Wholly Bible: A View from the Pew

Eager for Apocalypse

By RAY WADDLE

Another surge of Mideast war and religious extremism. Price of oil nearing 100 bucks a barrel. UN troops heading for the Israeli border.
 
That's right. Armageddon is back.

It's always high season for biblical prophecy and apocalyptic expectation, but this summer
even the national TV anchors were paying attention. "Is this the 'end of times'?" they announced breezily, summarizing the latest speculation with a twinkle in their eye and visions of soaring ratings.

Let's be blunt: Armageddon business is the religious exploitation of fear during anxious
times. It is lucrative -- prophecy books sell, radio preaching flourishes, rapture-friendly Web sites rise to pop culture status.

It's all based on a particular reading of Scripture that looks to the Bible as a precise blueprint for predicting events in our own jittery times, whatever the century.

Never mind that this is a distortion of the Bible. An obsession with biblical prophecy always
means something else too. It says, my fear has gotten the best of me. It says, I give up, life's too complicated, the world's too evil. It says, my faith in God's creation is dead -- we need a new start, a new Jesus, right now.

Preoccupation with the endtimes is a way of changing the subject. It's a refusal to fess up to
our own human fault for the mess we're in -- our addiction to foreign oil, the failure to find a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, an eagerness to fire missiles instead of hire diplomats.
 
It's also a way of denying Jesus himself. A lopsided stress on the timetable of his second
coming overwhelms the message and memory of his first coming. Jesus returns every time a
person reads the Gospels or takes communion at worship or looks into the eyes of another
weary human being. That's Jesus returning every day, while others eagerly map out Holy
Land troop movements on the plains of Megiddo.

Jesus said He'll come back, and churches should ponder the doctrine of His Return. But an
armageddon fixation -- with its pushy, horrific scenarios of detailed disaster -- is a titillating
distraction. It gets people talking, it gets the blood going. But it's still a distraction. It should
be Left Behind.

--Columnist Ray Waddle is the author of Against the Grain: Unconventional Wisdom from . Contact him at ray@raywaddle.com.