“Pick a Direction”
Reading: Daniel 12:1-13; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15
Written and preached by Luke Richards
Prophecies are tricky things. Imagine, for instance, that you’re minding your own business walking down the street one day when you come across a mysterious old woman who looks like a gypsy and is holding a crystal ball, and the woman says to you that she’s very sorry but she has to tell you that you’re going to die tomorrow, and she won’t tell you when or how. How would you react? I for one don’t believe in crystal balls and fortune tellers and magical things like that, but I have to admit that I would probably be a little spooked when I got out of bed the next day. Or let’s lower the stakes a little bit: suppose the mysterious old woman simply prophesies that tomorrow is going to be a horrible day for you. Whether you believe her prophecy or not, I’d bet there’s a good chance some of us would be on the lookout for things going wrong that next day, and even if that day didn’t end up being that bad, maybe you would interpret things as being worse than they really were.
Having those expectations for the future affects what we do now. We might not all react the same way to a prophecy about dying tomorrow, but we would probably all have that prophecy in mind as we went through our day. Some people would be determined to prove that they don’t believe in such things: I’m the master of my own fate, and by golly I’m going to go skydiving tomorrow just to show that old woman that I’m not afraid of her prophecy. Other people might be so terrified of her prophecy that they would go home and make sure all their affairs were in order, maybe even call some loved ones to make sure nothing goes unsaid. Maybe most of us wouldn’t do anything out of the ordinary, but we’d be extra careful about crossing the street. Our expectations for the future affect what we do now. Are we hopeful and optimistic, looking forward to a bright future? Are we gloomy and cynical, expecting things to go down the tubes? Or do we think things really aren’t going to change drastically any time soon, and tomorrow will be pretty much like today?
We’re focusing on apocalypses today because we’ve been working through the book of Daniel for the last couple of weeks, and if you’re going all the way through Daniel, you’ll get into some very apocalyptic territory. The second half of the book, really, is a series of apocalypses. The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word meaning “revelation,” so the last book of the New Testament, which we call Revelation, is in fact one great apocalypse. There is much that could be said to explain how apocalypses work, but you probably already have at least some idea of what apocalypses involve since even today we still refer to things being “apocalyptic,” or we talk about “the apocalypse” in reference to the end of the world. Usually when we think of apocalypse we associate things like the end of the world, the second coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and other massive conflicts, and maybe some natural disasters. A written apocalypse like the book of Daniel had certain characteristics that marked it as an apocalypse, and in fact there were quite a few other apocalypses written by Jews and Christians in ancient times. But the one characteristic above all else that makes an apocalypse an apocalypse is that it is a revelation — sometimes of future events, sometimes of current events explained, sometimes of the end of the world — a revelation that you and I could not see if it were not given to us by some supernatural agent. And, it’s important for us to notice today, the point of an apocalypse is to give us that expectation of the future so that it will affect our actions today in a certain way.
The question, though, is how it should affect our actions today. There’s a lot of disagreement on that point. Just like different people would react differently to a mysterious old woman prophesying that they were going to die tomorrow, different people react differently to books like Daniel. These apocalypses are very strange, frankly, full of monsters coming out of the sea and strange beasts waging war and huge numbers of people being slaughtered. Daniel doesn’t give us a nice, neat package with instructions on how we should read his book and what we should do about it. And therefore many people have significant disagreements about apocalyptic things.
What do we think about the future? Where is history taking us? Some people insist that the future doesn’t really have a direction to it. There is no purpose or meaning to history, they think, and these apocalypses like Daniel are nothing but the ramblings of crazy ancient mystics. The future will be what we make of it, good or bad. An apocalypse, a revelation, is not something worth taking into account. And yet many people in our culture are still fascinated by apocalyptic things. We could easily list dozens of movies that are very apocalyptic in their focus, even if they aren’t based on anything biblical. Think of how many movies involve the end of the world or some major apocalyptic catastrophe: the Terminator movies, Independence Day, 2012, I am Legend, War of the Worlds, and Armageddon are just a few of the blockbusters that come to mind. There are always disaster movies, alien invasion movies, and zombie movies coming out in which a few plucky characters face the complete breakdown of human society, and the point of those movies is usually less about the disaster and more about the people involved and how they react to their circumstances. In other words, some people look toward the future and the only thing they can see in that future is what we as humans do. It’s our future, we will build it for good or for ill, and we will deal with it.
At the other end of the spectrum are lots of Christians who take books like Daniel and Revelation very seriously, who believe that God is taking history in a direction, and who look very intently through the Bible for clues about what the future holds. The problem is that many people misunderstand what these apocalypses are revealing to them. They think of Daniel as a book of code, with all sorts of clues about which nation will do this in what year, and which world leader is going to become the Antichrist. And so lots of people have scoured the Bible, taking a verse from Revelation, mixing it with a few verses from Daniel, adding some obscure trivia from Ezekiel, giving it a shake, and coming up with a date for when Jesus will return. They’re reading these apocalypses and it’s affecting their actions, which is what I said was the point of those apocalypses, but they’re coming to some questionable conclusions. It happens all the time, and it’s been happening all the time for a very long time. In AD 793, for example, a group of people in Toledo, Spain picked up the rumor that the end of the world would come on Easter of that year, so they spent all night and all day fasting and praying, until they became so hungry that one of them decided that if they were going to die in the apocalypse, they might as well die with full stomachs. Or in 1297, a friar named Petrus Olivi wrote that the Antichrist would arise between 1300 and 1340 (so far as we know, he or she did not). In 1414, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly predicted that the Antichrist would come in 1789. In 1534, a group of Christians led by Jan Bockelson and Jan Matthys took control of the city of Münster, claimed to be the successors of Gideon and King David, declared the city the New Jerusalem, legalized polygamy, and claimed all goods for the community, all because they were convinced that the end would come in April of that year. In 1910, there were reports of crowds panicking in Chicago, New York, and France in response to the approach of Halley’s Comet. In 1970, Hal Lindsey wrote the extremely influential book The Late, Great Planet Earth, essentially proclaiming that the world was ending. In 1988, Edgar Whisenant published his pamphlet titled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will be in 1988. More recently, the internet was abuzz with people mashing together random verses from the Bible to argue that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. We could go on and on.
