Surface Readings

Now is the age of anxiety. ― W H Auden

“THE END IS NEAR.” Phenomena Pending.

Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime. You can view some of the headlines and pronouncements here: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.

Before I came on the scene in the early 50s, the advent of nuclear weapons in the 40s posed the threat of nuclear war annihilation. Adding to American’s anxiety and panic during the Cold War period that followed was the new mass medium of 1950s television. Its B&W news, public service announcements, documentaries, and science fiction programming brought into homes the stark magnitude of the nuclear age.

One response during that anxious time was to use ‘Duck and Cover’ drills in schools across the United States. Students were trained as to what they should do in case of an atomic attack – dive under their desks and cover their heads (Producing another Atomic Kid!).

And though in the early 60s the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was discussed as a mutual deterrent, no one knew what would happen as in 1962 when the Cold War nearly escalated into nuclear war. The United States and the Soviet Union faced off during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The escalating arms race was at issue.

Released in 1965, Barry McGuire’s The Eve Of Destruction protest song addressed the instability in the world – the prospect of nuclear war, the Vietnam War, the middle east conflict and civil rights.

During the late 60s and early 70s, I was involved in the Chicago area Jesus People movement. I remember attending a Larry Norman concert where he sang, I Wish We’d All Been Ready. (Sadly, the song refers to a “Rapture” event, a popular escape plan for Christians based on a mis-reading of scripture.)

Life was filled with guns and war
And everyone got trampled on the floor
I wish we’d all been ready . . .

There’s no time to change your mind
The Son has come and you’ve been left behind . . .

A man and wife asleep in bed
She hears a noise and turns her head
He’s gone
I wish we’d all been ready . . .

Spectacularly wrong environmental and climate predictions were made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. Some in 1971 predicted an Ice Age. Not one of the alarmist climate crisis predictions during my lifetime (or yours) have ever come to pass.

Nor did the wild claims of ‘The Adam and Eve Story’, written by a former US Air Force employee, UFO researcher and self-proclaimed psychic Chan Thomas in 1966. For the past 59 years the book has been kept under wraps by the CIA. The claims of the book are based around periodic cataclysmic events in history. The next one he proposed would be a sudden reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles, thereby wreaking havoc and total destruction to the planet in a matter of hours.

“You Never Want a Serious Crisis to Go to Waste.”

Along with the many end-of the world scenarios came Pop eschatology. The end-times prophecy business has been around during my entire lifetime. Not long ago I received a flyer announcing a weekend End-Times Prophecy seminar to be held at a local hotel.

In 1995 a series of books fictionalizing events surrounding a supposed rapture and seven-year tribulation period prior to the second coming of Christ began to appear on best-seller lists. The 16 Left Behind lowbrow thrillers of the Left Behind series, authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, arrived on the scene twenty-five years after another end-times book.

When Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson came out with The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 it sold millions of copies. Their ‘non-fiction’ end-times book was later adapted (1979) into a documentary film narrated by Orson Welles. 

Some readers might recall that Orson Well’s, on October 30, 1938, gave a dramatic War of the Worlds radio broadcast. It scared the heck out of a lot of people. Some say Lindsey’s book did the same.

The Pop eschatology of LGPE, applied to current events such as the Cold War, was released shortly after the Israel’s Six-Day War. The authors aligned their dispensational theology with contemporary geopolitical events to show that civilization was headed for doomsday. They pushed hardcore Zionism.

 Men Who Stare at Charts

The Left Behind series, The Late Great Planet Earth, and much of today’s “prophecy”, are steeped in John Nelson Darby’s dispensational theology and “rapture” nonsense. Darby (1800-1882) was an Anglo-Irish Bible teacher, clergyman, and founder of the Plymouth Brethren and the Exclusive Brethren. Among other things, he thought that Christians should not be involved in politics (as if Jesus ascended to the Father only to leave us here to ponder salvation in different epochs, to develop dispensational theology charts to schedule God’s acts, and to console ourselves with millennial dreams.)

In my estimation, dispensational theology, which didn’t exist in the church history until Darby came along and the Scofield Bible expanded its reach, is a way of charting Scripture into manageable chunks of salvation history and a way of managing God and expectations. This theology proposed to show how God planned for people’s salvation in each historical period by what relates to Israel, what relates to the church, and what the End Times will look like. It was a way to get a handle on dates and times and God.

