The End Time: Apocalypse, or Epiphany?

We are talking about the End of Time, the Apocalypse, and the signs of the Second Coming. We’re looking at Jesus’s answer to the disciples’ question: “What will be the sign of Your coming and the end of the age?” 

We have in our mind a vivid picture of the end. First of all, we think of two groups of people: The wicked and the righteous, the good guys and the bad guys, those going to heaven and those going to hell, the sheep and the goats, those who are on the right hand and those who are on the left hand. But what makes the difference between them? 

A rich young ruler asked Jesus: “Good teacher. What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:18). In other words, he’s asking “How do I become a sheep and not a goat? How do I get on the right side and not on the left side? I want to go to heaven and not to hell.” 

“Why do you call Me good?” Jesus replies, “There’s no one good but God.” This statement challenges us in defining what good and bad really are, what is righteous and what is wicked. Our idea of the good guys waiting in their long white robes for translation while the wicked cry for the rocks and the mountains to follow them doesn’t fit with Jesus’s statement. We are, after all, not just all wheat or all tares; rather, we are a combination of good and bad. We’re not all good or all bad. 

So what does it mean to be wicked? What does it mean to be righteous? We associate righteousness with being ready for the End of Time and wickedness with being unready for the end. Moreover, the picture we have of the End of Time is only applicable to the single generation of mankind that is alive at the End of Time, yet we all probably think of ourselves as being there at the end. 

But for millions of people who have lived and died since Jesus made his comments, the End of Time was different. There were no two groups of people, the good guys and the bad guys, the sheep and the goats. There were no rocks or mountains falling on anyone. There was no time of Jacob’s trouble. There was no second coming during their lifetimes. They just lived their life as they lived it and then they died. 

What about all these generations past? How did they find meaning concerning the End of Time? Theoretically, only one generation will live through the Great Tribulation, the seven last plagues and the Second Coming. But every generation has lived in fear of it. So far, we’re still here waiting. 

Do you think that the End of Time as described by Jesus is generational—that is, singled out for a specific time in a specific place? Or is it personal? Are the signs of the end generational? Or are they personal? Are we waiting for the event or events? Or is it possible that we could be in the End of Time and we don’t even know it? Is it possible that we think we’re living in the End of Time, and be far away from it? Will a time come in the end where there will be wicked and righteous, as we consider it (Righteous ready for translation; Wicked ready for hell)? How can we be good when Jesus says Only God is good.

The picture of two groups—righteous and wicked—each set in its own ways, awaiting a Second Coming, going through the Tribulation, through the abomination of desolation, and enduring the seven last plagues is a distinct contrast to the picture that Jesus paints:

 “But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Matthew 24:36-39) 

Here we see a distinctly different picture—one of business as usual, of life being carried on as we’ve always known it. Is the Great Tribulation only for those who live in the last generation at the End of Time, or is the Great Tribulation for everyone? Is the party that Jesus refers to in this passage for everyone except the last generation? 

What is righteousness and who among us are righteous? The word righteous has two meanings. It is used in a sense of right behavior. In Greek, the word primarily describes conduct in relationship to others, especially with regards to the rights of others in business or in legal matters. It is contrasted with wickedness, with denotes the conduct of one who, out of self-centeredness, neither reveres God nor respects Man. 

The bad news, of course, is that true and perfect righteousness and behavior is not possible for humankind to attain on its own. The good that we receive is offered by grace through Jesus Christ.

Consider the case of Noah, who… 

 … found favor in the eyes of the Lord….  Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. (Genesis 6:8-9) 

But Noah was not flawless. He was righteous, blameless, and he walked with God, but that is what grace does. It counts you as blameless and righteous even if you’re not flawless. We know this is the case because Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, gets drunk, gets naked, and passes out—hardly the picture of a flawless man. Not flawless, yet righteous; not error free, but still blameless. At the End of Noah’s Age—at Noah’s Apocalypse, the Great Flood—we see a righteous Noah but not a faultless Noah. 

