Last Things? Or Things That Last?

Delivered by Rev. Dr. Tim Boyle on Sunday, December 28, 2025.

Passage:

Mark 13:3-13 (NRSV)

3 When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, 4 “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” 5 Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. 6 Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. 8 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

Persecution Foretold (Mt 24:9–14; Lk 21:12–19)

9 “As for yourselves, beware; for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them. 10 And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations. 11 When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. 12 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; 13 and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

Sermon Text: (Transcribed from YouTube)

As we prepare to enter the new year of 2026, I think it is an appropriate time to think about time—particularly as it relates to the so‑called end times.

Ever since I can remember, there have been various individuals and groups telling us that the end of the world is near. You no doubt remember the hubbub back in 2011 surrounding the claims of Harold Camping that the rapture would occur on May 21, followed by a period of tribulation on earth that would culminate in the end of the world on October 21. To his credit, he later acknowledged his error and said that he no longer believed we finite humans could know beforehand when the end would come. But those who had believed him and took what they thought to be appropriate preparations—such as quitting their jobs or selling their houses—were not only disillusioned but also left holding the proverbial bag.

I am not aware of more recent such predictions, but it would not surprise me if something similar happens again, as it has numerous times before. It seems that we humans have a proclivity to want to know the future, and so anyone who claims to have such information automatically attracts attention.

The Bible clearly teaches that our present world will come to an end sometime in the future, when God creates a wholly new and wonderful realm for our resurrected bodies to live in. Likewise, the Bible gives various descriptions of the process the world we know will go through as that great transformation takes place. The problem, of course, is that the visions various biblical writers were given of this transformational process are described to us through symbols and expressions that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Thus, it is only natural that followers of Christ have developed a wide variety of interpretations as to how this will all play out.

So what are we to make of it all? How should Christians view biblical teachings concerning the end times? Needless to say, this is not an easy subject to deal with, as there are widely divergent and strongly held views as to how these portions of Scripture are to be understood.

My purpose in bringing up this subject today is not to give you a definitive view, as though I have all the answers—for I certainly do not. There are considerable portions of what is termed apocalyptic Scripture or literature in the Bible, primarily in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Revelation of John in the New Testament, that I find rather difficult to understand. What I hope to do is to give you a few handles with which to grasp this subject, to understand its purpose in the Scriptures and in God’s overall plan, as well as its relevance to our situation today.

If you have ever read through the book of Revelation, you know how difficult some parts of it are to understand. Basically, it is a description of the visions the apostle John had in his later years while in exile on the Greek island of Patmos. Much of it sounds like a weird dream, with dragon‑like creatures, a lake of fire, and an array of symbolic numbers and events. The overall pattern of the book, however, is a series of scenes of blood and gore on earth—of people being judged—interspersed with scenes in heaven where God and the Lamb, who is Jesus Christ, are being worshiped and praised with great rejoicing. It all then climaxes with a beautiful description of the new heavens and the new earth, along with a prayer that the Lord Jesus will come soon: “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus.”

There are several important passages related to the end times in other parts of the Bible, including our Scripture reading in Mark 13 and the corresponding sections in Matthew and Luke. By far the most comprehensive passages are those found in the books of Daniel and Revelation.

The setting of Daniel is around 550 BC, during the time when the Jewish nation had been carted off to Babylon in slavery. The well‑known story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being thrown into the furnace and coming out unharmed, and the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, are recorded in this book. The major portions of the book, however, are accounts of the dreams of King Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel’s interpretations of those dreams, along with the visions of Daniel himself. These all have to do with future kingdoms, climaxing with the end of the world and the founding of a new one.

