Many are keen to identify, in these troubled times, signs of divine intervention. These doom merchants are tearing out handfuls of red meat from the Bible and flinging it around.
It’s an unedifying spectacle – a bunch of people scrambling to save their own asses, while they denounce other churches and denominations, whose members, they confidently predict, are on the road to Hell.
They mainly draw their vocabulary – the Fiery Lake, the Lamb of God, the Wrath, the Antichrist, the Mark of the Beast, the Book of Life, and so on – from some endlessy chewed over Biblical passages. They particularly partial to the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24-25, Revelation 4-22, Thessalonians 4 and parts of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam all visualise versions of the of the end of the world, to maintain patriarchy and keep their adherents in line. Over the centuries, their intra-religious bickering has killed and maimed millions – not least in the Bible Lands.
The lesson of Lot
Why can’t Jews and Christians follow the lesson of Lot, who is shown unfavourably in the Book of Genesis 13:11 selfishly grabbing the lush, fertile lands of the Jordon Valley from under Abraham’s nose. Why not drop vindictive dogma based on subjective textual interpretation and share life’s blessings? Be nice guys.
The Book of Revelation, which closes of the New Testament in a blood curdling finale, is a happy hunting ground for these Armageddon pedlars, who can identify a false prophet at the drop of the hat.
The imagery of Revelation, is suffused through western culture. We know the catch phrases. Most people don’t know the chronology, even if they have been to Sunday School, which focuses on tame and uncontroversial parables. Why would they?
The chronology goes as follows. After a low-key start, Revelation gets lively in chapter four, with opening of the seven seals (a seal is a scroll). This signals the beginning of the Tribulation.
The seven seals
The opening of the first seal (6:1) give us the four horsemen of the apocalypse – white, red, black and pale – the rider of the white one is sometimes identified as the Antichrist. That would be Pope Vincent, or Bill Gates. The sun turns black, the moon turns red, stars fall to earth (6:12). But this just an hors d’oeuvre.
When the seventh seal is opened, seven angels appear, and they blow on seven trumpets. See a pattern here? The first blast causes a hail made of fire and blood to burn up a third of the trees on the planet (8:17), the second turns a third of the sea into blood killing, everything that lives there and a third of all sailors – a bit arbitrary.=
When the fifth trumpet blows (9:1) Satan is given the key to the bottomless pit – a tactical manoeuvre on god’s part. The sky darkens and smoke and locusts issue from this fiery hole. Looking like armoured horses, with human faces and the sting of scorpions, the locusts torture the unrighteous for five months. Does God have anger issues?
Armageddon outta here
With the sixth trumpet (9:13), God unleashes four wrathful angels who slaughter a third of the human race. He hasn’t finished yet. As a final gesture, he tips out seven bowls of wrath, which bring about seven plagues – festering sores, rivers and seas turned do blood, a blazing sun that shrivels flesh – more torture, on an industrial scale.
It’s the main event – Armageddon – rounded off by the biggest earthquake ever seen that reduces a city to ruins – it could be Jerusalem, Rome, or Babylon depending on your preference. As parting short, God rains down forty kilogram hailstones.
A new player appears and ends the Tribulation – a rider on a white horse, leading the armies of heaven (19: 11-16). ‘He treads the wine press of the fury of God’. He is the King of Kings. It’s the Second Coming! The tide is turning. Satan is ‘bound’ bringing about a thousand years of peace and righteousness begin (20:2). Righteous people who have died are resurrected.
After a thousand years are up. Satan is released from Hell (20:7). He summons a force as numberless as the sand on the seashore. There is another one-sided bust-up. Satan is thrown into a lake of burning sulphur, where he will burn forever (20:10). Next, God, on his white throne, opens up the Book of Judgement on the living and the dead (20:11). A second resurrection occurs. Even those in Hell are given a chance (13). The Holy City, a New Jerusalem appears (21:1) in which the righteous will dwell forever. It’s the end of the end days.
The crux of the matter
So, here’s the crucial point, theologically, for end of the world watchers. Have these events – the Tribulation, the seals, trumpets and bowls, Armageddon, the Second Coming, the Day of Judgement happened, are happening now or they yet to happen? Oceans of ink have been expended on these issues – a dismal swamp of exegesis. Over many centuries, proponents of theological turf wars have developed their own shorthand.
For ‘full preterists’ the events recounted in Revelation occurred in the past, including the Final Judgement. Far more common, for Protestant churches, is ‘partial preterism’. This is the vanilla option. Under this scenario, the nasty stuff has already happened – the violent retribution of Revelation from 4 to 19. It corresponds to the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in AD70 – thus, it was all the Jews’ fault. The nice stuff – the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement – haven’t happed yet. It’s just a matter of saying one’s prayers and waiting. Who knows for how long.
Then we have the full-colour futurists. Their creed is modern. It originated in the nineteenth century, took off like wildfire with the radio preaching of the 1920 and came to dominate US Protestantism in the 1970s, with the rise of Baptist and Presbyterian Churches, whose slick Bible thumping preachers dispensed old-fashioned fire and brimstone on TV. Their lapel-grabbing, no holds barred style travelled back across the pond to the UK, to the horror of the sherry sipping clerisy.
Futurists maintain that we are still awaiting the Tribulation or that we are in it – citing modern diseases and nuclear weapons as God’s signs. It’s the Apocalyptic, socially conservative religion of the red Republican states. Many adherents are ‘dispensationalist’. That is, they believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
Aerial event
They like the idea of rapture (Thessalonians 4) in which the resurrected and living faithful will mingle in the clouds in an ‘aerial event’. Their hell is not metaphorical but real and it is eternal. Key to their ‘dispensational premillennialism’ is a ‘pre-Tribulation rapture’.
That’s important to them. The rapture, deemed to be vulgar by Catholics and other Protestants, can happen at any time. Being pre-Tribulation means that those who have accepted Jesus into their lives – the bar for entry into their church is low – will be spared the plagues of boils, scorpion stings and angelic slaughter that will engulf the rest of us.
The Jews may not enjoy this free pass. But ultimately, they believe, the good ones, unlike Moslems and members of doctrinally unsound Protestant churches, will earn a place in heaven, after a bit of chastening punishment from the man upstairs.
Contradictory positions
Never accuse the Catholics of shying away from simultaneously holding two contradictory positions. The Church of Rome has promoted both preterist and futurist theology in its history. It was a defence mechanism. For centuries, Protestants said the Pope was the Antichrist (Revelation 13:7). It this part of the Bible happened before the Catholic church began, or would happen in the future, the Pope couldn’t be the bad guy, could he? It’s a great example of creative ambiguity.
Is any of this stuff true? Of course not. It’s nonsense, dating from the time of a geocentric view of the universe and the burning of witches. The Jehovah’s Witness confidently predicted the return of Christ to earth in 1914. Some of them believe that Satan and his demons were cast down to earth in that year and that he rules the current world order.
Everyone should just grow up. The preachers should get proper jobs. Those proclaiming Biblical evidence of Armageddon are stirring up hatred and helping to bring it about through their very actions – a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe that is their intention.
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