked at themselves in life at that time.

It all ties into a Biblical story. And we have to see what is happening today, from a Biblical worldview, a Biblical perspective. That's what we do on Beyond Today. We'll come back to these trends, these four trends of geopolitics, of ideology, of technology, and spiritual and help us all to understand that from a Biblical worldview more deeply as to what God is telling us and how we should understand what it is. That's what we do on Beyond Today.

That's "BT Daily." Join us next time.