For instance, there is King Nebuchadnezzar’s first dream about a statue with a golden head, a silver chest and arms, a bronze middle section, legs of iron, and feet made of iron mixed with clay. The statue is then crushed by a great stone that grows into a mountain covering the earth. God gives Daniel the interpretation of this dream: Nebuchadnezzar himself is the head of gold, with the other parts representing future kingdoms—generally interpreted as the Persians, then Alexander the Great, and then Rome, symbolized by the legs of iron with weakness in the feet. The rock that crushes the statue and grows into a great mountain represents the kingdom of God, often understood as referring to the spiritual kingdom of the church itself.

At any rate, this is representative of the kind of literature we are dealing with in both Daniel and Revelation. Needless to say, because these passages are so symbolic in nature and refer to such an important topic as the events of world history leading up to the end, the way is wide open for all sorts of abuses by a variety of far‑out groups.

We have all heard of, and perhaps even talked to, people who resemble the stereotype depicted in cartoons of a bearded man in a white robe holding a sign that says, “Repent! The end is near.” In one sense, of course, the message of this stereotype is very relevant, because repenting—turning away from our wrong attitudes and deeds and turning toward God—is a valid message at any time. Throughout history, however, there have been those who meant by this that we should withdraw from society and its evils, hole up somewhere, and wait for the end to come, which is always said to be just around the corner.

Even before Christ, there were the Essenes, a group of Jews who desired to separate themselves from the perceived decadence of their day and help usher in the restored kingdom of God in Israel. Because of them, however, we today have the famous Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient copies of various Old Testament books that clearly show how accurately the biblical texts have been transmitted over the centuries. Thus, God certainly used them in a way they could not have imagined.

Likewise, even the disciples of Jesus were looking for a quick return of the Lord. Thus, there are several references in the New Testament letters indicating that at first they believed the end of the age and the second coming of Christ would occur during their own lifetimes. Later on, of course, they began to realize that this was not God’s plan after all.

During the almost 2,000 years of church history since then, there have been various movements similar to the Essenes, particularly during the last couple of centuries. I am not aware of any large‑scale movements during the Middle Ages that focused on end‑of‑the‑world prophecies, but there was certainly a powerful movement centered on escaping the evils of society by withdrawing into monasteries. Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church and the various state churches of Europe, with their highly centralized power structures, have tended not to be fertile breeding grounds for prophecy‑emphasizing movements. Such movements have generally arisen in more decentralized churches, such as those found in American Protestantism and similar situations elsewhere.

In the 1840s, a New England farmer by the name of William Miller studied the Bible thoroughly—particularly Daniel and Revelation—and became convinced through his calculations that Christ would return to earth exactly 2,300 years after Ezra’s return to Jerusalem in 457 BC. He convinced many thousands of people that Christ was returning on October 22, 1844. This resulted in the spectacle of thousands of people dressed in white robes on top of a New England mountain, waiting expectantly to fly up into the air to meet the Lord.

When things did not work out that way, they had a problem. They concluded that the only way around it was to spiritualize the event, saying that Christ had simply entered an invisible heavenly sanctuary on that date instead of the earthly one they had expected. This eventually resulted in a new denomination, the Seventh‑day Adventists, with its unique emphasis on Saturday worship and dietary rules, among other distinctives. While that church in recent years has gone a long way toward coming back into the Christian mainstream, an offshoot of it—the Jehovah’s Witnesses—certainly has not. Because their view of Christ and other foundational doctrines is so very different from mainstream Christian understanding, there is no way they can legitimately be called part of Christianity.

Even in Japan, practically everyone has had the experience of greeting these dedicated but misguided people at their front doors. This is a real problem for the Christian church, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with the Mormons and Moonies, label themselves as Christian, causing considerable confusion.

We must also admit that a truly holistic view of the Bible is often lacking across the spectrum of Christian thinking. Liberals are often just as guilty as fundamentalists, as they concentrate only on those Scriptures that support their views of social liberation and the like. I myself come from a mainstream church that tends to be rather liberal—at least at the leadership level—and as a whole it has dealt very little with the topic of Bible prophecy. This area of Scripture has tended to become the specialty of groups labeled fundamentalist, as well as outright mind‑control cults. This is not as it should be. These sections of Scripture are part of the whole of Scripture and need to be understood within that larger context.

