Michigan and eschatology

I usually put on my seminary-sophisticate glasses when reading Old Testament prophecy, automatically translating "horses" into guided missiles and IEDs. But this morning, for a change, as I read Ezekiel 38 and 39, I mused about a more literal interpretation.

The chapters describe a time in the future when an array of nations will attack an Israel at peace:

"You will come from your place out of the uttermost parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great host, a mighty army. You will come up against my people Israel, like a cloud covering the land. In the latter days I will bring you against my land, that the nations may know me, when through you, O Gog, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes" (38:15-16).

Then my friend David phoned from Michigan and told me the economy is so bad there that rather than repairing deteriorating roads, they're crushing them up and reverting to gravel---a sort of reversal of modernity, a descent into pre-industrial (if not prehistoric) times.

I checked it out and sure enough, President Obama's stimulus package didn't quite stretch thin enough to cover all the needs of the state with the nation's highest rate of unemployment. Back in June 2009, the Chicago Tribune was reporting that "more than 20 of the 83 counties in Michigan . . . have turned rural roads back to gravel with no immediate plans to repave."

On Jan. 29 of this year, an editorial in The Detroit News noted, "Michigan's transportation department has chopped 243 badly needed road repair projects out of its five-year-plan because it can't afford them. . . ."

This all raises interesting questions for my smugly modernist biblical hermeneutics. What if "horses" means "horses"? What if this slow motion train wreck of an economy we find ourselves in is heading us for a time more like our Caveman ancestors than our Jetsons fantasies?

Roughly 2,800 years ago there was a famine in Samaria, brought about by a Syrian siege. It was so severe that the population was reduced to cannibalism. It was so severe that when the word of the Lord promised through the prophet Elisha that the very next day flour would be so plentiful that it would drive the price down, a sophisticated man scoffed at the divine prediction. Sure enough, God found a way, and the very next day, flour was cheap. You can read all a

bout it in 2 Kings 6 and 7.All of which gives me pause about going too quickly to an overly intellectual reading of biblical prophecies. For all I know---and the way things are going---"horses" may turn out to be "horses" in the end. We may be living in The Book of Eli. It's not what I wish, and it's not the wish of Tim Hammill, managing director of the Dickinson County Road Commission in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, "where 2.5 miles of paved road was converted to gravel last year." Says Hammill, "It's depressing."

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