On one hand, we seem to be irrevocably drawn to the apocalyptic, end-of-the-world stuff, especially in movies. apocalypticmovies.com lists 61 apocalyptic movies since the year 2000. In his article, “It’s the End of the World, and We Love It,” Mark Moring says, “We are divinely wired to wonder what comes next.”1
Every now and then, this deep hunger for knowing the future leads people to make some outrageous claims. Just a few months ago, an 89 year old American radio guy named Harold Camping hosted a huge campaign - with public billboards, radio slots, news footage, and mobile bus advertisements - saying Jesus was coming back at exactly 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
That kind of error-based fear-building has given many people a distaste for eschatology. Many of us would rather just put our heads down and live today, one day at a time. Some folks just want to forget the future.
But eschatology is still really important. It’s the closing chapter of our human story. In fact, nearly all of the New Testament - and really the whole Bible - is forward looking. From the Biblical perspective, the future is holding our hand and pulling us into its reality.
The problem with understanding the future is that it isn’t here yet. As much as the Bible is forward-leaning, as much as Christianity views us as being pulled into the future, there aren’t many details.
Christians are deeply committed to the future, though. We have a few absolute beliefs about the future.
The Apostle’s Creed says: “We believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord ... he will come again to judge the living and the dead... We believe in ... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”
The Nicene Creed says: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ ... He will come again to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. ... We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
The Church of the Nazarene pretty much follows these creeds in our statement of faith: “We believe ... that our Lord will return, the dead will be raised, and the final judgment will take place.”
There are four basic eschatological concepts on which all Christians agree. Each concept shows up in dozens of places in the Bible, but I’ll give you a sample text for each one.
Jesus’ Second Coming. Jesus will come again. We aren’t sure how. We aren’t sure when. But Jesus IS coming back. “Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go” (Acts 1:11).
Resurrection. Death is not the end. We will be raised again. Jesus said, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned” (John 5:28-29).
Judgement. Everyone everywhere will be judged according to how we have lived and how we have responded to God’s grace. “People are destined to die once, and after that, to face judgement” (Hebrews 9:27).
Restoration. The end of this world is not the end. One day, God will make everything right. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. ... Look, God’s home is now among his people! ... He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever” (Revelation 21:1-4).
Second coming, resurrection, judgment, and restoration - all Christians everywhere agree on these four points. We know Jesus will come back. We know we will be raised. We know we will face judgment. We know God will make everything right. But beyond these four things, we don’t know very much about the future.
There are all kinds of discussions and debates. Some of these debates revolve around a few key words.
People have all kinds of different opinions about heaven and hell. (We’ll save that for next week.)
Revelation 20 talks about a thousand year period (the millennium), and scholars ask: Will Jesus come back before the millennium or after the millennium? Or is the millennium just a metaphor, not an actual 1,000 years?
In Matthew 24, Jesus talks about a period of tribulation - a time of suffering before he returns. But there is all kinds of debate about when this tribulation will happen and whether Christians will experience it or be taken to heaven before it happens - or at least before it really gets bad.
The Church of the Nazarene has resolutely refused to take sides on these debatable issues. In the early 1900s, when various Christian groups were merging to make the Church of the Nazarene, some groups wanted us to take a clear stance one way or the other, but as a church we said, “No.” We don’t take stances on debatable issues. We give people room to have different opinions about lots of things, especially things that aren’t clear in the Bible. Our statement of belief on this point is simple: “We believe ... that our Lord will return, the dead will be raised, and the final judgment will take place” (Manual 26.8).
So given these basics, how does it all play out? What are the basic ideas of how the end will go? As I understand it, there are two popular views of eschatology these days. Roughly speaking, I think we can call these two views rapture and restoration.
I grew up with Rapture-Eschatology. In my church, we watched the Left Behind movie, and we were all duly scared that we too might be left behind. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins made millions telling a fictionalized account of this view. This view mostly builds on the theology of the USA in the 1800’s. Here’s the basic concept of the Rapture-Eschatology.
Long, long, long ago, God made a good world. But ever since, we humans have been messing it up. In fact our world just seems to be getting worse and worse. Sin is spreading and getting worse all over the world. And, that’s just how it’s going to go. Our world is going to get more and more messed up until Jesus comes back.
In the meantime, Christians have two basic jobs: (1) Hold on. Don’t give up. Don’t let this evil world corrupt you. (2) Try to get more people to trust in Jesus before it’s too late.
