Nuclear apocalypse bunker offers resort-sized swimming pool: Our perennial fears and God’s transforming grace

This headline caught my eye: “This luxury nuclear apocalypse bunker has a swimming pool, movie theater, and sauna.”

The Survival Condo is a luxury condominium complex comprised of fifteen floors and reaching two hundred feet below the ground. It is located roughly two hundred miles from Kansas City. Retrofitted with nine-foot reinforced concrete walls, its renovators claim it can withstand a twelve-kiloton nuclear warhead being dropped half a mile away.

For $1,000,000, plus an additional monthly $2,500, you can enjoy a resort-sized swimming pool, complete with a waterslide, as well as a rock-climbing wall and a shooting range. There’s also a classroom and library, a cinema, and a bar.

The facilities are powered by five redundant energy sources. A hydroponic system allows for fresh fruit and vegetables to extend the vast preserved food supply.

We often hear comments regarding the challenging uniqueness of these days. We’ve not faced a pandemic, recession, political turmoil, and racial unrest at the same time. But the Survival Condo reminds us that ours is not the first generation to deal with frightening challenges.

God’s grace is still relevant

I am old enough to remember my parents’ fears during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The threat of nuclear annihilation became very real during the Cold War and remains today.

Polio outbreaks caused more than thirty-five thousand cases of paralysis a year before vaccines became available in 1955. Parents were afraid to let their children go outside; quarantines were imposed; travel and commerce between affected cities were restricted.

Smallpox was a grave threat in colonial America, so much so that George Washington ordered the inoculation of all men in the Continental Army in 1777. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed at least fifty million people worldwide. The 1957–58 influenza pandemic killed at least one million people globally.

My point is that each generation can easily believe that our problems and challenges are unprecedented in scope and scale. While our issues may be unique in some ways, they are part of the history of life on this fallen planet. When Adam and Eve fell in the Garden, pain and suffering were the consequence for them (Genesis 3:16–19) and for us as well (Romans 8:22).

The fact that our fallen human nature does not change is paradoxically good news for our souls. It means that God’s word is just as relevant today as when it was first inspired and revealed to us. The Bible is still “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

It means that God’s grace is just as relevant as when it was offered to our first parents (cf. Genesis 3:21). Our Father loves you and me just as much as he loved Abraham, Moses, Daniel, or the apostles.

And it means that God’s path to redemption and hope is just as transformative as when it led the first believers to faith in Christ. If Jesus could turn Saul of Tarsus from the church’s great persecutor to its global missionary, he can use anyone in his kingdom advance.

You may not be afraid of nuclear holocaust today, but something is burdening your heart and spirit. Name your fear, worry, temptation, or challenge. Bring it to your Father’s unchanging love and claim his unchanging mercy.

Then ask him to make you his ambassador to your fallen culture (2 Corinthians 5:20). Everyone you know needs the Christ who knows and loves you.