Our view of the righteous and the wicked at the Time of the End perhaps requires a revision in our thinking. We wait for the Apocalypse as righteous but not flawless individuals. We wait for the Second Coming as blameless but not error-free people. Here’s how:

 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Being ready for the End of Time doesn’t mean that we’re free from error. But by God’s grace, we’re free from blame. Being ready, being righteous, being sheep and not goats means that we have accepted God’s grace—nothing more and nothing less. The wicked refuse to look at the serpent who has been lifted up in the wilderness and refuse to take the robe of righteousness at the wedding feast. They refuse God’s grace. 

For you, this may be a new way of thinking, a new paradigm, a new understanding, a new revelation; the Bible would call it a new apocalypse. There is an age-old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Day by day, we settle our lives into familiarity. We have our routines, we see the same people. We do the same tasks. We experience the same events. We begin to see the world in well-worn patterns—ways of thought that seems so stable that we come to believe that nothing can ever shake them. 

The story of the Bible is meant to do just that—to shake us from our viewpoints as a dog shakes off water. But the Bible doesn’t just deconstruct the way we’ve always seen things: It replaces our frail paradigms with robust ones that come from a new perspective. When we let the Bible become the lens through which we view reality, we become free of old worn-out paths, and everything begins to look different. We get divine clarity, divine insight, divine ideas, and divine revelation; or, to use the biblical language, we experience an apocalypse. 

An apocalypse isn’t a catastrophic end of the world, but in modern Western thought, in the vernacular, that’s what the word means—witness apocalyptic movies such as Godzilla, Zombieland, Terminator, and many others. In the popular imagination, an apocalypse is a dreaded unraveling of everything which is good. But that is not what the word means in the Bible. 

In the Bible, an apocalypse is what happens when someone is exposed to the transcendent reality of God’s perspective. An apocalypse is a confrontation with the divine so intense that it transforms how a person views everything. In short, a biblical apocalypse is not an ending: It is a beginning. An apocalypse is not the unraveling of good; on the contrary, an apocalypse is reorientation to that which is truly good. 

Take, for example, the story of Jacob. He cheated his brother, deceived his father, and ran for his life—straight into his own personal exile. Jacob’s former way of life was over. Surely this was a permanent unraveling of anything that was good for him and for his future. But right at this point God reveals himself in a dream that transforms an ordinary place into a meeting place with God so that Jacob can gain God’s perspective. 

As told in Genesis 28, Jacob falls asleep on the ground and dreams he sees a stairway connecting Heaven and Earth with angels ascending and descending the staircase. Above the stairway, God stands and speaks to Jacob and promises to bless him and his descendants, to give him the land that he had promised to Abraham and Isaac, and to multiply his descendants. God even gives Jacob the promise of his continued presence and protection. 

So when Jacob wakes up, he sees everything differently, even his physical environment. “Surely,” he says, “The Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He added: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16-17). Later, he wrestles with God at the brook Jabbok in Genesis 32. And subsequently, in Genesis 35, Jacob has an encounter with God which is called an apocalypse—in Hebrew, galah (גלה).

Jacob was not experiencing the end of the world, but was experiencing the end of his former perspective, the end of the world as he knew it, and a shift to a new world. He was experiencing the end of his limited viewpoint and his narrow ideas. He was experiencing the end of his confusion and dismay. But it wasn’t the end of the world. The apocalypse for him was just the beginning of his new reality, one in which he had confidence that God was for him and that his time of trouble would one day end.

The Bible, it turns out, is full of apocalypses: From Adam and Abraham, through the prophets and the kings of the Old Testament, down to Paul on the road to Damascus. Each of them have their apocalypse. If you read these stories and let them soak in, you ask yourself the question: “Am I ready for an apocalypse?” An apocalypse will feel uncomfortable and strange. It could lead to the death of things and ideas that you hadn’t reviewed for many years, the laying down of perspective, and ways of thinking that you’ve held onto for a long time. 

