Things to come

God said to Jeremiah, "...Ask me and I will tell you remarkable secrets you do not know about things to come."

The Sciguy, a website, predicts this for the year 2030:

1. Learning a second language will no longer be necessary thanks to machine translation.

2. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people will have a life expectancy of 150 years.

3. Only 2 percent of the world's population will live in extreme poverty.

4. The best food will be grown in skyscrapers.

5. Driverless cars will be commonplace.

6. 18 cities will have more than 20 million inhabitants, and New York City will be the 16th largest city in the world.

7. Automated flying drones will transport humans.

8. Space tourism will be common, and 40,000 humans will be working in orbit.

9. Most film actors will be out of work due to competition from cheap computer animated actors.

10. China will have 250 cities with more than one million inhabitants.

Uh, wow. I thought Tom Cruise would be making Mission Impossible 10, but I guess it will be Tom Cruise's computer animation that would be doing it.

In any case, none of these things are more remarkable than what we've seen just in the past 20 years, and none of those things are as remarkable as one single thing God has done.

Doubt me?

Take a breath. Take a moment. Hold the breath. Take another quick moment. Let the breath out. In those two moments, God showed his remarkable genius, his infinite power. He gave you breath. Let some scientist do that. He gave you DNA, from scratch, mixing and matching till there was you. Let some think tank do that. I'm not talking cloning. That's way too easy. I'm talking making a human being from nothing.

That was just for starters.

Let science figure out a way to create planets from no ingredients, create stars from blackness, create suns from nothing but a word spoken.

When science can do that, get back to me.

By the way, Jesus said there would always be the poor. I pray that No. 3 is correct one day, but I strongly suspect that till we give water to the waterless, give food to the hungry without government planning and give hope to the hopeless by telling them about a man who wandered a dusty trail or two in a little land called Palestine all those years ago, none of this top 10 list of predictions need be worried about.

Truth is it would take extraordinary technological and political change to raise the 1.5 billion around the world from extreme poverty.

I pray we do. I suspect we won't.