Of late, a strange alarm has been flowing through Kenyan social media, particularly TikTok, and whether every statistic, anecdote and darker allegation being carried along with it could survive forensic examination is almost beside the immediate point, because the picture emerging from the mouths of the drinkers themselves is extraordinary. Men who appear to have accumulated enough years around bottles to qualify as unwilling field researchers are looking solemnly into their phones and warning fellow imbibers that alcohol in Kenya is no longer what alcohol used to be: “Hii si pombe. Hii ni sumu.” This, they say, is no longer the familiar drink that made a man quarrel with his chair on Saturday night, misplace Sunday and report sheepishly to work on Monday morning. Some describe drinking today and remaining trapped in a stupor for two or even three consecutive days, waking only sufficiently to discover that the calendar has moved on without them. Others paint an even grimmer picture of parts of Central Kenya, claiming that scarcely a homestead remains without a son, brother, husband, uncle or father whom alcohol has reduced from a functioning human being into something approaching zombie-like uselessness, physically present but economically, socially and sometimes mentally absent. Darker voices go further still, alleging that specially concocted alcohol was at one time deliberately directed towards that populous region to weaken it politically because of the numerical weight of its voters. That is a grave allegation requiring evidence and should never be elevated from social-media testimony into established fact merely through repetition. Yet its very circulation tells us something about the atmosphere surrounding the crisis: among some of the drinkers themselves, the bottle is no longer being spoken of merely as an indulgence. It is being spoken of almost as a weapon.
And now, according to the same circulating accounts, whatever poisonous stream may once have been geographically concentrated appears to have discovered both gravity and economics: once there is money downstream, the waters spread. The alleged counterfeiters have apparently discovered that poisoning customers need not interfere with profitability provided enough customers remain alive to buy the next bottle, and so the river is said to be flowing beyond Central Kenya into the rest of the country, carrying with it products whose external appearance can be frighteningly respectable. The bottle looks right. The cap looks right. The label looks right. The colour looks right. The KRA and KEBS markings appear reassuringly official. Everything seems to whisper, Relax, my brother, I have passed through the Republic of Kenya. Then somebody scans what appears to be an authentication code and technology occasionally performs the comedy that human beings have somehow managed to insert into tragedy: your whisky, according to some of these accounts, suddenly introduces itself as a computer, a garment or some entirely unrelated commodity. One is left wondering whether to drink it, wear it or install Windows on it. Yet behind the laughter is a chilling possibility. If imitation can become sufficiently sophisticated to wear the external garments of authenticity, then the consumer may no longer be able to distinguish refreshment from poison by looking at the bottle. Death need not arrive wearing a skull and crossbones. It can come properly sealed, beautifully labelled, tax-stickered and sitting politely on a supermarket shelf.
Little wonder, then, that something approaching an eschatological alarm has broken out among sections of the drinking fraternity itself. Spectacular figures circulate in some videos, with speakers placing counterfeit or illicit alcohol at anything from 60 to 90 percent of what is supposedly available in parts of the market, estimates far too serious to be converted into national statistics without authoritative verification, but alarming enough as evidence of what drinkers themselves now fear. There is an almost comic reversal in the spectacle: people who once had to be warned against alcohol are now warning one another about alcohol. The sermon has apparently migrated from the pulpit to the bar stool. And because Kenyans possess that astonishing national gift of discovering a joke even while standing beside the abyss, somebody has inevitably observed that perhaps the Mijikenda will be among the few communities least troubled by this particular crisis, because some drinkers can still stand beneath the coconut palm, watch their mnazi being tapped before their own eyes and follow its remarkably transparent supply chain all the way to the mangweni, the local drinking joint. No mysterious factory. No sophisticated label. No QR code announcing that today’s palm wine is actually a laptop computer. From tree to container to mangweni: perhaps one of the few supply chains in the republic whose entire audit trail can still be conducted while sitting under the asset that produced the inventory.