But ultimately, God’s apocalyptic goal is to reorient our lives to what truly matters. God wants humans to live an abundant life full of wisdom and to rule in an orderly world with them. That means that an apocalypse is never a bad thing for any of us. Apocalypse is always something God does to our lives to produce good and beautiful results, bringing glory to his name and ultimate good to his people. 

So an apocalypse is never the end of the world; but it may be the end of the world as we’ve known it. For instance, take the longest and most famous book of the Apocalypse In the Bible—the entire book of Revelation. This book is famous for being about the end of the world because there are so many violent images of the destruction of evil and disorder. But the end of the Apocalypse—the book of Revelation at the end—leaves us not with the end of the world but with a renewed world where injustice is gone, humanity is united in self-sacrificial love, and the creation is remade. It is a new heaven and a new earth. 

This week, as I watched the flooding in Kentucky, I heard over and over again that it was a sign of the end. What are you willing to rethink about the End of Time? What ideas do you have about being ready? What are the real signs of the end? Do you have an apocalypse, a new revelation about the End of Time, about the Second Coming? Does knowing that this is the End of Time really make a difference? Are you prepared? And if you are what are you prepared for? Are you prepared for grace? Do you count yourself among the righteous? Or do you consider yourself wicked? Can you reorder your thinking to a Time of the End which is a new beginning rather than a Time of the End? 

David: An apocalypse, you seem to be saying, is equivalent to an epiphany. 

Don: Yes. 

David: That’s really quite radical, but I like it. I also very much like the notion that other parts of the world, other traditions, religions, beliefs don’t categorize people into good and bad and so on. Daoism does not bother with such sweeping and judgmental classifications. Individuals may be described as bad or good but it’s very specific to something that they did, it’s not a sweeping condemnation that the individual is bad by virtue of belonging to some category. That seems to be pretty much a Christian, Judeo-Christian, or even Abrahamic view of life.

Reinhard: In addition to personal and universal apocalypses there are also localized apocalypses, such as when the Romans pretty much wiped out the nation of Israel. That was their Tribulation. As was noted last week, it’s hard not to be saved, even for those who, after the 4th and 5th bowls of wrath in Revelation 16, continue to curse God, yet in the end God gives everyone the chance to return to him, like the criminal pardoned on the cross alongside Jesus. 

Those who refuse to repent right up to the end are the truly wicked. Believers don’t go straight to the right or the left. 

Sinners in Zion are terrified;
Trembling has seized the godless.

“Who among us can live with the consuming fire?
Who among us can live with everlasting burning?”   
One who walks righteously and speaks with integrity,
One who rejects unjust gain
And shakes his hands so that they hold no bribe;
One who stops his ears from hearing about bloodshed
And shuts his eyes from looking at evil;…” (Isaiah 33:14-15)

Jesus wants us to make the effort to go through the narrow gate. So we have to stay on course. Grace, of course, covers our shortcomings, makes us secure. We already know the roadmap leading to salvation. That’s our advantage.

C-J: I think that we’re talking about two different levels. One is the personal, the linear: Right behavior/wrong behavior. But the epiphany comes when we think about global relationship. When Jacob wrestled, he’s trying to decide are there many gods or one god, and who’s right? He went from what he wanted to believe (that his position was right and self-justified) to the point of thinking about humanity. God does both. He wants us to have right thinking, right behaviors, because what we choose to do impacts others. 

We are accountable before God at two different levels when the epiphany is that “I’m not the only guy here. I’m not thinking just about ‘Am I gonna survive?’” The message all through the New Testament is sacrifice, service to others, the entire thing. Your relationship with God begins with your accountability first before God and then to Man.

