Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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How It Ends, Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

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Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance

God has shown us a glimpse or two of how this life transitions to the eternal. The details are sketchy, but the overall picture is clear: we have perfect fellowship with the infinitely, eternally, unchangeably good God, and we serve him meaningfully and perfectly, having shed our personal flaws and having entered an unbroken cosmos. In the meantime, the Scripture tells us, we endure the difficulties of the present broken world because we are eagerly anticipating what is to come.

But we’re not just hanging on, waiting for the good stuff. And we’re not just passive, waiting for God to do what he’s promised.

There’s good stuff now. Lots of it. And there’s work to be done—joyously, effectively, redemptively.

Jesus himself told us how our energy should be directed during these days of anticipation.

Shortly before his death, he told a story about a nobleman who “went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then return” (Lk 19.12). He gathered his servants, gave them resources, and said, “Do business with these until I come back” (Lk 19.13).

Our more familiar KJV renders that statement, “Occupy till I come.” The less formal NIV says, “Put this money to work until I come back.”

And the story ends with two servants being rewarded, on his return, for their diligence, and one being condemned for being more concerned with security than productivity.

Did Jesus intend for this story to guide our time as we wait for his return?

You think?

Jesus set the example himself. As a boy of twelve—too young to be a rabbi, at a time too early for the death his Father had planned for him—he wasn’t playing the 1st-century equivalent of video games. He was about his Father’s business. When the family was in Jerusalem—as it likely was at least three times a year, for the pilgrimage feasts—he headed for his Father’s house. And he was surprised that his parents didn’t think to look for him there first.

The Father’s business.

The Father has invested in all of his people, in different ways. We’re all good at something—some of us at many things—and we can do those things for him, and his work, and his people. There’s great joy in doing something well; God has kindly set up the world so that our greatest joy is in doing well those things for which we are gifted—and thereby accomplishing his work, showing all who see us the glories of the invisible God.

I started life on a little family farm. There’s great satisfaction in working hard all day and then seeing the visible results of your labor—the plowing, the planting, the irrigating, the weeding, the piles of harvested corn, the shucked ears hanging to dry, the ground corn meal, the well-fed cattle, the milk, the butter, the cheese, the beef. Every day there’s a new opportunity for the joy of accomplishment and the visible and tasty fruits of your labor.

This week is Thanksgiving in the USA—the meal that takes hours to prepare and more hours to clean up after, but that lasts, seemingly, just 15 minutes. Yet we all know it’s worth it—not just for the 15 minutes of turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, but for the shared experience and fellowship.

How much more is our lifetime of preparation for the eternal feast worth it? Even in the preparation there’s joy of visible accomplishment—changed lives, examples of mercy and grace—and joy of fellowship, working together toward a goal that’s bigger than all of us.

When The Day arrives, his servants shall serve him (Re 22.3).

Better get some practice.

20 The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
21 The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen (Re 22.20-21).

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How It Ends, Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance

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Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation

We live now in the confident expectation of Christ’s certain return.

But in spite of that bright light at the end of the tunnel, we do indeed live in a tunnel, and roses don’t grow in tunnels. The Bible has more to say about how we live as we anticipate The Light.

After lambasting those of his day who hold all the social power and oppress those who don’t (Jam 5.1-6), James turns to the unempowered—which in those days included the Christians—and says,

7 Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. 8 Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh (Jam 5.7-8).

Be patient, he says. This is the word used to describe Abraham’s waiting—for years—for a son through Sarah (He 6.15). It’s the word used to describe the Lord’s waiting for us to come to repentance (2P 3.9).  It’s the first word listed in the virtues of love (1Co 13.4).

You know people like this. You’re all torqued about something, and in a frenzy, and there’s that old guy who’s just sitting calmly, at peace, in stark contrast to your gesticulations, your full-bore linear panic. And when the panic has passed and the chaos has settled, it becomes obvious that the old guy had the sensible response—usually because this isn’t his first rodeo. It’s those with long experience who are in a position to “keep calm and carry on”—to focus on executing the fundamentals when it looks like the other team is just going to run up the score. To be the tortoise rather than the hare.

