1998 was a huge year for life-ending meteor strikes to the earth, at least according to Hollywood. I was a freshman in high school when two major movies with the same premise came out only a few months from each other: Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, and Deep Impact, starring Elijah Wood and Morgan Freeman. These two movies depicted extinction-level events where something from space came to Earth with cataclysmic effects. The fear of space rock impacts was not just in the movies.
The late 90s were already flooded with existential dread. As Y2K (Year 2000) was approaching, there was talk of the end of the world as we knew it. In ’94, astronomers watched in awe as pieces of a giant comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, smashed into Jupiter. In early ’98, just months before these two movies debuted, the discovery of a mile-wide asteroid, hypothetically on a collision course with Earth, was announced to the public. It splashed across newspapers and outlets worldwide and terrified everyone. The same year that the public panic was peaking, and the movies were released, the US government announced a NASA program called the Spaceguard Survey, a kind of planetary defense that was supposed to chart near-Earth objects that pose a threat. These were my high school years, years we lived in the notion that the end of the world was possibly at hand.
It was in that time that my youth group took up the study of Revelation. As we worked our way through the verses on Sunday nights, I was astonished. Especially in chapter eight, where the content, specifically Wormwood, sounded a lot like the two movies I had just seen in the theater. I was both amazed and not a little scared. As the years have passed, the meteor hysteria has decreased, but one day, it will return with a fiery resolve. That’s one thing we will discover in this chapter.
