Understanding the direction of world events is an ever more important goal for analysts of various kinds in today's interdependent political and economic structure.

One of the world's wealthiest men attempted such an analysis. It appeared in many newspapers as well as in the pages of Atlantic Monthly. The title of the article was "Towards a Worldwide Open Society." It later formed the basis of a book entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism.

In his analysis, George Soros wrote that the world's economic order has become a global capitalist system. This was not always so, and it brings with it an interesting philosophy and ideas with a number of threats and opportunities. At the turn of the century the imperial powers held the world's economic order in their control. Then they destroyed that order in a cataclysm of world war. Today the system is no longer imperial, but it is no less dominant—and, at the same time, threatened.

Soros has proposed that the answer to the weaknesses of the present system lies in the creation of a global open society to match the global economic structure. A society is more than an economic order. The web of human relationships that can make the economic structure a social entity is underdeveloped. We might say that the global body needs a global "soul." According to Soros, the global marketplace must find a way to accommodate living human beings with all their diversity, their needs and their cultures. It is, of course, an elusive solution to a serious structural problem.

If history is true to its patterns, the markets will go through a major correction when the financial mercury finally falls. Soros believes that the system will go through the predictable cycle of boom and bust. But this veteran of 40 years' experience in the financial markets has also concluded that the system has an inherent weakness and that there are values that ought to form a firmer foundation for global prosperity.

This modern world economic order has some fascinating parallels in the pages of a book that deals in the very kind of values that Soros seeks—not the same precise values to be sure, but universal values nonetheless.

The major objective of this journal is to bring to light the applicability of the Bible to today's world news. Many would not think it possible to identify the concerns of some of today's economic analysts in texts almost 2,000 years old.

Does the following quote sound any familiar bells? "And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore: merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet, every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of ivory, every kind of object of most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble; and cinnamon and incense, fragrant oil and frankincense, wine and oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and bodies and souls of men" (Revelation 18:11–13).

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