Many have tried their hand at it. Some even built careers out of it. They called it “futurology.” The gurus of the profession were termed “futurologists.” A veritable battery of news commentators and analysts tried it once again as we entered a new calendar year.

Predicting the future has been a fascination of man since earliest recorded history. Yet it seems that only by virtue of sheer “luck” or happenstance do a few of these predictions come anywhere near to fruition. As a piece in the Economist recently opined, “Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before” (January 1).

Futurology was a fashionable outcome of the social dislocation that happened following the upheavals within society experienced during the 1960s. Old certainties were under challenge following two great world wars. Freethinking was in. Absolutes were out. The standards that had guided the British and American peoples to become the leading nations of the world, propelling the globe into the modern age, became open to question on university campuses, a phenomenon that readily reached the masses via an increasingly accessible web of media outlets.

The postwar penetration of both education and the media by Communist-aided left-wing elements accelerated the challenge within the free democracies to anything that smacked of the least association with the wasp element within society—White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. The very work ethic that had underpinned the growth and development of the white English-speaking peoples into the most influential civilization on Earth was attacked by the intelligentsia and the chattering classes. The foundation of civilized society that we had become so used to over the past two centuries began to crumble.

Added to this was the massive increase in scientific knowledge. Suddenly it became hard to keep up with change. Corporations hired gurus as “change agents” to manage the disruption that occurred within workforces as technology overtook technology, as machines, robots, and electronic devices increasingly displaced people, and as traditional Bible-based virtues morphed into politically correct, godless “values.”

Out of all of this social mayhem grew the pseudo-science of futurology, which became particularly extant in the 1970s and 1980s. The American futurologists Herman Kahn, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler became household names during those two decades as human beings strived to guess what changes were ahead, as if by anticipating them before they were engulfed by them, they would have time to adapt.

The frustrations born of difficulties adapting to rapid change meant that the fashion for futurology matched the fad for the family shrink. Both denied the God of absolutes. The result was that people lost confidence in the age-old certainties that once governed life.

The theories of evolution, Marxism, Freudianism and the predictions of the futurologist were all peculiarities of the age of the destruction of absolutes. Now, looking back as the first decade of the 21st century rushes toward the second, it is patently obvious that neither the fashionable, godless and hence directionless ideologies of the 20th century, nor their cloning of their sister fad of futurology, have gone anywhere near to replacing the relative security of the era of absolutes upon which Britain built an empire and the United States grew into the greatest single nation on Earth.

Godless evolution, which prescribes no moral foundation, no framework of timeless virtues, is now embedded in our systems of education. The pseudo-science of psychology, spawned by Freudianism, now permeates the very social fabric of civilization together with its outgrowths—the politically correct language, gender confusion, immoral habits and shameless ways of this current century. Yet futurology has fallen by the wayside, its grandiose predictions now being seen for the empty, foundationless prognostications that they truly always were.

Paradoxically, if ever there existed a need to predict and prepare for the future, surely it is in this most mind-bending age that we now live in, the age of global disorder.

Enter religion, especially the religion of the doomsayers, the prophets of “the end of the world.”

They’ve been there since the Bible was translated from Latin into the vernacular and distributed to the masses. Caricatured as the guy walking city pavements draped with the sandwich board declaring, “The end is nigh … prepare to meet thy doom,” these self-styled religious nay-sayers have brought the only real source of predicting the future into grave disrepute. Today, although they can still be found on street corners or peddling tracts door to door, they are more often found in the form of charismatic televangelists who remonstrate to the unthinking faithful with one hand while holding out the other for financial reward. Often the book they claim to preach from is held aloft, occasionally thumped or brandished, oft quoted from, but seldom understood.

The only source of reliable, inerrant prediction of the future is your Bible! Yet few there be who truly understand its message.

