God on Globalization

Yet another snack that originated from the food safety conference last month. When the representative from the CDC was speaking, he was talking about all of the difficulty in tracking outbreaks on a national scale. One of the things that he noted was that if 10 people who ordered the same dish in a restaurant in a small town on Tuesday all get sick on either Wednesday or Thursday with the same symptoms, then it’s not hard to trace the source. The difficulty comes in when you have a national outbreak with cases sporadically strewn across the nation. It’s much more difficult to diagnose food-borne illness when the patients have never met each other, their respective doctors don’t know each other, and there is no reason to think that the person is sick from something that they ate rather than from some other source. The curious thing is that these types of nation-wide outbreaks only occur because products are shipped from a single producer to retailers all over the country – so if it’s contaminated when it leaves the packaging plant, it’s contaminated in dozens of stores across several states.

I’m not necessarily advocating that we all buy local, but it does seem that life would be a lot simpler if we did. This lead me to pondering what God thinks of globalization. Globalization is good for consumers because it gives us greater variety and better prices. It's bad for consumers because it causes more pollution, more potential for spreading disease, and fewer local jobs in areas that are not productive enough to attract large-scale businesses. When I put it like that, globalization doesn’t look so great. It's not enough to effect a drastic change in my behavior, but it does make me wonder if this is the sort of thing that God was getting at in these scriptures:

Micah 4:4

Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken.

Zechariah 3:10

In that day each of you will invite his neighbor to sit under his vine and fig tree, declares the LORD Almighty.

These scriptures are stated with such simplicity that it almost obscures the scope of what will be happening. The effects really are drastic when you personalize them and extrapolate their impact. Life will be much more agrarian than the world that we currently live in. This is something that people will have to adjust to, especially in modernized nations. Everyone will be growing their own food, at least to some extent. In order to do that, everyone will have to own land. I think it’s then safe to assume that everyone will have their own house. Just as God divided the land for ancient Israel, so will He divide it for families living during the Millennial Kingdom - no one will be homeless. Furthermore, everyone will be sharing freely with their neighbors, which signals a transformation from the usual attitudes that we see today. People won’t be competing anymore with their neighbors to have the nicest house or the best-kept lawn. Companies won’t be competing with each other for profits. The focus of enterprise will be to provide services for people rather than to make a profit, if indeed such a thing as enterprise exists in that time. Will there be a need for companies or even currency as we currently understand it? 

God has promised to bring about this dramatic shift in the thoughts and attitudes of people worldwide, and people will someday live in such a world. This doesn’t just apply to America: all of the people packed into unacceptably small living quarters in 3^rd world countries will have their own land and home, and they will not go hungry. Everyone will have a chance to work and live in peace, and “no one will make them afraid” that they are going to lose what they have, because it is given to them directly from God. 

Coming back to the original topic, I think that we are going to have rapid de-globalization in the sense that we understand the term, but rapid globalization in a different sense. On the one hand, our daily lives will be more focused on helping each other in our own community and striving to live together in harmony in accordance with God's law. On the other hand, there will be one Government, which will be upon the shoulders of Jesus Christ, as it was prophesied, and this will bring us to worldwide unity in a way that has never been seen before. All of the problems that mans' globalization has caused will be undone in the Day of the Lord, and God's globalization will rise in its place.