Relocating To Elfland

Many of us, I think, if we were honest, would have to admit we aren’t quite sure how to interpret a lot of what is described in the Olivet Discourse and the Book of Revelation. I want in this post to offer a few interpretive helps, admitting up front that this is a sketch that calls for further study and reflection, and also that what I am offering is not original with me.

Here is an excerpt from the Olivet Discourse that has puzzled a lot of us (Jesus is speaking):

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Matthew 24:29–35)

Now here’s the phrase that tends to make us think Jesus is talking about His second coming, His return to earth at the end of history: “and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (verse 30b). When we think of the “coming” of Christ, we naturally think of the second coming. Recently, however, I read something which proposed that this language of “coming on the clouds of heaven” refers not to Christ’s coming down or coming back but rather to His going up, to His ascension. Is it possible that what Jesus is describing here is some visible manifestation (“they will see”) of His having ascended to the right hand of God the Father?

Two things we should look at, one in the immediate context, the other in the canonical context. In the immediate context, Jesus is speaking about “the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel” (Matt 24:15). If you are a Dispensationalist, you immediately think of the arrival of the Antichrist, which is to occur in connection with the “great tribulation,” which will occur before (or after, or all around, depending on what sort of Dispensationalist you are) the “rapture” of the church. In short, the “abomination of desolation” is a future event located near the end of the church age and the beginning of the so-called “millennial kingdom.”

The problem with this Dispensationalist view (and hopefully I have been fair in representing it) is that it fails to take account of the parallel passage in Luke 21:20, which says this: “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near.” What in one gospel Jesus refers to as the “abomination of desolation,” He refers to in another gospel as the siege of Jerusalem by armies. Reading the Matthew text in connection with Luke, then, we need to understand that the “tribulation” referred to in Matthew 24:29 is the tribulation of the Jews during the destruction of their holy city.

It is after this tribulation that the “sign of the Son of Man” will become visible: “they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (verse 30), and then the Son of Man will send out His angels to gather His elect “from the four winds” (verse 31). What appears to be occurring is this: the ascension of Messiah will somehow be made publicly visible to the Jews, and then the gospel age will begin wherein Messiah gathers His people from under the whole heaven.

But we need something from the canonical (larger biblical) context to make this clear, and Jesus has already told us where to look by referencing “the prophet Daniel” in verse 15. Let’s go there.

Jesus’ referring to Himself as “the Son of Man” takes us back to Daniel 7, where “one like a son of man” comes before the Ancient of Days (Dan 7:13). When he is presented, “to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Dan 7:14). We know this is referring to the ascension of Messiah to the throne of God, when He is seated on the holy hill of Zion, there to reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. But what is especially interesting, for our purposes, is that Messiah comes “with the clouds of heaven” (Dan 7:13). In other words, His “coming” is not down to us but up to God, and what is being described is not return to earth but ascension to the right hand of the Father.

This helps us understand why Jesus could say, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt 24:34). He would, indeed, ascend to the Father and visit public judgment on unbelieving Jerusalem before the end of that generation. It also helps us make sense of some other passages, for example, where Jesus says to the Sanhedrin at His trial, “From now on you all [the second person pronoun here is plural] will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt 26:64). The Jewish nation, and particularly their leaders, would indeed see the visible evidence that Jesus was the ascended, reigning Christ; this would occur at the destruction of their beloved city, a destruction Jesus had Himself prophesied. We also gain some insight into Revelation 1:7; and this, in turn, opens up the possibility that references in that book to Jesus’ “coming” may be primarily oriented toward the desolation of Jerusalem and the end of the old (first Adam) age of the world.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to be done with these lines of interpretation. Their implications are rather immense for our understanding of both Old and New Covenant prophecy.

“A creature really has a choice between only two options: either it chooses to be its own creator and thereby ceases to be a creature, or it must be and remain a creature from beginning to end, and therefore owes its existence and the specific nature of its existence only to God.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.376)

“There must be someone in this world – which rejected God and in this rejection, in this blasphemy, became a chaos of darkness – there must be someone to stand in its center, and to discern, to see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup full of life and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and to thank God for it. This ‘someone’ is Christ, the new Adam who restores that ‘eucharistic life’ which I, the old Adam, have rejected and lost; who makes me again what I am, and restores the world to me. And if the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always this act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.” (Schmemann, For the Life of the World)