During the resurgence of interest in biblical prophecy over the last 60 years or so, a number of popular books and movies have been produced on this theme. Some of you may have read the popular Left Behind series back in the 1990s. In fact, in 1998, four books from that series occupied the top four positions on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. Total sales for the series now exceed 80 million copies. While these are fictional novels, they nevertheless claim to be based on an accurate portrayal of biblical prophecy and what the world will be like immediately before and after the rapture, at the beginning of the seven-year tribulation period just prior to Christ’s second coming on the Day of Judgment.

I’ll come back to these dramatizations of the final days in movies and books later, but first, what about this event called the rapture? Just what does it mean?

The clearest teaching about this event is found not in what we normally think of as prophecy sections of the Bible, but in Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians (4:16–17). Paul is talking about that day when the Lord comes and says:

"For the Lord himself with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with a sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up into the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever."

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With these words, it’s easy to see why Christians have visualized themselves suddenly floating off into the clouds. In Matthew 24, Jesus talks about his coming again on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And then he says in verses 40 and 42, “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

Perhaps you have heard imaginative descriptions of what this would be like. For instance, some have painted lurid pictures of jet planes and cars crashing all over the world as those pilots and drivers who are Christians suddenly disappear, leaving no one in control. It would be mass chaos, and those who are left behind would supposedly rationalize it away as an attack by UFOs that suddenly carried millions of people away from the earth. Now, how does that grab you?

Now, I don’t want to suggest for a moment that there is no reality at all to the rapture, the tribulation, and so forth. It is clear that the Scriptures teach that some rather dramatic and unusual events are going to happen when this age comes to a close at Christ’s return. But the details of exactly what is going to happen are given to us only in general and symbolic terms.

The fact that God will one day intervene dramatically in world history and bring about the demise of all that is evil and unjust is our great hope. No matter how foreboding the future looks—even with everything seeming to be out of control and heading toward an ultimate crisis—we know that God is still in control and that ultimately everything will be reconciled in and through him.

What disturbs me most about this topic is that, by and large, those who put their major emphasis on Bible prophecy tend to be very dogmatic in their interpretations of the details of how these prophecies will be fulfilled, while also failing to give a balanced view of the whole counsel of Scripture.

During my college days, some fifty-plus years ago, there was a period when I became deeply interested in Bible prophecy and read several books on the subject. One book that particularly impressed me at the time was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. This book, along with many others of a similar vein, takes each symbol and ties it directly to a specific country, place, or person in the world at the time it was written.

For instance, the account in Revelation of the dragon with seven heads and ten horns clearly represented, according to Mr. Lindsey, the European Common Market. At the time, there were only nine countries in the EC, and supposedly one more nation was to join to make ten nations—or horns—in the symbolism. The headquarters was also expected to move to Rome, the city of seven hills. Unfortunately for Mr. Lindsey, the headquarters of what we now call the European Union is still in Brussels, and there are now twenty-seven “horns” in it.

Likewise, what once seemed like a very convincing argument was made for the king of the north being that evil empire, the Soviet Union. But that, too, appears to have bitten the dust—at least for the time being—though some might argue that Putin’s Russia now fits the bill.

Perhaps things will change in the future and those symbols will be actualized in that way. After all, the probabilities may seem remote, but then who am I to say just as dogmatically that they won’t? The people of Jesus’ day thought they knew what to expect when the Messiah came the first time, didn’t they? They knew their Scriptures very well, yet they completely misunderstood what was going to happen.

The many prophecies concerning the Messiah as a lowly figure who would be rejected and killed were clearly written before their eyes, but it was only after they were fulfilled in Jesus that the proper connections were made. In a very real way, we are in a similar position with respect to the prophecies about the second coming of Jesus and the events surrounding it.

