The End Is Not Near

 

Many evangelical Protestants are awaiting the End Times. They keep seeing signs of it in the news. Many Catholics are into this too, referring to the prophecies of St. Malachi, and proclaiming this the last pope.

Bad idea.

From the Bible:

“you do not know when your Lord is coming … the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” – Matthew

“you do not know when that time will come… the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect." -- Mark 

“that day will sneak up on you like a trap. For it will come on those who are unsuspecting all over the earth.“ -- Luke

“the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”—Paul

Aren’t these passages telling us it is foolishness to look for signs? We will not be given signs. It will happen when we least suspect it. The need is to always act as though the next second may be our last. At any moment, we might die and come face to face with our maker.

Which is obviously true.

Jesus actually said “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” (Matthew) “Truly I tell you that there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1). “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:27). That was 2000 years ago.

So we are always in the End Times. We enter the End Times at physical death, death to the world; because we do not die then, we enter eternity. We must always be ready for that hour, because we might die at any time. The end of the world at large is largely irrelevant.

The belief that the Second Coming is imminent and about to begin a reign of peace and justice on earth, “millennialism,” has been with us for more than the past two thousand years; it was also the essence of the traditional Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah. It had a great recent resurgence in the US the 19th century. Specific dates were proposed: 1844 was a big one. New denominations were formed on this belief. But it keeps not happening. Encyclopedia Britannica writes “For all the costly failures, … the appeal of millennialism remains, and generation after generation of devotees have sought the chimerical kingdom.” 

It is worth noting that the belief in the imminent dawning of a New Age has sometimes brought more than mere disappointment. It led to the destruction of the ancient state of Judea and the diaspora of the Jews, after the failed Bar Kochba revolt. In China, it led to twenty million deaths in the Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century.

Marxism and Fascism are examples of secular, non-religious millennial movements. They have been responsible for the holocaust of many millions.

The Catholic Church properly considers all millennial movements manifestations of the Antichrist. This has been so since Saint Augustine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads:

“The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the ‘intrinsically perverse’ political form of a secular messianism.”

Jesus himself came to disprove millenarianism—that is, the Jewish expectation of a messiah who would rule the world.

I think it is true that we are living through a time of epochal change, due to the effects of the new technology. Just as there was a great general change at the Renaissance, arguably due to the invention of printing. Or as a result of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. But the sky is not falling.