I sat on the porch, holding the hand of my weeping daughter. She was heartbroken. A few days earlier she had rescued a butterfly that had lost a wing. It couldn’t fly or eat, so she made sugar water for it and nursed it along. We both knew it wasn’t going to make it, but she wanted to help it anyway. For three days she carried it around in the palm of her hand. It sat at the dinner table with us and went into a small box at night. By the third morning, it was time. Shattered, she released it and let nature take its course. She mourned over its suffering and looming death. They were hard tears for a mother to watch because this sweet girl wanted nothing more than life, goodness, and healing for this delicate creature. There was nothing I could do.
Like my daughter, I am tired of suffering and death. I am tired of war. I long for the day when humanity beats our weapons into farming equipment and gets to work bringing creation to its full potential. But like the butterfly in distress, the time has not yet come. We wait on Yahweh, trusting in His plan to run its course.
The controversy over the land of Israel and the Jewish people is polarizing and bloody. If you take a political stance, you end up either hating Jews or Arabs. If you take a biblical stance, you end up loving both Jews and Arabs, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch what’s happening. All the rhetoric in the world doesn’t explain why those who are so captive to hatred and violence don’t want to be set free from it. It’s difficult to understand why the wounded would rather die in a pool of their own blood. But I try to remember that it was never for me to solve the mystery of man’s iniquity.
Instead, God has a decisive timeline to resolve the controversy of Zion.
It goes by many names: the great tribulation, the Day of the Lord, a year of recompense, the last days, the time of the end. Personally, I like the title Jeremiah uses, the time of Jacob’s Trouble, because it reminds us who is in trouble. But regardless of the title we use to name God’s plan, the crowning jewel in the timeline is the revelation of His Messiah.
Although I struggle with the mystery of human wickedness, Paul tells the Thessalonians that the same thing was hard at work in their day. He believed God would not allow injustice to just continue on and on unchecked. He apparently explained this plan in detail to a fledgling assembly of believers when he pastored them briefly in Thessalonica. Basically, this mixed gathering of Jewish and Gentile believers had an understanding of God’s decisive timeline. (Read the full story in Acts 17 and 2 Thes. 2.) They had just confessed Jesus as the Messiah, yet Paul thought it was foundational that they understand eschatology and the sequence of God’s plans. As a pastor and leader of the faith, he taught brand new followers this information. Look at the vast amount of material he breezes through:
Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus [Messiah] and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us…asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God…
Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming….
2 Thessalonians 2
The author of Hebrews also considered eschatology a basic, elementary teaching:
Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about [the Messiah] and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.
Hebrew 6:1-2
Apparently, things like resurrection, being gathered to Jesus, a final rebellion or falling away, judgment at the end of the age, and the revealing of “the antichrist” at a specific time are elementary principles that new disciples of Jesus were expected to understand as foundational messianic teachings. Think on that for a moment. It’s almost shocking! To consider someone a seasoned believer and educated disciple of Jesus in the first century, the apostles’ prerequisite included an understanding of God’s plans for resolving evil and restoring Zion under the reign of the Messiah. Things of an eschatological nature are about the farthest thing we expect new believers to grasp today. It makes me wonder if, in our attempts to stick to more encouraging or basic topics for newbies, we have robbed these “baby Christians” of some of the some of the most nourishing, encouraging, faith-forming, and vital concepts the Word of God has to offer?
As I have conversed with believers of all maturity levels and traditions on the topic of Israel, I am continually met with blank stares when I bring up anything surrounding the end of the age or return of the Lord. People will happily talk about seeing Grandma again when they get to heaven, but the expectation of a physical resurrection or Jesus’ reign from Mt. Zion is extremely murky, if not entirely foreign, for the vast majority of Christians I speak with.
Thankfully, God’s plan to resolve evil and bring His blessing to humanity is not as complicated as the abundance of charts and biblical prophecy books out there would have us believe. Even women like Martha and the Samaritan woman had a robust understanding of it, likely because they were Old Testament literate. The information we are given in scripture about God’s timeline to resolve the controversy of Zion is a beautiful and intricate mosaic of art, each piece revealing a side to the glittering gem of redemption. The core frame of God’s redemptive plan is given to us in the Torah, then developed thematically throughout the Hebrew Bible, and eventually used as short-hand by the New Testament authors, hyperlinking back to prior scriptures when describing the end of the age.
However, the blank stares I’m met with today reveal that so many followers of Jesus lack the skills necessary to read these texts responsibly and link them together in the way Jesus and the apostles did. I know certainly did. For most of my life, I either overlooked these passages entirely or read them incorrectly. It wasn’t until the past several years that I got serious about recovering a more authentic way of reading my Bible, and especially my Old Testament, that I began to connect the dots and see the picture for what it actually is revealing.
When read together in proper literary and historical context and within the overall design of the Hebrew Bible, these passages make up the high mountain peaks of biblical prophecy. Most people want to jump right to the juicey parts. I’ve seen it often. We want to know when things like when Jesus will return on that timeline or what something like Revelation’s 5th trumpet or the mark of the beast is actually. So some well-intended person jumps into Revelation or Daniel full gusto, with their head totally spinning somewhere around chapter 7. Eventually, most people give up. They’re so confused, embarrassed, or have read so many conflicting commentaries and opinions, that they begin leaning on the various one liners that excuse them from understanding God’s plan:
- No one knows the hour or the day!
- I have enough to worry about today so I’m not going to try to figure out tomorrow.
- It’s all symbolic. God eventually wins! We don’t need to know how.
- All these events already happened in history past, so we’re just waiting for Jesus now.
- Revelation is just too hard and scary. I’ll stick to the Psalms and Gospels.