Dispensational theology and its offshoot Pop eschatology seem to be a science project applied to theology. Darby, the originator of a pre-trib rapture, lived during the 1800s, a period following the Enlightenment when knowledge by way of rationalism and of empiricism was emphasized.

I don’t know that anyone cares about dispensational theology except for a few wonky theologians. If you do, then see The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation and What Is Dispensationalism and Who Believes It?

Pop eschatology looks at the geopolitical landscape, cherry picks what is literal and symbolic, and crams headline news into end-time predictions. But “de-coding” symbolic scripture prophecies to give a detailed scenario of end-time events is not Christian eschatology. It’s trying to time the market for the I wish we’d all been ready crowd to jump in. It’s manipulation of scripture and of people to produce a turn to God out of FOMO.

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Added 6-23-2025, in light of the Israel/US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities:

I have a great deal of sympathy for Christians who still believe the lore that dispensationalism offers. I understand what motivates them and why. But, it is well past time for the church to provide better Bible teaching that does not encourage American Christians to develop misplaced loyalties. American Christians have duties to their nation and their church. But for too many American Christians, misplaced theological convictions have led to political loyalties that prioritize Israel over both the church and their own nation.

https://www.jchasedavis.com/p/rumors-of-war

Questions Abound

This post is not meant to be a reproach to making sense and order of what is happening around us. That’s what we do, especially in a time and under those who “forsake the law and praise the wicked” (Prov. 28:4):

Why did Joe Biden award the wicked Hillary Clinton and George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

And why did Biden pardon the treasonous General Mark Milley and the murderous Anthony Fauci? Why did Joe Biden preemptively pardon them and the illegal Jan. 6 committee? (I don’t believe these Federal pardons are legal. In any case, states can bring charges against them.)

Why did Joe Biden commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row — a list that includes at least five child killers and several mass murderers? Biden gave the reprieve to some of the nation’s most violent murderers — nine of them found too dangerous to live after butchering fellow inmates — as part of his effort at “ensuring a fair and effective justice system.”

Why did Joe Biden preemptively pardon capitol police officer Michael Byrd, the one who murdered unarmed US Air Force veteran Ashli Babbit on J6?

Why haven’t the “Spies Who Lie” – 51  intelligence agents – who signed a letter in 2020 saying emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop carried “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation in an effort to interfere with the election been brought to justice? (Trump just yanked their security clearances.)

How does one justify Biden protecting Ukraine’s border with billions and billions of US taxpayer dollars and weapons as being more important than protecting our own overrun borders and our exposed citizens? And how does one justify Biden and Ukraine escalating the war with Russia to a point that’s dangerously close to nuclear war?

And what about those (Globalists, WEF, WHO) who appear to use dystopian novels as their guidebook to immanentize the eschaton with their version of sense and order – a New World Order – under the guise of saving the planet (from the people living here)?

And, going forward, why turn over our future to godless pagan Globalists and their anti-human tokenization of life?  Why let them concentrate power in human-replacing AI?

(Thank God. Trump just signed executive orders to get the U.S. out of the WHO and out of the Paris Climate Accord. He also signed an EO barring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs could facilitate a social credit scoring system that controlled a person’s behavior and assets.

Trump also signed EOs to secure the border with a National Emergency and EOs that work to eliminate “government censorship of free speech” and the “weaponization of government” against “political adversaries of the previous administration.” Thank God Christians were involved in politics this last election!

Seeing evil expand its reach over the last four years of the illegitimate Biden regime and finding out that there were Christians who supported four more years of it just to say “No” to Trump, had me horrified at where this world is headed. With Trump as president now we have some buffer against the evil that works to overcome us. The fight against dark forces is not over.)

Alarm bells should go off when you hear dogmatic pronouncements such as “Trump will destroy democracy” and “humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency.” These preposterous statements are meant to manipulate. We must be careful as to what and who we put our trust in.

When things converge and become dark, ugly and threatening, imaginations take on visions of the end times. And unless you are a nihilist and believe in Nothing except power, you desire a time when things will be put right. Most of us want justice to prevail in the end and to see all of our best hopes realized.

