This is the third blog in a nine-part series around the topic of something “Beyond Human Experience”. In most of the recent Hollywood movies about the end of the world, I’ve noticed that they always seem to begin with being caught off guard. The scientific equations were miscalculated and disaster struck suddenly. Although from the outset, the timescale of the events described on this webpage is completely unknown, three things are worth bearing in mind three things when you’re trying to time what’s next:
– There Are Signs of the Season
All the visions and predictions we have that date back to several centuries BC, are still only pictures of things to come. So we don’t know if the details described in each picture are literal or figurative. Although we may have ‘signs of the season’[i], we still can’t be absolutely sure of the day and the hour when the curtains will open up on the final Act to this particular portion of the Creator’s epic drama. We don’t know how many scenes this Act will hold. We don’t know the exact order in which they’ll take place. Only the Creator God himself knows the time and the date that He has set for His creation.[ii]
– “The Last Days”
To put ‘a spanner in the works’, the whole time period from AD33 to modern day, is known as “the Last Days”. It’s a season (an ‘age’) between the time when God’s promises were fulfilled, and what the prophets called ‘the end of the Age’.[iii] So the first thing we need to remember is that when the Scriptures say: ‘the last days’[iv] or ‘soon’, it could mean any time now, every day in every generation.
If for example, you read the Book of Revelation from start to finish, it could be that the curtains have been open on the last Act in the Creator God’s epic Play, ever since Jesus left. He was just like a seed going into the ground. As soon as it went in and germinated, things started happening under the surface as well as on top. All this is long before the flower (the results) appears. We never know what’s happening under the ground or how long before things will start to become visible.
The same may be true of God’s story in the Book of Revelation. Rather than the events being chronological, the imagery of the last Book of the Bible could be a matrix of world affairs describing both a visible and invisible struggle.[v] In this case, the Book may be an over-view of world history from start to finish — as seen from God’s side of the looking glass. Rather than linier and still to come, the visions may describe layers of spiritual activity on world events. These layered themes, taking up varying lengths of time, are then superimposed onto each other to reveal a complex multi-dimensional conundrum. Like a movie with many different story lines all feeding into the one plot, you leave the cinema saying, “Wow, I had no idea that would happen until that last scene!” If this is the case with the Book of Revelation, we may be several chapters through the last book of the Bible already!
– God’s Eternal so His Show MUST go on
There is one thing that we can be sure of. Because the Creator God is an Eternal Being, His timing is different to our time. While we seem to always be running out of time, the Creator God is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end”.[vi] But why is this important here?
Being eternal, the Creator’s Show must go on. So our temporal human experience, as written in the Bible, ends with a cliff hanger. The last chapter in the Bible clearly shows a new beginning seamlessly woven onto the end of current world history as we know it.[vii] Another whole epic saga is about to begin on the foundations of what’s happened in the past, and it includes God’s family. If we pause for just a minute to allow the implications of this to settle on us, we may be in a better position for understanding the seven events that are still yet to come. If you would like to know more, just click on my next three blogs beginning with: 3.4 Seven Events to Come – Part 1
[i] Matthew 24:32-35
[ii] Matthew 24:36-44 and Mark 13:32-37
[iii] Isaiah 2:12; 13:6; Ezekiel 30:3; Joel 1:15; 2:1,11; Amos 5:18,20; Obadiah 1:15; Zephaniah 1:7,8
[iv] Isaiah 2:2; Hosea 3:5; Micah 4:1; Acts 2:17; 2 Timothy 3:1; 2 Peter 3:3
[v] Ephesians 6:12
[vi] Revelation 22:13 [NIV] See Also: Revelation 21:6
[vii] Revelation 22