We do have one advantage over the people of ancient Israel: we do not have unfulfilled prophecies concerning both the first and second comings of the Messiah mixed together. It is easy for us to separate them, since the prophecies concerning the first coming have already been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. For them, this distinction was much more difficult.

Likewise, as we get closer to the end, we may be able to see with greater clarity how these unfulfilled prophecies will be fulfilled. Nevertheless, we need to learn a lesson of humility from those first-century Jews. God is liable to have a few surprises ahead for us as to how all these prophecies will unfold.

As I mentioned earlier, there are several interpretations within the Christian tradition concerning how the end times will play out. I’d like to give you a brief overview of the main ones and how they handle such concepts as the rapture, tribulation, millennium, and the second coming of Christ.

The term millennium refers to the description found in Revelation 20 of the thousand-year reign of Christ prior to the final judgment. Some believe this number is symbolic rather than literal; this view is called amillennialism. Along with another view, postmillennialism—which does see this period as a literal thousand years—both understand the millennium as culminating in the second coming of Christ and the final judgment.

The Left Behind series and similar portrayals hold to a different position called premillennialism, which teaches that the second coming of Christ precedes the millennium. Even within this view, there are three varieties concerning the rapture and the tribulation: pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, and post-tribulation rapture. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it?

The most common is pre-tribulation premillennialism, which many people find attractive because it suggests that true Christians will be taken out of the world before the terrible tribulation begins. In other words, it offers a kind of escapism. I don’t personally hold to that view. One reason I’m suspicious of it is that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, no one interpreted the Bible this way. If it were plainly taught in Scripture, why was it unnoticed for the first 1,800 years of church history?

That doesn’t mean it is necessarily false, of course, but whenever someone introduces a new theological twist, we should be cautious and test it against the entire counsel of Scripture. I don’t have time to go into detail on all these positions, and I don’t pretend to know which—if any—is completely correct. None of them are without problems.

When asked which position I hold, I sometimes reply tongue-in-cheek that I’m a panmillennialist—the view that in the end it will all pan out anyway. While meant humorously, there’s actually some good theology there. What matters most is that God will triumph over the forces of evil.

God has given us only a broad outline of future events. Christ assured us that he is coming again, and that this time it will be in power and glory. Evil will be conquered, and an eternal existence in a new realm will usher in a world without suffering or injustice. We know who wins, and we can be confident that we are on the winning side.

Therefore, it is important to study biblical prophecy—not to figure out every “who,” “when,” and “how,” but to kindle in our hearts hope for his coming and courage to live and serve the Lord today and in the days ahead. As Paul said in Thessalonians, “Therefore encourage one another with these words.”

As I was preparing this sermon, I happened to hear an old song on television: Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. That made me think—maybe we need a que sera, sera eschatology. Eschatology, of course, is the theological study of the end times. The future is not ours to see, at least not in its details.

The Bible gives us the big picture, but we should leave the details to God and focus on what truly matters today. The desire to decode every symbol in Revelation is natural, but it often misses the real purpose of these writings.

The title I chose for this message is a question: Last things, or things that last? By now, you know which I believe deserves emphasis. The study of last things has its place, but it is the things that last—faith, hope, love, and faithful service—that truly matter.

As someone once said, we should live as though Christ is coming today, and plan as though his coming is still far in the future. Christ’s return is our great hope, but we have also been entrusted with the responsibility to care for God’s creation and to do the Lord’s work wherever we find ourselves.

Any teaching that suggests there is no point in addressing the world’s problems because the end is near cannot be pleasing to God. Instead, let us hold fast to the hope that God will one day create a new heaven and a new earth, wiping away all evil and suffering.

And while we wait patiently for that great day, let us live responsibly, striving to do what is right and good, encouraging one another with the hope of his coming. It is our relationships with God and with one another that are the things that last.

May God bless you and your efforts to build up those lasting relationships.