Yet beneath all this humour lies something profoundly unsettling. It was while contemplating this strange picture of a poisonous stream, beginning somewhere almost invisibly, gathering commercial tributaries, finding new channels, spreading geographically, carrying its cargo from community to community and leaving damaged human beings along its banks, that another and infinitely larger river came into view. For the more one contemplates the prophetic course of this world, the harder it becomes to see history merely as a disorderly collection of wars, elections, inventions, revolutions, economic crises, cultural upheavals, technological breakthroughs and human ambitions accidentally colliding with one another. There is something profoundly river-like about history itself. Stand beside a great river and what immediately confronts the eye is confusion. Waters twist around rocks, collide with themselves, disappear around bends, gather branches and debris, divide around islands, form whirlpools, burst into rapids and occasionally produce eddies that appear almost defiantly to be travelling backwards. Yet rise high enough above the river and the apparent confusion resolves itself into something altogether different: direction. The whirlpool is not the river. The eddy is not the river. The floating branch is not the river. Beneath all the local turbulence remains one enormous, stubborn fact: the river is going somewhere.
So it is with history. The individual generation may know no more about the ultimate destination of history than an individual drop of water knows about the ocean. Nations rise believing themselves permanent. Empires stride onto the stage announcing that the future belongs to them and eventually leave through the same door through which vanished empires before them departed. Governments change. Borders move. Technologies transform civilization. Economies integrate. Knowledge multiplies. Moral boundaries migrate. What one generation prosecutes, another tolerates; what the second tolerates, the third celebrates; and what the third celebrates, the fourth may eventually compel everyone else to affirm. Meanwhile humanity congratulates itself upon continually entering unprecedented territory, scarcely noticing that Scripture has been standing above the riverbank for millennia describing not every ripple, but the direction of the current. “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). What therefore arrives on our screens this morning as breaking news may, from the vantage point of eternity, be merely another bend in a river whose mouth God saw before its first waters began to flow.
And perhaps there is something deeper still in the metaphor, because dissipation itself possesses something of the character of a river. In the physical world, concentrated energy tends towards dispersal; gradients diminish; ordered arrangements require energy to maintain them; usable differences from which work may be extracted tend towards exhaustion. We must resist the temptation to baptise thermodynamics into theology or to pretend that the second law of thermodynamics is an undiscovered appendix to the Book of Revelation. Yet the analogy remains arresting, particularly because Scripture itself describes creation as having been “made subject to vanity” and tells us that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:20–22). And what occurs physically as dissipation possesses a terrible moral analogue in fallen humanity. Truth disperses into competing truths. Conviction weakens into preference. Restraint dissolves into appetite. Appetite hardens into entitlement. Institutions lose coherence. Boundaries become negotiable. Yesterday’s abomination becomes today’s controversy, today’s controversy becomes tomorrow’s accommodation, and tomorrow’s accommodation becomes the next generation’s orthodoxy. Paul describes precisely such downstream movement when humanity, having known God, “glorified him not as God,” became “vain in their imaginations,” exchanged “the truth of God into a lie,” and was progressively “given up” to the consequences of its own chosen rebellion (Romans 1:21–28). Romans 1 does not merely describe sins scattered across a landscape. Read carefully, it describes a current.
And there lies the paradox that may explain more about our age than many of its individual headlines ever could: energy dissipates physically, humanity dissipates morally, civilizations dissipate institutionally, yet history converges prophetically. From below, everything appears to be coming apart. From above, everything appears to be coming together. The debris scatters, yet the river carrying it grows wider. Tributaries arrive from politics, economics, technology, culture, war, commerce, human appetite and human rebellion, each apparently possessing its own independent explanation, yet increasingly they enter the same great current. The observer standing ankle-deep in one tributary may therefore spend his entire life explaining the chemistry of the water immediately around his feet and never once ask the more consequential question.
Where is the river going? Scripture has been telling us all along that the river has a destination.
