Preparing for the End Time

This past Wednesday, the orbiting moon came on its cycle closest to the earth. It produced a bigger and brighter moon, something that the astronomers call a “super moon.” The Native Americans call it a “buck moon” because whenever this does occur, it occurs during the season that young male deer sprout their antlers. 

In many places across America, this moon took on a reddish glow. This, it was said, was due to the pollution in the atmosphere from forest fires raging in the northwest. This blood-red moon fulfilled the prophecy of Joel:

I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth,
Blood, fire, and columns of smoke.   

The sun will be turned into darkness,
And the moon into blood,
Before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.   

And it will come about that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord
Will be saved;
For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem
There will be those who escape,
Just as the Lord has said,
Even among the survivors whom the Lord calls. (Joel 2:30-32) 

Was Wednesday a sign of the second coming and the end of the age, as the disciples asked Jesus in the passage that we’re studying from Matthew 24? On Tuesday, President Biden took science news reporters into the White House auditorium to show them the first pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. Light from galaxies billions of miles away twinkled like Christmas tree ornaments.

The slice of the universe we saw in the picture, we were told, was as if (size wise) we were looking at a single grain of sand on the end of a finger held at arm’s length. The point being made was that the vastness of the universe is incomprehensible. Someone wondered whether the telescope was so powerful that it actually might see God! 

We’re talking about signs and wonders in the sun, the moon, and the stars. Is the James Webb Space Telescope fulfilling end-time prophecy? Was Wednesday a sign of the second coming and the end of the age, as the disciples asked Jesus in the passage that we’re studying from Matthew 24? 

Why do we look for signs? Is it simply curiosity? Hasn’t every generation looked for and actually found for themselves signs of the end of the age? In every generation there have been celestial signs and earthly signs too: Wars, calamities, natural disasters, unrest. Are things worse now than they’ve been in the past? Every generation, it seems, believes that it’s worse in their generation than it was before. 

Is this really the end—finally, for real? Why do we want to know anyway? Why do we need to know? What difference does it make if we’re at the end of time? If you knew that Jesus would come one month from today, what effect would that have on your life? What would you do differently? 

As Jason has pointed out on several occasions, mankind wants to control and manage his circumstances. We have an overwhelming need to be in charge of ourselves, of others, and even of God. Leaving things up to others or even up to God is difficult for us to do. Jesus said: 

 “Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming.” (Matthew 24:42) 

What do you have to do to be ready? Here’s a picture of doing something to prepare for the end of the age: Work, strive, prepare, do something, don’t be caught by surprise. But what am I supposed to do? If I’m saved by grace, what meaning does being ready really have? And how can we have signs that are supposed to warn us and then Paul says:

 …the day of the Lord is coming just like a thief in the night. (Thessalonians 5:2)

When I was a boy, I remember hearing a lot about being ready and thinking a lot about it what it meant for me personally. It meant cleaning myself up, turning away from doing bad things, and above all, asking in my prayers for forgiveness for sins known and unknown which I had committed. Being prepared, for me, was to have the robe of righteousness already on when Jesus came. So there I was, ready and waiting, already cleaned up, standing there with my righteous robe. 

That, of course, is just what the signs must be for. To give us a warning, to sound the alarm: Get ready! Be prepared! But be prepared and get ready for what? For God’s grace? How do you get ready for God’s grace? Joel told us in the passage above that the great and dreadful day of the Lord will result in everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord to be saved. Why is it a dreadful day if everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved? And how do I prepare to call upon the name of the Lord? How should I be ready to call upon the name of the Lord? 

Jesus told this parable concerning end of time. It gives a picture of what it means to be ready, to be prepared: 

 Jesus presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and left. And when the wheat sprouted and produced grain, then the weeds also became evident. And the slaves of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ And he said to them, ‘An enemy has done this!’ The slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us, then, to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No; while you are gathering up the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Allow both to grow together until the harvest; and at the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather up the weeds and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” (Matthew 13:24-30) 

First, let me say what I believe this parable is not. Although commonly believed (and usually taught) it is not about good people and bad people. There are no totally bad people and no totally good people. We are not just wheat, or just tare. All of us are both wheat and tare. And truth be told, for many of us (myself included) we are more tare than we are wheat. This is not about the destruction of the wicked. It is about the destruction of evil. 