One of the names that you will never see mentioned in any list of futurologists is that of Herbert W. Armstrong. Yet Herbert Armstrong was the singular great futurologist of the 20th century! Unlike the secular futurologists, the major events that Mr. Armstrong prophesied over his almost 60-year ministry have either come to pass exactly as he declared, or are even now in the process of precise fulfillment.

The Trumpet seldom if ever quotes from a secular futurologist to demonstrate a point, but we are constantly quoting from this man, who was far and away ahead of all others in predicting the future.

Search the archive on our website and you will see more references to Mr. Armstrong in relation to his uncanny predictions concerning major world events than any other commentator. Those references will inevitably be to prophetic forecasts that Mr. Armstrong made predicting global events sometimes multiple decades before those events actually occurred. No commentator was more tenacious in prophesying the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany into a powerhouse nation that would lead Europe to become the world’s dominant power than Herbert W. Armstrong. And he declared it, as we have so often referenced, while Germany lay divided, in the ashes of abject defeat. Decades before Yugoslavia became divided up in preparation for takeover by a united Europe, Herbert Armstrong prophesied it. He forewarned of America’s now-emerging great financial crisis half a century before it happened. Over 20 years ago he cautioned the American and British peoples to prepare to reduce their lifestyles. They didn’t listen. The result is events like the recent subprime mortgage meltdown.

For the duration of his long ministry, Mr. Armstrong pointed to multiple prophecies to indicate that time was running out for the hedonistic ways of the British and American peoples and that foreign nations would literally take away the bounty upon which these richest nations of the Earth had built their societies, foreshadowing the eventual enslavement of these peoples as their civilization collapses around them. Those who listened to Herbert Armstrong prophesy of these events should not be surprised to read of their increasingly rapid fulfillment today. As we have pointed out over the years, headline news topics of world events that have occurred over the last 20 years since Mr Armstrong’s death were often headline news crafted by Mr. Armstrong to describe coming world events in the light of Bible prophecy in the publications he produced throughout his long ministry.

Herbert Armstrong was a man ahead of his time.

Those who tuned in to Mr. Armstrong’s radio and television program, The World Tomorrow, who received and read his magazine the Plain Truth, did indeed gain a foretaste of events we are living through today. In his own unique style, Mr. Armstrong certainly gave to his vast audience the plain truth about the news of the day and the prophecies of the world tomorrow!

How this contrasts with the perspective of some of the best intelligence analysts and commentators on the secular scene. As one mused, “We are, frankly, far too much in awe of the world, and too deeply entertained by it, to think that we can understand it today or foretell tomorrow. … Still, we can’t resist taking a guess. … [T]he whole truth is always complex to the point of being unknowable, even to the world’s greatest geniuses” (Daily Reckoning).

And that’s the very best that our secular media pundits, intelligence analysts, and now unfashionable futurologists can manage: All their efforts at predicting the future amount to just a shot in the dark.

Well, we are here to tell you, you can do better than that. You can have real confidence in the future by coming to terms with the only reliable source that predicts it: your Bible!

All of the writers, columnists and analysts who contribute to the Trumpet magazine had to start right there. They had to prove there is a supreme God in charge of, and controlling events within, the universe. They then had to prove that God has given us a code book that, when deciphered correctly, enlightens the Bible student as to the relationship between world events and Bible prophecy. They had to prove the biblical identity of the nations in relation to their modern names today. Then, as their knowledge of these things expanded, a great panorama of the future opened before them, a future full of hope, full of abundance in the good things of life, and a wonderful assurance as to the unfolding plan that Eternal God has for the family of man!

You too can have this vision of real hope and confidence in the future—that exciting vision of future reality as captured and disseminated to millions by Herbert W. Armstrong.

Request our Herbert W. Armstrong College Bible Correspondence Course, offered to you gratis. It will lead you into the most stimulating study of your life. In fact, it will reveal to you your very reason for being, enabling you to begin fulfilling your incredible human potential, a potential that will open to you the most fantasticfuture ever offered to man!