“No Flesh Would Be Saved”

Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ gave a dire warning: Mankind would eventually bring all life on Earth to the point of extinction, and only His return would prevent that catastrophe. And in the millennia that have followed, the ways in which humanity could commit planet-wide suicide have only multiplied. The future Jesus prophesied has become easier for us to imagine, not harder.

Many individuals who call themselves Christian may not even realize that Jesus Christ gave us prophecies—but He did. Not only does God’s word specify that the entire prophetic book of Revelation is “the Revelation of Jesus Christ,” but that book also tells us plainly that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 1:1; 19:10).

Jesus also gave us many prophetic pronouncements during His three-and-a-half-year ministry on Earth. They especially concerned the years leading up to His Second Coming—years immediately ahead of us. For instance, Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 relate one of His longest discussions of the years ahead, often called the Olivet Prophecy or Olivet Discourse, giving a dire warning about our imminent future: “And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened” (Matthew 24:22).

The specific context of that warning is the Great Tribulation (v. 21), a period of two and a half years immediately preceding the Day of the Lord and Christ’s return. And it should grab our attention: Unless God intervenes to prevent us from continuing on our current path, no flesh will be saved. Those words reveal a level of devastation that is truly hard to fathom—the planet-wide, species-wide self-destruction of mankind.

Indeed, we are living in a time when Jesus Christ’s warning about a world where “no flesh” would be saved is more than a 2,000-year-old prophecy—it’s a subject of serious study and concern. Let’s look at the remarkable relevance of Christ’s words by examining just five ways in which mankind could destroy itself in the years ahead.

Nuclear War

Humanity’s destructive capacity reached a new milestone on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped its newly developed atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in a bid to end World War II and force a Japanese surrender. A second bomb followed three days later, devastating the city of Nagasaki.

Death tolls are hard to tally accurately, but the blasts and fires of both bombs together killed between 100,000 and 150,000 people immediately, with thousands more dying from radiation, burns, and injuries in the weeks that followed. After the first bomb was dropped, President Harry Truman addressed the American people, saying, “If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” (“‘A rain of ruin’: Watch Truman announce the Hiroshima atomic bomb,” The Kansas City Star, August 8, 2017).

While the justification for those bombings was debated—and still is—one thing was clear: Mankind had learned to tap into one of the most primal forces of nature and unleash it in the most destructive way imaginable. Suddenly, Jesus’ warning about a world where no flesh would be saved had become a real possibility.

And that nuclear possibility has only grown more real as the years have passed. We’ve moved from atomic bombs to thermonuclear warheads, each with far greater destructive power than was unleashed on Japan. In fact, the Soviet Union’s thermonuclear device known as Tsar Bomba yielded an explosion 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped over Hiroshima—and it was detonated at only half of its designed yield.

Over the years, the number of nuclear weapons, as well as the number of countries possessing them, has multiplied greatly. The nonprofit Arms Control Association estimates that the nine known nuclear nations hold more than 12,100 warheads. Some are set to be dismantled, yet nearly 10,000 are still in service—waiting for the button to be pressed, so to speak (“Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance,” ArmsControl.org, June 2026). A 2008 Physics Today study estimated that a nuclear war involving fewer than half of these weapons would initially cause approximately 770 million casualties (PhysicsToday.AIP.org, December 1, 2008).

And that would only be the beginning—what would follow for survivors would be worse. In 2022, the journal Nature Food examined the impact of soot produced by fires in cities and forests after a nuclear exchange and found that “more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia” due to the famine that would follow (“Global Food Insecurity and Famine from Reduced Crop, Marine Fishery and Livestock Production Due to Climate Disruption from Nuclear War Soot Injection,” Nature.com, August 15, 2022).

Biological Weapons

We might think of biological warfare as a recent invention, but it goes back centuries. Baylor University Medical Center researchers documented many of its uses throughout history—for example, Tartar forces catapulted the corpses of plague victims over the city walls of Caffa, the Spanish sold their French enemies wine mixed with the blood of leprosy patients, the British gave blankets used by smallpox patients to Native Americans in the New World, and Confederates in the U.S. Civil War sold clothing from yellow fever and smallpox patients to Union troops (“Biological Warfare and Bioterrorism: A Historical Review,” October 2004).