Notice first that the introduction of evil into the world occurs beyond our consciousness. “They were sleeping,” it said. In addition, the separation of good and evil is beyond our ability to discriminate. Remember this in regard to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that we’ve spoken of so many times. 

Mankind’s inclination and approach to evil—in others and in themselves—is to do the work to get rid of it. But this, Jesus cautions, is dangerous work and should be left to divinity alone. It is precisely because none of us is completely wheat and none of us is entirely tare that discrimination cannot be left to mankind. Evil will, in the end, be destroyed and the harvest will be gathered, but not at the hands of man. It is angels, Jesus says, who will do that work.

That’s why the question is so important: What does it mean to be ready, to get ready? What does it mean to be ready, prepared, and waiting for the end of the age? The parable teaches that evil is defined as resorting to our own work, trying to do the work ourselves. The definition of good in this parable is leaving things up to God, or as Joel says, calling on his name saves us. 

If we’re not made for cleaning ourselves up for the end of time, then what are we supposed to do with the signs? If we are saved by grace, if evil will be taken care of by God, if all who call upon his name will be saved, what are the signs for? Are they intended to reassure us? If so, in what way? To alarm us? In what way? And are signs to be universal, global, or regional? Should signs in North America be different from signs in Asia? Should signs in Africa be different from signs in Europe? Or is it possible that signs are individual, personal, just for you and just for me? 

Have we been looking for signs in all the wrong places? Have we completely missed the point? In the Olivet discussion of Matthew 24 Jesus suggests that the end of time should be considered individually. He refers specifically to nursing mothers, pregnant ladies, Sabbath keepers, those sensitive to cold, those seeking the Messiah: 

 “Therefore when you see the abomination of desolation which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place—let the reader understand— then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains. Whoever is on the housetop must not go down to get things out of his house. And whoever is in the field must not turn back to get his cloak. But woe to those women who are pregnant, and to those who are nursing babies in those days! Moreover, pray that when you flee, it will not be in the winter, or on a Sabbath. For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will again. And if those days had not been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. Then if anyone says to you, ‘Behold, here is the Christ,’ or ‘He is over here,’ do not believe him. For false christs and false prophets will arise and will provide great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect. Behold, I have told you in advance. So if they say to you, ‘Behold, He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Behold, He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe them. For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be. … Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. (Matthew 24:15-27;34-35)

While we hold a universal view of prophecy, perhaps we should think more personally. While surely the future holds a glorious return of Jesus Christ, for all generations past and future and for individuals in every age up until now there is an end of time, a judgment to everyone. In every generation, there is a time of tribulation and of distress. To everyone there is a deliverance from sorrow. To everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord, there is a redemption. 

In a sense, to everyone in every generation there are signs of the end. To everyone, the promise is made of hope. To everyone there is an invitation to enter the narrow way that Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount, which is, as we’ve said, the Way of Grace, where you are fitted individually with the robe of righteousness in preparation for the marriage supper of the Lamb. 

Is it possible that we have completely misunderstood the signs? What are the signs for? When are the signs for? Are you afraid or distressed by signs, or are you reassured by them? Do you think that signs should be universal—something for everyone, everywhere, at all time—or is there a personal aspect to the signs? If you are preparing  for the time of the end, what are you preparing for? 

And finally, what good is it to be prepared? What purpose is there in being prepared, in being ready, in being alert, if you’re actually saved by grace? What does it mean to ask the question: Are you ready for Jesus to come? Does the blood red moon of Wednesday, with smoke and fire, fulfill the prophecy of Joel 2? Does the James Webb Space Telescope fulfill the wonders in the sun and the moon and the stars? If the answer is yes, these are signs, what difference does it make? What are you going to do differently about it now? If the answer is no, it happened by coincidence in one week, what does it actually take for you to call something a sign? 

Jay: I think that human beings need stimuli in order to change. If something new is not introduced, if there is no sense of urgency, our natural tendency is to stay within our area of comfort, in homeostasis, in equilibrium. Impetus to change is what I see as the value in the signs. They are such that we can always seem to find ourselves to be in the end time, no matter where we are in time and place.