The illustration James chooses for this characteristic is the farmer. He prepares the soil, and then plants the seed, and then prays for rain.

And then waits.

Most of us, being continental Americans, are used to four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter. In much of the world, however, particularly the tropics, there are just two seasons: dry and rainy. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in equatorial countries (Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania) where the temperature—and the day length—hardly changes at all. What changes is the precipitation. In the dry season, we’ll go weeks with no rain. In the rainy season, we hardly ever miss a day of rain. If we’re doing work in the bush villages, we have to plan to avoid the rainy season, because the dirt roads will be completely impassable with mud.

Israel’s not tropical, but it does have a Mediterranean climate, where summers are warm and dry and winters are mild and wet. The first, or “early,” rains of the rainy season normally arrive right after the Feast of Booths (Sukkoth) in the fall, allowing the farmers to prepare the soil for the spring planting. The “latter” rains show up after planting, around Passover in the spring, and precipitate (pun absolutely intended) the growth of the crops.

If you’re a farmer, you can’t make it rain; you just follow the seasonal pattern, do your job, and hope this year’s precipitation is normal.

James tells us to think like the farmer.

We actually have a better deal. The farmer doesn’t know for sure that the rain will come as it usually does; droughts do happen. But we know that the Lord is surely returning, though we can’t predict the timing.

And yes, it takes longer than a few months. So far it’s taken close to 2000 years, and for all we know, it could take 100,000 more. (Yes, it could be today; but I’ve long ago lost patience [heh, heh] with the hyperbolic date-setting exploiters.)

And so we wait.

But not idly.

More on that next time.

Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How It Ends, Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation

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Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then

If we’re living with the end in mind—an eternity living in intimate fellowship with God, and serving him perfectly—then how do we live now? What are our priorities?

Like all the most important questions, the Bible answers this one clearly. I’d like to offer three passages where the New Testament addresses the answer.

Anticipate with Confidence

In his last recorded words to his protégé Titus, whom he left on the island of Crete to oversee the churches there (Ti 1.5), Paul gives him some imperatives designed to last him for life:

11 For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, 12 Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; 13 Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; 14 Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works (Ti 2.11-15).

Some of this he has said often elsewhere: in light of God’s grace to us (Ti 2.11), we should live seriously and righteously (Ti 2.12). No surprises there.

But then he adds a descriptor, a participle, that applies specifically to what we’ve been discussing; he says we are to “look for” Jesus’ return, the event that distinguishes the present age from the next, the event to which life as we know it points. This verb describes Simeon and Anna, and indeed all the Jews of their day, living under the bondage of Rome and the hated Roman puppet Herod the Great, as they anticipated and longed for the day when they would be liberated once more (Lk 2.25, 38). It describes Joseph of Arimathea, who as a member of the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of Israel, had not consented to the council’s condemnation of Jesus and then risked his career by asking Pilate for custodianship of the body of the crucified “blasphemer” (Mk 15.43; Lk 23.51)—a body that in the eyes of the council should be thrown out in the trash with the bodies of the other two miscreants. Joseph’s most noteworthy characteristic, in the eyes of the two Evangelists, is that he “was waiting for the kingdom of God.”

That’s our verb. That’s how we’re supposed to be thinking and living—“looking for” Jesus’ return. Or, as Paul calls it here, “that blessed hope.” I’ve noted before that biblical hope is different from how we use the word today. To us, hope is something we wish for. Maybe it’s likely, maybe it’s not; as is evident from the size of the jackpots, millions of people buy lottery tickets in the forlorn hope that one day they’ll hit the big one. Some wag has observed that a public lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. They hope, many of them fervently, even religiously. But if their dreams come true, they’ll be more surprised than anyone else.

That’s not biblical hope. Hope is the anticipation of a certain future event. It’s the president-elect waiting for Inauguration Day; it’s the senior who’s just passed all his final exams; it’s the engaged couple focused intently on the coming June Saturday.

This is not wishing; it’s explosive, confident anticipation. It’s taking the future to the bank.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the future. It may hold financial setbacks, or job loss, or terminal disease, or sudden, violent death. We don’t know what life will be like for our children and grandchildren, should the Lord tarry. Even as we study prophecy, we don’t know—for sure—when Jesus will return, or when it will be in relation to the Tribulation, or what the Millennium will be like, or which ZIP Code of the New Jerusalem we’ll occupy, or what we’ll do with our time—or the absence of it.

So many unanswered questions.

But this we do know.

Jesus is coming back. For us. And for justice. And for eternal day.

Anticipate, with confidence.

Next time, more ways to live as we anticipate.

Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

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How It Ends, Part 2: Anticipating the Then

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Part 1: Taking the Long View

I noted last time that there’s quite a bit of biblical material about the millennium. Assuming that the millennial passages should be taken with a reasonable amount of ordinary hermeneutic, this period will be characterized by

Our knowledge of the eternal state, however, is much less extensive. Most of it is confined to the last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21-22. The environment portrayed there seems to have two outstanding characteristics:

Perfect fellowship with God

God and the Lamb light the whole city (Re 21.23)—and likely the whole world, given that “the nations will walk by its light” (Re 21.24). Recall that at the Transfiguration, Jesus’ garments shone whiter than any launderer could bleach them (Mk 9.3); that Paul was blinded by Jesus’ heavenly glory (Ac 9.8-9, 18); and that when Jesus’ closest friend, John, saw him glorified, he fell at his feet (Re 1.17).

But there, all the barriers—sin, distance, visibility—will be removed. You and I are going to enjoy the open, intimate, personal presence of the Godhead.

Perfect service for God

There we will be in a position to worship God perfectly; we’re told that “his servants will worship him” (Re 22.3), in a time when we have bodies like Christ’s resurrected body (Php 3.21), and we will be like him in other ways as well (1Jn 3.2).

We worship him today, both in private and in public, but our worship is dented by our sinfulness, by distraction, by limitations of imagination and creativity, and by all sorts of other factors. Yet even in this broken state worship is highly satisfying, both to us and to God.

I recall attending church a few years ago in Arad, Israel, with a small Messianic Jewish congregation. They met in a house on Shabbat. As I entered, a young lady just inside the door asked, “What language?” When I answered, “English,” she twisted a knob on a small black box and handed it to me with a set of headphones. I entered the living room and sat down with 30 or 40 other people seated close together.

The preacher began speaking—in Hebrew—but I heard a live translation in English. As I looked around the room, I noticed that most had on headphones, but a handful had microphones as well, and they were speaking softly as the sermon continued. I learned afterward that translations were available in German, French, Spanish, Arabic, and a North African tribal language as well as English.

I couldn’t help thinking that this was a delightful foretaste of glory divine, of the day when every kingdom, tongue, tribe, and nation will be gathered around the throne, singing and shouting the praise of the Lion of Judah, the Lamb who was slain (Re 7.9ff).

Even here, worship can be delightful.

But there, there, all those limitations will be done away. We will worship him purely and completely, and we will serve him perfectly and successfully as well.

What will that service look like? Will there be white-collar and blue-collar jobs? Will there be physical kinds of service as well as spiritual? Will God send us shooting off through the regenerated universe on missions of importance to the accomplishing of his will?

All good questions; thanks for asking them. But by God’s choice—and his grace—we don’t know the answers. All we know is that we will serve him—and serve him perfectly.

So that means—to put it in absurdly simple terms—that everything’s going to turn out just fine.

And that presents us with a question: What do we do in the meantime? How do we think? How do we make decisions? How do we feel?

How do we live?

More on that next time.

Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How It Ends, Part 1: Taking the Long View

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It’s human nature to focus on the Now.

Sometimes that looks like shallowness: the magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store, the obsession with celebrities, many of whom are famous for nothing more than being famous.

Sometimes it looks like self-centeredness: hoarding, the manic grasping for whatever’s right in front of you, from Tickle Me Elmo to toilet paper, before somebody else gets it.

Sometimes it looks like fear, or even despair, over the state of the world, the suffering of so many, wave after wave of insoluble problems.

There’s a difference between stewardship—doing your best to approach life’s problems sensibly and successfully—and nearsightedness. From driving a car to inhabiting the C suite in a multinational corporation, we know that it’s unwise to obsess over the immediate or to downplay the long-term view.

It’s wise to proceed with the end in mind.

For the Christian, that means staying focused on the certain divine victory.

There are many who scoff at such things. It’s pie in the sky. It’s how the empowered and privileged manipulate the masses into not revolting and casting off exploitation.

I’m not for the empowered and privileged manipulating the masses into not revolting and casting off exploitation; the prophets talk a lot about that, and Jesus speaks to it as well. But I would argue that thinking eschatologically is not in fact pie in the sky, and it’s not properly used to manipulate the unempowered.

It’s not only a worthwhile occasional exercise; it’s the only way of life that makes any sense.

I’ve written here before on the difficulty of developing an eschatological system, because the prophetic genre is inherently and intentionally clouded; God intends that the prediction not be fully understood until it is fulfilled. I speculate that one reason he might do that is so that the outcome—and the accuracy of the prediction—would have maximum impact on the audience. If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to figure out a puzzle for centuries, then the resolution is going to hit you like a ton of bricks.

That’s essentially what educators call discovery learning, and in my experience it’s the most impactful kind. When a student learns something for himself, he considers it his own personal property, and he’ll remember and use it for a long time—often for the rest of his life.

But even though interpreting the Bible’s eschatological material is difficult, and even though we’re unlikely to figure it all out ahead of time, and even though we have to come to our conclusions humbly, it’s still worth studying the material—first, because it’s Bible, and going to the metaphorical gym in your study of Scripture is a means of grace, building spiritual muscle in you; and second, because in this area of theology, as in all others, God has made the important stuff, the stuff necessary for now, clear enough. There are some things of which we can be certain.

I’d like to spend a few posts investigating how it all ends. There are significant arguments, as we would expect, over the path we follow to get there, and when that will happen, but the main truths of how it ends are pretty clear. And thus it’s equally clear how we should live now in light of where we’re headed.

I’ll note that while there’s quite a bit of biblical material on what we call the millennium, that material suffers from the same clarity problem that other prophecy does. Bible students can’t agree on whether the millennium is real or symbolic; whether it lasts a thousand years or something else; whether it’s in heaven or on earth; or even whether Christ is visibly ruling or not.

I’ll note that I have an opinion on all this—I’m premillennial, and I have what I think are good reasons for holding that position—but if it turns out that God has some other approach in mind, I’m not going to be overly surprised, and I’m not going to go all Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Mt 16.22-23) and try to change his mind.

So my concern in this series isn’t the millennium; I’ll let the millennium take care of the things of itself. I want to look at the very end, after everybody’s eschatological system has been either confirmed or, more likely, corrected. What then?

We have very little biblical material on that—what theologians call the eternal state, and what most people refer to, accurately or not, as “heaven.”

Next time we’ll see what we can wisely discern from that little bit of material.

Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

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Living in the Brightest Light, Part 4: Occupy Till He Comes

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Part 1Part 2Part 3

Thus far in our brief look into 2 Thessalonians, we’ve noted that when Christ returns, God’s going to right all the wrongs, and that he’s going to bring history to an end in his own good time, according to his plan and timetable.

So what to we do in the meantime? In the last post we saw a very brief statement of that, in 2Thess 2.15—we need to continue holding on to what we’ve been taught.

But there’s more to it than that—and Paul has more to say in the next (and final) chapter. He speaks of a couple of general activities first—

  1. We need to have a prayer life. We need to pray specifically for one another. Paul asks for prayer for himself (2Th 3.1-2), and he confidently (2Th3.3-4) prays for them (2Th 3.5).
  2. We need to have a consistent pattern of following Christ. That’s what he prays for them (2Th 3.5), and that’s what he’s so confident about (2Th 3.4).

