Nothing sells books and movies like predicting the end of the world. Janet and I saw a new commercial this week for “2012,” yet another cinematic adventure in this literary genre.
Eschatology is the theological study of last things. Much of the excitement about “Bible prophesy” is not actually about Bible prophesy at all. It is the same excitement that comes with the movie “2012.”
The Bible makes it clear that the Lord Jesus will return one day. It also makes it crystal clear that no one knows when this will happen except the Father in heaven.
Eschatology is not about when or how. It is about who and what. Jesus is the end of all things. That is the who. And God wins. That is the what.
Jesus told us about the end of time so that we would live for him in the here and now. His childish disciples pled with him for dates and charts about the end of time. He refused to succumb to their foolish curiosity. They asked him many times. He gave them this answer: “It is not for you to know” (Acts 1:7).
People, it is not for us to know. The prophets of the Bible were generally forth-telling, not fore-telling. They were speaking the word of God to the leaders and the people. That was their task. When they digressed into fore-telling, predicting future events, they always did so in order to challenge the people of the present to live for God and to abandon their sinful practices. That is the purpose of prophetic utterances—to point the people of God to their true source and their true behavior.
The “when and how” boys are opportunistic and entrepreneurial. They sell millions of books generation after generation despite their mistaken and often fraudulent claims. The sheep keep coming back for more.
All the charts are wrong. None of them actually come from the Bible. They are pieced together by humans who write into them their preconceptions, biases, systems, and errors. The true center and purpose of eschatology is not timelines but ethics—how I live here and now. Get that right and you are ready for end whenever and however it comes.
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