First of a series on The Bible and Your Future.

How do you feel when I say the word "future"?
Most of the kids I talked to in the 1960s felt the future was
grim, but they could just possibly change it. Most of the kids
I’ve talked to in the 70s agree that the future’s grim, and that
they can’t change it.

And what about the future beyond this life? There
are mixed feelings about that too. For some great thinkers "eternity"
is a horrific idea. For others – well, they just can’t wait to
get there! Still others are agnostic: "Eternity! thou pleasing,
dreadful thought" as Joseph Addison put it. At the funeral
of his brother, Robert Ingersoll said, "Is there beyond the
silent night an endless day; is death a gate that leads to light?
we cannot say. The tongueless secret locked in fate, we do not
know; we hope and wait."

If human beings are still inhabiting planet earth
when the 3rd millennium AD rolls around the least we can say of
their existence is that it will be interesting. By then, according
to Gough Whitlam, Australia will be a republic, and no one will
be able to afford to run a car. Doctors tell us sperm banks will
allow men to father children ten years after they’ve had a vasectomy.
Science fiction writer Arther C. Clarke believes space shuttles
will take ordinary people for holidays around the planets. If
your heart packs up, you’ll be able to choose from several models
of man-made replicas. They’ll diagnose and even predict any of
your diseases simply by examining a single strand of your hair
with a proton accelerator. Social scientists tell us that flexi-time
will be universal: you’ll choose when you work – and where (at
home, in the country etc.) But jobs will be much harder to get:
so you’d better learn to grow food in your back garden, and make
things to sell. The little silicon chip will make most of us redundant…

But there’s also some bad news. Malcolm Muggeridge
believes that Western civilisation will destroy itself from within:
it’s already "in an advanced state of decomposition".
If it doesn’t it will probably be destroyed by the Bomb. The Americans
and Russians can destroy all living things twenty times over!
The Russians are working on a "Star Wars" type particle-beam
cannon with which high-energy, high-density beams or microscopic
particles will hit targets anywhere on earth – in a fraction of
a second. Of course, if you’re not finished that way, then a terrorist
with a nuclear bomb in his suit-case could do it, just a little
more slowly. (The London ‘Daily Mirror’ says Idi Amin was trying
to get some of these. He planned to send them with suicide squads
of diplomats to various world capitals).

But then there’s 1982. In the Sept. 16, 1974 edition
of Newsweek two leading scientists tell us there’ll be a conjunction
of all the planets. This takes place every 179 years. But in 1982
they’ll not only be on the same side of the sun, but also in perfect
alignment. Disturbed magnetic activity in the sun will produce
huge firestorms; the ionosphere of the earth will be changed;
earth’s rotation, and the length of days may change; and many
earthquakes will occur, they tell us.

If we survive that, we’ll then have to cope with
George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Anthony
Burgess’s 1985, and H G Wells The Shape of Things to Come.

In spite of all this, a girl in this church wrote
an essay for school, and began with these words, "Despite
the current trends of gloom in Western society, I believe that
the 1980s will be the most exciting times in all of history …
I say this without any doubts, because I’ve placed my life in
the hands of my Creator." Wow! What makes her so sure?

Mark 13 – Mark’s "Little Apocalypse" –
is one of the hardest chapters in the Bible to understand. And
yet Jesus was using terms and pictures well-known to Jews. To
begin to understand what Jesus was saying you need to know about
the Jewish idea of The Day of the Lord. Basically, Jewish prophets
talked about a time of terror and trouble. The earth would be
shaken to its foundations. But then God would break in, destroy
His enemies, and re-create everything in a new age (see, eg, Amos
5:16-20, Is. 13:6-16, Joel 2 & 3 etc.). Just before Jesus
came, many Apocalypses were written by Jews, with dreams and visions
about the Day of the Lord. Jesus’ words are quite similar to some
of these. These books, it must be stressed, were visionary. "They
are attempts to paint the unpaintable and speak the unspeakable.
They are poetry, not prose. They are visions, not science. They
are dreams, not history. They were never meant to be taken prosaically
as maps of the future and timetables of events to come" (Barclay).

All through Mark 13 Jesus uses pictures and symbols
from this OT and apocalyptic literature. He was working with ideas
Jewish people knew. These "sayings about the future"
were, nonetheless describing real events.

The second thing to note here is that Jesus is seeing
several events at once, like someone standing on a high mountain
viewing an ever-receding range of peaks. With such a breath-taking
view, you’re not interested in details (like which mountain is
closer than which other) but in the broad features. So in this
chapter the fall of Jerusalem and the End of the Age blend into
each other, and the features of each can’t be precisely determined.