Those two general activities can keep us plenty busy until he comes. But he gets more specific in the next paragraph.

We all know that Paul’s epistles are “occasional”—that is, they’re written to address specific situations or occasions. In this case, Paul has learned that there are people in the church who aren’t working to support their families. Some interpreters speculate that they’ve quit working because they think Jesus is coming back very soon and they want to be ready—but the passage doesn’t actually say that.

At any rate, they’re sponging off the church’s kindness. And these days we have a term for what the kind church is doing. We call it “enabling.” Sometimes love has to be tough; you can’t smooth the path for someone headed in the wrong direction.

And that’s what Paul calls for here. We’ve told you, he says, that if someone is unwilling to work, he shouldn’t eat (2Th 3.10).

Obviously Paul’s isn’t calling for hard-hearted starvation of the elderly and enfeebled. These were people who could work but were refusing to. And here Paul calls for tough love. He even notes that he had set an example of that when he was with them (2Th 3.7-9).

How should the church deal with the situation?

  • Don’t give the lazy guy food (2Th 3.10).
  • Don’t let him wear you down. Don’t cave. You’re doing a good thing (2Th 3.13).
  • Don’t associate with him (2Th 3.14). Let him feel the sting of social penalty for unacceptable behavior.
  • But don’t cast him aside (2Th 3.15). He’s your brother. Guide him toward the joy of repentance. That’s the whole point.
  • Don’t lose your peace (2Th 3.16).

Wise words for all of us these centuries later, in a virtually identical culture. We’re living in the brightest light, the light of Christ’s return. Anticipating that, we get impatient with the brokenness all around us—and within us—and we’re tempted to just find a quiet corner and hunker down waiting for the cavalry.

But God hasn’t called us to do that. He’s called us to live in a broken world, to deal with its brokenness every day, sometimes by doing hard things, things we’d rather not do. He’s called us to persist in those difficult things, and even more, to do them with grace, continuing to spread The Story even as we feel the frustration that long waiting brings.

People who live through that kind of frustration, and who do so with peace, are testimonies to the truth of what they’re persistently believing. Only God could bring peace to a person in that situation. Something supernatural going on here.

And maybe people will want to look into that.

Live on, my friend.

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Living in the Brightest Light, Part 3: In God’s Good Time

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As we’ve noted, when Christ returns, God’s going to right all the wrongs, correct all the injustices. That takes care of a lot of anger and frustration for us.

But we need to be careful how we anticipate. When Paul wrote this letter, the readers had apparently received a letter claiming to be from Paul, giving the impression that Christ had already returned, and they’d missed it (2Th 2.2). Paul went to the trouble of signing this current letter himself, so they’d have his signature to compare to any future letters (2Th 3.17).

What does Paul tell them here? He says the Lord won’t return until several things have happened:

  • a falling away, or “apostasy” (2Th 2.3)
  • the revealing of a “man of lawlessness” (2Th 2.3)
  • the removal of a “restrainer” (2Th 2.6-7)

There a lot of stuff to argue about here. :-) As I’ve noted before, prophecy is hard, and we should expect to have our disagreements over the details without viewing one another as spiritually blind or weak on the authority of Scripture. Paul notes that he’s explained all this to the Thessalonians in person (2Th 2.5-6), so he doesn’t need to say any more. Many of us wish he had, but this is where God has left us for now.

Over the centuries people have tried to identify the “man of lawlessness,” which many assume to be the same as the one that John in his epistles calls “the antichrist.” The Reformers thought it was the pope; during World War II both Hitler and Mussolini were suggested; then Henry Kissinger; and even Ronald Reagan (6 letters in each of his three names, you know—666).

And who or what is the “restrainer”? Rome? the Catholic Church? Christians? the Spirit, who indwells Christians?

Nobody knows. Well, nobody but God, for now. And Paul, and apparently his readers, now long dead (2Th 2.6).

But there’s one interpretation of this passage I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t make.

Some people read 2Th 2.8-12 to say that if someone heard the gospel before the Rapture, then afterwards he won’t be able to believe and be saved. God will send him delusion (2Th 2.11).

