Since the disciple of Jesus is to be living in anticipation of our rapture (or death), why should we study the end-times? Besides the obvious reasons for studying anything in the Bible, there are two prominent reasons for spending time in the eschatological passages of Scripture.

The first reason is that studying the end-times and then seeing these events coming to pass in our lifetime increases our sense of urgency and causes us to work harder. How does that work? Imagine that you are a forty-five-year-old American believer in good physical health. As you look out at the future, you could reasonably expect forty more years before your death. Nothing is guaranteed, but, based on statistics, an expectation that you would live forty more years would not be imprudent or unreasonable. In this case, if you had something that you wanted to accomplish for the Lord or had a special mission that you wanted to complete before you died, you would have a slight sense of urgency, because you felt that you had forty years or so to get it done.

But now suppose that you were that same forty-five-year-old American believer in good health and were studying last things in the Bible and began to see happening on your morning Internet news feeds events that were predicted by the Bible as events of the end-times. At first cautiously and then with increasing excitement, the news articles began to sound more and more like fulfillment of the biblical prophecies and, as your conviction began to grow, you began to seriously contemplate the possibility that you might not quietly live out your days in serenity, but you might be raptured before your physical death or you might even be martyred. In other words, an any-minute return of Jesus would supply a sense of urgency that a “normal” Christian life would (potentially) lack. You would get after your kingdom projects with vigor.

The second reason for spending time in the eschatological passages of Scripture is to persuade us beyond any reasonable doubt that Jesus is certainly coming back. That one day the resurrected Jesus Christ is returning from heaven to earth to destroy all the unrighteous and to judge the world is a lot for a new believer to take in. The events of the end of the age seem so fantastic that they almost cannot be real. Then the adversary, Satan, whispers his doubts in your ear and the world adds its ridicule and scoffing, and the believer who is not scripturally rooted and grounded can become effectively agnostic in their beliefs. Before long, they have abandoned the return of Christ as Christian myth, not realizing that they have unwittingly actually gone apostate. A Christianity without a returning Christ is an anemic fairy tale.

But now picture the believer who has a sure grasp of Scripture and who is not intimidated by the apocalyptic language of end-times prophecy. This disciple reads and studies the whole word of God with prayerful diligence. All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), and so all Scripture is to be understood and enjoyed in a godly walk with the Lord. Yes, some of the eschatological passages are difficult to understand fully, but they are not inconsistent. Jesus has certainly been resurrected and He has ascended to the Father’s right hand and there will be a day when the Father sends Him back to gather all His people to Himself and to judge all the unrighteous to eternal punishment. All the Scripture affirms this, and the Scripture cannot be broken. God cannot lie, and His Word is therefore always true. Therefore, the disciple of Jesus is to work hard to understand the difficult end-times passages and thereby to become more and more convinced of the soon-coming return of Jesus. The more the disciple studies the Scripture, the deeper the roots go and the more convinced they are of all that the Scripture declares, including the bodily return of the glorious Lord Jesus Christ. Satan’s whispers are ignored and the ridicule and scoffing of the world becomes the noise of fools who are perishing. Christ is coming back, and it could be today, and I am looking up.

SDG                 rmb                 1/6/2021