The hardest saying, of course, is in verse 30, and
the early Christians interpreted this to mean that Christ would
actually return within their life-time. Were they right or wrong?
Both! Any event which is definitely to happen in the future but
whose precise timing is unknown must be imminent for expectant
people. Every generation of Christians ought to have this kind
of expectancy. But precisely when His second coming would occur
not even Jesus knew. So it’s not our prerogative to set dates:
He could come tonight, or next year, or in a thousand years. We
must work for others and serve out Lord as if we were going to
live a long while yet; but we must pray and hope as if our Master
were returning any moment!

This discourse arose out of a question about the
Temple: a magnificent set of buildings, with 40 foot columns carved
out of single stones, clusters on golden vines taller than a man,
a gold-covered dome. Every Jew was proud of it. But it was especially
the place where God dwelt: it was the centre of all their religious
hopes. Even with Rome governing them they were free to carry on
their worship there without interference. So the Temple was the
one significant symbol of the Lordship of their God, of their
hope of deliverance from the domination of Rome.

So when Jesus talked about the destruction of all
this, He was inviting disaster – to Himself! Jeremiah had predicted
the destruction of the former Temple (26:6). The people’s response:
"You shall die!" (26:8). To announce the ruin of the
Temple was to say that Israel would cease being the people of
God. And since they could not conceive of their God existing without
His people to worship Him, this was to them blasphemy.

"When’s this to happen?" the four disciples
asked Jesus. Many troubles and sufferings will be the birth-pangs
of the new order, Jesus replied. There are no specific hints about
the timing, and He is cautious about specific "signs"
of coming events. He counsels them to discern the general signs,
and to be patient and "hold on". Jesus is really saying
three things: 1. The time is near. Summer comes soon after the
fig-tree begins to sprout. 2. The time is unknown. All the signs
will be witnessed by "this generation" (29, 30), but
when the End would come only God knew. 3. Therefore, watch, be
ready! The end will come suddenly, like the springing of a trap
(Luke 21:34-5). Constant vigilance and preparedness is the only
way to prepare for His coming. The people in Noah’s day says Jesus
(Lk 17:26, 276) were alert to the present but careless about the
future – and the flood caught them unprepared and swept them all
away.

The Thessalonians, on the other hand, had the opposite
problem: they weren’t concerned about the present in their preoccupation
with the (immediate?) future (2 Th 2:1, 2; 3:6-12). The proper
attitude is that of the Christians at Smyrna (LRv. 2:8-11). They
were alert both to the present and the future.

On the dome of the Capitol at Washington are these
words: "One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine
event, To which the whole creation moves …"

I’m not so sure the Second Coming of Christ is so
far off at all. The sands of the age are falling ever more swiftly
into the hourglass. It may be later than any of us think!

I have two pieces of conflicting advice for you.
"Have a healthy anxiety about your destiny!" do something
constructive about your relationship with God, and then "Don’t
be anxious about tomorrow!" Regarding the future, a Christian
is both a pessimist and an optimist. The world is going to blow
up; but the eternal, beautiful kingdom of our Lord and Christ
will endure forever! We live in a runaway world; but God’s in
His heaven, and everything’s alright!

Kris Kristofferson says somewhere, "I have a
great future in my past." Just as the sum-total of all your
past experiences have influenced who you are now, so you will
continue to be the person you are making of yourself now. Maslow
talked about self-actualisation, "inventing the future".
As you conceive the future, so you will become. This works, if
only in psychological terms. The people who really succeed at
something are those who expect to succeed. But in the ultimate,
final analysis, heaven and hell are simply who you are, for ever!
The future is not a lottery, a game of chance, or a whim of fate.
It is very much the result of life-changing decisions made – or
not made – today.

This planet earth will pass awy – but you won’t!
When C S Lewis was asked what he’d do if he knew that a nuclear
bomb was coming to land on him, he replied that in the fraction
of a second before the bomb got to him he’d have time to say "Huh!
You’re only a bomb. I’m an immortal soul".

Malcolm Muggeridge: "As the old do, I often
wake up in the night, half out of my body, so that I see betweeen
the sheets the battered carcase I shall soon be leaving for good,
and in the distance a glow in the sky – the lights of what Augustine
called the City of God. Two sharp impressions accompany this condition.
The first is of the incredible beauty of our earth, its colours
and shapes, its smells and creatures; the enchantment of human
love and companionship, and the fulfilment of human work and of
human procreation. The second is a certainty, surpassing all words
and thought, that as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation
I am a participant in His purposes, which are loving, not malign,
creative, not destructive; orderly, not chaotic. In that certainty
lies a great peace and a great joy."