From the Editor Jul/Aug 2014
Dear Friends
I am not a Facebook fan. One of my daughters has tried to get me on it, luring me with pictures of my grandchildren. And in a moment of weakness several years ago, I allowed her to sign me up using a pseudonym with a profile that provided zero information.
A click here, a click there, and presto! I was on Facebook. Less than 30 seconds later, a slew of people I barely knew tried to friend me; and one person declared, “I know who this is!” and outed me to the entire Facebook world. I promptly unFacebooked myself and never looked back.
I still place a premium on personal privacy, something that no longer exists in an Internet-dominated world. In fact, most people these days seem not to care about privacy, which explains why Facebook has 1.23 billion active users—almost four times the population of the United States of America and approximately one-sixth of the entire world population.
Society, it seems, can no longer function without its social networks. As computers become more sophisticated, they probably will dominate our lives more than we can imagine. Yet by then, perhaps no one will care.
The new technology is crafting a world that will be tailor-made for the biblical events of the end-times. That’s why we decided to focus this issue of Israel My Glory on the new technology and 666.
Who knows what vast changes lie in store in the computer world? An article by John Markoff, “Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience,” in the December 29, 2013, issue of The New York Times, spoke of a whole new “generation of artificial intelligence systems”—computers that will “learn” from their mistakes and “see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control.” “Designers,” wrote Markoff, “say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world.”
What does that sound like to you? To me it sounds like the book of Revelation. So in this issue, our writers explore some of the new technology in view of Bible prophecy. We offer this issue with a prayer that God will give His people the wisdom to recognize He is setting the stage for things to come and that His Word never returns to Him void.
Waiting for His Appearing,
Lorna Simcox
Editor-in-Chief
