Leaving Behind “Left Behind”
The Choice Facing the Church Gets Clearer Every Day
The year 2020 is not yet half over, but is gaining quite an apocalyptic reputation: global pandemic, collapsing economy, racial injustice, rioting, political turmoil. Each day brings news and we think, “Can this be true? Is this really happening?” Yet it is and as followers of Jesus we are left to decide how to respond. How do we pray, think, and act when the world appears to be falling apart at the seams? Where is God? How and when will he set things right?
I grew up in an evangelical sub-culture that believed that worldwide judgment and restoration would happen in a series of events known as “The End Times.” If you are a Generation-Xer like me or older and were a Christian in the 70’s and 80’s, you probably remember the fervor for which the Church looked for signs of the imminent return of Jesus. They wrote books, made predictions, preached sermons, drew curious maps, and dramatized the end time events in movies that were particularly disturbing to a pre-teen like me. The height of fervor for End Times theology and its media culminated in the “Left Behind” series of books.
Roughly, the end would happen like this, at least how I remember the story being told. First, faithful Christians would mysteriously be taken into heaven during an event called “The Rapture” which would obviously send the world into chaos. In the vacuum, a universal human government would centralize the economy and snuff out any resistance (especially any people who would become Christians in the aftermath). Plagues, death, and destruction would bombard the earth. The story would culminate in a final battle where heavenly armies would defeat the government and the powers behind it and the earth would be destroyed. It was assumed that Christians would be in heaven the whole time this travail on earth was happening.
As I got older I began to question if this was really the story John’s revelation was telling. The Telos (or ultimate end) of God’s purposes for humanity was not an other-worldly heaven, but a this-worldly renewed earth. The physical world will be married with heaven in a mysterious and beautiful way, and the justice and peace universally longed for will be made complete. Instead of spiritual bodies floating on a cloud, we will inherit resurrection bodies, as Jesus did. This was a revolutionary idea that challenged much of what I thought I knew about the biblical vision of the future. Instead of waiting to be rescued by the Rapture, I began looking for signs of God’s Kingdom that was coming and had already arrived.
During the first century, a sermon was written on the island of Patmos by a pastor named John. Those who called themselves followers of The Way, were small in number and on the margins of society. At that time, Imperial Rome dominated every aspect of life and the emperor was worshiped as a god. “Pax Romana” (Roman Peace) meant prosperity as long as you were not a slave or failed to bow the knee to the emperor’s cult. The Roman policy was that conquered peoples were allowed to keep their gods and worship as they chose, just as long as they also worshiped the Emperor. Those who refused were quickly punished, enslaved, or killed.
The Way had a peculiar belief that put them at odds with Pax Romana. They believed that Jesus Christ was King of the whole world and through his death and resurrection he had established the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom was not just for the rich or advantaged; it was for the whole human race and creation itself. Entering the Kingdom meant your life was changed from the inside out and you joined a new family that loved and cared for one another. They had a history in the people of Israel, the Jews, but through Jesus the family had been opened to anyone that believed and gave their allegiance to him.
This family also had a future. Through his sermon, John sought to tell a hope-filled story about the Kingdom and this small family that lived in the omnipresent shadow of the Roman empire.
It is that word “allegiance” that gave these young Christians the most trouble with the authorities. We do not know how John ended up on the island of Patmos where he wrote his story, but it is likely that his allegiance to Jesus put him there. In exile, John probably spent day after day staring out into the sea, praying, thinking, longing to be back with his brothers and sisters. One Sunday, while he was worshiping alone, he was tasked with writing down in a book a vision that was almost too glorious for words. The audience for this book was to be seven churches in the province of Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.
These were not large churches or anything like what we associate with the word “church” today. They were small assemblies of mostly poor Jesus-followers living next to massive Roman temples dedicated to Caesar and Roman gods. A few of these people did have money, or at least a larger home than most, and they often hosted gatherings. Others were gifted in teaching or revealing truth about God or telling their neighbors this revelation about Jesus. Still others traveled from city to city bringing news and instruction from the apostles who had seen and lived with Jesus. They mostly blended in to Roman society, paid their taxes, and built quiet lives of peace. But occasionally, and as the years passed more frequently, their allegiance to the Kingdom of God clashed head-on with Empire.
Perhaps some of these clashes were what John had been meditating on before he saw his vision on Patmos. Perhaps he had witnessed Christians being persecuted for refusing to worship the emperor or participate in the worst of Roman society. In spite of their non-violence and commitment to the ways and teachings of Jesus, the family was falsely accused and treated unjustly.
