Mark Rushdoony
Are we the stars of a movie called “history”? Has it all led up to… us?
Mark Rushdoony asks a penetrating question: “What if the end of history is not soon approaching?”
https://chalcedon.edu/blog/history-is-never-about-us
How many people wind up thinking, “Our time is the end times–it’s all led up to now“? People have been believing that for 2,000 years.
We are where God has put us, and He is the only one who knows the number of the page in which we appear. Each of us is here for a reason. We may not know what it is, but we can be sure God knows.
History may not be about us; but like it or not, each of us is part of it.
There’ll be so much to learn when we finally get to Heaven!
I have known people whom believed that Christ would return in their lifetime. In more than one case, such persons have died, confused because they were at the end of their life, and Christ hadn’t returned. One man I knew had lost everything in the Great Depression and lived over 50 more years at a subsistence level, convinced that Christ’s return was imminent, and that any success he had in life would be futile. I mention this not to denigrate anyone, but simply to point out that becoming obsessed with the End Times extracts a cost. Even if the End Times are to end soon, I still have to take care of practical matters and provide for my own, until Christ actually returns.
There is a man whom produces YouTube videos that frequently are presented as prophetic messages. He has written a number of books, and I actually read one of them, where he makes some extraordinary claims linking certain events to dates which were significant in the ancient worship of pagan gods. It was interesting, even compelling, but he offers no references as to where these dates could be found to be significant in pagan worship. I’m not calling him out as a liar, but if these event dates coincide with pagan worship, I’d like to see some proof that these dates actually were significant in the past.
If you read Deut 18:20-22, you can see that false prophets are not taken lightly, so I wouldn’t want to claim that I was a prophet, unless I had something tangible to prove that I indeed was. I’m not holding my breath, on that one. Quite simply, Deut 18 tells us that one who claims to speak for God, and these predictions fail, they are a false profit. When Jesus listed the signs of His return. false prophets were first on the list.
In the first century, some tried to promote the idea that Christ’s return was going to happen any minute. In 2 Thess 2 they were warned to let no man deceive them, regarding such matters.
We are in stringent times, and I could interpret current events as being fulfillment of prophecy, but that is not to suggest that anything will happen in a certain time frame. All any of us can do is to live the day we’ve been given to live, and to strive to live a godly life.
Meanwhile, we still have to take out the garbage every Sunday evening.
Exactly. If the Lord returns tomorrow, my savings and retirement funds will be meaningless, but if He doesn’t, I still have to keep the lights on. I know people who are obsessed with this, and I’ve even seen a bunker mentality take over some people’s lives, but no matter what our situation at the Lord’s return, we will be spared only at His will.
I’ve just finished another reading of Revelation. It all turns out right in the end.
You should have prefaced that with a spoiler alert. 🙂
I love this man – how wonderful he is following in the steps of his earthly father.
This quote from Mark R. Rushdoony would have made a good foreword to my book “Israel, Rapture, Tribulation: How to Sort Biblical Fact from Theological Fiction.”
“For the last century and a half, Christians have been preoccupied by eschatology; they want to study last things. Implicit in this trend has been the assumption that the end of history is imminent.
But what if the end of history is not soon approaching? What if our anticipation of it actually represents a shirking of duty? Isn’t it a bit arrogant to assume we ought to experience the climax of history? Would we be content to be bit character in God’s Kingdom?”
I wholly agree with his thinking.
Do not forget, ever one who believed, for the last 200 years, that they were living in the end times and last days has been wrong. Every preacher that has taught that Jesus is coming soon, has been wrong, and always will be.
There are over 70 verses in the New Testament that show the early church believed Jesus was coming soon, in their lifetime! They believed they were living in the last days. They believed that, because Jesus said He would come in their lifetime, before most of them died!
The Biblical “last days” and “end times” which Jesus spoke about, have been over for about 1,900 years. Which means, we are at the very beginning of the new age, the whole future lays ahead of us, tens of thousands of years, millions of years lay before us.