I don’t think this passage says that. It says that God sends delusion to “those who are perishing” (2Th 2.10). Let’s not read anything more into it than Paul put there. If it’s the Tribulation period, and you want to come to Jesus, you come. He’ll welcome you. That’s what he does (Mt 11.28-30; Jn 6.37).

Paul’s word for his readers is the very opposite of off-putting. He thanks God for choosing his readers for salvation (2Th 2.13). He has every confidence.

And what should we do with that confidence? How do we occupy ourselves as we live in this brightest light?

Stand firm. Hold on resolutely to what the apostles have taught (2Th 2.15).

We don’t focus our efforts on when Christ is coming, or the details of how Christ’s return is all going to work out in the end. We don’t descend into wrestling matches about the details.

What do we do instead?

We live on.

We believe what God has told us, and we live out his plan for each of us individually, day to day.

Loving God (Mt 22.37).

Loving our neighbors (Mt 22.39). All of them.

Being ambassadors for Christ (2Co 5.20).

Taking the story of Jesus and his love to all who haven’t heard, starting right here in our town and extending to the very ends of the earth (Ac 1.8).

And how do you think that’ll turn out?

God’s going to give us the strength to be faithful till he comes (2Th 2.16-17).

And when the time’s right, he’s going to come.

Right on schedule.

Just as he has always planned.

Live on, my friend, this day, and however many more days he’s scheduled for you.

Part 4

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Living in the Brightest Light, Part 2: Justice Wins

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Part 1

As we live in the light of Christ’s return, in his brief second letter to the Thessalonian church Paul emphasizes three ideas that drive our thinking, attitudes, and choices. The first he gets to right away: when Christ returns, no injustice will be left uncorrected (2Th 1).

Paul begins all his letters with a standard 4-part introduction. First, he names himself (and sometimes others, e.g. 1Co 1.1) as the author(s). Here, Silas and Timothy are with him (2Th 1.1a). Second, he names the recipients (2Th 1.1b). Third, he offers a benediction (2Th 1.2). If you’ll compare his epistles, you’ll find that this third section is the most consistent from letter to letter. And fourth, in most cases he offers a prayer of thanksgiving for something about them.

These prayers are instructive. There isn’t one in Galatians; Paul is taking those folks straight to the woodshed (Gal 1.6ff). But with other churches he always finds something to be thankful for; even in Corinth, where they’re taking each other to court (1Co 6.1) and getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper (1Co 11.20-21), Paul manages to thank God that they have a lot of spiritual gifts (1Co 1.4-8)—even if they’re abusing them (1Co 12-14).

Here in Thessalonica, Paul rejoices that his readers are continuing to grow in Christ, even though they’re being persecuted. The persecution had started right at the very beginning of the church (Ac 17.5-10) and had continued after Paul left (1Th 2.14-16; 3.4). Paul doesn’t speak of this as though it’s a sign that something has gone terribly wrong; he mentions it matter-of-factly, no doubt because he knew of Jesus’ teaching that persecution would surely come to his followers (Jn 16.33).

So how should they respond to the persecution? I find it interesting that there are no calls to imprecatory prayer, no combat techniques, no legal advice. Paul sets forth just two Big Ideas.

Christ’s Coming Is Going to Right All the Wrongs

First, we don’t need to wrestle with our opponents. Those who oppose God’s people are dealing with an Opponent they can never defeat, who will most certainly call them to account for their evil choices, and who will carry out justice for all the injustices done (2Th 1.6-9).

Not our job. God’s better at it anyway.

And Paul points out that in that day, we will have “relief” (2Th 1.7)—but even beyond that, we will “glorify” and “marvel at” him (2Th 1.10). You know what it’s like when your team wins. The place just explodes, and everyone’s screaming and shouting and hugging and pumping their fists in the air. The fireworks go off, and eventually the party moves out into the street and around the block, and everyone’s just beside himself with sheer delight.

It’s going to be all right. Exponentially better than all right.

