Thinking from the end backwards - Mark D. Thompson

A former Principal of Moore College wrote a book about what Christians believe in which he took his readers on a journey from the end to the beginning and then to the middle. It was a brilliant move. ‘In seeing what God is planning’, he wrote, ‘we gain perspective on who he is and what he is doing to fulfil his ends’.1

We operate like that often. The examination in the future hopefully directs our teachers in their preparation for the class, just as it drives us to study in the present. Of course, we are all prone to distraction and our plans can be derailed by factors outside of our control. We are not God. We don’t always see the end clearly and we don’t always keep our promises. Promises are by their very definition forward looking. They concern what will or will not happen in a future time. It is of very great significance that the Bible begins with promises: the promise of blessing at the moment of creation (Gen 1:28) and the promise of deliverance in the wake of the Fall (Gen 3:15). There is a forward moving momentum in the Bible. We long for that day when the blessing God pronounced at the beginning will be realised in full, when the deceiving enemy of humankind will be decisively defeated, when each of the elements of the promise made centuries later to Abram will be fulfilled (Gen 12:1–3). From the very beginning of the Bible we are being pointed to the end to make sense of everything else in between.

As I write this, a war is being waged in Eastern Europe which threatens to engulf many more of us. At the same time, some of the old certainties in the West are crumbling and it seems we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. A lot of our optimism seems to have been drained by natural disasters and not so natural disasters, or simply by a seemingly unrelenting determination to unpick the Christian heritage of Europe, America, Africa and Australia, and to eliminate all reference to Jesus in the public square. Economies are buckling and the everyday lives of men and women are becoming more difficult. How do we understand this and how do we face the future if it is to be like this?

Starting from the end is a very attractive option, not least because the often-unexpressed question on so many people’s lips is ‘Where is this all heading?’ There have been many times when Christians have asked this question and the Book of Revelation was written, amongst other reasons, to answer it. It was written during a time of disorientation and despair, when the future of the Christian movement seemed on a knife edge. Sometimes it looked like the cause was lost. A bit like today. The Book of Revelation ends with a declaration and a promise. ‘He who was seated on the throne said “Behold, I am making all things new”’ (Rev 21:5). At the end we are shown the renewal and recreation of all things. And the promise? ‘Surely I am coming soon’ (Rev 22:7, 20). A new heaven and a new earth, with a new Jerusalem at its centre, replaces what has been defiled and destroyed by the machinations of human history. This is a phenomenal challenge to our preoccupation with this heaven and this earth and even this earthly Jerusalem. This world is not all there is and we are not tied to it forever. In the new heaven and new earth at the end, everything that threatened or challenged human life is gone forever. Every tear is wiped away, no more death,

no more mourning, or crying or pain. All that is left is blessing—the fulfilment of the blessing in the Garden. God’s purpose has not been derailed and at the end it will be exactly where God wanted it to be all along: a new heaven and new earth in which we live in full knowledge of how far God was prepared to go to have us as his people. I am not for a moment suggesting that all we are or do now is unimportant. It is good and worthwhile. Each day there is a good work which God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in (Eph 2:10). But it will not last. So the picture at the end, the destination to which everything is headed, relativises the importance of the present and challenges us not to hold on to it too tightly. Achievement, acquisitions, authority: none of it lasts and all of it pales into insignificance beside the future God has already secured for us. What God has planned is wonderful and beyond our wildest imaginations. It is worth waiting for. The second big picture idea is the victory of the Lamb. In the Book of Revelation, opposition to the Lamb and those who are his escalates to monstrous proportions. Yet at the very end he is the one who is victorious. No matter what is thrown at the Lamb, and those who are his with all their fragility and failures, he ultimately prevails and they share his victory. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the opposition to Christ and his gospel by the loudest voices in our world. In some places it is noisy and overt. In some places violence and physical coercion is employed. In other places it is more insidious, a quiet fury displayed in our education system, in our legal structures, and by the gatekeepers of information. Language is reconfigured, history is rewritten, the most basic relationships are overridden and redefined. Most tragically, failures from within the churches compound the opposition from without and sometimes we have to agree the critics have a point. Apologist Josh McDowell asked whether this might be the last Christian generation.2 Yet looking at the end reminds us that any victory the enemies of the gospel might seem to have at this moment is temporary and illusory. Christ is building his church and not even the gates of Hades will be able to prevail against it (Matt 16:18). So social media and political parties don’t have a chance really. He is the one who will execute the final judgment and he will gather those who are his in the new Jerusalem. A third big picture idea occurs again and again through the Book of Revelation but comes to its climax at the end. Amidst all that is going on in the world, and despite all that might be done to them, those who belong to the Lamb, the saints, are safe. Their prayers are the incense that rises before God (Rev 8:3) and they, along with the apostles and the prophets, are those for whom God has given judgment in the end (Rev 18:20). In one remarkable picture, when all the might of Satan and his armies surrounds the saints and all seems lost, the final defeat of those forces arrives: ‘fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur’ (Rev 20:10). Like the martyrs who are kept safe under the altar until the appointed time (Rev 6:9–10), not one of the saints of God are lost.

Today’s opposition to the gospel might seem ferocious and unstoppable. We might seem vulnerable and unprotected, uncertain we can survive. But the end shows us that the saints of God, the followers of Jesus, are safe. They have always been safe, even in the face of the worst the world can do. They are not lost and cannot be lost. Thinking from the end backwards into a world as confused and tumultuous as ours reminds us of at least these three things: there is a great renewal and recreation to come, at the centre of it will be the victorious lamb of God, and God is able to keep his servants safe. The Book of Revelation is a kind of peeling back of the curtain to see what we do not normally see in the midst of the lives we live. What we are shown is that none of what disturbs us, not even the most frightening of it all, has made the slightest dent on the sovereign rule of God. He is entirely in control and his purpose has not been derailed by even a millimetre. What he promised he will do. The blessing at the beginning will be there at the end, bigger, better and brighter than in the beginning. The promise of deliverance will be kept and the enemy of God and his people will be destroyed for ever. He will not trouble us in the new heavens and the new earth. And the grand promises to Abram which incorporated a blessing to ‘all the families of the earth’ will be fulfilled as a multitude from every tribe, language, people and nation gathers to praise the victorious Lamb and to celebrate their redemption. Knowing that end casts the present in an entirely different light, doesn’t it?

1 P. F. Jensen, At the Heart of the Universe: What Christians Believe (Homebush West: Lancer, 1991), xi.

2 J. McDowell, The Last Christian Generation (Holiday, FL: Green Key, 2006).