Sometime when someone has been wronged by another, the one doing the wrong eventually suffers a devastating wrong himself or herself. It is often said in these twists of reversed circumstances, “What goes around comes around.” In other words, an intentionally bad thing induced by the wrongdoer circles throughout the ether of human interaction and finally comes back to inflict similar tribulation on the one who initiated the trouble.

Right or wrong, we often experience schadenfreude—enjoyment of other’s misfortune—when that happens. I must confess that, for example, a broad smile of pleasure is one of my failings when I see the political tables turn on those who strive to fundamentally change America and have their efforts fail—and even rebound dramatically to their detriment.

Demonically inspired Eastern religionists and occultists call this situational turn of events “karma.” God’s Word frames this as the results of wrongdoing: “Be sure, your sins will find you out” (Numbers 32:23). In this sense, we might say the Bible is warning that what goes around does, in fact, come around.

God’s book on wisdom addresses, in part, the following in this matter:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:9–11)

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana is given credit for phrasing the warning wrapped up in both the scriptural and the philosophical alerts that say “what goes around comes around”: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This is an explanation I found in researching Santayana.

Santayana is said to have first used the phrase in his book The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, Volume 1 as a warning against repeating past mistakes. The quote is one of academia’s most cited and paraphrased lines, and explains why it’s important to study history. The quote means that if you don’t learn from other people’s mistakes, you are likely to make those same mistakes yourself. For example, in politics, lawmakers’ mistakes can result in [detrimental effects on] tens of thousands of lives, or more.

During this wrap-up of the Age of Grace (Church Age), we’re seeing Santayana’s alert coming to fruition. We are on the cusp of the entire world of God-deniers and anti-God forces coming to suffer the consequences of sin.

The people who reject Jesus Christ for salvation are about to experience “earth’s fatal Santayana moment” in that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The first earth-dwellers to experience cataclysm because they rejected God’s salvation message were, of course, the antediluvians. They felt God’s holy, righteous judgment and wrath begin with the first drops of rain that became a deluge from above and water erupting from the earth below.

The next such catastrophe fell upon the people of the time of the Tower of Babel, when God destroyed their attempt to establish a world totally apart from Heaven’s governance.

The next and final such worldwide calamity because of the rejection of God and His Son will begin its final phase with the event that will be, for believers in Christ, the most glorious adventure imaginable.

The Rapture will snatch millions of Christians into the clouds of Glory while leaving billions of unbelievers behind on a planet about to suffer the worst time of human history. The Rapture will, for these left behind, be “earth’s fatal Santayana moment.”

You don’t have to be one of the billions who will endure this horrific period of human history. Here’s how to be with Christ and the safety of Heaven with God the Father for eternity:

That if you will confess with your mouth the lord Jesus, and will believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9–10)