This site is headed as ‘perspectives’. I just held back from calling it ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ but then just mentioned to resist. I am now involved in these zoom groups and believe it or not there is not just a simple agreement that what I have written there is the finished article. I am shocked! So I thought I would scribble here a few thoughts that are maybe along the lines of a perspective that is firming up. Don’t take it as the truth (unlike everything else I write….)
I am still wrestling a little with how I write vol. 5 which I plan to be an introduction to our hope. First what I don’t go for – no millennium (just too many symbolic numbers in the book to try to make this one literal); no Armageddon (the place does not exist, indicating that surely it cannot be literal); no rapture (an invention from 1831); no signs of the times (a little more controversial and take a little longer to explain why); etc. So not along the lines of what many think of as conventional eschatology. My question is whose conventions?
Basically for me very simple. We provide the building blocks (hence Paul’s warning to apostles not to mess around in 1 Cor. 3) and God builds it. We do not build it; God does not provide the material. Then Jesus has not yet returned as not enough material.
Can be a little depressing as it would be nice for God just to wind it all up and all the injustices sorted. So, if we are waiting, a lot seems to be down to us… But here is a thought.
What if there is already (and has been for some time) enough material to wind it all up and to bring in the age to come. But the age to come could be even better yet and for this reason God would like to hold back a little longer so that it can be even better still?
Crazy thought? Well it is only a perspective and one that I am only 72% endorsing. I do wonder though if the word ‘eschatos’ pushes us beyond the 72% conviction? ‘Telos’ is the other word for ‘end’ in NT Greek, used for example of Jesus being the end of the law, the terminus and termination. Maybe eschatos (‘eschatology’) indicates it is the end but not the final. What if the eschaton is to be the beginning of something incredible, and God is holding back to give us the best beginning that we can help bring about?
This is extremely interesting as I always saw it or perhaps was subliminally taught that God provides the material and we build the kingdom here on earth. Being commissioned to be his hands and his feet etc. I look forward to reading more on this in your next volumes.