End-Time Prophecy - (Part One)

For much of my life, I lived in a prophecy-saturated religious culture. I lived in constant apprehension and fear of an impending doomsday. I believed that “the end” could come at any time; I was convinced that we always lived in a window of a “few short years” from the events surrounding the second coming. I did not treasure the message of the Book of Revelation, I feared it. The specific “end-times” interpretation I was taught exercised enormous power over me and many others.

Decades later God’s grace completely changed my understanding of Revelation – from a book to be feared to a book to be treasured. God’s grace helped me to find the authentic message and unique Messenger of Revelation and in the process to discover what it has to say about the real agenda of God – and this agenda does not include performance-based religion.

I was not alone in my experiences. In his book "The Jesus I Never Knew", Philip Yancey shares his childhood experiences growing up in a church that sponsored annual prophecy conferences. Yancey relates that these conferences “revealed” that a ten nation European Common Market would fulfill the prophecy of the biblical beast with ten horns. “What sticks with me, though, is not so much the particulars of prophecy as their emotional effect on me. I grew up at once terrified and desperately hopeful,” Yancey says.

Today millions continue to be enslaved by “just-around-the-corner” interpretations of Revelation. Some live in fear within cultic groups where apocalyptic anxieties allow leaders to combine irresponsible prophecy teaching with authoritarian control, while others experience the rigors of prediction addiction (prophetic teaching that turns into a religious addiction) within churches that generally teach sound doctrine but corrupt and cheapen the gospel with unwholesome speculation. In either case Revelation is used by religion as a club to control and intimidate.

For many years my relationship with God was in large part dictated by what I was taught about the Book of Revelation. I was forever looking to future events and predicted dates that were misinterpretations drawn from Revelation. I was focused on a Jesus who would return, rather than the one who had already come and conquered on the Cross: the risen Lord, the head of the Church, who is always with His people corporately, and IN His people individually.

The power of God’s grace eventually dismantled my former understanding of Revelation. I came to see that Revelation was not about an out-of-control-beast I had to fear; rather it was all about the beauty of God’s amazing grace and the sovereign power of the Lamb.

I now see that such prophetic teaching is much like a drug, providing an incredible rush while also being the source of the depression and disillusionment that inevitably results from unrealized and unfulfilled expectations. By God’s grace, I came to see that the views I had cherished and believed amounted to a sleazy religious carnival where prophecy pundits and pushers sell their prophetic potions.

Along with its equally seductive cousin of religious legalism, prediction addiction had been the language of my life, the drum beat of my religious soul. It is an obsession, a compulsion to continually seek exhilarating “fulfillments of Bible prophecy” in current events of the day. In my experience, the bondage of legalism combined with an addiction to prediction gave meaning and order to my world while at the same time being the perfect one-two punch religion needed to control me. Legalism told me what I HAD to do in order to earn God’s love and the kingdom of heaven. Prophetic teaching assured me that people who did not do what I was convinced the Bible taught would experience the plagues of Revelation. And, on the other hand, if my works were acceptable to God, I would be saved from those plagues.

The two evil cousins of religious legalism and prediction addiction work hand in hand; where one flourishes the other cousin is surely to be found in the same general vicinity. They feed off of each other. They both lead to religious captivity and eventually control those who buy into their premises and beliefs.

For much of my life to age fifty (I am now seventy-four), I was in a never-ending race to be found faithful at the soon-coming second coming, and so my life on earth consisted of earning my own salvation by deeds. There was no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t “get right” I would “get left.” I accepted date-setting as a part of my life; failed predictions would all simply be re-issued by extending the goal line to some even more future and far off date.

Political and historical events and people, past and future, had the lead roles in the Revelation I once knew, with Jesus far from center stage. The Jesus of the Revelation of my past was a far-off, future Jesus, not one who had already conquered on His cross and who was already reigning in my life and in the lives of those who trusted in Him. Seeing Revelation through the eyes of grace, with a Christ-centered filter, revolutionized this amazing book for me.
[To be continued.]

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