The end.

Have you ever thought about endings? No - not just things that end here, now. The ending of it all. How will this earth end?

It’s a good question. I never realized how deeply my eschatology affects my actions and viewpoints until this afternoon. Well, I did, but I never had to express them that way. Believing that Christians will be beaten underfoot until Christ returns, or that they’ll be raptured secretely before all hell breaks loose, or that Christ will indeed see all his enemies laid broken before his footstool - these ends bring a person to a different beginning, and a wildly different present.

I, for instance, am a post-millenialist. Amillenialism, to me, is a zero-sum, hopeless philosophy basically saying that it’s the fate of the people of God to be driven into the ground far enough by the hammer of Satan until God magically re-appears with a sword in his hand, all the glorious promises made to his people fulfilled in a place where there is no enemy. It simply doesn’t make sense. There’s much too much victory spoken of in the now for everything to be Future Glory.

And that means also that Christians aren’t relegated to a ghetto of opression or irrelevancy. We were born to lead - to take over the world. The culture is ours, not Satan’s. The world is ours to subdue, not the other way around.

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Posted May 21st, 2005 in main.

One comment:

  1. SarahJane:

    I agree that eschatology affects (to some degree) how we live as believers, although not to the extent I once thought. I guess it might depend on how firmly one is convinced of his eschatology. I am currently wavering between amil and postmil - mainly because I don’t know enough about either to make a truly educated opinion. However, I thought I was amil for a long while, because I struggled (and still do) with the idea of THIS earth being the one referred to as the new creation. It seemed absurd to me, by looking through history, that the world is getting “better” by bits and pieces. I still remain unconvinced of that.

    But at the same time, if God could take this old soul of mine and make it over into a shiny new creation in bits and pieces, far be it from me to say He couldn’t (or isn’t) doing the same with this old earth.

    If I don’t have a good grasp of what postmils actually believe, please forgive and correct me. Like I said, I REALLY haven’t looked into it with much depth or purpose yet.

    Good post.

    May 21st, 2005 at 2:03 pm

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