Perspective: Preparing for the Everyday Apocalypse

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Preparing for the Everyday Apocalypse

But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.  So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night.  But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

1 Thessalonians 5:4-8 (NRSV)

It happens in a blink, it happens in a flash

It happens in the time it took to look back

I try to hold on tight, but there's no stopping time

What is it I've done with my life?

From "Blink" by Revive

St. Paul writes in one of his letters that "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night."¹  A film released in the 1970s, which takes its title from these very words, depicts events that many Christians believe will happen at the end of this age.  I have never seen this particular film, but, when I was a teenager, I was a fan of a certain book series that described basically the same events.  Both the film and the book series are based on a timeline that people have constructed by piecing together certain parts of the Bible, most prominently the Book of Revelation.

According to this timeline, at some indeterminate point in the perhaps not-too-distant future, all people who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior will be spontaneously taken to Heaven.  Everyone else will be left to face a seven-year period of hell on earth, when the whole world will come under the control of a diabolical ruler known as the Antichrist.  Everyone must either be branded with a mark of loyalty to this leader or else be put to death.  At the end of this Great Tribulation, Christ will return to defeat the Antichrist and establish His kingdom on earth.  Those who have sworn allegiance to the Antichrist will be condemned to Hell, but those who accept martyrdom or persevere to the end will be accepted into Christ's kingdom.

I used to be interested in books and films that depicted this framework of the end times, sometimes called premillennial dispensationalism, but now I wonder if the purpose of such media is primarily to scare the hell out of people so that they will become Christians.

I think it was shortly after I graduated from college when I officially left behind such theories and timelines, having learned that the bizarre imagery found at the end of the Bible is most likely representative of the conflict between the early Church and the evils of the Roman Empire.  Though I no longer believe everything I once believed about the end times, as a Christian, I still hold on to the hope that Christ will someday return to set things right in the world.  At the same time, I think it is important that we do not get so caught up in what we hope God does in the future that we fail to see the work God is doing in the world in the present day.

God is not malevolent like a thief.  Christ said, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.  I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly."²  Paul compares the work of God to the work of a thief because, for many people, the actions of God will come as an unwelcome surprise, like waking up to find that everything of value in one's house has been stolen.  A thief strikes when his actions are least likely to be noticed - at night, under the cover of darkness, when people are asleep.  A thief would not strike in broad daylight when his actions are likely to be noticed.

For Paul, day and night do not describe parts of a 24-hour cycle but are rather symbolic of the state of a person's mind and heart.  The day is a time of light and awareness; the night, on the other hand, is a time of darkness and obliviousness.  People with a "daytime" mindset, who seek to know God and understand God's will, will be more able to see what God is doing in the world.  People with a "nighttime" mindset, who are distracted by the temporal things of life and have anesthetized themselves to the suffering of the world, will be caught off guard by the redemptive work of God.

I do not think that God really wants to catch us off guard.  The question is whether or not we are paying attention to what God is doing.  Paul encourages us to prepare ourselves by letting faith, hope, and love be our armor.  In another letter, he writes that when all other things come to an end, these three things will remain.³

The knowledge that God is setting things right in the world should be good news for everybody; however, if we've built our lives on injustice, then it will come as a very unwelcome surprise for us.  As I've written before, I think that the best way for us to prepare for the reign of Christ on earth is to allow Christ to reign in our hearts right now.  When we pray as Jesus taught, "Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we are not simply expressing a hope for the future but are seeking to align ourselves with the will of God.  Though we long for a day when God sets all things right in the world, we must be attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit within us, setting things right in our hearts.


Notes:

1. 1 Thessalonians 5:2 (NRSV)
2. John 10:10 (NRSV)
3. 1 Corinthians 13:8-13

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was painted by Viktor Vasnetsov in 1887.