CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
EXPIRATION DATES [Su, 5-7-18]
A woman was explaining to
me why she was leaving the church I pastored. We were not “prophetic.” By that
she meant that we did not try to predict the end of the world.
That’s the way “prophesy”
is used in “evangelical” circles these days. It means foretelling the future,
specifically when the world will end. That definition does not come from the
Bible but is imposed upon it. Biblically, prophets don’t foretell, they forth
tell. They don’t foretell the future but tell forth the word of God.
Which is right in the
wheelhouse of Jesus, who shot down the idea of prophecy as predicting the end
of the world once and for all.
“But about that day or
hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the
Father.” Matthew 24:36.
So I quoted those words of
Jesus—THE WORDS OF JESUS!—to her. As I said, Jesus had settled the matter once
and for all. Not exactly.
She replied, “But he did
not say we could not know the month or the year.”
In some ways, I wanted to
cut her some slack. In the first place, I liked her. She was a new faculty
member at our university and had not been in our church very long, but she was
nice. More importantly, her PhD, and thus her teaching field, was food science.
Nutrition and such. Expiration dates are important in that field. So I could
see why she might be interested in the expiration date of the world.
But the intentional
perverseness of what she said left me speechless. Anybody with even an
elemental acquaintance with the Gospels knows that Jesus spoke metaphorically,
not as a scientist or news reporter. Clearly, by “day or hour,” Jesus meant any
time at all—month, year, decade, millennium, whatever.
For someone who claims to
be a follower of Christ to dishonor him so completely by twisting his words in
order to believe and do the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish
is mind-boggling.
Yet people keep doing it,
especially about predicting the end of the world. We know of about two or three
thousand such predictions over the years since Jesus spoke his words. They were
all wrong.
Except were they? 99% of
those predictors are dead. For them, this world has ended.
I think that is what Jesus
was concerned about, the end of the world for each of us. Yes, this world will
end for me, and for you. With the help of modern medicine, we might predict
fairly accurately when that will happen, as oncologists do when they say “You
have six months.” To which we reply, “But Doc, I can’t even pay your bill in
six months.” To which they respond, “In that case, you have twelve months.”
Predicting the end even for doctors is kind of iffy.
Yes, the world will end
for me and for you, and we don’t know when. Why not just get ready and stay
that way?
JRMcF
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