Indeed, Scripture itself repeatedly invites us to think of history in terms of movement rather than isolated events. Daniel did not merely see Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome as unrelated geopolitical accidents. He saw succession, progression and destination. One kingdom yielded to another until finally the stone “cut out without hands” struck the great image, shattered the kingdoms represented by it, and became “a great mountain, and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:34–35). Jesus likewise did not give His disciples a miscellaneous scrapbook of future calamities when He spoke of wars, rumours of wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, persecution, deception and apostasy. He placed these things within a movement and warned that “all these are the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew 24:8). Paul similarly spoke of a developing apostasy and the eventual revelation of “that man of sin” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). Revelation then carries the movement to its appointed consummation. Biblical prophecy therefore does not portray history as a drunkard wandering randomly through the night. It portrays history as something astonishingly more like a river, sometimes placid, sometimes turbulent, sometimes apparently diverted, but always moving toward a destination already known to God.
That downstream character is important because civilizations rarely collapse morally in a single spectacular leap. They drift. One restraint is removed here, another conviction diluted there, another inherited truth ridiculed somewhere else, and every concession appears too small to justify alarm. Yet rivers do not reach oceans by leaps either. They arrive through accumulated movement. The water that passes one village appears almost identical to the water that passed the previous village, but eventually the landscape has changed completely. Scripture captures something of this cumulative deterioration when Paul warns that “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13). Notice the motion contained in those words: worse and worse. Jesus similarly speaks of lawlessness multiplying until “the love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12). The prophetic picture is therefore not simply that evil will exist, for evil has existed since Eden. It is that certain tendencies will mature, intensify, accumulate and converge. The river gathers tributaries.
Yet this is precisely where we must make a crucial distinction, lest we confuse the sovereignty of God with the rebellion of man. The river of human history, carrying within it sin, violence, apostasy and judgment, should not simply be called the river of God, because Scripture reserves some of its most magnificent river imagery for something altogether different. “There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4). Ezekiel sees waters issuing from the sanctuary, first to the ankles, then the knees, then the loins, until they become “waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over” (Ezekiel 47:5), and wherever those waters go, life appears. Revelation completes the breathtaking picture with “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). God’s river gives life. The world’s rebellious current produces death. One proceeds from the throne; the other proceeds from fallen human hearts. Yet even the rebellious river cannot escape the banks of divine sovereignty.
Humanity fragments while prophecy converges. Institutions fracture, moral consensus dissolves, information multiplies into billions of competing voices, identities proliferate, authorities weaken and societies increasingly struggle even to agree upon the meaning of words that previous generations considered self-evident. Yet simultaneously, the technological, political, economic and cultural architecture of the planet becomes increasingly interconnected. Knowledge races across continents in seconds. Financial systems communicate instantaneously. Nations that once existed in relative isolation now depend upon one another through networks of trade, information, security, energy and technology. Daniel was told concerning the time of the end that “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4). Whatever precise prophetic boundaries one places around that verse, the spectacle of a civilization simultaneously fragmenting internally while integrating externally is extraordinary.
Perhaps this explains why the prophetic landscape can sometimes appear strangely uneventful to those living inside it. Nobody standing in a river experiences “the river” as an abstraction. He experiences the water immediately around his legs. Likewise, generations experience inflation, war, elections, artificial intelligence, social upheaval, digital currencies, surveillance technologies, pandemics, geopolitical realignments and cultural revolutions as separate events requiring separate explanations. And indeed they usually possess immediate political, economic and technological explanations. Biblical sobriety requires us not to stamp PROPHECY FULFILLED upon every newspaper headline. Jesus expressly warned against premature excitement: “See that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet” (Matthew 24:6). Yet refusing sensationalism does not require refusing pattern. A person can examine every wave individually and still miss the tide.
Ecclesiastes provides perhaps the most haunting river image of all: “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again” (Ecclesiastes 1:7). The Preacher looks upon the relentless circulation of creation and sees both movement and repetition. Generations come and generations go. Human beings announce new eras, new systems, new philosophies and new emancipations, yet beneath the vocabulary the ancient rebellion continues. Babel changes architecture but not ambition. Pharaoh changes uniform but not appetite for control. Nebuchadnezzar changes throne but not human pride. The serpent changes vocabulary but not question: “Yea, hath God said?” (Genesis 3:1). Civilization develops astonishing machinery while carrying an ancient heart downstream.