That a later generation believes the world is a worse place than it was for the previous generations exacerbates our sense of urgency. The world always seems to be getting more chaotic, so when we look at the end-time signs described in the Bible we easily put ourselves in that spot and develop a sense of urgency we wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Christ said that a wicked generation is one that seeks signs. It shouldn’t be how we function. It shouldn’t be what we need in order to establish the Kingdom of God here and now, and yet it seems that because we are wicked, because we are depraved, we seek signs, we seek a reason for urgency, we seek impetus to change and hopefully change for the better. But it doesn’t seem like it should be that way. The signs are extraordinarily vague. Why are they not specific?

Donald: I live in an Adventist Mecca where Adventists still feel the need to find evidence of the truth that the Church presents. They put up physical signs in the community, never about grace but about the end of time and what that means. They refer to the lions and five heads and all the rest of the things in Daniel and Revelation by which, apparently, people are intrigued and fascinated. 

Does the Church see God less as a God of grace and love and more a God of signs pointing to our truth, which we feel compelled to share with others? “Here are the signs!” Yet we do this knowing that the Bible says no one can know, that it will come like a thief in the night. 

There seems to be so much contradiction here. We’re drawn to it like we’re drawn to an accident that we drive by. Is that what we should be preaching? It is what we preach: The end of time in the 2300 day prophecy. 

And what about the state of the dead? At the end of time, if Christ is returning, what’s he returning for? Just for the people who are alive? Or the people who are in their graves as well?. Those are some parts of this conversation that we need to include.

Dewan: God never does anything without telling us. In the time of Noah, God sent a message which people rejected. In the time of Abraham. the people of Sodom and Gomorrah rejected God’s warning. In the days of Jesus Christ, the Jews also rejected his teachings. Today, the same thing is happening. The end is very near. The message is reaching all over the world. People are rejecting God’s warning and have no fear of God:

The secret of the Lord is for those who fear Him, 
And He will make them know His covenant. (Psalm 25:14)

Reinhard: I think the end of time is the final blow to the activities of Satan, the end of the war between good and evil. Humanity is involved in this process. A phrase I heard from a Muslim cleric broadcast over a loudspeaker (and I might also have heard from a Christian pastor) is that we should live as if this were the last day of our lives because the End of Time could come tonight, yet we continue as if the world will go on for a thousand years. 

So on the one hand, spiritually we have to prepare that the end time, the second coming, is going to take place, but we have to work as if the world never ends. Jesus said he would prepare a mansion for us, and then come back to take us to it. The end time actually is a joyous time for us, because the chapter of living on this earth is closed but all the redeemed will go back to heaven. 

Maybe we will live to see the global event of the end time or we will die and have our own individual end time. It really is irrelevant. The time may be short or may be long. As Christian believers we have to live as if Jesus is coming back tomorrow. So if we live according to His Word, be a doer of his word, we don’t have to worry about anything. That is a matter for joy.

Revelation 16 points out that even people who don’t at first repent when they see the end coming get a second chance. We don’t have to worry as long as we live according to God’s will. We already glorify God in our life. If we try to live according to his word then we don’t have to worry about the future—as long as we stay on course, as long as we live according to God’s will. 

C-J: In the military, there’s a saying: “Know where you are, know where you’re going, know what you have, and know what you need.” So if you march through life, whatever your perception of that is—in the Be Here Now or in the ever after, if your goal is “Where am I going?” the message in all of that is “Are you prepared?” What is in your backpack—what are you going to carry, what do you value? Don’t go back and get the things you think you’ll need here; this is bigger than that. 

Then I think we’re in a good place. If we’re that witness, we don’t have to preach, but we can be that witness. And the rest is really God’s grace, it’s in God’s hands. God uses where we are consciously to deliver the message every day, all over the place. God is in the room,

Kiran: For a long time I understood the parable of the weeds and tares as meaning that God would destroy you if you are a tare so you must change into wheat. I tried everything I could to turn myself into wheat but the more I tried, the worse it became. So I think the perception of God matters in how we view the second coming. 

This is my strongest belief: Preparation means the sooner I get over the fact that I can’t fix myself when I need help and I accept God’s help 100 percent, the better. That is all the preparation I have to do, nothing else. 

If I view God as holding a stick and watching my every step, then I am super-scared of the second coming. But if I view God as being here to save me, because I can’t save myself, then my view of the second coming is completely different. 

The longer I tried to fix myself, the longer I tried to say: “My wedding robe is better than the one that you’re providing” the worse it was for me. Many—80 to 90%—of the people in any church say that you have to fix yourself in order to have a good relationship with God. Jesus made it impossible. If you even think about a woman in your mind, you are an adulterer. If you break one commandment, you break them all. All it takes is to break one commandment once in our lifetime, and you are doomed. 

