An interesting article written by Dr. Larry Spargimino in the "Prophetic Observer," a monthly circular sent out by Southwest Radio Church Ministries, tells how the world is running out of time in just about every area, by use of the exponential curve. Most of the following is taken from Dr. Spargimino's article:
To get an idea of what an exponential curve is. Imagine that you place one bacterium in a glass jar at 11:00. The bacterium begins to multiply, each bacterium reproducing and doubling itself every minute. We start with one bacterium and one minute later there is a second bacterium, and one minute later you have 4 bacteria, each doubling every minute. as you can see for every minute that passes the number of bacteria doubles because each bacteria reproduces, becoming two where before there was only one. Let us imagine it will take 60 minutes for the entire jar to be full. At what time would it be half full?
Most people would probably answer at 11:30, half way through the hour. However time and quantity increments are not the same. The jar would be half full at 11:59. Though it took a full 59 minutes for the jar to become half full, it only takes one minute for the remaining half to be filled. This is due to the exponential curve.
To use this curve in other areas. Knowledge took 5000 years to double in 1800. In other words, at the end of a 5000 year period people only knew about twice as much as they did in the beginning of that period. In the next 100 years, however, knowledge doubled a second time. What took 5000 years now happened in 100 years. Then in half that time - in just 50 years - knowledge doubled a third time. It has been estimated that by the 1990's knowledge has been doubling every 18 months.
Life expectancy worldwide was 21 years of age at the time of Christ, and it took 1900 years to double to 42 years in 1900, but it only took 100 years to reach 65, and is expected to reach 85 by 2050.
In 1790, the population of the United States was 3,929,214 people. This comes out to 4.5 persons per square mile. In 1992 however, the population skyrocketed to 256,561,239 people with a population density of 70.4 persons per square mile. It took thousands of years for the density to reach 4.5, but it only took 202 years to redouble almost 4 times, to 70.4.
With the exponential increase of wars, earthquakes, disease, droughts, famine, etc in the world, you begin to wonder, how long before time runs out, and the jar is full. Are we in that last minute? As the population of the world increases, so does crowded living conditions, which in turn increases viruses and disease. In the 40 year period between 1950 and 1990, the number of passengers aboard international commercial flights increased exponentially from 2 million to 280 million. This means that human beings carrying infectious disease can now travel to any part of the globe.
As Dr. Spargimino states: The human race is fast reaching a point of total collapse. This is not prophetic hype, but Biblical reality. The Bible says, "Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the time for salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2). Dr. Spargimino's prayer, and my prayer, is that those who read this, who have put off receiving Christ would realize that there is great peril in delay.
Because of the reality of the exponential curve, the foolish person is someone who has no strategies for life and misses the opportunities for grace that God gives to each one of us. It is imperative that our understanding of time be governed by the words of Ephesians 5:16 "Redeeming the time, because the days are evil."
By George Konig
Christian Internet Forum
www.georgekonig.org
July 20, 2003
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