Why Do People Like to Set Dates for the Apocalypse? II

It’s not about the glory of you.

Last month I noted a good question from a student: why do people so like to set dates for Christ’s return as well as for other aspects of the Apocalypse?  And I wrote here the answer I wish I would have given — that the heart of a Christian yearns for the return of Christ, and some Christians get carried away with that with obsessions that Jesus is surely coming back in 1844 or 1988 or 2011.  (Read the earlier post on those dates.)

I have gotten well distracted since, but now I will briefly expound on the answer that I did give the student: people tend to overemphasize the importance of their particular time and place.

Yes, this is worse than getting carried away with yearning for Christ’s return. Instead of being Christ-centered, this tendency is man-centered and self-centered.  And this trait is not at all confined to Christians.  The Hippies thought that surely the Age of Aquarius was upon us.  The Jacobins and the Khmer Rogue reset their calendars to Year Zero because the beginning of their regimes were that important. With Christians, this trait is most commonly exhibited by speculations and too certain prognostications that the time of The End and of Christ’s return will be in year x in our lifetimes.

Note that I am not talking about openness to the possibility of Christ returning in our lifetimes.  Jesus himself said we should be alert and be ready for that possibility.  What I address goes beyond that to setting dates and details that Jesus said are not for us to know. Yet any number of Christians in history have presumed to know them anyway.  Yes, Christians can be creative in doing an end-around of “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7)  And, like others, they often inflate the importance of their own time.

With us of a traditional Western church calendar (A blessed Good Friday to my Orthodox friends.) now observing the Forty Days between Christ’s resurrection and ascension, it is worth noting that Jesus gave the above admonition during those forty days. It is among the teachings and instructions he gave to his disciples just before the Ascension and therefore of all the more import.  I wrote more broadly on how Jesus spent the Forty Days earlier this week over at Stand Firm.

God knows how needful Jesus’ admonition was and is.  For presumption and inflation of one’s own time and place can get downright comical.  This is one reason I greatly appreciate Warren Johnston’s scholarship in Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England which documents quite a number of rather Anglo-centric 17th century interpretations of Biblical prophesy.

The anonymous Key of Prophecie had the little horn of Daniel being the Commonwealth of England and Scotland. The same pamphlet had the execution of the two witnesses as the executions of King Charles I and Archbishop Laud.  The Beast that executed the two witnesses is the Long Parliament.  And the resurrection of the two witnesses is the return of Charles II and of the episcopacy.  Another anonymous pamphlet The Mystery of Prophesies Revealed also thus identifies the two witnesses dead and arisen.  Abraham Nelson, in A Perfect Description of Antichrist, reveals the Antichrist responsible for killing the two witnesses of Charles I and Laud to be … Oliver Cromwell.  Perfect! (Johnston pp. 127-9)

But there’s more!

Arise Evans wrote that the British Civil Wars were the war with Gog and Magog, and Revelation 12 is about the birth and preservation of Charles II.  And under that holy king, the conversion of the Jews would surely occur.  Thus he titled his work Light for the Jews.  Walter Garrett found that the kings of the East in Revelation 16:12 are the English kings, Charles II, James II, and William III.  And did you think it was only Jesus knocking at door in Revelation 3:20?  Garrett informs Elizabeth I was knocking at the door by calling Parliament “to have it set Open to a Thorow Reformation” in 1559. (Johnston, pp. 233, 234.)

Trust that I could continue at length as Johnston well does. I can have too much fun with this arcane topic. It is not just our time and scholarship that can get silly.  And man-centered Biblical interpretation that makes too much of one’s time and place is a sure way to get silly.

Speaking of man-centered, some false teachers go further and identify themselves as key players in the end of the age. When they read Revelation, they are so insanely egotistical, they focus somehow on themselves in the drama of the Apocalypse instead of focusing on Christ.   These are especially dangerous, and Jesus warned against them, “See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray.” (Matt. 24:4,5)  David Koresh is one example. Jan van Leiden, who led the Anabaptist commune of Munster to a horrific end in 1535, is another.  Worse is likely to come.

Jesus’ warning included those who place too much importance on their own time.  He continued:

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains. (24:6-8)

Overcertainty about the times has caused faith and lives to be shipwrecked as in the Great Disappointment of 1844 and in 1260 passing without the end of the age coming to pass as followers of Joachim of Fiore expected.

So, to oversimplify Jesus’ teaching on The End, there is a balance.  We should not presume that we are at The End.  For we do not know when The End shall come and Jesus return; we really don’t.  Believe Jesus on that.  And when he does return, people won’t be expecting it. 

So, as several of Jesus’ parables illustrate, we should neither presume Jesus is coming now nor in the distant future; we should instead be ready. We should not presume he is coming tomorrow, but strive to be ready if he does. Readiness, not presumption.

Hmmm, someone should write a book on that instead of on the Rapture occurring in 1988.