Jehovah’s Witnesses have, many times, wrongly predicted the time of the second coming, as have many other cults. Christ said that we should be ready for Him (Luke 12:40), but He also said that we should not be preoccupied with His return, for He will come, ‘Like a thief in the night’. He told us that we will never have any way of foreknowing His return, thus intimating that our being ready for it is of paramount importance.
In this sense, being ready does not mean living every moment as though it is now going to happen, but that we should be sure of our own salvation, so we know that when it does come, we will spend eternity with God. We will have the knowledge that the overall plot will be revealed to us; that we will not be cast aside because we did not repent.
The fourth objection is more psychological. People see the coming of God as something to fear, and naturally, if we can avoid fearing something, we will not hesitate to do so. But avoiding fear does not necessarily mean that we are right in doing so. We may be so drunk that we do not see the potential danger of a situation. We may be so ignorant that our unawareness of something casts aside all knowledge of the dangers of that situation. We may be so passionate about our love for someone that we fail to observe the dangers of loving that person. There are many more examples. And notice that though we desire to reach a stage we fear has dissipated; we very rarely enjoy the build up to that process.
Nobody, in their right mind, enjoys a trip to the dentist as much as they enjoy leaving the dentist’s after the work has been done. But that does not mean that we do not desire that our teeth will be alright. For those purposes, we do not embrace any agent that casts aside fear before time. But any fear of the second coming is quite different. Those who are afraid of it are those who know that their ultimate destiny, when it is revealed to them as true, will not be a favourable one.
Now you might be wondering, if such a daunting prospect is upon non-believers, why are they not doing more to find out if Christianity is true? Again, I think the reason is primarily psychological. The human mind does not like to prolong any negative emotion for a very long time, in fact, it is probably impossible to sustain a negative emotion longer than our cognitive reasoning process allows us to. Nobody likes to feel afraid, so our reasoning process, through a period of transposition, combats that fear, and suppresses the negative emotions for a period of time. So people fix their minds on the here and now, on things that won’t cause them fear and consternation. And it is probably true that human minds are conditioned not to gamble too much on things that are, to them, seemingly unlikely.
But man has not really understood that he is partaking in a true gamble, or perhaps more accurately, that he has misunderstood which pathway is the real gamble. If man’s vision of an earthly utopia - a vision that sees him creating paradise himself - is false, then the true gamble is with those who are betting their entire stake on something quite uncorroborated. For if time has shown us one thing, it has shown us that man, despite being materialistically better off, is no happier for it. And this is the biggest misconception that permeates the minds of those who say the world is getting better every decade. I do not doubt that, largely, it is, but if this admission implies the corollary - man is also getting better and more righteous, then it is simply an illusion. With this in mind, the doctrine of salvation though the blood of Christ sounds not only the most appealing but also the most likely. It is in accordance with what we have been observing for thousands of years, that man is doomed unless he realises his situation and acts upon it.
It should be said that the doctrine of salvation is much simpler than many people realise. Humans have a straight choice between choosing God’s path for them and choosing their own plan. As it says in the Bible, ‘Two will be in a field, one will be taken one will be left’. And here we see the principal difference between two ways to live your life. The one who is taken; taken up to be with God will be ploughing away without any trepidation regarding his eternal destiny. But you would find, if you examined the thoughts of the one who is destined to be left and banished from humanity, that he would be living his life with much trepidation and uncertainty. This is the difference between knowing God and not knowing God; between life and death; between eternity and nonentity.
There is perhaps one way that we can all be more aware of what is to come. We can improve our own methods of analysis; we can realise that our perception of things on earth is so often tainted by our emotions and desires. We desire something to be true, so we often convince ourselves that it is true. We cannot do that with our discounting of God; it will not work for us in the long run. In doing God’s work, we should be trying our best to show non-believers that the second coming does not belong in fantasy books.
We should be showing them that the spectre of God’s judgement is something to be taken very seriously, and that fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7). But perhaps the main thing we should try to focus their minds on is the fact that God’s ultimate plan for them is not at all contrary to their own subliminal wishes regarding their future existence; that, in fact, what they had hoped for all along - cognitively, rationally, and intuitively, is in fact, what God has, through Christ, been offering them all along.
Next week James will continue his thoughts on another objections to Christianity. Meanwhile, we welcome your thoughts and comments, below, upon the ideas expressed here, which are intended to stimulate debate. You can contact the author at james.knight@norfolk.gov.uk
