The End of the World

 The End of the World 

By Bobby Neal Winters

Advent is that Season of the Church when we prepare for the coming of Jesus as the Infant, but also as The King.  I learned all of this as an adult.

I grew up in a dispensationalist church. “Dispensationalist” is a long word and you might not know what it means even if you are one.  What it boils down to is that when the world ends, the faithful will be raptured away before the time of trial, the Great Tribulation.  

I remember we had one preacher--he was a young man at the time--where the world ended twice every Sunday and eight times a week during revivals.  I was waiting for the Last Trump to blow, and sometimes when one of the local bulls was feeling frisky, I heard it.

My thinking along these lines has changed over the years.  You think about things differently when you are fifty-eight than you do when you are eight, or even eighteen.  I am in a Zoom Bible Study, and we are going through Matthew.  Last week we did Matthew, Chapter 3, which is John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus.

John the Baptist was preaching that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand and the clear implication in that chapter was that Jesus would usher that Kingdom in.

My thoughts when I was a boy weren’t very well developed, but my expectations were very concrete.  I expected the End of the World to be, well, the End.  Everything would be over, and and we’d all be in Heaven.  I can’t say that is what the preacher preached, but that is what I walked away with.  Having preached myself and having heard some interpretations get back to me, let’s just say that every sermon is a Rorschach Test. 

But my thinking has changed since I was eight, since I was eighteen, since I was forty-eight.  I believe the Bible, I believe in the Word, but I’ve learned of the limitation of “words.”  Transmitting a message is difficult when not everyone has the same lexicon. The way an itinerant preacher might convey a message is going to be different than the way an electrical engineer would.

There will come a day when it will all be over.  In the meanwhile, there are times when, for lack of a more precise phrase, the human race presses the reset button.  When the old way of doing things stops, and a new way of doing things starts.  As a more modern prophet with the unlikely name of Bob put it,

“Come writers and critics /
Who prophesize with your pen /
And keep your eyes wide /
The chance won't come again /
And don't speak too soon /
For the wheel's still in spin /
And there's no tellin' who /
That it's namin' /
For the loser now /
Will be later to win /
For the times they are a-changin' ..”

In a way, we can think of these changing times as an “end of the world.”  An old way of doing things passes away, and a new way starts.  Our lives are filtered by fire.  The things that we do, the ways that we think that can survive the flame make it through and the rest are burned away: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  

John’s way of putting this carries a lot more rhetorical impact that my milquetoast way of putting it.  

We are being winnowed by this Pandemic, not so much in terms of lost lives but in terms of how things are done. We’ve learned new ways of doing. Things will change.  Hold close to you the things that you want to survive.  There will be another side to this, but all will be changed. 

Let us prepare.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )