It's the End of the World!

     “Repent! The end of the world is nigh! Doom, death, and destruction are at hand!”  I’m sure you can easily picture the dishevelled ‘prophet’ on the streets downtown with his message sharpied onto his cardboard sign, preaching of the coming judgement and destruction.   Imagine if you saw him, but as you came closer, you notice how calm he is.  How his message doesn’t look scribbled and frantic, but instead reads more like the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, written in large, friendly letters: “DON’T PANIC.”

          When reading popular books like the Left Behind series (or, back in the day, Hal Lindsey’s books on prophecy) or watching popular films, Christian and secular, it’s quite natural that many, well, panic.  It seems as though Hollywood hasn’t let a single day pass without at least one end-of-the-world flick being played in the cinemas.  The end of the world no longer seems a murky future, but clearly tomorrow (or maybe The Day After Tomorrow…or maybe in 2012).  It can be easy to panic when the “End Times” (already so often associated with mass destruction, chaos, and terror) begins to become more and more often associated with “Current Times.”

End-times prophecy fuels debates.  It’s great fodder for books (and blogs).  It provides intense sermons.  It makes for good television. With so much hype about it bombarded into our faces from Hollywood, politics, and the Church, could it perhaps be true?  Well something interesting happens when you take the advice of the Guide to not panic (and moreover when you read THE Guide offering Peace beyond understanding), and allow yourself to take a few steps back from everything.  You begin to notice that the dingy, sign-wearing prophets (or clean-shaven pastors and authors) and their new message from God aren’t all that new.  It becomes apparent that they’ve been there a long time. A very long time. You notice that they’ve been preaching it since 2000.  They were preaching it in the 1990s.  They were preaching it in the ‘80s.  They were preaching it in the ‘70s.  They were preaching it in the 1860s.  They were preaching it in the 1550s and at the turn of the first century.  They were preaching it the day after Jesus ascended after His resurrection.

Biblical prophecy is an incredibly hot topic…even for people who don’t believe the Bible.  A popular idea is that the world will get worse and worse until all God’s followers are raptured from the Earth, followed by seven years ruled by the Antichrist when the Great Tribulation will start, and then God will wipe out everyone to establish His kingdom.  This is what is known as the Dispensationalist (admittedly I sometimes jokingly refer to it as ‘sensationalist’) view of prophesy.  From this viewpoint, the prophesies found in the books of Daniel and Revelation take on a sense of mystery and a sort of haziness that appeals to popular ideas of biblical prophecy, with everything slowly building until finally we get to where it all culminates with our generation.  But when we look at history, all the bits of this prophecy that seem hard to explain or even mystical, start to become surprisingly clear.  This leads to the Preterist viewpoint, which interprets much of this prophecy as referring to the period of history going slowly from the time of Daniel until it all culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70 (Daniel 9:26).  Even the ancient Jewish historian Josephus calls this the fulfilment of Daniel’s prophecies.  And it doesn’t get much clearer than when Paul explicitly reveals to us the identity of the “Antichrist” as not a mysterious political figure to come, but as an already present lie that denies the Christhood of Jesus (I John 2 and I John 4).

We see hurricanes and watch candidates from a party other than our own get elected and immediately we know it’s the end of the world.  Every generation since the very start of the Church two-thousand years ago has believed that their time was to be the end of times.  And why not? The Bible does tell us that Christ’s return will be like a sudden thief in the middle of the night and that it could be at any time.  It keeps us on our spiritual toes.  It fuels the urgent and emotional aspect of our Great Commission from Jesus.

But I worry that it may be dangerous to try to differentiate ourselves from the previous generations of Christians; even arrogant.  I simply would not be able to look in the eye of a martyr from the time of Diocletian (or any other martyr from any other time) who saw the mass suffering of God’s people and tell them my generation of heated/air-conditioned churches is the one on the verge of the “Great Tribulation.” In truth, hurricanes have been ravaging coasts since the coasts first came into existence, different parties have been in and out of the White House since America began, the economy has gone up and down, and kingdoms have arisen and kingdoms have fallen.

 I don’t have all the answers and I’m not going to say that dispensationalism is wrong, but I am saying that I often do see fear in people when confronted with a message of such doom and gloom.  God does not desire us to live in fear, but would rather we look to the hope we have through his Son the Prince of Peace.  When I read books such as Daniel and Revelation, though promising temporary trials, be they past, present, or future, I see that the answer to all of this is not eschatology (the study of end-times prophecy), not forty-two (the Hitchhiker’s “answer to life, the universe, and everything”), but God’s eternal love and hope which will one day be ultimately fulfilled when He returns on His own timetable.  It is to be our hope of our lives, not the thing of our fears.