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Within five years, a major earthquake will devastate Japan, toppling skyscrapers on the world's highest priced real estate and bringing down with them global financial markets worldwide.

The signs are imminent, says economist and author Gary North, who spoke at a National Reform Association lecture held in February in Pittsburgh. North told the audience of 100 that every 69 years a quake of at least 8.0 on the Richter scale hits the island nation. Since A.D. 1500, a volcano near Tokyo has warned of the coming quake by erupting from five to 10 years prior.

"That volcano erupted in 1986," North said. In addition to killing 150,000 and wounding another 200,000, the next quake will destroy everything in and near Tokyo built before 1974. Japan's financial markets will collapse as real estate values plummet and cause the greatest worldwide economic crash in the history of man.

"It's not an if, but a when and everyone in Japan knows it," North said.

Apparently so does Larry Burkett, another Christian economist and author. Yet Burkett, in his novel The Illuminati, comes to a completely different conclusion about how that earthquake will affect the future. The differences between North's and Burkett's predictions illustrate the even greater differences between a postmillennial and premillennial view of the future. In Burkett's novel, a young grad student and computer genius predicts the great quake. A U.S. Senator who is running for the presidency intercepts the young man's prediction and uses it to propel himself into the White House. The candidate is controlled by a secret cabal whose roots go back to the secret society Illuminati. The cabal is controlled by the Antichrist himself, who appears in the early 21st century in the form of an Arab businessman.

Well, the earthquake hits. Japan is destroyed and so its economy, which sparks a worldwide financial crisis. Mr. Senator, now Mr. President, sets up a worldwide computerized monetary system. The Antichrist, who's pulling the President's strings, sets himself up to control the world's economy and begins the annihilation of all Christians in the U.S. and Jews in Israel.

Along the way, Burkett treats us to a plethora of fundamentalist nightmares: a cashless society, mandatory personal I.D. numbers stenciled on everyone's right hand, and the capture, incarceration, and threatened elimination of American Christians. Let it be said that the Antichrist and his cabal are thwarted, this time, by a fiery band of fundamentalists and pro-lifers led by a TV preacher.

Gary North's Pittsburgh speech offered a radically different interpretation of the earthquake-hits-Japan scenario. Yet, where Burkett sees signs of the end times, Antichrist, and the great tribulation, North sees a civilization in the midst of transformation, and in that transformation an opportunity for Christians to offer a radicle alternative to a collapsing humanist civilization.

Like the Japan earthquake, there are tremors warning of the coming collapse of "that humanist civilization that has supported the West for the last 300 to 400 years.

'The storms are coming to shake the foundations of a civilization that has thought it could get away without Jesus Christ and the Bible,' North said. Western society has 'lost its soul,' according to North, and is divided in its loyalties among 'predestinarian fate, impersonal random luck, and occultism.'

'When you see this you must expect the judgment of God. You cannot sustain a society split schizophrenically between fate, luck, and occultism,' North said. 'When you see a collapse of the moral and religious foundations that undergird a political system you can expect to see breakdown of law, breakdown of order, breakdown of respect for the system,' North said. The great humanist experiments in centralized control of Western economies will face tests more strenuous than the founding of the Bank of England at the end of the 17th century.

'I believe these tests will fail in our day, and then the question is, What will happen?' North said. Christians, during this crisis, will do well to follow the apostle's advice in 1 Peter 2 to 'keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles' and to 'submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution . . . that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.' 'This is very good advice for the Church today and for Christians at whatever level of responsibility,' North said. With the Word of God as our guide, we should strive to become the best at whatever endeavor we pursue, so that during the coming crisis, we--the Christians--are the ones society comes to for answers.

'We make them dependent on us, because we are dependent on Christ. And because they become dependent on us, indirectly they become dependent on Christ,' North said. 'They will come to us, not because they love Jesus Christ, not because they want to hear the message of heaven and hell, but because in a breakdown civilization there is no one else to come to,' he said. North encouraged the listeners to use this lull before the storm to make themselves ready for leadership by assuming increasing levels of responsibility, whatever their station in life.

'While we have this period where the storm is not yet at the door, where there is some degree of stability, where the money does buy something, when you do still have a job, when the stores aren't looted, when the earthquake hasn't hit Tokyo, let us work hard, as hard as we can, that we might be fit servants when the storms do come.'

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