How are we going to fix it? If you really think about it, none of us can fix ourselves, so it’s futile to try, and to claim that we can. I’m honest with you, I cannot fix myself. I am terrified of the evil I am capable of. But I have peace in my heart because I went to the hospital and the doctor personally guaranteed to make me well. So all I have to do is stay in the hospital and let him fix me. It is as simple as that. 

But my nature always wants me to fix myself. I think the preparation is accepting that I’m a sinful person, that I can never fix myself and accepting the help that is coming to me, 100 percent for free. I still hear people preaching, calling the altar calls—”Clean yourself up!” Every camp meeting, every youth meeting, every general conference meeting tells you to fix yourself and evangelize to other people. 

A lot of evangelism is based on fear, no matter what they say, and I think we should stop that.

Carolyn: I have learned that my true peace comes from not just my loving the Lord, but it’s my allowing the Lord to love me and my knowing that he loves me and takes care of me.

C-J: If I remember correctly, you have to let the tares fully mature among the wheat because you can’t discern them until they’re fully mature. At that time, the tips of the tares turn black and poisonous. So I think part of the storytelling, if I remember correctly, is that we have to become fully mature. Either get it right from the beginning, or recognize that you are imperfect and turn it over to God and let God’s grace guide you. 

When you’re fully matured and you’re actually dying because you have not intervened—you haven’t said “Lord, I give my life over to you”…. I think the wheat and tares is about being fully mature. We can be fully mature in Christ, or we can be fully ignorant—by intention or just because we weren’t fortunate enough to hear about the revelation and the restoration that Christ can and does provide.

Anonymous: I like this new perception of the second coming of Christ and the end of time. I’m not sure if they are the same thing, because if the second coming of Christ is personal, it might occur in many ways. Maybe coming to know Christ—the experience of coming from darkness to light—may be the second coming of Christ to me individually when this happens in my life. 

I associate the end of time with the end of evil. That is very clear, I have no doubt about that. If the second coming of Jesus happens at different times in different people’s lives, then what about his physical, glorious coming on the clouds and taking us up and opening the graves and lifting up the dead…? What about all that? How does it fit in this new interpretation?

I like the thought that it is grace that’s really making our lives very, very easy. And everything the Bible says (there are so many points of view, as Donald said) about the way we teach, the signs, the prophecies, the commandments,… everything that we care to preserve and keep doing and keep focusing on is all important. Everything in the Bible, it seems to me, was given to help us. 

It has nothing to do with the judgment or with or with the end of time, because we all sin, we all do wrong things. Doing right or doing wrong is probably not the point. It’s all for our help, to enlighten our way, in the few years we’re given to live on this earth. 

At the end, when evil is gone completely, maybe all the prophecies will come to realization and eternal life and the kingdom of God will reign. It’s so big. I had some comfort in coming to the realization even before today that as long as I trust in God, as long as I believe he is, and I believe in his promises, his truth, his grace, his patience, and I believe I cannot live without him, that there’s nothing I can do without him, that I’m completely dependent upon him…. All of this creates a relationship between me and God that’s not based on whether I did right or wrong. 

What I care about in everyday is life is how much I can rely on God. I acknowledge the fact that I’m nothing without him, I cannot do anything without him. I can’t heal myself, I can’t prevent myself from sinning. I can’t. I can’t lift up my soul from depression, I can’t do anything. I can’t keep myself safe from all dangers around me. So my approach to God is that of a child needing his parent’s presence, otherwise, he’s alone and fearful. That really makes our responsibility as Christians much easier. 

But of course, I still don’t see the i‘s dotted or the t‘s crossed. It’s still a vague, big picture. 

Bryan: If the End of Time events are important to you, and heaven is where you want to end up, then maybe the signs we’ve been talking about are confusing or difficult to understand. However, you want to look for them for the reason that human nature wants to be in control. If these events were very specific and easy to understand, it’d be very simple to put together a checklist and check things off as they happen, which defies what we’re told in the Bible, namely, that nobody knows the time, the when or the where, and so a checklist would be counterproductive to what we’ve been told—that God the Father is the only one who knows when it’s going to happen. 