Donald: When the conversation regarding the End of Time transpired with Christ, did that happen always on the basis of a question? Or did Christ bring that conversation forward without a question? Because in context, in parallel to what CJ just said, Christ’s message was really accountability to others. Was it we who kept asking what’s going to happen at the End of Time, or did Christ himself raise the issue? It was more important to Christ how we treated each other, surely?

C-J: Christ was born about 30 years into the chaos of Rome and what was going on in Jerusalem in terms of politics, economics, religious freedom, and who was going to be on the top of the heap. So I don’t think that was the issue. Jesus had no problem going into the temple and calling the Pharisees or the priests a den of thieves. He called them out regularly. 

It goes back to Jacob. “I want to be the best.” “Okay, you will be the originator, your seed will be like a thousand stars in the sky, uncountable.” Well, he was happy with that. He just wanted to have power and inheritance and influence. But really, I think he did not understand that the revelation was about humility. I don’t need anything from God, but grace; the rest, the provision, he will provide. I don’t even need to ask. I only need to have gratitude and understand where my source and resource is. 

When we do that. It’s much easier for us to say to the next person: “If you are cold, here’s my wrap, for I am warm now and we can share it between the two of us.” How many people are really capable of that consistently? Extending generosity without charging interest—all the things that are forbidden in the Holy Bible, in the Koran. If you’re going to loan somebody money, it’s not to make money, it’s out of the goodness of your heart. And there are many, many examples. 

When society gets greedy, when society divvies up those that have and those that don’t, we begin to say, “Well, if you were better, you would have more; if you were good, then God would bless you.” But I think that goes back to ego and God is all about us getting rid of our ego and how we define ourselves other than we are a witness and a testament, of the transformation of that relationship, in our person, and in our relationships.

David: I would agree that the whole point of Christ (but unfortunately not of Christianity) was to spread the message: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus prefaced it with “Love God” but to me, you love God by loving your neighbor as yourself. This is why religion has little relevance to me. I believe it doesn’t matter whether you “believe in God” or not if you express love for your fellow human being. If you do, then you’re doing exactly what God wants and you are you are honoring and loving God whether you admit it or not, whether you say you believe in God or not. It really doesn’t matter. 

Saying that you love God, saying that you believe in God, is not a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a good thing. Because if you if you read what Jesus says then I think you must know that by loving God you must love your fellow human beings as a matter of course, without thinking. It will be part of your very nature.

Jay: I think we Christians underestimate how much our view of judgment affects what we think about the End Times and the feelings that the End Times invoke in us. The Abrahamic religions’ concept of judgment at the End Time, of being good or bad, saved or lost, shapes how we think about the End Times. We downplay it a little bit because nobody really wants to talk about judgment. We’re reminded that the concept of judgment is not something mortals can really understand and we are warned to stay away from it as much as we possibly can. 

And yes, we interlink this into the End Time to a very great degree, Our interpretation of what the End Times are about, the feelings invoked by thinking about the End Time, in my opinion are really wrapped up in judgment. Are you going to be on the good side or are you going to be on the bad side? That’s why there’s dread or wonderment or confusion. 

I’m curious to know, if you approach the End Times without that lens (which I don’t know is even possible for us anymore) would you get a very different view of what the End Time is, what the End Time leads to, what it means to say that the kingdom of heaven is here and now? I would guess that without a judgement lens on the End Time we would be extraordinarily happy about its coming, if we had no reason to worry about it, no reason to wonder about it, no reason to be concerned whether or not we were saved. 

But I think the Abrahamic religions have made judgment a humongous part of their identity. One of the major differences between our church and others is our understanding of the investigative judgment. This concept of judgment is bound to our identity, to our culture, which makes it very difficult to appreciate what the End Times are going to be.

Donald: We’ve all probably been in a conversation where somebody says they just want to go home, that this world’s a terrible place. It is usually said in desperate situations, like in a hospital, where someone just can’t wait to go home with Christ. It seems a bit presumptuous to assume that we will be taken home just because we wish it. 

