We’re not meant to bail the world. We’re meant to work with Christ in redeeming it. That won’t happen until we scuttle our desire for escape and embrace Paul’s ethic of work and faithfulness. That is how we live like—and even in a sense become—Christians.

If you’re worried about the coincidence of four blood moons somehow signaling the end of the world, relax. The prophetic scheme hatched by ministers Mark Blitz and John Hagee amounts to little more than proof of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thesis in Fooled by Randomness.

Our world is full of noise and confusion. As a result, we look for patterns to create sensible narratives that help explain reality. Taleb applies this insight to markets. But it’s just as true for people predicting the Ultimate Crash.

Witness the various and sundry end-times predictions of, say, Harold Camping. Or Hal Lindsey. Or Herbert W. Armstrong. Or the Watchtower Society. Or William Miller. Or Melchior Hoffmann. Or . . . well, just pick your favorite street-side apocalypse hawker with a sandwich board.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, to choose from. And they’ve all left their disappointed doomsday devotees. But studying where they went wrong can be instructive.

Predictable as a thief

Solomon was right: There’s nothing new under the sun, including people eager to see it drop out of the sky. The turn of the first millennium after Christ had everyone buzzing about God rolling up the big scroll. And first-century Judaism sprouted more false messiahs than the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s.

Earthquakes and eclipses. Comets and conflagrations. Wars and their rumors. We’re always eager for the end. We are obsessed with it. Not that we don’t have cause. Christians see it in the scripture. We confess it in the creed. But obsession with the eschaton is as unbiblical as it is unhelpful.

“Now,” says Paul, “concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come” (2 Thes 2.1-2).

Paul penned this corrective to the church at Thessaloniki because they had already disregarded his previous teaching. “But as to the times and the seasons,” he said, “you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thes 5.1-2).

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