“The end of all things is at hand” –1 Peter 4:7
What is your response when you hear something like that? If you are anything like me then your antennae goes up and you think to yourself, “Nut Job Alert!”
My first exposure that I can remember to weirdoes that say stuff like this was to a guy named Marshal Appelwhite and the Heaven’s Gate cult. In March of 1997 he and 38 followers committed mass suicide. Why? Well, they believed the world was about to be recycled. The end of all things is at hand. Thankfully a way of salvation from our space ancestors was provided. And that way of salvation was that the Hale-Bopp comet had a UFO traveling behind it. In order to travel with the spaceship though they needed to shed their earthly bodies. What I always found hilarious in this sad story is that each member had in their pocket a $5 bill and three quarters for inter-galactic toll prices.
But Applewhite isn’t alone in doing crazy things because he believed the world was going to end. What do you think of as typical responses to “The end of all things is at hand”?
- Isolating away from society
- Doing something strange for salvation/protection
- Stockpiling goods (or giving away everything)
- Gathering other followers to observe your same rituals
- Panic
Now listen to this from 1 Peter 4:7:
“The end of all things is at hand”.
Therefore….(and here it is. Whatever follows after this will help us compare what Peter says to the other nutjob responses that we see). Be self-controlled and sober-minded. When Peter talks about the end being at hand he doesn’t say bunker down and isolate yourself from others. He doesn’t say get out your charts and graphs so you can know the exact day of the return of Christ. Nothing like that. Instead it’s the opposite.
Jesus could return any moment. Because of this we ought to be self-controlled and sober-minded. This isn’t something strange that we do in response to the fact that Christ could return any moment. We don’t need five bucks and three quarters.
What you often see with believers when they think and talk about prophecy stuff is panic and losing their heads. There is a show that I noticed on Netflix—I don’t know how many episodes but I watched one of them—it’s called Doomsday Bunkers. It’s people that are creating these elaborate sometimes million dollar bunkers to try to survive the upcoming Apocalypse.
Peter reminds believers to not be like that. Just live normal everyday Christian lives. This is a call to think sensibly in light of the fact that Christ is returning. And I love what Dr. Schreiner says on this:
The realization that God is bringing history to a close should provoke believers to depend on him, and this dependence is manifested in prayer, for in prayer believers recognize that any good that occurs in the world is due to God’s grace.
But we are also called to love one another and serve one another. Rather than isolating and going all crazy and trying to survive a zombie apocalypse in our bunker we are called to actually be hospitable. The way we respond to “the end is at hand” says quite a bit about what is going on in our hearts.
- What if I panic? It shows that your confidence is not placed in God.
- What if I’m calm? It might mean that you are trusting Christ. It might also mean that you are a sociopath. That’s why we also see the second thing
- What if I don’t love, don’t show hospitality, and don’t use gifts to serve one another? It means that you aren’t really prepared for Christ to return. You aren’t about his mission—you are about your own mission. (This is in varying degrees—don’t assess yourself too harshly here, are you growing in these?)
So we survived another blood moon. And we’ll likely survive the next one too. But consider your hearts response when you think about “the end is at hand”. If it doesn’t motivate you to love one another and dig in to service, or if it causes you great panic, you might be missing something. A proper view of the end times will cause us to love our neighbor.
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