Yet Scripture refuses to permit us to mistake repetition for endlessness. Biblical history is not a wheel condemned to rotate forever. It has a beginning, a centre and an appointed end. Creation begins it, Christ divides it, and Christ will consummate it. God declares “the end from the beginning” and says, “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure” (Isaiah 46:10). Human beings may build dams, redirect channels, construct ideological embankments and announce that history has finally submitted to their engineering, but “the counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations” (Psalm 33:11). Even the rebellion of nations cannot surprise Him. Psalm 2 almost laughs at the spectacle: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” Kings assemble, rulers take counsel together, humanity flexes its political muscles against the Lord and His Anointed, and heaven’s response is devastating in its serenity: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh” (Psalm 2:4). The river may rage, but God has never fallen into it.
This also guards us against another mistake: imagining divine sovereignty to mean that every human action is divinely approved. Joseph’s brothers intended evil, yet God could say through the eventual outcome, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20). The crucifixion itself provides the supreme demonstration. Herod, Pontius Pilate, Gentiles and Israelites acted through genuine human wickedness, yet the apostles could say that they accomplished what God’s “hand and...counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:27–28). Here sovereignty reaches its staggering biblical depth. God does not need evil to become good before He can overrule it. He can permit rebellious currents to run while remaining perfectly holy and still bring history exactly where His counsel appointed. The creatures paddle furiously; Providence governs the river.
And perhaps the closer history approaches its appointed destination, the more important it becomes to distinguish speed from significance. A river approaching rapids may accelerate. Developments that once required centuries can occur within decades; those that required decades within years; those that required years within months. Technologies increasingly amplify one another. Information produces more information. Networks strengthen networks. Cultural changes cross borders almost instantly. Yet the Christian must resist both panic and sleep. Jesus commands neither newspaper hysteria nor prophetic indifference. He says, “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matthew 24:42). Watching is not date-setting. Watching is disciplined wakefulness. It is the capacity to observe the current without being swept spiritually unconscious by it.
For there is something particularly dangerous about travelling downstream while believing oneself stationary. The generation before the Flood “were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” until the day Noah entered the ark (Matthew 24:38). None of those activities was inherently extraordinary. That is precisely the point. The decisive prophetic moment approached under the camouflage of ordinary life. Jesus says they “knew not until the flood came, and took them all away” (Matthew 24:39). Noah saw the same sky, walked the same earth and lived among the same people, but he possessed information from outside the immediate visible environment. Faith therefore enabled him to interpret the present in light of a future God had already spoken. Hebrews says that Noah, “being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark” (Hebrews 11:7). Prophecy functions similarly. It allows those standing inside the river of time to know something about where the river is going.
The ultimate biblical picture, however, is not one of God’s people desperately clinging to branches while history plunges uncontrollably toward darkness. Scripture ends neither with Babylon nor Antichrist, neither apostasy nor Armageddon, neither beast nor dragon. It ends with a throne. It ends with a city. It ends with God dwelling among His people. And astonishingly, it ends with a river: “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). The Bible begins beside rivers watering Eden and ends beside the river of life in the New Jerusalem. Between those rivers flows the turbulent history of fallen humanity, carrying empires, civilizations, rebellions, revivals, persecutions, inventions, catastrophes and generations toward their appointed reckoning. Yet above the entire course stands the One who declared Himself “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending” (Revelation 1:8).
So perhaps the great prophetic question of our age is not merely, What is happening? Every generation asks that question. Nor is it merely, Who is responsible? Politics will provide an endless supply of candidates. The deeper question is: Where is the current going? For individual events can deceive us precisely because they are individual. A ripple tells little about a river. An eddy may even appear to reverse its direction. But stand high enough, look long enough, and the course becomes visible. Scripture gives us that higher ground. And from there an extraordinary picture emerges: humanity dissipating even as history converges, rebellion multiplying even as divine purpose advances, the world apparently becoming less ordered even as the prophetic destination becomes more discernible. The waters are moving. The tributaries are joining. The current appears to be deepening. And somewhere beyond the bends that remain hidden from human sight stands the throne from which proceeds the only river that will finally matter, the river of the water of life. History is not wandering into an unknown sea. It is moving toward an appointment. And the God who was present at its source is already waiting at its destination.