Before going after all the other purveyors of Bad Eschatology, I’d like to take a deep breath and talk about two reasons why the Last Days were always going to be impossible to understand.
God’s Purpose
Seal Six
And, I can tell you from personal experience how hard it has been to see even a little bit of what will happen in the Last Days. So, let’s take a moment to understand why this is so hard, and why we need to be a bit humble about what we know.
The Pretribulation Rapture theory arises from an honest mistake and a corrupt fable – at a time when advances in printing made crazy ideas accessible. Books were the Internet of their time, and an information-starved populace couldn’t get enough. And, when Scofield put Dispensationalism everywhere in his ‘study bible’, it was the final blow.
The Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventism, Communism, Eugenics, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and the Flat Earth movement – all owe their rise to the steam-powered printing press and a 19th century desire for a good story.
My favorite pastors believe in a pretribulation rapture. I currently attend a church that holds to a pretrib eschatology. So, my disagreement with this view is no reflection upon anyone’s faithfulness to God. In fact, I normally like pretribbers more than post-tribbers.
However, as your brother in Christ, I am required to point out where you get things wrong, especially if such errors put you in harm’s way.
Just remember what I wrote last week about our tendency to blindness. We are all vulnerable to error, and it’s hard to undo the mistakes that we were taught.
It is normal to be blind to our own errors – even when people show them to us. Even when we struggle to find errors and misconceptions, it can take a lot of work to see what should have been obvious.
Unfortunately, most believers are not interested in ferreting out falsehood. Change is painful, and it’s much easier to trust the stories of a professional – their pastor. And, the pastor is the product of seminaries that are paid to produce cookie-cutter Christians.
Then, there are the fabulists that created the fables that we love so much.
So, let’s talk about why we can be so blind.
I dedicated much of my life to the Redemption of Israel. During my 15 years in Jerusalem, nothing was more important. It would be miraculous. It would be awesome. I wanted to be a part of that work of God. But then, our Lord dragged me off to Taiwan, and that’s when I began to see something serious:
The suffering and death of five billion people.
My hyper-positive focus on Israel had left me unable to see a vast catastrophe that would crush our civilization and kill billions. And, because of our bad eschatology, we aren’t able to see what’s coming.
Let’s dig in to all that badness.