We are not to let eschatological speculation or theories about the prophetic calendar push us to just go into useless inactivity. We are to keep on keeping on for Christ and the Kingdom.

Quite often when I or others seek to alert fellow Christians to some of the pressing issues of the day that need to be addressed, whether in the culture wars, or problems in our churches, or anti-Christian bigotry, or the tsunami of evil overwhelming the West, oftentimes someone will come back and reply something like this:

‘The Bible said this would happen’
‘This has all been prophesied’
‘Scripture warns about this’
‘It was all foretold to happen’
‘All according to what God said’

I hear these sorts of things all the time. Just yesterday for example on the social media someone put up an abortion post. I saw that someone replied with this remark: “The world is divinely ordained to get worse and worse but Christians will be raptured away and leave the world to the Great Tribulation.”

Too often these sorts of responses can be used as a copout, as an excuse to just sit back and do nothing. The unspoken idea is this: ‘It is meant to be, so who am I to take a stand against these things?’ But this is NOT how we are to understand and use the Bible, including prophecies and passages dealing with the end-times.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, the prophetic passages, especially as found in the Old Testament, can be, and are, understood in various ways. Indeed, the very notion of the “last days” itself is open to various interpretations and debate.

The person above clearly has in mind a short period of time at the very end of the age. That might be part of it, but the New Testament actually uses phrases like “the last days” to designate the entire sweep of history from the first coming of Christ through to his second coming.

If that is how we should look at things, that means the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Luther, Spurgeon and you and I have all been living in the last days. Thankfully these and millions of other believers did not let this understanding become an excuse to sit back and do nothing.

They were fully involved in the work of the Kingdom in countless different ways. And even if they did think the end was near—and Christians throughout the church age have always thought their generation could be the last one—they did not resort to a life of resignation, passivity and indifference. They worked even harder.

I have no doubt that just as some believers today will criticise others, and use the mantra, ‘it is all meant to be,’ so too Christian activists in the past heard similar things. I do not doubt that when William Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists worked so hard against one terrible social evil—the slave trade—they were told by some Christians: ‘Hey Wilby, this was all predicted long ago, so just chill.’

Thankfully many active Christian workers ignored such unhelpful advice. Indeed, for many, they used the idea of the Lord’s future return to spur them on even further in their activity for the Kingdom. They used their view of end-times as a motivation to pray even more and work even more.

And the truth is, even if this or that was foretold by the prophets in the Old Testament or elsewhere, that does not mean we are to just pull out of things and take a breather. The command to be salt and light for example is NOT nullified just because evil was foretold long ago.

Read More