Assertion #2: The last assertion ended with me telling the church to get off its collective fat rear-ends and be the church, and stop waiting for the return of Christ. This leads to my next assertion:
Christ ain't coming back any time soon.
I know, this flies in the face of everything Hal Lindsay, Tim La'Haye, and all these other so-called "scholars" of apocalyptic literature have told us.
First, I can't understand why Christians spend so much time trying to figure out every detail of Christ's return, when Jesus clearly says that it isn't for us to know (Acts 1:6-7). God has the end times under control. We just need to go out and be the church and leave the end times to God.
Second, the urgency with which we should live every day is that Christ, while he may not return for a thousand years or a million years or a billion years, may return for YOU tomorrow, or may return for that neighbor whom you haven't quite gotten up the courage to tell about Jesus. How can studying the end times make the message of Jesus any more urgent than that?
Third, this whole bit about the rapture is based on an abuse of the Greek word
harpagesometha (I Thess. 4:17) which was translated into the Latin word
rapio, than, transliterated into a meaningless English word
rapture. This passage clearly indicates that many believed the end was imminent. While the early Christians knew that the dead would be raised, this raised a question of what would happen to those who happened to be living when the end came. Paul says,
No worries. Jesus will take the living, too. To make this passage the centerpiece of pre-tribulational theology where Christians disappear out of their cars and places of work before a great tribulation is making more of the passage than the passage claims of itself. It is an abuse of the scripture because we cram several
"proof texts" from different books that were never written to be together in the manner in which we use them. Besides this, show me any other place in the scriptures where God removed the witnesses of His love from the very people who needed it. This is totally out of character of the God of the Bible who allows His people to go through the suffering of the world in order to be a witness to it.
Fourth, we abuse the book of Revelation by making it a book of the
"end times" and by trying to wring meaning out of it to fit our theology. This is an abuse of this book that does not occur amongst Christians in any other country except the US. Conservative Christians in Europe and South America and Asia are not discussing the signs of the end times, and have outright rejected our use of the book of Revelation. Tim La'Haye's book sales are pretty tepid outside of the US. Maybe Christians in the rest of the world get it, and we are the ones who don't. Reveleation is not a book of endings, but a book of beginnings and of hope and of newness of life. It is a book that was written to a church going through a time of great persecution, which is maybe why we have such a difficult time understanding it. We are not persecuted and oppressed. No, a lawsuit by the ACLU to take down the 10 Commandments from a courthouse is NOT persecution. We need to grow up and get over it. The church in the US can be so lazy and selfish, which is maybe why we want Christ to return: so that we don't have to get off of our fat collective rear-ends and do something about those who do not have a relationship with Christ.
Fifth, Christ will come again, but I'm sorry... I just don't think that it will be any time soon. I know, I know... look at the signs, blah, blah, blah. The church has been saying this for hundreds of years, and our predictions all have one thing in common: they were all wrong. Take a look at our ridiculous predictions about the end times over the centuries:
http://www.geocities.com/alma-geddon/succeed_fail1.htmlSixth, all the conditions necessary for Christ's return existed after Christ's resurrection! This is why Christ's disciples thought that the end would occur in their lifetime. We do live in the end times, and have for 2000 years! The reason why the world hasn't ended is because God is a God of grace, and we are living in a season of grace. God saw that you would be born thousands of years after Christ's resurrection and He decided that you were worth waiting for. Don't you think there are others worth waiting for in the future, or is it all about you?
"I'm here, I believe, so come now, Christ, so I don't have to go through this anymore..." How selfish is that?
That said, could I be wrong? Sure, but I doubt it. If I am, so what? If I knew for a fact that Jesus would return tomorrow, it would not change my behavior today. I always live with the urgency that today may be MY last, so why would that knowledge change my behavior. Live for Christ always, leave the end times to God, and none of this even matters.
