Apocalypse Now

By
Dr. David Hilton
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0
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Across Asia, people are starting to become alert to the fuelpocalypse.

Petrolmageddon, coming soon to a bowser near you.

Normies don’t really pay close attention to news developments. That’s wise, really. Most of the time, they’re a waste of time.

But sometimes they’re not. And when they’re not, it’s really handy to be the one who panics first.

Along with ballistic missiles hitting Israeli cities, oil tankers getting bombed in the Persian Gulf, missiles raining down on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Iran getting pummelled, and Middle Eastern oil looking like it’s about to go permanently offline, becoming apocalyptic is not entirely unreasonable.

For Christians, though, ‘apocalypse’ doesn’t just mean the destruction of the world. There’s much more to it.

The Greek word from which we get ‘apocalypse’ actually means ‘revelation’. Hence, the name of the final book in the Bible. It’s the content of the Book of Revelation, trumpets being blasted, seas turning to blood, Hell being opened, Whores getting burned, that kind of thing, that has given us our meaning of apocalypse.

I have to confess, and it might not surprise you to read this, that I’m kind of looking out for the apocalypse maybe soon, too. But it’s not because of the sudden outbreak of a very dangerous war in the Middle East. That’s secondary. There have always been wars and rumours of wars.

I’ve got other reasons, and given that it’s March 18, 2026 today, I thought I’d go through one of them with you.

Today is New Year’s Day. Or at least it was for the group of people who wrote and stored the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Scholars are pretty confident that they were Essenes, and it’s my view that this group was a community of people on the lookout for the messiah who got absorbed into the Jesus movement and became the foundations of the early church in Palestine.

A scholar who has spent decades investigating how these people understood time is Dr Ken Johnson, and he wrote a book about the Essenian calendar and how it points to the timing of prophetic events.

Ken Johnson’s work is not especially well known, but it is unusually specific. He argues that, unlike the more familiar lunar calendar used in mainstream Judaism to this day, the Essenes appear to have followed a solar calendar structured around fixed cycles. Johnson’s claim is that this calendar preserves a Jubilee framework that is not merely symbolic but chronological.

They are fifty-year cycles of ordered time.

Within that framework, he places what he calls the “final Jubilee” of the last age1 between roughly 26 AD and 76 AD. The dating is not arbitrary. It begins around the start of Christ’s ministry and ends with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD, with a few years on either side to complete the cycle.

The claim is not just that important things happened in that period. It is that the period itself was structured to contain them.

All the big events that Daniel and the other Prophets had proclaimed about Israel came to pass within that time window.

If you accept that premise, even tentatively, then the implication is difficult to ignore. Jubilee cycles do not simply stop. They roll forward. And if one such cycle marked the end of an age centred on Israel, then a corresponding cycle could mark the close of a broader age.

Not a local ending this time, because God has not been dealing with humanity through one people during this age. This time, the events foretold in the New Testament’s version of Daniel, Revelation, will affect the entire world.

And today, March 18 2026, is the first day of the final Jubilee year according to the Essenian calendar.

Happy New Year !

You may, however, not be a believer in such Bible nonsense. That’s fine. The cyclical view of time held by ancient people, however, is something that I still believe we can learn from and gain wisdom by.

They understood that time is cyclical in ways that we intuit but can’t explain. Certain pressures recur. Certain alignments return.

We are living through a time that in many ways echoes the 1970s. The Bretton Woods monetary system broke apart, and dollar hegemony was challenged. Oil shocks disrupted industrial economies. Inflation unsettled politics and destabilised governments. Remember the Whitlam Dismissal? The US seemed overextended and on the wane.

The same cluster of pressures is visible again. Energy insecurity. Questions around dollar dominance. Regional conflicts that sit uncomfortably close to critical supply routes. None of these, taken alone, is unprecedented. Together, they begin to form a pattern that is harder to dismiss.

What we are seeing is not simply a crisis. It is the reappearance of a particular kind of moment.

These are the types of insights that are often best captured in literature, and the novel I’ve found myself reflecting on recently is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness is often read as a critique of colonial brutality, which it is. But structurally, it is about something more precise. It traces the movement from order into ambiguity. The further Marlow travels from the administrative centre, the less coherent the imperial project becomes. By the time he reaches Kurtz, authority has detached from any recognisable moral framework.

The horror is not just what Kurtz does. It is that he has become the chaos he was sent to tame.

Apocalypse Now! lifts that structure almost intact and places it in the context of the Vietnam War. The river journey remains. The gradual breakdown of command remains. Instead of Africa, we see Southeast Asia.

A mission continues because it has begun. Each layer of authority is thinner than the last. By the time Captain Willard reaches Kurtz, the war has ceased to have a clear objective. It persists out of inertia.

With Trump, we are seeing the Heart of Darkness play out in the Middle East. Destruction for the sake of destruction. Out of the imperial project to impose order emerges chaos, horror, and despair. Imperial overreach bringing darkness, atrocity, and ultimately destruction on the empire itself.

The revelation for Marlow and for his film adaptation Captain Willard is that the darkness is not external. It was internal all along.

The revelation of celestial reality at the end of the Bible does bring God’s destruction down on the corrupt world system at the end of this age. It is Yahweh on the storm clouds, bringing divine retribution and the administration of catastrophic judgement.

The Essenes seemed to get it right about the apocalypse of Israel at the end of the last age. The Jews had been warned. They suffered terrible destruction in Jerusalem for what they’d done to the messiah.

We’ve been warned, too. Nothing lasts forever.

The storm is coming.

  1. The Essenes believed that God would deal with men through a period of either seven ages or seven thousand years. The latter has been picked up by Young Earth Creationists.

You can find Dr. David Hilton at Substack.

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