Eschatology is the branch of theology concerned with ‘last things’ - the second coming, final judgement and so forth.

 

There are several verses in the New Testament which talk very seriously about Christ coming again. He was raised from the dead, He ascended to Heaven and He shall return to judge the world. 

 

Now it seems to me that if any of us are quite happy to think of Him as God, without paying much attention to His second coming, we not taking it all quite as seriously as it should be taken. And I get the feeling that in this contemporary age, men and women are quite embarrassed to talk about such things; after all, do not words like ‘You shall see the Son of Man …coming in the clouds of heaven’ belong in fantasy books? 

 

The grounds for disbelieving such things fall into four categories. I will look at two this week and two more next week.

 

The first reason is that many people fear extremism so much that they cannot force their imagination to go beyond anything that they would not see printed in newspapers or on television. 

I use the word ‘extremism’ because many people feel that something which goes far against the grain of modern existential thinking can be seen as extremism in its fictitious sense. It takes a little too much faith to believe such things. People believe that all this apocalyptic stuff is taking too far, something that started off with good moralistic teaching.

 

When we ignore the apocalyptic teachings and concentrate solely on Christ as a moralist we ignore something very fundamental in His teaching. We are, when we are at our very worst, presuming that our own thoughts are better than those of God Himself. We end up picking and choosing which bits of the Bible we like. And it should be noted that if the authors themselves had done this, it surely would have looked different to what it does now. 

 

There are several verses which, if taken wrongly, could cast doubt over the overall efficacy of the scriptures. Christ asking the Father why He had forsaken Him (Mark 15:34) is one particular instance. Another is Christ’s claim that He did not know the day or the hour when He would return (Mark 13:32). Such verses, some might say, add to the doubt shared by some over the Bible’s validity. People find it hard to reconcile this with the fact that Christ was God and therefore all-knowing. In fact, we find out in John 21:17 that Christ does indeed know all things. So how do we show unbelievers that there is no Biblical errancy?

 

Now of course, it is impossible for any of us to imagine the consciousness of Christ, as He was fully man and fully God, but we do know that He had to endure many of the things that we have to endure. He became scared, tired, and hungry, to name but three - and presumably, as God Incarnate, Christ experienced the perfect harmonising of finite thoughts and infinite thoughts. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that some people do not understand God as a man. But as long as we do not start to create for ourselves, thoughts of another dimension of time beyond our own, we can understand enough of what needs to be understood. There is not, in our terms, any real concept of any kind of harmonisation of timelessness with temporality. And it should be said that we have no real reason to try to imagine such a concept. 

 

Christ died as a man so that we could share in that dying, and then He defeated death, so we could, through our faith in Him, defeat death also. I do not see why people are so surprised when Christ claimed that He did not understand certain things. If He became a man to endure the limitations that we endure, then we should not be surprised to see some of them recorded in the New Testament. If He knew everything, He would not (in the sense that matters) be like us, and thus, we would find it harder (harder, not impossible) to sympathise fully with Him. 

 

But now we come to the second objection, and this one, unlike the first, is an objection strong enough to put men off Christianity all by itself. It is not congenial to the minds of modern men to think about anything than runs counter to the theory of evolution. 

Some modern atheists believe that we are gradually getting ever-nearer to utopia and that progressive change, in the next few thousand years, will yield the sort of utopianism that man has craved for thousands of years. 

 

And with this in mind, it is easy to see how the sudden and dramatic second coming of Christ is anathema to many people. For they have been taught that the earth will eventually be swallowed up by the sun’s expansion and the universe will gradually degenerate; that man will diminish into non-existence. As biology, evolutionary theory might be correct, but it is not so difficult to see that modern man’s perception of things to come is deeply flawed. And surely, even if we can accept evolutionary theory as accurate, we can easily see that men’s thoughts are tainted by a subliminal belief that something high always supersedes something low; that progression can only really lead us to something better. 

 

Man has always been subsumed by the pressure to invent something progressive, particularly in contemporary times. So we see it is hardly surprising that people choose to disregard the Bible, for the Bible states that the next stage in the evolutionary process has already happened - that man will transcend corporeality, that man will be with God.

 

Also, the doctrine of the second coming does something else that is not congenial to human minds. It teaches us that nobody has any idea when it will occur. In fact, we are as helpless as victims of a burglary - we will be caught by surprise (Matthew 24:43,44; 1 Thessalonians 5:2). It is hardly surprising that men hate this contention, for men have, for many years, loved the notion that they are in control of all earthly events - that they can eventually progress to a stage where they can outwit nature herself. And it could be imagined (although I do not believe it) that, if God does not exist, man could advance technology to such a level that this could be possible. That we might be able to, in the future, travel through galaxies just as postmen travel from street to street, I have little doubt; but all attempts to expunge God from the whole picture are not based on anything rational.

 

As far away in the future as these innovations may be, we are already seeing how men repeatedly succumb to the temptation of trying to remove God from the picture. Man can be in control of his own destiny and to those who do not know that God exists, there can be nothing more alluring. But it is not so. We think it possible because we constantly fail to realise that we do not understand the full picture. We do not know exactly how the story will end. But thanks to Christ, we have at least some idea. 

 

Modern man wants to shape his own destiny, and somehow he thinks that this is more exciting than being a Christian. But one thought has perhaps slipped his mind. Although we know a little bit about how God will end the world, we do not have, in an eternal sense, any real knowledge of what we are going to become when we are with God. As far as mankind goes, we know a miniscule amount, channelled through our own cognition, but we are told that the plot thickens; that we will become like God, that we shall experience timelessness in all its true glory. 

 

We can, at this point, have no concept of anything beyond corporeality. We are characters in a major drama of which we do not really know, and cannot really feel, the true glory of its eternal outcome. We are told that those who stay loyal to God’s cause shall experience such a stupendous transformation and transpiration. And surely, it is easy to see that this concept, if true, is incalculably more exciting that any modern form of existentialism, or any potential conclusions that modern science or philosophy can bring us.  Therefore we would be very foolish to reject the second coming of Christ based upon our biased favouring of modern scientific thinking. There is a place for science, and philosophy, and psychology, and perhaps even many tenets of modern man’s naturalistic thinking - but all thoughts propounded intentionally to will the removal of God will not, in the end, survive very long by themselves.