I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. – Revelation 6:12-14
John should have added semi-sentient cell phones acting as personal assistants to the sixth seal.
Revelation is one of the most intriguing and potentially misunderstood books of the Bible. It’s a piece of apocalyptic literature, a genre marked by fantastical and grotesque imagery. Revelation does discuss the end of the world, but it’s difficult to draw direct correlations between the images in Revelation and our world today.
Unless those images are correlated to the iPhone 4S.
Last week Apple announced the iPhone 4S, the successor to the iPhone 4. One of the main features of the new phone is Siri, something like a digital personal assistant. Siri allows the user to schedule appoints, send messages and place phone calls. Siri also responds to commands, understands everyday language and even talks back.
If anything was going to usher in the apocalypse, then it might just be the iPhone 4S and its artificial intelligence.
In the commercial for Siri, people ask questions like:
“What’s the traffic like around here?”
“Is it going to be chilly in San Francisco this weekend?”
“How many cups are in 12 ounces?”
On the commercial, Siri understands the question and responds with the necessary information. I think that better questions for Siri would have been these:
“Are you the harbinger of impending doom?”
“Are you the first sign of the coming tribulation?”
“Why have you come to destroy humanity?”
I imagine Siri would say that it doesn’t understand the question, but that’s exactly what a death robot bent on eliminating humanity would say. Since Siri won’t be forthcoming with its intentions of bringing Armageddon, we’ll just have to wait and see.
We can’t say with any certainty how the world will end, just that everything will be restored. We’ll see the new heaven and the new earth, which will hopefully be free from that apocalypse-bringing iPhone 4S.
How do you interpret the book of Revelation?
I don’t know if you’re serious or is this some kind of joke?
If it actually happens and the iPhone 4s takes over the world, then I was serious and I’m a prophet. If it doesn’t happen, which is far more likely, then it was just a bit of fun.