Some people scoff this off as “pie in the sky.” Bourgeoisie trying to keep the oppressed happy under their thumb. Trying to crush the proletariat.

And there’s no question that that sort of thing has gone on. But to suggest that here is a category error. It is to suggest that persecution is abuse by a hostile master rather than training by a supportive coach. And it assumes, without evidence, its most fundamental premise—that both “the pie” and “the sky” are fiction.

We have every reason to believe the opposite.

We Have More Important Things to Attend To

Since God’s going to take care of the unpleasant business, we can devote our time to more important things. Paul writes,

We pray for you always, that our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power, 12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ (2Th 1.11-12).

We have a calling, you see—one that our heavenly Coach—and I say that reverently—is exercising us toward through the very persecution itself. This calling involves several elements—

  • Goodness
  • Faithful (persistent, enduring) work—with power
  • Glorifying God—and being glorified by him

Wow. That’s a lot more fun than plotting the demise of my theological opponents.

I think I’ll work on that instead.

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Living in the Brightest Light, Part 1: Introduction

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Christmas. Summer vacation. Birthday.

Marriage. Childbirth.

We love to anticipate things. Can’t wait. It’s gonna be awesome.

And the anticipation is half the fun, isn’t it?

When my wife and I were first married, one of the things I had to learn was that whereas I’m impulsive and like to do things on the spur of the moment, she enjoys the anticipation phase more. Rather than coming home from work and suggesting that we go out for supper tonight, I needed to learn to make the suggestion in the morning so she’d enjoy having time to think about it.

That’s a pretty simple adjustment, and an enjoyable one at that.

As a biblicist, I’m always asking myself, “What’s the biblical perspective on, or approach to, this or that topic?” So what’s the biblical perspective on anticipation?

Does God anticipate things?

Well, he certainly talks a lot about the future, and he seems to enjoy the prospect of what’s coming. Isaiah 11 comes to mind.

Theologians say that God lives beyond time—but then, no one really knows what that means. He certainly knows about time and understands it perfectly—having created it—and he speaks as though he’s thinking in terms of time, though he knows the end from the beginning (Isa 46.10).

Jesus endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb 12.2). That sounds like anticipation to me.

Should we anticipate things?

If God’s doing all that anticipating in the Bible, he clearly intends that it should be part of our thinking as well. We ought to look forward to stuff. Excitedly, eagerly, expectantly.

What stuff?

What should we look forward to? Is there any biblical guidance on that?

I’m not asking what our purpose or goal for life is, though that’s an important question too—in fact, I think it includes our question, though it’s broader and more basic than it. The Bible gives us guidance on the larger question of purpose, reason for living:

  • Clearly the Prime Directive is, as the scholars say, “doxological”—we exist for the purpose of giving glory to God, both in this life (1Co 10.31) and the next (Rev 7.9-12). Even eating and drinking are things we should do for his glory.
    • Sidebar: How do you eat and drink to the glory of God? You recognize food and drink as gifts from a generous God, creatively designed for our pleasure (color, texture, flavor, etc.) and given to us freely and abundantly. You delight in his supply and his artistry even as you delight in the food. Eating, properly done, should be an act of worship. But we’re not worshiping the food—that’s gluttony, a form of idolatry. We worship the Creator, not what he has created (Rom 1.25).
  • Along the way we consider other things. As just one example, Jesus said that he came to give us “abundant” life (Jn 10.10). We exist to live abundantly: joyously, committedly, living out all the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5.22-23) with delight.

Now, as part of that purposeful life, what do we anticipate? What do we look forward to?

The Bible speaks to that as well.

We look forward to the return of Christ; we are “those who look for him” (Heb 9.28); “from [heaven] we look for the Saviour” (Php 3.20); we look “for that blessed hope, even the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ” (Ti 2.13). We’ve been doing that from the moment he left (Ac 1.11). It’s the greatest of our anticipations.

So how do we live in light of that certain coming event? How do we live in light of it—the brightest light?