“Feast means joy. Yet, if there is something that we – the serious, adult and frustrated Christians of the twentieth century – look at with suspicion, it is certainly joy. How can one be joyful when so many people suffer? When so many things are to be done? How can one indulge in festivals and celebrations when people expect from us ‘serious’ answers to their problems? Consciously or subconsciously Christians have accepted the whole ethos of our joyless and business-minded culture. They believe that the only way to be taken ‘seriously’ by the ‘serious’ – that is, by modern man – is to be serious, and, therefore, to reduce to a symbolic ‘minimum’ what in the past was so tremendously central in the life of the Church – the joy of a feast. The modern world has relegated joy to the category of ‘fun’ and ‘relaxation.’ It is justified and permissible on our ‘time off’; it is a concession, a compromise. And Christians have come to believe all this, or rather they have ceased to believe that the feast, the joy have something to do precisely with the ‘serious problems’ of life itself, may even be the Christian answer to them.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy)

Okay, history of western civilization in a few paragraphs. Out of the basically tribal cultures and conflicts of the ancient near east, there eventually emerged four great world powers: Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. These are the four great empires which together composed the mighty image of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2; they appeared as four beasts in Daniel 7; and they appeared in late form as the beast out of the sea in Revelation 13.

The unified message of the prophets and apostles is that when Christ stripped principalities and powers on the cross, rose from the dead as the Son of God in power, and ascended the holy hill of Zion to sit at the Father’s right hand, the messianic kingdom of God was inaugurated, and all rule and authority and power and dominion have been put under His feet. The mighty image of Daniel 2 was toppled once for all, never to rise in power again. The terminus of the dominion of Nebuchadnezzar’s image was the collapse of Rome around A.D. 476.

There has not since the fall of Rome been a world-dominating pagan power. Two great religious powers have vied for conquest of the world: the power of Christendom, and another power which arose out of the Arabian desert in the mid-eighth century – we know it today as Islam. These two religious powers are still locked in combat for the souls of men and nations, and will likely be so for many years to come. But noteworthy is that Islam is essentially a perversion of Christianity – it was fashioned in part from the revelatory material of Christianity and Christianity’s ancestor, Judaism. Christ still has His enemies, but they have arisen from within the pale of His kingdom; the ancient powers that once stood without are gone forever.

What about the so-called Enlightenment, the “power” of secular humanism, which has eaten away at the vitals of western Christendom? This whole ideology is a parasite on its host. It is incapable of sustaining civilization, because it acknowledges no deity, goodness, truth, or beauty transcending the individual self. Lacking even the risible gods of paganism, it remains unstable as water and will not excel. It will in time be relegated to the dustbin of history.

I should probably be glad comments are not open after writing something like this. . . .

Here is E. Brooks Holifield, commenting on the eucharistic controversy between Charles Hodge and John Williamson Nevin in the mid-nineteenth century:

“The controversy illuminated two distinguishable tendencies in nineteenth century American Reformed theology. While remaining with the Reformed tradition, Nevin demonstrated a willingness to accept categories of continuity that at times approximated the Roman Catholic tradition: continuity between creation and redemption, between the divine and human natures of Christ, between the first Adam and the second, and between the visible Church with its efficacious means of grace and the ideal communion of true saints. Charles Hodge, on the other hand, carried almost to its logical terminus another pattern present within the Reformed tradition: the impulse to accent discontinuity, in various ways, as the prevailing theological category. In the course of their polemics, therefore, Hodge and Nevin not only delineated the contours of two divergent Reformed eucharistic doctrines, but they also displayed two conflicting modes of theological reflection and produced the indices for identifying a spectrum of sacramental positions.” (E. Brooks Holifield, “Mercersburg, Princeton, and the South: The Sacramental Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Presbyterian History 54 [1976], pp. 238–257)

Professor Holifield goes on to explore how, for these nineteenth century disputants, the question of the relationship between sacramental elements and sacramental grace was closely tied to the question (so fiercely debated in the fourth and fifth centuries) of the union of Christ’s divine and human natures, to the issue of the soteriological significance (if any) of Christ’s Incarnation, and to questions regarding a proper definition of the church. Variances in sacramental theology, both Hodge and Nevin understood, are intimately related to variances in Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology.

My father was a primary school educator for thirty-nine years. He and my mother reared a family of three children, all of whom are walking faithfully with the Lord. He did all this while serving as a lay pastor for some dozen years. Let’s just say he knows a lot about people, and about little people in particular. When he speaks, I listen.

