“The time will come when people will not listen to sound doctrine, but will follow their own desires and will collect for themselves more and more teachers who will tell them what they are itching to hear. They will turn away from listening to the truth and give their attention to legends.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

For nearly a year prior to Dec. 21, 2012, non-archeologists pretending to be archeologists spread the idea that the ancient Mayans believed the world would end on that date.

We live in a time when people believe in a flat Earth, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs and a great deal of other nonsense, but a goodly number of very loud non-experts hope to capitalize on people’s ignorance and confusion.

But sin never slumbers. This year, the same non-experts admitted they got it wrong in 2012, and that the Mayans actually said the world would end June 21, 2020 ⸻ which was yesterday.

In fact, the Mayan calendar doesn’t even predict the end of the world. Their calendar simply ends just as all of ours do with the month of December. But just because our 2019 desk calendars ended with December, it didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a January 2020.

The Mayans used two calendars, both of which had major astronomical and mathematical errors inherent in them. Actually, they didn’t even create their calendric system. Rather they stole it from the Olmecs — the people whom the Mayans slaughtered when they took over their crushed empire.

Contrary to what New Agers would have us believe, the ancient Mayans weren’t wise, healthy, moral, enlightened people who could control the elements and the natural world around them. In reality, the Mayans were a failed empire with a failed economy which, like their Aztec neighbors, practiced wide-scale slavery, human sacrifice, infanticide and cannibalism (ritual and otherwise). They were also responsible for massive deforestation in their Central American empire, which caused widespread ecological collapse, which in turn caused famines and epidemics that quickened their demise. They couldn’t be as wise as modern pagans claim if they so efficiently wiped themselves out, having stolen their empire from its previous owners by force of arms.

Coincidently, though the Mayan Empire is defunct lo these many years (their classic period lasted from A.D. 250-900) the Maya are still with us — very much like how Romans remain in Italy’s capital though their empire has also gone the way of the dinosaurs. When the Maya are approached about their ancestors’ prediction of the 2012 apocalypse, they shrug and admit ignorance. In a sense, this modern obsession with the “true knowledge” of the Mayas’ ancient writings is a pretentious, modernist version of noblesse oblige colonialism. “Poor Third World folk don’t understand but we, the liberal, educated and enlightened people of Western, 21st^-century, First World countries, do — even though we hate Christians and Christianity.”

The Maya aren’t the only people associated with predictions of the end of the world. Many have offered possible dates, including the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hopi, Aztecs, Incans, Hindus and others. Nostradamus predicted a great comet, Nibiru, would impact the Mediterranean Sea in 1999. Edward Cayce, that old goat, assured his followers the world would end in 1999. He also insisted the Earth’s axis would tilt in the 1950s and the western portion of America would be utterly destroyed along with most of Japan, that China would convert to Christianity by the 1970s and the lost city of Atlantis would rise to the surface of the ocean in the 1980s.

Many Europeans were convinced of a second Great Flood taking place in 1524, which was also a no-show. Yet others believed the world was to end in 1666 simply because of the last three digits was a numerological reference to Satan. The fact that the Great Fire of London occurred in that same year didn’t help assuage their fears.

This nonsense should be a wake-up call to the world: “Be alert and of sober mind, for Satan prowls about like a roaring lion as he looks for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).