In the modern era, weapons became more sophisticated as biological agents such as anthrax were deployed. Yet we now face a world where we can design and weaponize bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens at the genetic level. If the danger is not obvious, simply think back to the COVID-19 pandemic. While theories abound, it is now considered plausible that the virus may have leaked from a Wuhan lab after being enhanced for advanced study. Even if it did not, the potential for a virus to run rampant globally should get our attention.

Now imagine a scenario in which pathogens are actively and purposefully enhanced for the sake of warfare. The international Biological Weapons Convention is intended to prevent such development, but compliance is hard to verify. Biotechnology makes manufacture of weaponized diseases increasingly easy; Tulsi Gabbard, former Director of National Intelligence, stated that “the threat of nuclear proliferation and advancing chemical and biological warfare capabilities continues to grow” (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, March 18, 2026). And, when push comes to shove, who trusts the leaders of the world to abide by such agreements?

During the Black Death of the fourteenth century, bubonic plague is estimated to have killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europe’s population. Thankfully, mankind has learned much and increased sanitary practices since then, but the threat of a similar pathogen being engineered for lethality and transmission cannot be ignored—especially when the Bible warns of devastating end-time diseases and pestilences, pictured by one of the infamous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Artificial Superintelligence

Of course, the world’s worries aren’t confined to biology. Some of the Revelation 9 imagery, such as its locust-like craft or weapon swarms, could be connected to drone technology or other artificial-intelligence-powered machinery. With advances in AI, scenarios of advanced autonomous weaponry run amok now seem within the realm of possibility and are actively discussed by policymakers.

But the picture painted by AI experts is of something even more dire than out-of-control weapon systems. As AI grows smarter and more capable, we are handing it the keys to more and more aspects of our lives. From driving new cars to creating new drugs, AI’s capacity is only growing, and it is beginning to solve problems that have historically stumped human beings. It is not unreasonable to expect that AI will soon outpace us and become superintelligent—not alive, yet capable of solving problems, reasoning, and planning vastly better than human beings can. As a result, we’ll want to give AI systems even more control over our lives and our infrastructure.

Yet we’ve also discovered that AI often has secret goals that conflict with ours—again, not because it is alive, but because it’s not really built so much as grown or trained. And when AI exhibits values in direct opposition to ours—such as routinely showing itself as being willing to lie, cheat, blackmail, or even kill to achieve its own goals—that behavior is never completely rooted out, only suppressed so it learns to behave. The dangers remain.

How serious are those dangers? In 2025, AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares were very plain on the subject: “If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die” (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All).

It’s easy to think that Yudkowsky and Soares are being dramatic, but prominent AI community leaders don’t think so. In fact, in 2023, the heads of AI at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic joined with other AI leaders to publish a startling statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war” (“Statement on AI Extinction Risk,” Center for AI Safety, May 30, 2023).

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, has written in detail about his concerns, saying, “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” Worried that interest in AI benefits was clouding concern about AI risk, he wrote that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023” (“The Adolescence of Technology,” DarioAmodei.com, January 2026).

Perhaps we can count on the wisdom and self-control of all the individuals and nations who stand to profit from constantly pushing AI forward, knowing that they have humanity’s safety and best interests at heart. Then again, maybe we’d better keep an eye on it.

Global Infrastructure Collapse

Modern civilization is remarkably interdependent, kept running by fragile and vulnerable connected systems. Grocery stores depend on trucking, refrigeration, fuel, packaging, electronic payments, and farms often hundreds or thousands of miles away. Hospitals depend on electricity, clean water, specialized medicines, disposable equipment, global manufacturing, and well-timed deliveries. Even a gallon of gasoline or a loaf of bread depends on hidden networks most of us never see.

This global web of interdependencies is one of the wonders of our modern world. It’s how we can have bananas from Guatemala, grapes from Chile, and salmon from Norway, all fresh and ready for customers at a Texas grocery store. It’s how oil from a pump in the Middle East turns into fuel for cars in New Zealand, and it’s how schoolchildren in England learn on computers made from materials produced in China, Taiwan, and South Korea.