Then, at some point, God is going to push the eject button for the Christians. Jesus is going to rapture all the real Christians out of earth before life gets really bad in the tribulation. If you don’t get the early ticket out through Jesus, you’ve got to endure all hell breaking loose on earth. Basically, you’ll wish you were dead. Then, finally, God will end everything in a huge storm of fire - maybe through a global nuclear war. After that, we get whatever is next - heaven or the millennium, depending on your local variety of rapture-ism.
It’s kind of like our world is this piece of paper, and humans are little stick figures moving around and basically messing things up. Before things get really, really bad, God sucks out all the Christians and lets everyone else mess up the earth even more. Then, when he’s had enough, God takes the whole piece of paper, crumples it up, throws it in the fire, and starts over when a clean piece of paper.
Over the past decade or so, lots of scholars and young people have really knocked Rapture-Eschatology, but I think we haven’t been entirely fair. Lots of texts in the Bible lean in the basic direction of this view point. For example, listen to 2 Peter 3:
3 Most importantly, I want to remind you that in the last days scoffers will come, mocking the truth and following their own desires. 4 They will say, “What happened to the promise that Jesus is coming again? From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created.”
5 They deliberately forget that God made the heavens by the word of his command, and he brought the earth out from the water and surrounded it with water. 6 Then he used the water to destroy the ancient world with a mighty flood. 7 And by the same word, the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire. They are being kept for the day of judgment, when ungodly people will be destroyed.
8 But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. 9 The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent. 10 But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment.
11 Since everything around us is going to be destroyed like this, what holy and godly lives you should live, 12 looking forward to the day of God and hurrying it along. On that day, he will set the heavens on fire, and the elements will melt away in the flames. 13 But we are looking forward to the new heavens and new earth he has promised, a world filled with God’s righteousness.
This Rapture-Eschatology has some strong points. First, this viewpoint grasps that the hope of humanity is beyond us. We can’t fix our own problems. We need help from outside. God’s radical action is our only hope to get us out of this mess we’ve made.
Second, for Christians who are oppressed and persecuted and weighed down by life, Rapture-Eschatology can bring a lot of hope and comfort. The people who abuse and mistreat us will get what they deserve in the end. One day, this world and all its powers will go up in smoke, and God will take care of the judgment. We just need to hold on and wait for our home in that new heaven and new earth.
But Rapture-Eschatology also has some weak points. First, it misses the Kingdom of God. Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God some 71 times, and for Jesus this Kingdom of God can start happening right now in this world - with people who learn to live life God’s way. But for Rapture-Eschatology, this world just gets worse and worse.
Another big problem with Rapture-Eschatology is that its basic concept is Christians escaping suffering. Jesus pulls us out before the suffering gets really bad. But that’s not what most of the Bible teaches, and that’s not Christian experience. Ask Christians who fought the lions if God pulled them out. Ask Christians in North Korea how their tribulation is coming.
Lastly, a one-sided Rapture Eschatology leads to escapism. Jesus told us to pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” But Rapture-Eschatology has no concept of heaven coming to earth. Rapture-Eschatology is all about escaping from earth to get to heaven. If our world is going down in a raging storm of evil, the best we can hope for is to build a Christian fortress and get as many people to trust in Jesus before this place goes in the flames. This can lead people to focus only on eternal salvation: “Are you going to heaven? Because that’s all that matters.” Unfortunately, some Christians going down this path have neglected this world, our environment, and the poor. To outsiders they seem to be religious nuts who just want to convert more fanatics.
In response to this overemphasis on Rapture-Eschatology, Restoration-Eschatology has slowly become more popular. Some of its big advocates are N.T. Wright and Rob Bell, and much of this tradition builds on Eastern Christianity. Here’s the basic concept for Restoration-Eschatology.
God created a good world. We sinned. We messed up our world, but much of that original goodness still remains. It may be buried under layers of dirt and pollution, but underneath it all, there is a core of goodness.
The whole point of Israel was to reclaim God’s lost humanity and to restore God’s broken creation. Jesus came as the climax of this movement of restoration. Jesus was the Second Adam, the first fruits of the New Creation. When Jesus died and was raised again, God started a new era of restoration and recreation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The church becomes an outpost of heaven. We are like citizens of heaven who have set up a heavenly colony in this foreign land called earth. Together, we live the life of heaven - love, joy, peace, patience, sharing, generosity, hospitality. In our community together, we demonstrate and embody the life of heaven.