Despite literal, surface-level interpretations of conditions here on earth leading to end-of the world predictions, false prophecies, doomsday scenarios, worries about near-Earth asteroids, hyperbolic threats of “mass extinction” due to a “climate crisis”, and a “global crisis of unprecedented reach and proportion” (Fauci’s gain-of-function pandemic) The End has not happened during my 70+ years. Why?

“THE END IS IN PROCESS.”

The delay of The End, the delay in Christ’s Parousia or Second Coming, is God’s patience and grace giving people time hear the truth and to repent. How do they hear the truth? Those who have entered God’s kingdom as a result of his first appearance have a role in bearing witness to the nations to bring about God’s universal kingdom before his Second Coming.

Before “God through Christ Jesus judges the secret thoughts of all” (Paul in Rom. 2:16), all nations are to hear the gospel message. God’s desire is that all people hear the truth about His Son and turn to him and away from the worship of false gods and false power. This is what John of Patmos communicates to seven struggling churches in a Roman province in Asia with his apocalyptic prophecy Revelation.

John of Patmos writes to the seven churches, each in their own context, about their witness within the context of the worldwide tyranny of Rome and the broader context of God’s cosmic battle against evil and his purpose for his creation and kingdom.

John makes it clear that witness of the truth proceeds based on the church’s loyalty to God’s kingdom and the church knowing the truth worth dying for and on the church being a faithful witness of that truth even unto death. The truth:  Jesus Christ, the Lamb Who was slain, is One with God and worthy of all worship and praise.

Revelation was written within the setting of the Roman empire. Early Christians were struggling against the “satanic trinity: the dragon or serpent (the primeval, supernatural source of all opposition to God), the beast or sea-monster (the imperial power of Rome), and the second beast or earth-monster (the propaganda machine of the imperial cult).”[i] The worship and witness of only the One True God and not of the Roman emperor put these early Christians in serious opposition to this “satanic trinity.”

Regarding a surface reading of events and of scripture (sometimes called “the plain meaning of the text”), consider the reverse engineering applied to the Genesis creation account to create a ‘Biblical origins’ response to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and later, for the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Based on research that includes astrophysics, geology, and the James Webb Space Telescope, the universe is estimated to be 13.8 -26.7 billion years old. But reverse engineering of earth’s age using a literal surface reading interpretation of the creation account in Genesis estimates the earth to be about 6-10,000 years old. In terms of Jewish and Chrisitan thinking over millennia, the young earth creationism (YEC) position came about recently.

The YEC position has tied itself to concerns of Biblical inerrancy as if only a plain reading of the text, the lowest level of understanding, is what makes the Bible the Word of God. The fact that the Bible was written for us but not to us, the YEC position doesn’t allow for a historically contextual understanding to be taken into account.

Consider that the same reverse engineering used for the creation account (recently, the attempt to conform physical evidence into a Young-Earth biblical framework) has often been applied to End Time accounts in scripture to conform events to dispensational theology.

The prophecy and theology of Revelation relates not literal dates and geopolitical events but cosmic eventualities and resolutions. Its message for those in Christ is to persevere while living with evil opposition all around and with the tension of the imminence and delay of Christ’s return.

John encourages the churches: the enemies of God are finally defeated to make way for the ushering in of God’s fully realized everlasting kingdom. Heaven and earth will be joined together.

The delay of The End is a concern in heaven. John writes (Rev. 6): When [the Lamb] broke the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” 

John’s apocalyptic vision, filled with symbols and with descriptions of mythical characters evoking the book of Daniel, summons our imaginations to visualize things as heaven sees them. John’s prophecy, like the hundreds of OT prophecies he alludes to, is to reveal God’s POV.

 Revelation, you see, is what history has been all about. With that understanding, we carry on “knowing what soon must take place” (Rev. 1:1).

More about Revelation in my next post.

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[i] Bauckham, R. (1993/2018). The theology of the Book of Revelation. PP 88-89

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The Tribulation and the Rapture – Dr. Walter Martin (Historic Premillennial)

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“Can you give me a hand moving these?”

Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 13th | The New Yorker

Reports from Davos before President Trump speaks:

Personhood For Rivers And Trees: Larry Taunton On The Fundamentally Anti-Human Sentiment Of WEF

Noor Bin Ladin Reporting From WEF: The Golden Age Is Incompatible With AI Replacement