There’s a little book in the Bible that focuses on that question. It’s in the New Testament, a letter by Paul. We call it 2 Thessalonians—because it’s one of two letters he wrote to a church in Thessalonica (today’s Thessaloniki, or Saloniki), and because it’s the shorter. (Really; they put it after 1 Thessalonians primarily because it was shorter—though most commentators also believe it was written second.)

The book’s 3 chapters address 3 ideas:

  1. Christ’s coming is going to right all the wrongs.
  2. Christ’s coming will happen on God’s timetable.
  3. We should be living as God’s stewards in the meantime.

There’s a lot to talk about here.

We’ll get to it next time.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 4

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I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical  prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it, as well as an example to give us a more concrete understanding of the principle. Now for the hard question in any assertion—

So what?

I know people who have spent their whole lives trying to understand biblical prophecy. I know others who are troubled, or even disgusted, by the arguments and disagreements that spring from such efforts.

Why can’t we all just get along?

I think the matter we’re discussing here helps us put the modern situation into perspective.

  • The Bible contains a lot of prophecies that haven’t been fulfilled yet.
  • In many cases, God has designed these prophecies to be obscure until the time of fulfillment.
  • Just as Isaiah’s hearers, in trying to imagine a scenario in which Isaiah 53.9 could be fulfilled, would have been very unlikely to imagine what actually happened, so we should expect that our interpretations of the obscure prophecies will be off the mark in ways both minor and significant.
  • Thus it is likely that believers who love God and his Word and study it deeply will come to different conclusions about what precisely the eschatological material predicts.
  • The current disagreement is not a problem or evidence of some spiritual failure in the church; it’s exactly what we should expect.

So we have different views at the macroscopic level—

  • Premillennialists say that we should take prophetic passages just as literally as we take historical passages, because
    • Changing hermeneutical horses in the middle of the stream is inconsistent, and
    • Prophecies that have already been fulfilled have been fulfilled literally.
  • Postmillennialists say that if we really want to do that, we need to take literally Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom would come not suddenly, but slowly, over a long period of time (Mt 13.31-33).
  • And amillennialists say that if we want to take it literally, we’re going to have a problem with 7 heads and 10 horns. If there are clear contextual clues that we shouldn’t take it literally, then we shouldn’t take it literally. And isn’t the new covenant supposed to get away from the physical, literal, external stuff anyway, and move to the inner person of the heart (Jer 31.31-33)? And isn’t Jesus’ kingdom eternal, and not limited to a mere 1000 years (Isa 9.7)?

And even among premillennialists there are differences of interpretation—

  • Pretribulationists say that if we can be surprised by the Rapture (Mt 25.1-13), then it must be the very next thing to happen on the prophetic timeline.
  • Midtribulationists say that the Rapture is described as the two witnesses being caught up to heaven (Rev 11.12), at the seventh trumpet judgment (Rev 11.15), the “last trump” (1Co 15.52), at the midway point of the 7-year tribulation.
  • Posttribulationists say that both believers and unbelievers will be resurrected together at a single return of Christ at the end of the Tribulation (Dan 12.1-3).

Every one of these interpreters has a point. But they can’t all be right.

And maybe, based on what we’ve been discussing, just maybe none of them is completely right.

That means that we have to give one another some room to study, and think, and puzzle, and scratch our heads, and wonder. We need to hear one another’s arguments without making our primary goal to win the argument for our side. We need to approach this puzzle with some sense of historical and hermeneutical understanding, one that holds our own views loosely and humbly, one that waits for the Great Clarity that will come when it all comes to pass.

Humility. Tentativeness. Openness, within the bounds of clear biblical teaching.

Brotherly kindness. Cooperative investigation.

Now, I should say that I’m a pretribulational premillennialist. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. :-)

We ought to study, and think, and try to come to some sort of reasonable conclusion that accounts smoothly for all the biblical data. That’s what theology does, as a matter of stewardship of the great divine gift of the Word. We can’t just sit back lazily and be “panmillennialists—it’ll all pan out in the end.”

But we need to recognize our limits as well, and we need to recognize what those limits say about what kinds of doctrines are worth fighting over, and what kinds aren’t.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write about that one of these days.

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