From the Archive: The Apocalypse Is Not About You

Like many people in my particular stream of evangelicalism, I used to believe confidently that I was living in the end times.

Holding my Bible in one hand and the daily news in the other, I could see clearly that they were talking about the same things: conflict in the Middle East, natural catastrophes, globalization, and the world wide web. It was all the fulfillment of prophecy. Once I started seeing the pattern, it was everywhere — not just in Daniel and Revelation, but throughout the Psalms, Prophets, and Gospels too.

Questions about genre, authorial intent, or historical context were all secondary. These ancient texts were reaching across time and space and speaking directly to me, an average Midwestern millennial, about things that were happening, or were just about to happen, all around me. I knew that Jesus was coming back in my lifetime, that the years leading up to his return would be the most dramatic time in history, and (drum roll) that I was going to be a part of it. I felt like Emmet in the Lego Movie: an everyman discovering that he was the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all time. Given that the Left Behind series has sold 63 million copies and is now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage, it appears that I’m not the only one who finds this “daily news” approach to biblical prophecy compelling. And that’s not totally bad. At its best, this outlook can inspire a strong sense of urgency to live wholly for God. But growing up in the kind of high-octane environment that thrives on such things, I have come to see that one of the biggest dangers with this approach is also the main reason it continues to connect with people on such a deep level. Simply stated, the whole booming industry of end-times speculation is fueled by the strong human tendency towards egocentrism.

 Simply stated, the whole booming industry of end-times speculation is fueled by the strong human tendency towards egocentrism.

We all know what it feels like to talk to someone who doesn’t have the patience or empathy to hear us out because they think they already know what we’re going to say before we say it. If we’re honest, we’ve probably been that person on more than one occasion. It takes tremendous effort to step outside of ourselves, to lay down our own expectations and preconceived ideas, and to just listen to someone on their own terms. But that’s what we do when we love someone. In the same way, when we come to the words of God in Scripture, our first priority should not be to get something for ourselves or to find confirmation for what we think it should say, but to simply listen, without agenda, to what the text says. Far from being a dry or clinical discipline, biblical exegesis should be the natural outflow of a loving heart.

If we come to God’s word on its own terms, however, we are bound to discover two hard but ultimately liberating truths. First, the Bible wasn’t written to us. It was written to people who lived between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago in an environment very different from our own. Second, the Bible isn’t mostly about us—at least, not directly anyway. The Bible is mostly about Jesus, and it invites us to see Jesus’ story as our story, to reshape our lives around his life. Too often, though, we come to the Bible with the expectation that it should speak directly to us and about us, that it should conform to us instead of us conforming to it.

 If the last 2,000 years of failed end-time predictions tell us anything, it’s that we desperately want the Bible to be about us.

This is why there is often so much unhealthy obsession with biblical prophecy. If the last 2,000 years of failed end-time predictions tells us anything, it’s that we desperately want the Bible to be about us. We create new “signs of the times” to fit current events and create lists of reasons why our generation is the last generation, the most important generation, the generation the Bible talks about the most. Paul defines prophecy as peering through a glass darkly, but we somehow manage to find our own face on every opaque surface.

The only way to overcome our fallen tendency toward a self-centered reading of Scripture is to have our thinking renewed by the self-giving love of Christ, who “died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised”¹2 Cor. 5:15. At its root, the act of reading Scripture is an act of empathy: it requires us to step outside of ourselves, outside of our own time and space and likes and dislikes, and into the time and space of others. This is hard to do, not because it requires a special kind of intelligence but because it requires a special kind of love, the kind of love that drives a man to lay down his life for his friends.

 We must replace our egocentric eschatology with a hermeneutic of love.

“Love is the deepest mode of knowing,” says N. T. Wright, “because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality.”²N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2008), 73.

What does a mature Christian love look like when applied to the task of interpreting biblical prophecy? Answer: Love does not seek its own.³1 Cor. 13:5. We must replace our egocentric eschatology with a hermeneutic of love.We must write the words “love does not seek its own” on the doorway of our hearts so that every time we come to God’s word our ears will be open to the story he is telling, not the story we want to hear. Only by affirming and celebrating the “other-than-self reality” of God’s word, by counting everything as loss for the sake of knowing Christ and becoming like him in his death—only then will his story become our story.

(Photo: Stuart Boreham/flickr.)