When Christians Forget Their Bright Future

People often forget their wallets at home or forget a doctor’s appointment. It happens. Sometimes, however, people forget really important things.  

In the Old Testament, God’s people just sort of lost “the book of the law,” likely referring to the first five books of the Bible—the Pentateuch. Somehow, they misplaced Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—that is, until King Josiah initiated renovations of the temple. When they discovered the Bible and read it, God’s people said something like, “We’re not really doing any of this; we will start today” (2 Kings 22).  

We can look back at the story of forgetting about the Pentateuch and scoff without realizing how we can do the same. Although we may not lose the actual books of the Bible, we can gradually stop discussing important truths, such as the glorious return of King Jesus. This happened to me––a preacher and ministry leader for the last 20 years.  

So often when I would speak of the gospel, I would use shorthand phrases to refer to the whole gospel. I’d speak of the gospel as the “life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus to the throne of the universe from which He extends forgiveness to those who receive Him.” All of that is true enough. But it remains incomplete.  

My gospel shorthand had overlooked an important doctrine. This was highlighted for me unintentionally by the former EFCA president, Kevin Kompelien. He visited pastors in our area, and we had a Q&A session. I don’t even remember exactly what the question was or who asked it, but in answering a question, Kevin also spoke of the gospel in shorthand, speaking of the “life, death, resurrection, ascension and the second coming of Jesus.” 

As soon as he said, “and the second coming of Jesus,” I lowered my eyes and stared at my dessert plate, feeling no small dose of conviction. Not intentionally––and not even consciously––I’d omitted the second coming from my conception of the gospel. I’d gradually forgotten an essential doctrine. And I doubt I am the only one. 

Why do we forget our future? 

Why do you think we speak less often about the return of Jesus these days? I suspect part of our aversion stems from an overreaction to perceived abuses in the icky money grabs behind end-time scare tactics. For example, I distinctly remember sitting in a dorm room with some friends when one guy said, “I just heard a pastor talking on the radio about Revelation and how the flying grasshoppers are helicopters, and in the coming war, two-thirds of us are going to die.” I looked around the small dorm room, six of us sitting on chairs, a futon and bunk beds. We all wondered which four wouldn’t survive until our graduation. That was more than 20 years ago. All of us survived.  

When one puts these kinds of teachings about Revelation alongside the continual trickle of religious teachers predicting the exact date of the apocalypse, it is easy to become suspicious —if not completely disillusioned and cynical—toward teaching about the end times, especially when the predicted dates come and go. While delivering in sales, books featuring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on their covers have failed to deliver the imminent conclusion they’ve promised.  

Perhaps affluence also enables our neglect, causing us to believe we don’t need the second coming to usher in heaven on earth. From my house, I can drive to at least six grocery stores in less than 15 minutes and buy 100 types of cheese. We have shredded pepper jack cheese, cubed pepper jack cheese, sliced pepper jack cheese, whole blocks of pepper jack cheese—and, as I noticed on our dinner table the other night, “traditional cut” pepper jack cheese. (Apparently, “traditional cut” means cheese shredded in fat strips.) Who needs Christ’s Parousia to fully restore all creation when we have culture’s prosperity to do this for us? 

We could list other reasons for our avoidance of end-times theology, such as unhealthy secular skepticism toward the supernatural. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, there is unhealthy fascination with the supernatural, evidenced by the waves of for-profit bestselling books by people who died and came back to tell us what they saw. Or maybe we avoid thinking about death and the end of everything because modern medicine offers unprecedented expectations for health and healing. Maybe it’s a combination of all these influences together.  

What happens when we forget the end? 

To shift focus to God’s blessings now, to the exclusion of His blessings at the end, means we do not lose a part of Christianity; we lose Christianity. Consider the analogy of the human body. In a tragic accident, a person might lose a finger or an arm and still remain very much alive. We cannot, however, lose the function of vital organs, such as our brain, heart or lungs, without dying.  

For centuries, the Apostles’ Creed has helped Christians succinctly confess the core of our faith. How much can we ignore in a statement already so intentionally threadbare and still retain the Christian faith? That’s not the sort of question we should even ask. We must believe it all to have it all, including that Jesus Christ “ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.” And we must believe in “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” 

This is why scholar Anthony A. Hoekema opens his classic book, The Bible and the Future, by noting that the study of the last things “must not be thought of as something which is found only in, say, Daniel and Revelation, but as dominating and permeating the entire message of the Bible."¹ When the apostle Paul considers the implications of losing the doctrine of the physical resurrection of believers, he states that without the resurrection, Christian preaching becomes vain and misrepresents God, while the Christian faith becomes meaningless and futile, leaving us to perish forever in our sins as the most pitiable of people (1 Cor 15:12–19). The stakes couldn’t be higher. 

Of course, rather than complete avoidance of the indispensable doctrine of the return of Christ and the life everlasting, something more partial typically happens. We sing about it less, preach about it less, talk about it less, pray about it less. This inevitably leads to a “partialing” or weakening of Christian hope. We may not turn off the faucet completely, but we should not be surprised by our thirst when we only allow a trickle to come through. 

The biblical writers understood our thirst for “the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city” (Rev 22:1–2a). The biblical writers opened the faucet wide. Consider that in just the 27 books of the New Testament, the various authors mention or allude to the return of Christ more than 100 times. To meet suffering believers in their pain, the biblical authors continually held out the promise of Christ’s return. With suffering as the backdrop, they viewed the return of Christ as the ending that brings the best beginning––the start of the ultimate happily ever after.  

At our church (Community Evangelical Free Church), we recently preached through the letter of 1 Corinthians during the course of about nine months. It took us 37 sermons. In our preaching, we tried to highlight the theme of Christ’s return often. Yet we still did not come close to the emphasis on the return of Christ that Paul gives in that letter. Depending on how you count the references, something like 12 passages within the letter speak overtly about the return of Christ. (I say it’s hard to count because it depends on whether you consider chapter 15 one large reference or a half-dozen smaller ones.) Even after we preached the series and tried to consistently highlight the return of Christ, I would guess that our church would be surprised to learn that the return of Christ could have featured prominently in every third sermon.  

But I can also say that even the attempt to point people to the hope of the river of life, which will come fully and finally at the end of everything, had an effect on our people. People who never say amen in church said amen. People who don’t text or email me about the sermon found ways to say thank you. Slowly, through more emphasis on the end, God changed us—and He is changing us—for the better.  

Fellow pastors and church members, beloved brothers and sisters in the household of God, may I make a plea to you? As when the people of God rediscovered the book of the law and said, “We’re not really doing any of this, but we will start today,” we might need to do something similar. We need to throw wide open the faucet to thirsty people.  

Come, Lord Jesus.