[Gary Petty] We’re looking at a cultural phenomenon where people are fascinated with zombies. It’s not only Hollywood – I mean, we’ve seen lots of movies and television shows about zombies that are very popular. But it’s more than that. You know, if you go onto one of the U.S. government’s websites, they actually have a page on how to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. All this interest in zombies isn’t new – it’s just the enormity of it. I mean, of course, zombies go clear back to Haiti, where the witch doctors would actually give people a drug that would destroy part of their mind, and that’s where the zombie concept came from. And the earliest movies about zombies were about witch doctors who made people into mindless sort of slaves. But that evolved into something else, where today what we have is a fascination with millions of people, braindead, going around and killing and infecting others until everybody is becoming a zombie. And of course, the core of these stories are the survivors, the people who are fighting back, the people who are fighting off the zombies and killing the zombies and trying to survive in this horrible world.

Sociologists believe that one of the reasons for this sort of explosion of this genre is that, in the post-9/11 world, a zombie is sort of a symbol of the world that we live in – the uncertainty, the fear that society is going to collapse, that we’re really going to be attacked by neighbors and family members who lose their minds, as they try to live in a world, a post-apocalyptic world.

Some people are preparing. There’s actually people who are apocalyptic zombie preppers, who build bunkers and stockpile food and weapons to fight off the eventual zombie horrors they think they’re going to have to face. Well, the Bible does tell us about some terrible times that are going to come, where the world is going to face a time that Jesus says is so bad, that if He doesn’t return, no flesh will be saved. I guess you have to think about that – how deep does your bunker have to be to survive a time when no flesh survives? But you and I don’t have to fear that. You and I know Who our fortress is. We have a bunker. We have a protector that is God. What we need to be doing is spiritually preparing for the world that we face, spiritually preparing for the times that we may face in the future, knowing that God is with us, God is going to protect us, God is going to fulfill His will in our lives, and Jesus Christ is coming back to save the world. That is our hope.

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