I sympathize with the many people who are truly frustrated and lost by reading something like Revelation. I was in that camp for a long time, too. But comments like these starkly reveal the complacency within our hearts and the lack of preparation our traditions and modes of scriptural study have provided us. I believe we’ve forfeited a wealth of wisdom to be had in gaining a proper understanding of an issue that was incredibly heavy in the heart of Jesus at His first coming and remains incredibly important to Him today.
When the apostles instructed new Jesus-following communities about things of an end-times nature, they did so to emphasize what these things meant and how they fulfilled the thing the Messiah has been installed to accomplish all along. And they used the Old Testament to teach this:
“As for me, I have installed my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
I will tell of the decree:
The LORD said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
Psalm 2:6-12
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
Yahweh says to my Lord:
Psalm 110:1-3
“Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.”
Yahweh sends forth from Zion
your mighty scepter.
Rule in the midst of your enemies!
Your people will volunteer themselves freely
on the day of your power…
Both psalms are essentially poems about God’s decisive timeline. Psalm 110 is, in fact, the most quoted psalm in the New Testament because it is the cornerstone of messianic theology. These psalms talk about God establishing His anointed king in Zion and bringing all nations under His reign, as well as restoring the Jewish people and God’s purposes for them among the nations. These are just two examples out of many passages that give us the wisdom surrounding the day God will “arise for the controversy of Zion” and rescue Jacob from his trouble.
The challenge for us today is that we’re not like the Thessalonians. To them, Paul said something like this: “I don’t need to give you any more instruction about the Day of the Lord. You know it will come like a thief in the night. People all around will be crying out “Everything’s fine. Things will settle down. Look, we’ve achieved peace and safety!” But you won’t be taken by surprise. Instead, it won’t take you like a thief in the night because you are aware of the season. You have given your loyalty to the Messiah. You not only know God’s plan, you’re participating in it right now.” (My rough paraphrase of 1 Thes. 5.)
From what I’ve observed, mainstream Christianity stands a very long way from this today. We actually do need instruction on this topic, and lots of it. God’s decisive timeline is central to our own understanding of Jesus and our relationship with Him. Replacement theology (see part 2 of this series) has deceived many believers into replacing Jesus’ role as Messiah of Israel with that of a personal savior. But for Jesus, being a personal savior is just a small part of what being Messiah is all about:
And [Jesus] said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the [Messiah] should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses [i.e. the Torah] and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24:25-27
Perhaps we are slow of heart to believe the prophets as well. At His first coming, our Lord accomplished a big part of His messianic commission, but He still has more to do. And He expects His followers not just to understand those things, but participate in hastening the day He will fulfill them.
While its true that we cannot know the exact hour or day of the revelation of our Messiah (Jesus himself doesn’t even know!), our Lord expects us to know the season of His return. Regarding the meaning of His return, Jesus says this:
But when these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” And He told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees: as soon as they put forth leaves, you see for yourselves and know that summer is now near. So you too, when you see these things happening, recognize that the kingdom of God is near.
Luke 21: 28-31
To recognize something, one must have prior exposure to it. The account outlined here in Luke (as well as Matt. 24-25 and Mark 13) is Jesus’ way of summarizing what the Hebrew Bible has said all along. The season He describes is all about Him fully stepping to His chief role as Messiah and restoring His kingdom from Jerusalem. A careful reading of any of these accounts will show that Jesus doesn’t describe the kingdom arriving with the wave of a magic wand and poof–everything is instantly better. The plan is very human and will take place over real time through real events in real places, centering around Jerusalem and the Middle East. Jesus isn’t peering into His crystal ball of omniscience, forecasting random doom. He’s reiterating information His disciples already knew from the Hebrew Bible, the same scriptures we have today.
Jesus describes climax of the controversy of Zion, because when our Messiah returns, He is doing so to resolve the controversy of Zion and all that it entails. That is the central reason for His return.
He is the Jewish Messiah who will finish executing God’s decisive timeline of redemption in order bring the reign of heaven fully to the land.
Like my nine year old daughter, I look forward to resurrection. I look forward to the day no more butterflies or living creatures or human beings die. I hate war. I long for evil to be utterly and perpetually vanquished and new life to flood all creation. For peace, children laughing, and the nations of the Middle East to be called Yahweh’s inheritance along with Israel.
But if this is what I truly long for, then I also must long for God’s plan to get us there. And how can I long for something I know nothing about?
Understanding God’s decisive plan has sometimes been a tense and unwelcome journey for me. I admit that there are parts of the plan I don’t like. Despite the murky picture of eschatology I once had, I have realized that the scriptures do not teach a magic, snap-of-a-finger transport to the New Creation filled with rainbows and unicorns. It’s called the time of Jacob’s Trouble for a reason. And it’s a hard reality I have to face as a follower of Jesus, who wept over these things too.
Like Habakkuk, I sit with a growing understanding of what’s coming and pray for it to come anyway. Because above the chaos, the Spirit hovers. Light will overcome the darkness. In the fire, God is there. In the tomb, death has no sting. In the day of great distress and trouble, God rides the clouds. In the middle of the years, mercy will be remembered.
And in my place I tremble;
Habakkuk 3:16-19
Because I must wait quietly for the day of distress,
For the people to arise who will attack us.
Even if the fig tree does not blossom,
And there is no fruit on the vines…
Yet I will triumph in the LORD,
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.
The Lord GOD is my strength,
And He has made my feet like deer’s feet,
And has me walk on my high places.
Up Next: The Controversy of Zion, Part 4: The Object of Satan’s Wrath, Martyrdom, and the Prophetic Stance
Two Precious Stones 
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