“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Eleven
The churchmen had gathered from across Europe, North Africa, and West Asia in response to the Pope Julius II’s long-anticipated creation of the Fifth Council of the Lateran, the last attempt at reform in western Christendom before Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation in 1517.
Over the course of five years, the Fifth Lateran Council proclaimed a number of recommendations, some of them blatantly incendiary, like the launching of a new Holy Land crusade, and some that seem like no-brainers today, like demanding core competencies in preaching of the church’s clergy.
But my favorite by far is their recommendation that us pastors “are in no way to presume to preach or declare a fixed time for future evils, the coming of (the) antichrist, or the precise day of judgment; for Truth says, it is not for us to know times or seasons which (God) has fixed by (God’s) own authority. Let it be known that those who have dared to declare such things are liars.”
Basically, the Fifth Council of the Lateran shouted at the clergy, “Stop trying to predict the End Times, because y’all really, *really* bad at it!” Five hundred years ago, they were having the same problem of people getting their End Times predictions horribly wrong, so much so that the church had to ban it! A churchwide ban is usually not called for unless that thing is already a huge problem!
Fast forward over five hundred years, though, and it would seem little has changed. I told you several weeks ago about how one particular End Times televangelist had snookered an older relative of mine for thousands of dollars until my family finally put a stop to it. Literally dozens of major Christian movements have, since the Fifth Lateran Council, tried to predict the End Times, and they have batted a straight .000 so far. Yet their appeal continues, and sometimes tags us by association.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, but we arrive at the end of it today, after ten previous questions that I’ve had come up in sharing my faith. Specifically what I heard from Valley’s search and call team concerning sharing one’s faith was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith. I hope that has happened for you.
Our final whatabout question is, “What about the End Times mania?” Sometimes it gets posed as a “What do you think of the Christians who are really loudly into the End Times mania?” and sometimes it gets posed as “What do you, personally, believe about the End Times?” Either way, the question may not be the easiest or most comfortable for you to answer, and I think a lot of that comes down to how difficult and delicate an apocalyptic book like Revelation is to interpret. It is okay for us to admit the difficulty in interpreting something like Revelation, because there is no such thing as a simple read of it, much as we might wish that there were or pretend that there were. But if over five hundred years of various church leaders getting it wrong so far is any indication, we should not fault ourselves for not having a simple answer to a difficult and complicated question.
John of Patmos has composed and handed down to us a very tough to understand book, and that is by design. He reaches so frequently for ancient Jewish imagery—often butchering it in the process—that it is commonly believed that he did not want Gentiles (i.e., us) to be able to read it.
Why would he not want that, especially after decades of Paul and others outspokenly championing evangelism to the Gentiles? It is hypothesized that John of Patmos—who is not the same John as John the Beloved Disciple and Evangelist, who is credited with the Gospel and Epistles of John—wrote Revelation during the reign of the emperor Domitian, who instituted a number of empire-wide religious practices that the early church saw as conflicting with their faith.
The true extent of the persecutions of the early church by Domitian is tough to quantify, but the concern for it was strong enough to lead John to both critique Domitian in this passage in Revelation 13, and to veil that critique—to give himself plausible deniability, as it were.
The Number of the Beast is one of the most famous parts of Revelation, so much so that in 1982, the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden wrote a song by that name, which they begin with the final verse of this passage—let one with understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six. It ends with the lyrics, “I have the fire, I have the force, I have the power to make my evil take its course.” And whether the band intended to or not, the way they end the song pretty accurately sums up the power of the most likely candidate for the beast itself—either Domitian himself or one of his predecessors as Caesar, Nero.
Gematria is a numerical code system in Hebrew that dates back to ancient Israel, in which each Hebrew letter is assigned a numerical value. If you take “Caesar Nero” in Greek, the language of the New Testament, and transliterate it to Hebrew, you get “Nron Qsr,” or “Neron Kaisar.” If you take the numerical values of each of Hebrew letter and add them up, you get six hundred and sixty-six. Sometimes six hundred and sixteen is cited as the number of the beast, but it’s for the same reason; if you take the Latin name of Caesar Nero, not the Greek name, you get six hundred and sixteen.
That’s it. The famed number of the beast is most likely a reference to an earlier emperor. And why? Because Nero tends to be associated with the first persecution of Jesus followers that was ordered by Caesar himself. Earlier harassment may have occurred on a local or prefect-level, but Nero blaming Jesus followers for the burning of Rome was the first time that the reigning Caesar had directly ordered harassment of the Way. By equating Domitian with Nero, John of Patmos is telling us that he is worried that past is prologue, and that what one vindictive emperor began, the current vindictive emperor would continue.
The emperor had, at his disposal, literal fire and force—prisoners could be sentenced to death by fire, or by many other gruesome means of which the Romans availed themselves. And even with a powerful aristocracy in place, they certainly had power to make what evil they wished take its course.
That is the fear of John of Patmos—that Domitian would find ways to create more evil for the nascent church. It is a commentary, then, of events that were contemporaneous to him. John includes a great many hopes for the future in the final few chapters of Revelation, but he is commentating on events that took place within his lifetime, not ours or our children’s.
That might help explain why we have batted a woeful .000 in using Revelation to determine what the End Times must look like in the future—because the book is not about the End Times, not really. It is about the worry of things getting so bad for the early church that it would feel like the End Times.
And while 2020 has been a very real trial for all of us, with something that it has exacted from each of us, that is not now. That is not our present. And God willing, it will not ever be our future.
So, what about the End Times mania? I know it is tempting to
want to know exactly what will happen, and when, and how. It is tempting
because knowledge is not simply power, although it is often that, but that
knowledge represents security. Knowing what is coming down the pike makes
preparing for it infinitely easier, and concerning many, many things, from a
covid-19 vaccine to caring for our environment to much more, we should take
advantage of the knowledge we do have.
But part of faith—a big part of faith—is accepting that we do not know everything that is going to happen, and that attempting to do so is a fool’s errand. Part of faith is accepting our own limitations. And we can choose to accept that we know infinitely less about the End Times than God does.
That is not necessarily easy to do, certainly not in a culture where we love to talk about the limitless potential of persons, and often rightly so. But the Christian virtues of humility and humbleness come to the fore here, and they can bring us back full circle to where we started this sermon series together over two months ago—Genesis, where Adam and Eve sought knowledge that belonged to God, not them. What, and when, the End Times are is knowledge that is God’s, not ours, to have.
May we not let ourselves fall for the same temptation, of
demanding knowledge of the End Times that belongs to God, not to us. May we be
strong enough in our faith to know that God still loves us, and secure enough
in our knowledge of God’s love that such love can indeed see us through.
It is a hope for our future, whatever it may look like, that
I have.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 22, 2020