Recently he and I were discussing why communication breaks down between parents and their “teenage” children (I don’t believe in the whole notion of “teens,” incidentally, but that’s another story). He gave me a huge window of insight when he told me that, in his experience, around the age of eight children stop looking for meaningful engagement (“connection,” as it is sometimes called) with their parents and start looking to their peers instead. But a main reason, he said, why children stop trying to engage with their parents around this age is that the parents have made it clear they’re not really interested. Often, the children have been not just neglected or ignored; they know their parents find them downright irritating. The reason for the social and attitudinal transition, then, lies in general with the parents, not the children (who simply take their relational needs to those who will respond, i.e., their peers).

Running this through the grid of my own experience, it’s important to know what my father has in mind when he speaks of meaningful engagement. I know a lot of Christian parents try very hard to be involved in the lives of their young children. They are not passive – the kind of dads who sit in front of the television all evening, the kind of moms who visibly want to escape from their children at every opportunity. But it needs to be observed that one can do a lot of things with and for one’s children (take them to soccer games, attend school plays and PTA meetings, even read books and play games) and still not necessarily engage them meaningfully. One can, as a Christian parent, even have consistent family worship, catechize, and talk to one’s children, and still not engage them meaningfully. The last preposition is important: talking to a child is not the same thing as talking with a child in a way that opens up his or her inner thought-world, the heart out of which issue the springs of his or her life. And it is this latter kind of communication my father has in mind, and which he and my mother practiced brilliantly in rearing me.

Building a bridge to another human heart takes effort, whether that human is young or old. One must ask questions without intimidating. One must take more time than one reasonably has. One must learn to think the way another person thinks, which is often about as much fun as learning to speak a foreign language. One must encounter alien fears, alien joys, alien sorrows, alien ways of processing information. This is acutely difficult with children, especially young children who know next to nothing about communicating (do tantrums count?). It takes effort to figure out why a child is angry or sad. It takes effort to figure out how to help a child connect what she knows with something she doesn’t yet know. It takes effort to value what a little boy values. It is painstaking to intuit what is making a child’s eyes gleam with pleasure, or flash with frustration. How is one to see and feel what a child sees and feels when the child can’t articulate it? But then, are these problems so very different from those we encounter with other adults? Is it ever easy to cross the grand canyon between ourselves and another soul?

But the proof of a pudding, as they say, is in the eating. When a child has grown up with parents who expend the effort to “connect”; when a child has never known a day when it is not the most natural thing in the world to talk eye-to-eye with mom and dad; when a child learns from day one that mom and dad care deeply about what’s going on inside him, even when (especially when) he is being a real brat; this is the capital from which a family draws in challenging years when self-consciousness emerges with a vengeance, and the world is filled with recalcitrant questions and drives. I passed through some very troubled water as a “teen,” but it was too late – my heart was already knit to my parents. Even when I slammed the door as hard as I could in their faces, I couldn’t escape the fact that I wanted them to beat it down. I wanted to talk to them about what was going on inside, because that was how it had been for years.

I might add that parents who have the hearts of their children, and energetically maintain this privilege, need not fear usurpation by peers. Influences will come, but there is a basis to work with a child in responding to those influences, as one sees in the opening chapters of Proverbs. There is no formula here, and cases are different, but as a general rule the child who enjoys meaningful engagement with his or her parents from the earliest years will not be eager to give this up. It will even be possible to draw peers into this engagement; it will be possible for parents to care for their children’s peers whose home lives are a wreck. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

“Believers are willing to look at the disturbing reality of life; they do not scatter flowers over graves, turn death into an angel, regard sin as mere weakness, or consider this the best of possible worlds. Calvinism has no use for such drivel. It refuses to be hoodwinked. It takes full account of the seriousness of life, champions the rights of the Lord of lords, and humbly bows in adoration before the inexplicable sovereign will of God. This almighty God is also, we believe, our merciful Father. This is not a ‘solution’ but an invitation to rest in God.” (Bavinck, p. 2.341)

“Scripture teaches that faith is a gift of God’s grace, a work of God. Though in theory a person may be Pelagian, in the practice of the Christian life, above all in prayer, every Christian is an Augustinian. Self-glorying is excluded, and God alone is given the honor. Even foreknowledge, by definition, is predestination. Either God knows the elect with certainty or not at all. If he does, foreknowledge is redundant. If not, even foreknowledge has to go. The doctrine of predestination, therefore, is a dogma of the entire Christian church.” (Bavinck, p. 2.339)

“Generation and procession in the divine being are the immanent acts of God, which make possible the outward works of creation and revelation.” (Bavinck, p. 2.333)