A rapture rebuke

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Introduction
The 2024 solar eclipse came and went yesterday, but what else didn’t come and go, was a secret second coming of Christ to rapture His church and kick off a seven-year tribulation.

I know, I know. That meme about the eclipse’s path of totality covering cities like Rapture, Indiana, plus seven different towns not actually named Ninevah really had us going.

As did the post about how the different eclipse paths in recent decades just so happened to create a Hebrew letter, or two Hebrew letters, or a cross, depending on who you ask.

And while we’re at it, so did the numerology about six years, six months, six weeks, and six days. That, for the record, is not the same as six hundred sixty-six.

In light of all these things, I have three questions for Christians.

Question 1 – Can we try not being crazy?
I need to get this out of the way. There are some in our spiritual family who are like that weird little cousin who eats entire sticks of butter in one sitting, who, when you ask him if he could perhaps not do that, answers with an eloquent, “REEEEEE.” Family outings with that one are, well, embarrassing, in no small part because his parents not only permit his butter-eating habit, but his mom brings her own stick of butter in her purse to the restaurant so he doesn’t feel singled out.

That is exactly what so many leaders in the American church have done by stoking end times fears while using numerology and selective geography. The eclipse went over Cleveland too, you know, and I didn’t hear anybody talking about how marriage is one man and one woman “cleaving” to each other, and that means that the “land” will have a revival of marriage. See? Making stuff up on the fly is easy.

And even though a minority of Christians bought into this stuff, the unbelieving world sees that they’re loud, and then the mass media, who know how to get your clicks and listens, amplify the goofballs even more, just so they can point and laugh. And they should laugh, because deep down, they know we’re being hypocritical of our ostensible belief in the Scriptures, which command us to be reasonable and to not be anxious (Philippians 4:5-9). There is no good reason to, with bated breath, proclaim the Lord’s eventual return as if getting “left behind” is the worst that can happen to someone.

Question 2 – Can we learn from history at all?
One of the church’s perennial stumbling blocks is an obsession with the end of all things, which partially stems from misreading Revelation and parts of the Gospels (more on that in a bit) and partially from a martyrdom complex. We’ve had it so good for so long that we think it has to come crashing down at some point because we’ve absolutized 2 Timothy 3:12. It’s almost proto-wokeism in eschatalogical form. We feel bad that Christendom has built something so incredible that we also happen to have largely abandoned for the last hundred years.

And so we look for signs of the end. Hobby Lobby refuses to scan barcodes, fearing they could be the Mark of the Beast. The same goes for people who think neural implants are the Mark, forgetting that the text clearly says the mark went on the hand or forehead and not in them (Revelation 13:16).

In fact, here’s a list of just some of the antichrist suspects between the seventh and 14th centuries, as found in Francis Gumerlock’s The Day and the Hour:

Mohammed, Pope John XV, Pope Gregory VII, Peter Leonis, Frederick Barbarossa, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Emperor Frederick II, Pope Innocent IV, King Alphonso of Castile, Pope Alexander IV, Pope Boniface VIII, Pope Benedict XI, Pope John XXII, King Lewis of Bavaria, and Pope Clement VI.

Buncha amateurs. They should have known it was Donald Rumsfeld. Wait, he didn’t make a treaty with the Jews and kill two-thirds of them? Samsonite. I was way off.

My point here is this: Christians have been failing miserably at this for centuries, and that hasn’t even gotten into how the Restorationist cults of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists got started doing the same thing. End times speculation has a pretty sorry track record.

Question 3 – Can we read our Bibles better?
The problem boils down to the fact, again, that Christians in the global West have no idea what’s in their Bibles.

And here’s how I’ll prove it. Many of my readers, including yourself, are likely pointing to Matthew 24, when Jesus tells his disciples that they don’t know the day or the hour, but Jesus in that passage, just as in Mark 13 and Luke 21, is not answering a question about the end of the world. He is answering a very specific question about the future-to-Him destruction of the temple, which took place 40 years later. It doesn’t make sense for Him to start telling them about something that some of them will live to see and then sneak in things that won’t happen for at least 2,000 years.

As my second example, I would ask my reader what the Antichrist’s characteristics are in Revelation, and most people would go to Revelation 13. The issue here is that the word “Antichrist” is not used anywhere in the book of Revelation. In fact, the only usages of the term “antichrist” are in 1 John and 2 John and are used to describe teachers of Christological heresy. Seeing that the same guy wrote both books, he either missed a huge opportunity for clarity, or he was actually clear about the Beast (Which was Nero, by the way) and any of the plural, lowercase-A antichrists being separate entities.

But even further, I would lovingly challenge my dispensational brethren to show me where the Bible says that the church will be raptured from earth so that God can deal with “the Jews” again, but only after two-thirds of them are killed by the Antichrist after he breaks a covenant with them.

I would then say, you cannot exegete that position from the pages of Scripture, because it was imported into the text by an English guy in the 1830s who didn’t even believe in having paid pastors. In order to get to that position, you necessarily have to do what the memes did in the leadup to the eclipse, that is, to jump all over Scripture, pulling out a phrase here and half a verse there, totally ignoring the context of what Daniel, Ezekiel, or the Revelator are talking about.

Better than an ACE inhibitor
The blessed hope of the Christian is not to be yanked out of the world into some floaty place so God can burn it up and start over. Christ said that He is making, meaning currently making, all things new, not that He is making all new things (Revelation 21:5), and if you are in Christ, you are already part of that new creation along with Christ Himself (2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 1:18).

Isaiah 9:7 promised that Messiah’s coming would see a continuous increase to His government and of peace, but we want to freak out. We’d prefer to eisegete the Hamas attacks and COVID and Joe Biden falling off his bike somewhere in Revelation or Matthew 24. Why? Because we 21st-century Americans love to have our blood pressure raised through the roof. This isn’t even a Christian thing, as the hardcore environmentalists are constantly telling us the end is nigh if we don’t bottle up the cow farts and stop driving SUVs. Our forebears built something amazing, and we’re just waiting for it to go to hell in a handbasket. If you don’t believe me, count how many post-apocalyptic zombie movies have been made just this century.

But the hope of Christ’s Kingdom, which is a present reality as He is already seated at the right hand of power (Hebrews 10:12), is that He reigns and must reign until He has defeated all of His enemies, and the fact that He has a final enemy to destroy, being death, means that He is progressively putting His enemies under His feet. When Christ finally kills off death and physically resurrects His people to eternal glory and His enemies to eternal judgment, He will then deliver the Kingdom to the Father (1 Corinthians 15:20-28).

This is a glorious truth, and it is one that will lower your blood pressure.