What Tomorrow Holds

What Tomorrow Holds

By: Deji Yesufu

On the 17th of December, 2009, I married my heartthrob – Jolaoluwa Oluwatosin Olufemi – at the Chapel of the Resurrection, University of Ibadan. The officiating minister was the then Rev. Timothy Olatunji (now a Methodist Bishop) and the person who preached was Pastor Sola Kolade – minister at the Vine Branch Church, Mokola, Ibadan. Pastor Sola titled his message: “What the Future Holds”. He stated essentially that although many young couples start humbly in life, it pleases God to bless them and increase them in life. “Things will get better”, he was saying essentially. It is not entirely wrong to put some hope before a pair of struggling young people, who have decided to tie the knot despite the inherent challenges that come with living in Nigeria. Although this article shares a similar name with Pastor Sola’s sermon that day, I would be reaching a different conclusion with him here.

This article is inspired by my sermon at the Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Ibadan, on Sunday, 10th March 2024, where I preached from John 2:1-11, the story of Christ’s miracle at a Wedding in Cana of Galilee. I titled my sermon “Lessons from a Wedding” and I drew four lessons from that encounter. First, I showed my listeners that in the normal scheme of things, it is by God’s design that “wine should run out” in life. This brings mortal men to depend on God. Second, I showed that in such desperate times, obedience to Christ, in the words of Mary the mother of Jesus, is the only means to navigate the situations. Third, miracles follow faithfulness to defined biblical patterns and obedience to God. And lastly, the end of miracles is that men may believe in Jesus Christ as Lord. In this essay, I want to return to the first lesson: when the wine runs out. Unlike the postulations made by Sola Kolade when I got married, I am becoming increasingly convinced that things will not get better in our world. Rather that thing will get worse. Whatever wine people have been living off will soon run out, and our world will soon come face to face with a certain apocalypse. I will explain more.

The modern world as we have it today was established on a series of conflicts. While we can enumerate a lot more of these conflicts, there are some that are unavoidable. First were the Napoleonic wars that raged from the late 18th century till around 1812. Napoleon Bonaparte plunged Europe into crisis following the French Revolution and in his own personal quest to bring French dominance to his European neighbours. It is Napoleon who gave us the map of Europe as we have it today; those conflicts united kingdoms and brought an end to some superpowers – like the kingdom of Prussia. After Napoleon, another major world conflict was the American Civil War. Although limited to the geographical area of North America, it was a war that affected the whole world because it bordered on the ethical question of whether slavery was still an acceptable model of human life and relationships. Thankfully, the abolitionists won that war and this set the tone for the ethical question of how far countries can transcend the borders of another country in the name of colonialism. Very few people realize that the underlying tension in Europe that led to the two world wars in the early 20th century was actually the scramble by European countries to colonize Africa. The two leading colonists were Britain and France. Germany and Portugal were tagging along, while the other European countries resented the idea that some superpowers could invade a continent, no matter how backwards those people were, and cart away their resources. It was this underlying resentment that bludgeoned into a crisis after the crown Prince of Austria was shot dead by some ultra-nationalists. Then Germany found itself fighting France and Britain, resulting in the defeat of Germany, and the stripping away of her colonial territories in Africa. Still seething with resentment, and now led by the far-right Nazi government of person of Adolf Hitler, Germany precipitated a second world war. Rather than come to Africa to get land, Hitler headed to Eastern Europe and sought to take over the whole of Europe with the force of arms. He was defeated and the crisis ended.

Since the Second World War ended in 1948, the world has known considerable peace. The United Nations has worked very hard to ensure that the kind of crisis that the First and Second World Wars brought to the world should never arise again. One of the aftermaths of the Second World War was that African countries began to gain independence from their former colonizers. Britain and France had spent themselves thin in the wars, and reeling in debt, it made sense to let go of the countries they were colonizing. It did not help that many of the structures they left behind were not workable political systems, and it plunged many of those African countries, like Nigeria, into civil wars themselves. The fact remained that Europe was free to no longer burden herself with excessive pressure from the colonies.

The real challenge, however, that my essay wishes to postulate is that our world is over-ripe for a major conflict, and I see this conflict coming from the Russian-Ukraine crisis. I also envision that the coming war will be extremely apocalyptic because it will be fought between nuclear-powered countries. The Second World War was ended by the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Japan. The world learnt from that singular action that a nuclear war was capable of ending civilization as we have it today, and because of this most superpowers have essentially behaved themselves. They understand that all it takes is one madman in power to drop one nuclear bomb on one major city in the world, and there will be no end to the exchange of nuclear bombs between countries. There would be a nuclear holocaust like we never knew it; deaths will occur in numbers that our world has never known. I envision that the seventy-plus years following the Second World War have been seventy-plus years of plenty. The days of famine, like in Joseph’s dream interpretation of Pharoah, are about to hit our world. The days of peace, food, and plenty are about to run out. There will be famine like we never know it. And the only way to survive those days will be to have life in Christ Jesus and to obey God in every step that you take.

Practically speaking, one way to deal with the inevitable apocalyptic times will be to have life in Jesus Christ: be ye born-again. The second will be to be obedient to the living God as he instructs us daily on how to live. I fear very much that this mass exodus of Africans, particularly Nigerians, to the West will not augur well for many. You will wish you were living in Africa in the days when the nuclear wars began. For some reason, and because African nations do not possess nuclear powers, the continent will be spared; and the same way many Nigerians began to run helter-skelter after Putin invaded Ukraine, will be the same way they will begin to run around when the nuclear holocaust begin. This time, there will be nowhere to run to. It is simple, if God has not sent you abroad, it will be better if you remain in Africa.

In the midst of the holocaust, when resources have run, and men are in want, God will raise up provision for his people. Many will go to Goshen to find help from Christians – who themselves will be living off God’s supernatural provision. In those days, the gospel will spread to all the nations. Men, in their desperation, will have no choice but to trust Christ in faith. I think this will be God’s last-ditch attempt to bring the gospel to the hearts of men before the end comes. Let me make this clear: I am not a prophet and this is not a prophecy. It is however the result of my musing into scriptures and the thoughts of my head as I pray about these issues. They became more pronounced as I preached last Sunday’s sermon, and as I discussed them with other believers. While we may discard this as the ranting of a nobody, it will not hurt you to put your faith in God through Jesus Christ – and not in the fleeting things of this world that can run out. It will also not hurt the churches to teach their people to love Christ and to obey him. Whether the apocalypse comes or not, we will always be safe walking with the Lord Jesus Christ in this life.

Amen.