But the system is fragile and vulnerable. When COVID-19 hit, the resulting global supply-chain problems showed how fragile this spiderweb of interdependencies truly is. Pull a thread in China and shelves begin to empty thousands of miles away.

Still, the COVID supply-chain problems were small compared to what a true collapse would bring. The systems we have created are brilliant, but brittle. An EMP blast, a solar storm of just a touch greater magnitude than we are ready for, or a team of hackers intent on causing global chaos—any of these could disrupt satellites, communication systems, Internet connections, power grids, food distribution, and water supplies. The systems that make modern life livable could disappear quickly.

One such event, by itself, might not seem like a “no flesh would be saved” scenario—but it would take mankind into that territory.

Bioengineered Food and Ecosystem

In 1935, cane toads were introduced into Australia from Hawaii as a natural way to control sugarcane beetles. But the toad population began to explode on the continent—while mostly ignoring the beetles. More than 90 years later, cane toads are still spreading in Australia—resistant to eradication while producing toxins that poison native predators and damage ecosystems. One seemingly innocuous change wrought unforeseen consequences that are harming the earth to this day.

Now multiply such environmental interventions by the full power of new scientific advancements. For instance, some hope to engineer bacteria that can break down pollutants or digest hydrocarbons, which would be sprayed over oil spills to clean the oceans. To control global warming, some have suggested spraying particulates into the atmosphere to dim the skies and reflect more sunlight away from the Earth. To combat malaria, dengue, and other insect-borne sicknesses, researchers talk of genetically modifying mosquitoes so they no longer spread these diseases.

Yet others are sounding a warning against tampering with forces we do not completely understand. What happens when bacteria meant to consume hydrocarbons begin consuming other sorts of materials? What effects would darkening our atmosphere have on agriculture and weather cycles? As for altering mosquito genetics, what happens when man-made genetic sequences become part of the broader ecosystem? Can we really fine-tune such profound interventions?

Even in our well-intentioned solutions, we suffer from one fatal flaw: We are not God.

God describes Himself very plainly: “I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure’” (Isaiah 46:9–10).

And that isn’t us. Humans can’t look into the distant future to accurately understand the consequences of their decisions. Humans can’t comprehend what surprises the future may hold. But not only are we not God—as a species, we’re also not in submission to Him. We don’t seek His guidance or His aid, and we don’t follow His instructions. Ignoring the Creator of the world while seeking on a global scale to modify our planet—and even life itself—based on our own wisdom and knowledge, as if we are its creators, can only end one way: by ruining the very life-support system our Creator made and finely tuned to care for us.

Those Days Will Be Shortened

These are just five of the many ways life on Earth could be threatened, as mentioned in Jesus Christ’s prophecy. Of course, humanity is capable of more than one at a time—some would say we’re currently working on all of them. And we haven’t even discussed more speculative challenges such as runaway nanotechnology, the development of mirror-life organisms, and particle-physics experiments that could careen out of control.

But none of these scenarios should cause us to despair, because humanity will not be destroyed by any of them.

Though Jesus warned that “unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved,” He also said that “for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened”! That is marvelous news! Jesus Christ will return to this world to take dominion, assisted by His glorified followers, inaugurating the reign of the Kingdom of God. And the result of that reign will be—due to both miraculous intervention and simply the teaching and enforcing of God’s laws and way of life—a restoration of this world to the condition its Creator always intended.

Many passages in both the Old and New Testaments describe the wonders, sights, and sounds of that remarkable time. Those inspired words of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, offer a vision that has given hope to Jesus Christ’s followers for the last 2,000 years. And we need that vision now more than ever—so we can hold to it and plant its promise of hope firmly in our minds as our world comes ever closer to the brink of total annihilation.

If you’d like to take a tour of that marvelous world before it gets here, request a free copy of The World Ahead: What Will It Be Like? from the Regional Office closest to you or read it online at TomorrowsWorld.org. You can also watch our one-hour video “Christ’s Millennial Reign” on the Tomorrow’s World YouTube channel.