Many, many people have looked through these apocalypses, these strange verses from Daniel and other parts of the Bible, and they think they’ve cracked the code. They’ve assumed that these revelations were detailed road maps of the future, fortune cookies written in code, and if I can get my charts all figured out and line up this monster in Revelation with that world leader and calculate all the dates properly, I can figure out who the Antichrist is and when Jesus is coming back. The funny thing is that pretty much every generation since Jesus (and even before) has looked at the signs of the times and assumed that we must be the last generation. “Maybe it’s just that nobody’s gotten it right yet,” you may be thinking. Maybe. Or maybe looking for dates is missing the point of an apocalypse.
Paul’s letters to the church at Thessaloniki deal with some of these sorts of issues. They’re not apocalypses like Daniel or Revelation, but one of Paul’s main points to the Thessalonian Christians is that Jesus is coming back, and He is coming back soon. Yet while he’s discussing the return of Christ, Paul also keeps instructing the Thessalonians not to be idle, as he does in the passage we read today. One way that some people have made sense out of the situation in 2 Thessalonians is to suggest that these Christians heard the teaching that they were in the end times and therefore assumed that there was no point in going to work anymore. If Jesus is coming back any day now, why not just kick back and enjoy ourselves while we wait? What’s the point of going to the trouble of planting crops that will never have a chance to grow? And Paul’s instruction to them is, in no uncertain terms, to get back to work. Understanding the end times properly means that you should be more engaged, not less engaged, with the world. The fact that Jesus could come back any time does not mean that we give up all hope for the world, throw our hands in the air, and say that it doesn’t matter if we wreck the planet and start a war here or there. Very well, let’s say you do your calculations and you figure out that Jesus is coming back next year: so what? What are you going to do about it?
In fact, books like Daniel have a specific course of action in mind for us, and it doesn’t depend on figuring out the road map of the future. Remember, an apocalypse is a revelation, but rather than being a revelation of details about the future, it’s a revelation of the power of God breaking into our world and giving history a direction. When Daniel gives us his apocalypse, he is giving us a revelation of the kingdoms of his world portrayed as terrifying beasts; the struggles and wars of those centuries are personified in the cosmic realms so that we can catch a glimpse behind the scenes, so to speak, and see that God’s reality and God’s plan includes more than the mess we see on the stage of the world. We see that God has agents working and judging and moving history in God’s direction, a direction in which the faithful are included in God’s kingdom and the faithless are left out. We see that no matter how haywire things seem to be going, God is still in control, and none of this is unexpected. In fact, things have been going haywire for a long time, and though we don’t know when the fulfillment of God’s promises will come, we know that it will come. We are not on the losing side of history. History is not going to leave the people of God behind, because history is moving in God’s direction. Our faithfulness to God is not in vain, because our hope in God is not in vain.
History is moving in God’s direction, Daniel tells us, and the New Testament expands on that point a bit. God is going to be faithful to His promises, and since Jesus is Lord of all things, that implies that He will return to claim His kingdom. He is the one who makes sense of history, the one who gives the world a purpose, and so history will not end without Him and it will not be complete without Him. Jesus is Lord, He is coming back, and He could come back any time. That should not be a cause for fear, if your faith is in the right place; it should be a cause for celebration and expectation. That’s not a reason to give up on the world, that’s a reason to get more involved in doing work that honors Christ, because if we know that history ends God’s way, we know that we have nothing to fear. We know that there will be terrible conflicts until then. We know that nature itself will not be restored to order until then, and so natural disasters will continue. We know that Satan and the powers of darkness will continue to work against the people of God until then. We know that frauds, liars, and charlatans will continue to deceive people until then. These things are expected, but Christ will put an end to them, and we have no reason to fear.
The point of these overwhelming, confusing apocalyptic visions is to shift our focus from the mess in front of us to the coming kingdom that is breaking into our current reality. The point is to shift our hope from the shifting sands of human kingdoms, human technologies, and human philosophies to placing our hope in the kingdom that is founded on the blood of Christ and operates in the power of the Holy Spirit. The point is not to tell our fortunes, the point is to give us a vision of the future God has in store for us. The question for us is whether our lives right now are reflecting and contributing to that kingdom. Are we living fearlessly in the hope of a kingdom that will not fail? Are our actions in line with the clear teachings of Jesus’ kingdom? Are we making ourselves ready by being faithful? Jesus is Lord, and He will return. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.
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