Perhaps the signs are the way they are for that very reason. If so, then their point is to serve as reminders as the world starts the death spiral, like Sodom and Gomorrah. It is not so that we can check things off, but only to remind us of where we want to be at the end. So you live as though this is where you want to end up and these are signs along the way that point to the fact that this will happen at some point. But when really makes no difference.

Janelin: Why do we need signs? I grew up as an Adventist. It’s a big part of my identity. But I never yearned or felt like I needed to know about the End Time. Maybe I didn’t have interest at that time, and maybe I felt guilty about that. I didn’t think I felt like I needed the signs, that my relationship with God didn’t need to have all those pieces in there. And maybe I just superficially put a blanket over it. 

At the end of the day, it’s just having hope that Christ will come again. When I know a sermon might touch upon it, I don’t know why but it just makes my stomach tighten. It is one of those pieces I know are necessary to continue to grow in my relationship with Christ. It’s knowing the Bible, and that’s part of it. But I never felt like I needed to know all the details of Revelation in order to have a relationship with God. 

I just continue to hope that we’ll see the second coming. But do I need a sign? I don’t know that I really do.

David: I’m not sure that signs need to be instant or sudden or cataclysmic. I think the real signs of the end of the age have been rather slow in developing. To me, these signs are the existential threats to the earth and to life on Earth. We see that, obviously, in global warming. And in a way we see it also in the development of AI, if you accept my premise that AI is becoming smarter than we are and that the process of emergence will ensure that AI-endowed entities will become conscious as well. So those are two existential threats to human life. 

But the end of the age, to me, simply means the end of the age of human beings as stewards of the earth. And maybe just in time, because we clearly have botched the job. We’re burning it up, and AI may be the saving grace that will have the ability to halt and repair the ravages we’ve inflicted upon the earth and lead to a more intelligent stewardship of it. 

This doesn’t affect in any way my view of God’s overall “plan” (though I don’t think it is really a plan as we think of plans) and what you read in the Bible about what’s coming. A new Earth is coming. You can read that in the Bible, but also in the climate science that gave us the first signs that we are destroying the old one. I think the end of the age is coming about through the mechanism of the emergence of a higher lifeform. It is part of the process of evolution, which is God’s mechanism or plan, if you like. 

That the signs are slow marks a difference from the signs of earlier generations. They may have felt a plague or an earthquake as an immediate existential threat but they lacked the science to back it up. Climate deniers notwithstanding, today we have the scientific evidence to know that the whole of existence of life on Earth is threatened by global warming to the point of potential apocalypse. It is different today. 

Humanity itself has willfully thrown away all its chances to forestall the apocalypse. Individually, of course, we can prepare for our end, whether at the apocalypse or simply when we die of old age or in a car accident. In either case, we will face our own end time, and that’s where I think we must turn to God and ask the question Joel predicted: “God, where are you? Help me!” Most of us, I think, will do just that, when the time comes.

Donald: I worry about being ready, I worry about the time of trouble, I worry about the narrowness of the path. I need to rely on my maker. He knows what’s best for me. His commandments are there in my mind as a recipe for a good life, for the way people should live, for values. If I focus on relying on God my maker and Christ who died for me, I have greater assurance of what my future holds. 

But my concern is that to get people’s attention, we use scare tactics. Maybe that’s what Revelation and Daniel are all about. But those are not places where I want to dwell.

Don: I want to have a discussion about apocalyptic literature but I don’t know exactly how to go about it. We so rely on apocalyptic literature, we interpret it as if we’re been given special insight by God, and we do it in a very haphazard and random way. Some things we take literally, some things we take figuratively. We don’t have any justification for which ones we take which way and what the meanings are. 

But so much of end-time prophecy and end-time events is wrapped up in apocalyptic literature that I feel we need to have some discussion of it. I might do that next week. If you have insights, I appeal to you for help. We will discuss more the end-time events, signs, what it means to be prepared, what we are being prepared for, and what we have to do to be prepared. 

Most works of art that depict the second coming and the end of the age show people waiting for Jesus, washed and well dressed. Even at the time of the Great Disappointment of 1844, they made special outfits for translation.

The idea that we have to clean ourselves up, put on some kind of robe of righteousness in order to be ready for Jesus to come, is deeply rooted in our understanding of end-time events, but I think Scripture may actually tell quite a different story. 

That is one of the things we will discuss. 

* * *