David: In their common definitions there is a difference between epiphany and apocalypse. If all you’re looking forward to is the Apocalypse, then you feel pretty bad about it. But if you’re looking forward to an epiphany…? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d love to have an epiphany. I can’t wait. It is going to teach me, to enlighten me. It will be wonderful, it is something to look forward to. And maybe that is the message in the Bible, but we’re misreading it, badly.

Jay: We don’t look forward to our own personal Tribulation during the time of trouble. We believe we’re going to be saved, so the time of trouble will be horrific. But think about all the people in this world right now who are going through immense Tribulation—people being prosecuted and even slaughtered for their religious beliefs, suffering through earthquakes and other natural disasters, and from war and man-made disasters. Many people are living in their End Times already, but because we aren’t personally going through Tribulation and tragedy, it must not be the End Time. 

This narrow personal perspective wants to deny that the End Time is here but is that the global view? A lot of people will have died today because of persecution or disaster, not because of old age. It is their End Time. How are we not living in the End Time? Just because Christ might not come through the clouds in glory this afternoon, I don’t know that it means we’re not in the End Time.

Anonymous: The many different interpretations of the Bible from different people and different groups makes me think that maybe anything goes, everything’s right. This is possible. That’s possible. But what would that do to our heritage of understanding the Bible in a certain way? It makes me wonder if there’s no such thing as right or wrong (not in our behavior, of course, because God gave us the commandments, the moral law) but for the rest, how do we interpret the Bible? Maybe everybody will see it differently. To them, their view is right. I even thought perhaps there are no wicked people or good people. Maybe in the original translation of the Bible, the reference was to wickedness and goodness. 

When an apocalypse happens in my life, it’s like a new birth, a new experience, coming to know God. But in our misled or flawed understanding, new birth means following the bible to the T. Who knows if we’ve been doing it right or wrong? Maybe it’s individual, not cosmic or global events. That said, is there going to be an end of the world? I believe there is going to be an end of evil, and that humanity will be just watchers of the great controversy between good and evil. We don’t have much to do with it. The controversy is not ours. God has taken care of it. 

So we know and believe that God is the victor and will eliminate evil. Does that mean the end of the world? Does that mean life as we know it is going to change? Probably. There’s going to be development of our thinking towards good. But maybe humanity will never cease to exist on Earth. There’s not an end to existence, just an end to evil. People will continue to live with different sets of views and paradigms. 

Sometimes I think that just pleasing God as best I can is enough. That’s all I need to do. I know he likes good and I’ll be on that side. But to pin it down to details and precise prediction and interpretation when we’re all flawed in interpretation is troublesome..

C-J: If humanity became extinct, as the Neanderthals did, the planet would survive because nature, the sun, the cosmos don’t need us. It really comes down to our personal relationship with God and to each other. But in terms of an End Time, of the world coming to an end, the sun exploding, the planet burning up,… it doesn’t matter. If those things are going to happen and I’m gone, it doesn’t impact me. So I’m more concerned about my relationship with God and others.

Don: But as Jason would say, we’re reluctant to give it up because we want to control it, we want to analyze it, we want to understand it, we want to do whatever we can to make sure we’re in alignment with it. So to say that it’s not for us to know or that our knowledge may be incomplete or erroneous is not a concept that we embrace very easily, because we want to be able to control it. We want to be able to say this is the Time of the End. These are the signs of the coming. This is what we have to do. There’s a sense that being prepared involves us in doing something. It involves us making some maneuvers, forgiveness, praying, being pious. It completely eliminates God’s graciousness.

Donald: I’m still stuck on how central this conversation is to our belief system. Does it matter that the radical concept we discussed last week—that it’s the devil and his angels who will be drowned and consumed at the End of Time, not humanity—is only discussed in the context of our particular beliefs? 