Then, slowly, our new creation starts to spread. We begin the process of rehabilitating our broken world. We plant trees. We reclaim garbage dumps. We show love to the broken and forgotten, and together we are all transformed into more of the new creation that God has always longed for us to be. Slowly, we become more and more heaven-like in our life together and in our influence in the world.
All of this continues, until finally, heaven comes to earth. Jesus comes back and raises all the dead and establishes his new kingdom where the lion lays down with the lamb, and all people live in loving brotherhood.
So basically, this view is that our present age is like this two-dimensional picture. We think this is all there is, but really there’s this whole other world out there. There’s this 3-D Kingdom of God just waiting to break in, and the Kingdom of God - or eternal life - is designed to flow through our world like light through glass. So our job is to make space for God’s eternal life to reclaim our world and to shine eternity through our finite world. We keep cleaning off the mess and poking holes in the darkness until finally, God shines his amazing light through every corner of our world.
This is obviously a beautiful picture, full of Biblical imagery. Listen for example to Isaiah 11, a prophecy about the Messiah:
1 Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot
— yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root.
2 And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
3 He will delight in obeying the Lord.
He will not judge by appearance nor make a decision based on hearsay.
4 He will give justice to the poor and make fair decisions for the exploited. ...
6 In that day the wolf and the lamb will live together; the leopard will lie down with the baby goat. The calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion ... 9 Nothing will hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for as the waters fill the sea, so the earth will be filled with people who know the Lord.
10 In that day the heir to David’s throne will be a banner of salvation to all the world. The nations will rally to him, and the land where he lives will be a glorious place.
Restoration-Eschatology affirms God’s great love for humanity and for all of creation. It is thoroughly optimistic and hopeful. It encourages us to engage our world, to challenge injustice, and to join God’s mission of healing our world. If you’ve heard me preach, you know I resonate deeply with this view.
However, this view also has some problems. It’s hard to tell exactly how Jesus’ second coming factors in. And if earth is transformed into the new earth, where do all the resurrected people go? And what happens to people who reject God and God’s ways of love, where do they all go? The Bible talks an awful lot about judgment and justice at the end of time. How does that factor in? Also, some proponents of this view can basically forget all about God and just work like caring atheists with Christian name-tags.
Lastly, this view struggles to deal with the fact that evil seems to win out a whole bunch of the time. Somehow what we do builds toward God’s restoration, but in the end, it seems like God is going to have to do something drastic to make everything right again.
So Rapture-Eschatology and Restoration-Eschatology ... Both have support in the Bible. Both make sense in their own way. Both have weaknesses when they are taken to extremes. Maybe they are both true - in a paradoxical, very biblical sort of way.
Here is the Gospel - the good news of Jesus Christ. God made a good world. We walked away. We messed our world up. God began the restoration process with Israel, but God did something completely new in Jesus. God made a new humanity in Christ. Now God invites us into that new humanity to join the recreation process in our world.
But our help will not be enough. We can’t do this on our own. We’re going to lose a lot of battles - maybe more than we win. But justice is coming. There will come a day when God will end the battle. Jesus will come back. In some places, the Bible says, God will roll up our world like a worn out rug, and in other places it says God will recreate us like an abandoned garden returning to life. We don’t know exactly how that will work out, but we know that God will make everything right.
You know how when you’re reading a really good book and you’re watching a really good movie, you’re sitting on the edge of your seat. There are all of these strings of the plot. The tension is thick. You can’t figure out how it’s all going to end. How can all of these widely divergent pieces of the story come together in one coherent whole? You just want the story to work out so that everything makes sense and feels right and good. What’s going to happen? How will it all work out?
And then, it happens. In the last five minutes of the story, all the pieces start coming together. There is that epiphany moment, where the story just falls into place. The tension is resolved. The crisis is solved. Suddenly, this story that was full of conflict and fear and worry and danger is now resolved into a peaceful and fulfilling whole. Ahh, yes, that makes sense. That is the perfect ending.
God promises us a perfect ending. God promises a perfect ending to our world. Our world is full of conflict and fear and worry. There are so many pieces of the story that are just out there lost in the darkness, and we can’t imagine how they will all come together. The Bible gives us a clue to the ending.
It all works out. Through Jesus, it all works out. Jesus will come again. The dead will be raised. There will be a judgment day. And God will make everything right. It’s the perfect ending.
We can’t fully understand it now because it’s not the end of the story yet. But the Bible’s message is simple, “Don’t worry. Trust Jesus. Live for Jesus now in the middle of the story. He’s got the perfect ending.”
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