Daniel Darling: Hope, not panic

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming up next, the end of the world.

With pandemics, wars, and turmoil abroad, many are wondering whether we’re in the last days.

WORLD Opinions contributor Daniel Darling says Christians ought to face the future with confidence—and hope.

DANIEL DARLING: Christians are not immune to fear. We see the same images and hear the same headlines…

NEWS HEADLING MONTAGE

Bad news abounds. It leads many Christians to wonder if we are living in the last days predicted by Jesus.

Believers throughout the church age have held differing views on exactly how the end times will unfold. The latter half of the 20th century was a high-water mark for pre-tribulation dispensationalism, with bestselling book series, movies, and prophecy conferences. While belief in this strand of eschatology has waned somewhat in the 21st century, believers look at world events and wonder where they fit into God’s plan.

This is a good instinct. Every believer, regardless of his or her eschatology, has a hope that a fearful world lacks. We have the promise of Jesus’s coming. We have confidence that God is gathering history to Himself. Scripture tells us to eagerly anticipate the coming of Jesus, who said in Luke 21:28 to “look up, for your redemption is near.” Christians aren’t to be asleep and adrift amid the cultural tides, but to be watchful, alert, and sober.

For Christians, war, rumors of war, and Orwellian technology should not provoke us to fear, but faith. The sovereign Lord of the universe is not wringing His hands at any of this. In fact, Psalm 2 says that God sits in the heavens and laughs at human machinations.

Trust in God doesn’t imply naivete or a quietist withdrawal from the world. Rather, we are told in Scripture that anticipating the end should motivate us to double down on Christian faithfulness. Writing just after World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, C.S. Lewis wrote of Christ’s Second Coming in an essay, “The World’s Last Night.” He urged Christians, “Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.”

The Apostle Paul urged the first century church toward a holy urgency, “The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Romans 13:11-12). In one of his final letters, Paul urges Christians “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:11-13). The writer of Hebrews says the end of days should find us gathering more, not less, with the people of God.

So while believers will differ on the exact timing and details of Jesus’s coming, we are united by a hope that He is indeed returning, victoriously, to finish His work of making all things new. We can state with confidence that we are in the final stages of God’s redemptive plan not because of a headline, but because we have God’s sure word. And so, with the Apostle John, we watch and say, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

I’m Daniel Darling.

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