Jay: It only concerns me if what we say we believe is a static thing. I don’t know if anything is that static, that complete. that solid. It doesn’t ring true with what I read in the Scriptures, with what I see in the ministry of Christ. Nobody has the complete picture. We’re all struggling to grapple with a complete picture we will never have. I have a problem if I think I have the complete picture and some of these new thoughts don’t fit in the picture. 

Seventh Day Adventism believes it does not have all the answers. That’s what we say, anyway. If that’s true, then having something that expands upon, or dare I say is even contrary to, what is “known” at this time shouldn’t be a problem. For me, it isn’t a problem because I’m not going to tie it to judgment. If you want to tie your judgment and your understanding of the End Times and the completeness of your picture and your complete understanding of everything, then having the complete, right, and clear picture is pretty important. If it isn’t tied back to judgment, if that’s not your understanding, your complete picture, your understanding of what the End Times is, then it really has nothing to do with what judgment is about and I don’t struggle with that, personally,

Donald: I’m not sure that as a corporate church we’re as flexible as this discussion is (and should be).

Jay: I don’t think anybody is that flexible. I don’t think this is a problem just for Adventists. I think it’s a problem for humanity. No matter what the topic is, everybody wants to have the complete picture, the complete understanding, and be right. 

Donald: The church isn’t static, but in some ways our church has become more traditional in its way of thinking and less forward-thinking. On the other hand, I would think that parents are not sending their kids off to a university for flexible thinking. I think that they’re pretty dogmatic, and they’re hoping that they’ll come home feeling comfortable in traditional ways of thinking about the End of Time.

Jay: Speaking for me personally I would say that my generation is extraordinarily different from yours and from that of my own children. But I don’t send my kids to Andrews University so that they will think like Adventists, I send my kids to Andrews because I believe the culture has benefits for them in society, and I would say that that is why people are still in this church, from my generation down to the next. They are not here because it’s the “right” one but because it provides a cultural and environmental context in which they can love their God with all their heart and love their neighbor as themselves. 

I believe there are parts of the culture and the belief system that help people to do that and I want my kids to be exposed to it. I might be extraordinarily liberal and maybe conservatives outnumber liberals at Andrews, but I am still pushing my kids to go there—not so that they will believe in the state of the dead and in the investigative judgment and in our understanding of prophecy.

The church proclaims itself to have no creed except the Bible, and the preamble to its statement of 27 fundamental beliefs says that the church will change its fundamental beliefs if new light is shed upon them. So it seems to me to be the ideal environment for evolution. However, what’s unsaid is how does this happen? Does it happen in a class like this, where new ideas are discussed and new viewpoints are expressed? Does it happen because the seminary decides that they’re going to do something? There’s no formal way by which new ideas can be vetted and can be expressed and can be incorporated. 

Don: And most fundamentally, when you come to the issue of judgment, one of its characteristics is centered on the concept of grace, which is that it’s not your work, thinking, ideas, and point of view that are critical; it’s the point of view that God’s graciousness is what gives you the right to eternal life. 

If so, then all discussion of doctrine, of what does this cup mean and what does this scroll mean is interesting and in our apocalyptic literature discussion it’s nice to find yourself there and to see that in the end God triumphs and the Tribulation will be over and the new earth will be regenerated, etc, etc., but it’s not critical to the to the fundamental issue of whether God’s grace applies to me and will I accept it? 

Next week we will move on to the parables of the End of Time. Jesus, as part of this so called “Olivet” discourse on the End of Time, tells parables, one of which is on treating God and your fellow man as co-equals and another is the parable of the ten virgins with oil in their lamps.

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These discussions take place every Saturday (Adventist Sabbath) morning via Zoom. To join the conversation, go to http://oakac.org and enter the password “sabbath”. It is not the place to challenge every point of view that may disagree with or diverge from orthodox beliefs. Difference of viewpoints is welcomed; discord is discouraged; expansion of ideas is encouraged.