“Can you imagine what it would be like to live around here?” I asked my wife while driving next to the Dead Sea.

Her reaction was just what I expected: “Eewww!”

This is the most inhospitable place on Earth. Within its salt-laden waters—eight times the salinity of the ocean—only a few microbes survive. Besides that, there are no plants, no seaweed, no fish or any other water-dwelling creatures. There is simply no life in this massive body of water.

Beyond its shoreline, life is sparse. Leaving aside human beings who flock to the mineral-rich source for its medicinal benefits, the region surrounding the Dead Sea supports fewer living organisms than either the Sahara Desert or California’s Death Valley.

But it wasn’t always this infertile. In fact, 4,000 years ago, the entire region was teeming with exuberant life and lush, fruitful abundance!

When the great patriarch Abraham and his nephew Lot decided to spread out because of their expanding population centers, Abraham and his descendants chose Canaan as their homeland. Lot chose the Jordan Valley. And Lot, you might remember, had first pick! He actually chose the plains of Jordan. No one in his right mind, given first choice, would have picked a barren desert with an enormous salt sea as its most dominant feature. At that time, there was no Dead Sea! As the author of Genesis notes, the entire valley was like Eden, the garden of God. Everywhere in the valley, Scripture says, its fertile soil was well watered.

But this, of course, was before God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 13:10). “It was of old a most happy land,” first-century historian Josephus wrote, “both for the fruits it bore and the riches of its cities, although it be now all burnt up” (Wars,iv, 8, 4).

The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were known for their exceedingly wicked and perverse lifestyle. It wasn’t just their widespread acceptance of homosexuality—it was also their rampant individualism and excess. The Prophet Ezekiel described these prosperous people as being obsessed with selfishness and pride. They experimented with every abominable act imaginable. In the New Testament, the Apostle Jude said they were given to fornication and went after strange flesh.

The way God viewed it, besides Lot and his family, not one thing was worth preserving in these two cities. Notice what happened: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone [sulfur] and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground” (Genesis 19:24-25). God scorched the earth with fire and dumped sulfur on top of the destruction. The entire area was completely destroyed.

Even Lot’s wife, as is commonly known, turned into a salt pillar after she longingly looked back upon the extreme decadence and wickedness she left behind. Salt, of course, is known for its long-lasting preservation quality. How symbolic! Even to this day, the surrounding environs of the Dead Sea remain as an obliterated, salt-saturated, lifeless reminder of God’s fiery wrath!

The Old Testament Prophet Isaiah compares our peoples to those of Sodom and Gomorrah, describing us as being “sick” from head to toe. He prophesied of our eventual ruin and desolation as a result of our universal sin and rebellion against God’s laws.

Jesus Christ described our latter-day society as being exactly like Sodom and Gomorrah—abundantly prosperous, yet exceedingly wicked. Like Isaiah, Jesus prophesied, “But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed” (Luke 17:29-30).

The Apostle Peter, likewise, said the ashes from Sodom and Gomorrah served as a warning to the ungodly (2 Peter 2:6-7).

That is oneall-important lesson the region around the Dead Sea teaches us—that universal sin causes universal destruction. That is the course this present evil world is on due to its rebellion against God’s law and its stubborn insistence on living according to Satan’s laws of selfishness and greed, of vanity and pride, of sexual deviance and lust, of division and strife, of wars and rumors of wars.

Yes, we are steamrolling toward the same universal destruction Sodom and Gomorrah experienced nearly four millennia ago, only this time it will be worldwide—a literal scorched Earth.

But there is another, equally important lesson wrapped up in the lifeless wonder of the Dead Sea.

The Prophet Ezekiel wrote of a coming time, now just ahead, when a river will flow out of God’s millennial headquarters in Jerusalem, heading east into the Jordan Valley. That pure river, the prophet said, will heal the contaminated waters of the Dead Sea, making them fresh and pure! Fishermen will line the shores of the once infamous sea, filling their nets with fish. Fruit trees of every kind will grow along the riverbanks, producing fruit every month (read Ezekiel 47). Yes, God will restore life and abundance to this millennia-old, uninhabitable, barren wasteland.

And how powerfully symbolic this prophecy is.

Bible prophecy informs us that we are very near to the resurrection of God’s world from out of the scorched surface of this present evil world. Very soon now, rising from the ashes of that ruinous, death-filled wasteland, will be an eternal Kingdom. A messianic King, with the help and support of His saints, will establish a 1,000-year utopian rule on Earth!