Allow me to use an illustration.  When I owned a '67 Mustang, I found it simple to work on.  Pop the hood and you could recognize each distinct part and what function it performed.  You could easily reach everything you needed to work on.  The required tools were basic.  Everything was just so simple and straight forward.  Nowadays I can't even identify most of the parts under the hood of a late model car.

When the human race grows exponentially, the complexities of maintaining societies grows ever more complex and difficult to maintain.  It can be argued that we won't really reach a tipping point where resources are depleted entirely and I might concede that point.  However I would assert that the difficulties arising from the increased complexity of societal maintenance might reach a point that the end result is the same as running out of resources.

Running out of water?  Drill more wells.  Use alternative technologies.  Seems simple, but I would maintain that at some point the rising demand and consumption could eventually reach a point that distribution and cost would be so burdensome that the end result would be the same as if we actually had run out of water.  Right now the U.S. has pipelines and treatment facilities that are becoming antiquainted.  What happens when population increases

by another 25 percent?  We'll have the technology to accomodate the growth, but will we have the ability to implement it?
 
Let me make this certain, I am against population control and I am not a "tree hugger."  I just don't have faith in an ever more bureaucratic government to be able to deliver the necessities.  When faced with problems, government leaders will study the problem to death.  Then appoint committees and subcommittees.  Then generate reports that are thousands of pages.  As time drags on and politicians fight over solutions that best suit their personal interests, nothing gets done in the practical sense.  The situation becomes far worse when the government has to juggle muliple complex problems simultaneously.  Water, energy, transportation, food production and ditribution, sanitation.  Throw in societal unrest, wars and natural disasters and you will eventually reach a point that will be the same as having no readily usable resources at all.

 

This brings me to my final point.  There are some Christians who say Jesus might not come back for a thousand years.  They think everything is fine now and that it will keep on being fine for a long, long time.  I just don't believe that.  I think that if Jesus tarried for even a few hundred more years, who is to say that mankind will even be around.  That reminds me of the Bible where it says that unless those days are shortened, no flesh would be saved.  I'm not saying the way that passage is used infers anything at all about the complexities of growing societies.  I'm just reminded of it, that's all.  I do not think Jesus will come back in a few hundred or a thousand years.  I think Jesus will come back in my lifetime for a multitude of reasons aside from the the literal fulfillment of the Bible prophecies.  Yet the fulfillment of those prophecies are the strongest reasons for I have for believing that He is at the door.
 

Please, Lord, we await you.  We yearn for you to call us home soon.  Even now.

 

Bruce Baber