Major on the Clear Stuff

I get disturbed when I see people around me disturbed by the latest Bible mystery, or obscure interpretation of prophecy. These things sell books, and bring in offerings, but I don’t think they produce better followers of Jesus.

I don’t have a problem with discussing difficult or controversial passages, but the church has been living with new interpretations of prophecy that mean, well, generally that mean that you ought to send money to the person who truly knows.

I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist church. Practically every year as I grew up there would be a new evangelist in town, or even the same evangelist, who would have figured out how the beasts in Daniel and Revelation really meant something that was happening right now. One favorite was to find communist Russian in Bible prophecy. Of course, there is less interest in that these days. I used to wonder if the preachers thought I wouldn’t remember that the same symbol had definitely meant something completely different the year before.

But over time I’ve found that people do forget that sort of thing. They forget the previous prophecy or interpretation and move on to the next one. In terms of last day prophecies, Christian history is filled with the failure of the last day foretellers. I have come to the conclusion that God didn’t want us to know precisely what was going to happen at the end of time. I think there’s plenty of good reasons to believe this. What God did want us to know was enough to be ready.

You don’t need to know the identity of the antichrist. You just need to know what it means to be anti-Christ. (Spend some time in 1 John, not Revelation, to get an idea.) You don’t need to know just when persecution will begin. You just need to know who your Lord is and that you will be faithful. You don’t need to prepare yourself physically for disaster by stockpiling food and survival supplies. You need to be living as the one you claim as Lord lived. He was headed for immediate disaster, and he knew it. Yet he spent his time seeking and saving the lost, not looking to his physical survival.

We are doing so poorly with the part of the Christian message that is very clear and quite uncontroversial (in theory, at least!) that we really have no business in the trivia.

Here’s my end time formula:

⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, … (Philippians 2:4-5, NRSV, via BibleGateway.com)

Go, read the rest of the passage (Philippians 2:4-11). Or you could read the whole book!