Lack of justice is demoralizing and breeds hopelessness. This is evidenced in the protests that are spreading through the world as I write this. In John’s travels among the seven churches in Asia, he probably saw hopelessness turn into despair. As powerful as the message of the Kingdom had been in their lives, the harsh reality of Empire had taken a toll.
John’s revelation, or “apocalypse,” was written in a manner that sparked imagination and demanded contemplation. It begins as other pastoral letters with encouragements and admonishments, but with the obvious difference that the Pastor dictating this letter to John was Jesus himself. It then transitions into a series of visions which fold on top of one another, bending time and rapidly changing venue. There are trumpets, fantastic beasts, woes and plagues, huge multitudes of people, judgments, mercy, and a final vision of a city so beautiful and so filled with the glory of God that its life flows out as a river. The book ends with some more pastoral instruction, and a promise:
“Look, I am coming soon, bringing my reward with me to repay all people according to their deeds. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” — Revelation 22:12,13 NLT
I imagine that the churches who first read this letter had a similar reaction to many first time Bible readers. John’s revelation is not an easy read. It is filled with symbolism and imagery that is difficult to grasp and often leaves modern readers with many more questions than answers. But as the churches continued to read this letter and immerse themselves in its language and story, they would have begun to understand the point. The visions that John recorded serve as windows into the reality of the Kingdom of God. They are hazy windows, opaque even, but windows just the same.
Our human minds cannot conceive how there can be anything more real than what we can see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. John’s revelation uses vivid images to point to truths about the way the Kingdom works. It also uses these images to describe the ultimate purposes of God and what he is determined to accomplish through his Kingdom. If you were a Christian living under Roman oppression and injustice and read John’s letter, you would be filled with audacious hope.
Today, hope is scarce. One of the most challenging aspects of 2020 is that pretty much every kind of person from every walk of life has reason to despair. Christians by and large have not been excluded from this reaction. In fact, they often seem to be the ones leading the despair parade. This should not be.
The human response to oppression, loss, and despair is often violence. We see that in the opportunism of rioters and those who crave chaos as a means to bring anarchy. We also see violence in the response of a feeble government. We want compassionate and decisive leadership but only get destructive threats, empty promises, and photo opportunities.
Writing about the beasts of Revelation 13, Eugene Peterson says in “Reversed Thunder”:
“Killing the opposition is the sea beast’s way of solving its problems. It is not ours. Ours is endurance and faith.” — pg.125
We need to leave behind “Left Behind” theology because it teaches the Church will be taken away when we will be needed most. How can we display to the world endurance and faith while we disappear? Endurance — allegiance to Jesus in the face of opposition and suffering — and faith — placing ultimate trust in the Kingdom of God rather than the kingdoms of the world— are the powerful twin Christian virtues that bear witness to Kingdom hope.
We can already see the spirit of antichrist powerfully at work. Pastor John would warn us to be careful before aligning ourselves with movements or leaders that make promises in slogans but only deliver violence and division. Antichrist feeds off chaos. It dreams of a world where everything is destroyed and its vision of life can rise from the ashes like a phoenix. However, the antichrist vision is unholy, prideful, racist, and filled with contempt for its enemies. In essence, everything antithetical to the Kingdom of God.
The choice facing the Church gets clearer every day. Instead of aligning with antichrist, we must align with Jesus. In Revelation 13, John says the beast has a number — 666. This number was well known to represent NERO CAESAR in Hebrew characters. In other words, the beast represented the power that dominated human society at the time, but dishonored God at every front. Caesar was the head of state and claimed to be a god. But his worship and his power was a falsehood, a chimera. Peterson says:
“We choose: we follow the dragon and his beasts along their parade route, conspicuous with the worship of splendid images, elaborated in mysterious symbols, fond of statistics, taking on whatever role is necessary to make a good show and get the applause of the crowd in order to get access to power and become self-important. Or we follow the Lamb along a farmyard route, worshiping the invisible, listening to the foolishness of preaching, practicing a holy life that involves heroically difficult acts that no one will ever notice, in order to become, simply, our eternal selves in an eternal city.” — pg.132
Instead of a Church that escapes, imagine a Church that follows the Lamb in endurance and faith. That’s a vision of the End Times I can get behind. As we wait and work to that end, we pray as Pastor John did, “Amen, Come, Lord Jesus!”
