The End Times Are Coming

As a believer in Christ, if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that the end times are coming. 

One thing the Bible tells us about history—it has a vector. It’s coming from nothing and heading toward something, and that something involves the end of this world and the institution of God’s kingdom. Creation is moving from sin to salvation; from a good world turned bad to a perfect one renewed.

Growing up in the evangelical tradition, I as a teen was fascinated with a couple of practical questions about the world’s imminent ending. Specifically: When is this happening? And how? And how can I avoid the nasty parts?

At the time, I thought that divining the particulars of the apocalypse was the point of apocalyptic books like Daniel and Revelation. How wrong I was. Where faith should have had me rejoicing that God is coming(!), fleshly dread had me fearing everything the Bible said came with His arrival.

I wasn’t unique. The 90s saw a whole cottage industry of “end times” literature, most notably the Left Behind series. I have nothing against those books as fiction—they are entertaining stories, and I appreciate Jerry Jenkins as an author. But, even if we assume (as I do) the good intent of the authors, those books capitalized on temporal fear and the evangelical obsession with trying to map Revelation to current events. Back then, I found myself listening to, and sometimes participating in, strong attempts to prove theological “premillennialism” (that is, that the 1,000 year reign of Christ described in Revelation 20 is a specific and precise earthly political event that will happen into between Christ’s second coming and the destruction of the world) and “pre-tribulationism” (that is, that the tribulation of Christians described in Revelation is a specific 7-year future event, and that believers would be raptured away from earth before it happened).

Looking back, my interest in where God is taking this weird, wonderful creation is theologically appropriate and healthy. My mistake was accepting the notion that Revelation could be read like a cryptic newspaper article about future events, susceptible to diagrams and timelines.

Before we dig in, one important note: I’m not a fan of wantonly allegorizing or spiritualizing Scripture. The text generally means what it says, and that includes Old Testament prophecy and apocalyptic literature. But what it says has to be understood in context of what the author and original readers would have understood it to say in its original language. And those meanings are sometimes colloquial, symbolic, or allegorical. It bears remembering that first century Palestinians and Iron Age Israelites did not share our weird devotion to empiricism.  

The Bible is the record of God’s action in human history. It tells us true things that matter. While it uses allegory and analogy, we can’t carelessly apply those categories to portions of Scripture solely because they are supernatural or fantastical. But we also can’t ignore that the Bible does use allegory and analogy to convey some of its truths. To take the Bible seriously requires us to take it as it means to be taken, in the same way that taking Shakespeare seriously requires us not to take Romeo literally when he calls Juliet a “rose.”

That caution in place, I’ll plant my flag. The view of the end times I grew up believing, and that many evangelicals still embrace, misses the point. 

Revelation is complicated. It reveals truth through narrative, but that narrative doesn’t—and doesn’t mean to—follow rules of logic or chronology. It speaks through symbols which can’t and aren’t meant to be cleanly approximated on a one-to-one basis to particular persons or events.

Instead, Revelation does three things simultaneously. First, it gives us a mythic, symbolic narrative of the spiritual warfare that has defined created history, beginning in the serpent’s attack on humanity and culminating with the defeat of that serpent through the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. Consider Revelation 12: a woman clothed in light gives birth to a male child while a great red dragon waits to devour him. The child is caught up to God’s throne, and the dragon—identified as “that ancient serpent called the devil”—is hurled down to earth. This is a history of cosmic warfare, from Genesis to the cross. Since that spiritual warfare is not directly observable and its details likely exceed our capabilities of comprehension, it’s fair to say that the Bible is using symbol, mythology, and analogy to convey its point.

Second—through largely those same symbols—Revelation tells a parable to teach Christians living in the generation after Christ’s death to make sense of Roman persecution. Where was God? Why didn’t he save them? How should a person live in the face of a totalizing evil empire? The dragon of Revelation 12 reappears in chapter 13 as a beast rising from the sea, with seven heads wearing blasphemous names, demanding worship from all the earth and making war on the saints. First-century readers facing death for resisting Imperial emperor-worship would have recognized this as a portrait of Rome. Revelation teaches through this story that their suffering is a consequence of Satan’s rebellion, that God knows of it, and that they should continue to live out lives of patient faith even at the cost of torture and death.

Third, Revelation presents a promise, again using symbols, that the kingdom of God will come to earth and all things will be made new (someday, somehow). The dragon/serpent/Satan who threatened the child and empowered the beast is finally thrown into the lake of fire, and a new heaven and new earth appear, in which God dwells with his people.

Trying to create a timeline, or to map current events to Revelation’s text, is like trying to render a police drawing of a woman by reading poems out of her fiancé’s love letters. This shouldn’t surprise us. As Scripture says, no man knows the day or the hour of the Lord’s return.

Serious scholars who are devoted followers of Christ can and do disagree with me. These scholars object to my argument for precisely the same reason I make it—because they are deadly serious about the importance of Scriptural text. When they see Revelation 20 discuss Christ’s 1,000 year reign, they believe that taking the text seriously requires a period of 1,000 revolutions around the sun, with Christ enthroned in our old, not-yet-fully-redeemed world. 

I admire and agree with the intent. The text of Scripture means something—every word. But this interpretation disregards almost willfully that God chose to reveal truth not through newspaper reports, but through genre literature. And literature of this kind does not mean for itself to be taken always literally. Revelation was not written from an empiricist’s when/where/how framework. We make a mistake when we confuse that empirical perspective for the sum total of “fact.” 

So, if Revelation doesn’t give us a roadmap to avoid the pain of the world’s ending, what is the point?

It does for us the same things it did for its original audience. It shows us the truth of cosmic, eternal, spiritual warfare, as best we can understand. It helps us understand our present suffering. It teaches us to live lives of patient faith even if a world in the hands of the Enemy punishes us for it. And it shows the promise that, after all this: eternity with God.

 I am confident that, at the end of all things, believers will look back at the span of Biblical prophecy and say: Oh, now I see (much like the blessed souls to whom Christ opened the Old Testament on the road to Emmaus). Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising—even as brilliant and committed a scriptural scholar as Paul needed revelation of and from Jesus to understand fully and accurately the fulfillment of the prophecies of Christ’s coming.

When it comes to the details, timing, and specific order and character of end times events, the only unreserved position I think we’re entitled to is: “God knows; I don’t.”

The end is coming, that’s for sure. And we should not worry or doom scroll the headlines. We should read Revelation to tell us how to live joyfully and for God’s glory. And rejoice.