A friend of mine actually spurred me to write this because of what he wrote. I totally agree with what my friend said, however I would still like to weigh in with my own thoughts. Living in a city were there is some sort of church or religious establishment nearly on every corner, I hear all sorts of talk about "end times" and that we are there now.
In reality people have thought that they were in the end times long before I or even my city was born. How are we so sure that the "end" is now? I believe that we have to find some way to keep people worried about the uncertainty of the future, and the reason is simple, control. Fear keeps people in their place, creates some sort of order, and allows us to find common ground with our fellow man. We are all uncertain of what the future holds, and that uncertainty binds us together. I do believe, if you have not guessed, that we are not living in the end times. My reasoning behind this is that the same passages of the Bible that people use to say that we are living in the end times were talking about specific events that happened long ago.
Today we have people fearing that we are in the "end times" because we elected an African American president, global warming is getting worse (which it is not as a friend pointed out to me), there are nuclear warheads being fired, there are wars and rumors of war, recently the icing on the cake for many that we are in the "end times" is that our president got the Nobel Peace Prize. No matter your view on our president or his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, we cannot allow our own personal conflicts read into the text what is not there.
The passages in the Bible that people use to justify their thinking of "end times" are not used the way they were intended. The gospel writers said that the "end is at hand" which means that they thought it would be right around the corner, probably within the couple of years that followed their writing, not thousands of years from that point. Interesting how their way of thinking, that is that the end was close to them, sounds very similar to what is being said today.
Instead of reading "end times" language as we know it (ie the end of the cosmos) we should read it as the end of a time, not all of time. When they Bible authors were writing about the end, they were thinking more specifically about some event that would be the end of their existence. This was the fall of the temple, the heart of their existence, not the voting in of an African American president.
May we begin to think of these issues with a logical perspective instead of an emotional perspective.
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