The Lighter Side of the End of the World

By Mark LaFollette

If we treat Bible prophecy as a code to crack, we are likely to end up in the wrong place.

When Jesus tells us about his return, Hes talking to us about life. Hes correcting, encouraging, and preparing us for whats coming next. Whenever Jesus and his apostles teach about the future, their goal is to empower us for life today.

The Lighter Side of the End of the World is an engaging walk through the full scope of the Bibles teaching on the End Times that will encourage you in your daily life.

To learn more go to www.knowthebiblebetter.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449768607

Mark LaFollette

Mark LaFollette has a master of divinity degree from Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been a pastor for twenty-two years. Along with serving in ministry, Mark enjoys life with this family. He lives in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, with Judy, his wife of twenty-seven years. They have four children in their teens and twenties.

Book preview

The Lighter Side

of the

End of the World

Mark LaFollette

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Copyright © 2012 Mark LaFollette

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6860-7 (e)

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All scripture references are from the NIV copyright 1986

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/15/2012

Contents

1.   Children of the Light

Part 1: First Things

2.   Living for what Lasts

3.   Everything New

4.   Standing to the End

5.   Patient Endurance

6.   The Now, or Future, Tribulation

7.   An Honest Conversation about the Rapture

Part 2: The Revelation

8.   To the People of God…

9.   Seeing and Tasting

10.   Friends and Enemies

11.   War and Peace

12.   Finally Home

Appendices

Appendix 1 :   The War of Gog

Appendix 2 :   The Mystery of Ezekiel’s Temple

Appendix 3 :   The Lesson from the Fig Tree

Notes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife, Judy for her tremendous encouragement, patience, and hours of help with proofing. Thanks also to Andy McGuire for his wonderful editorial work. Thank you to the folks at Westbow Press. I also want to express appreciation to Aaron Speer for developing my website: www.knowthebiblebetter.com.

Thanks to our Lord, God for giving us all good things.

Chapter 1

Children of the Light

The house was empty. Judy ran from room to room shouting, Is anybody here? but she was greeted only by silence. She had just come home from elementary school. Her older sisters were usually there by now, but today Judy was all alone. To make matters worse, she had just seen a movie called A Thief in the Night, which told the story of a young woman named Patty who lived at the time of the end of the World. In the movie, life moved along normally for Patty until the day all her Christian friends and family disappeared. Houses were empty, and lawnmowers were left running in their yards. Patty would later learn that something called The Rapture had happened. Jesus had secretly taken away all the Christians. Now Patty’s world would go careening into a miserable chaos of human brutality and the flaming judgment of God called The Great Tribulation.

Tears trickled down Judy’s cheeks as she thought about that awful movie and looked around her empty home. Has the Rapture happened? she wondered. Didn’t I believe Jesus enough to go to heaven? Am I all alone? Then a thought came to her: Call Grandma! There was no way Jesus would leave Grandma behind. If Grandma answered the phone, then she would know everything was fine. Judy grabbed the receiver and tapped in the number. Seconds later she heard grandma’s tender voice. Hello… The world was not ending, not that day anyway.

Judy and her world survived. Instead of experiencing The Great Tribulation, she grew up and married me. Hopefully that has been more pleasant for her than the alternative.

My purpose in writing this book is to encourage and strengthen you to live a vital and powerful life for God. For too many people, talk of the events surrounding the return of Christ triggers fear. And the conflicting theories of the experts just add confusion to the fear. This is ironic, considering that fear and confusion are the exact opposites of what God intends for us when He talks about Christ’s return. The Bible tells us about the Second Coming of Christ to give clarity. And it doesn’t teach us about the End Times in order to make us afraid, but to fill us with courage and the determination to live life for all it’s worth. All through these pages we will see again and again that when God teaches us about Jesus’ return, He does it to make us hopeful and strong.

The title of this book, The Lighter Side of the End of the World, comes from 1 Thessalonians 5. After explaining the events of Christ’s return and the end of the world in all their brightness and darkness, Paul says:

But you, brothers, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness… since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5:4-5 and 8- 9)

The Thessalonians were afraid of the End Times just like many are today. They were like children scared of the dark. They were afraid because, like us, they had their own experts pushing different ideas about The End. Paul cut through the theories with the truth and inspired the Thessalonians to a life that was filled with the opposite of fear. Like those Thessalonians, if your faith is in Jesus Christ, you have been called to live a life driven by faith, hope, and love. This is because, …God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. We do not belong to the night anymore. We are children of the light. We have a relationship with God that enables us to live powerfully in the faith, hope, and love of Jesus Christ every day.

We will come back to 1 Thessalonians 5 again. For now, let me point out that God’s main purpose in clearing up these people’s confusion about the End Times was to make them strong for their daily lives. As I read the prophecies in the Bible that deal with Christ’s Second Coming, I am amazed at how God relentlessly keeps the focus on daily life. Virtually every teaching in the Bible on the End Times lands on this one question: Now that you know what’s coming, how are you going to live life right now?

You don’t need to take my word on this. As we go on this journey we will look at many of these prophesies in the Bible that land on a challenge or an encouragement to live for God now. Whenever God tells us about the future, it is always to help us live stronger today.

Where We Are Going?

As we travel through the Bible’s teaching on the End Times, a subject theologians call eschatology, I want to answer these two questions:

1.   What did Jesus and his disciples teach about the End Times?

2.   Why is their teaching on the End Times important today?

If we look at the second question first, we’ll see that we’ve already begun to answer it. A core reason for learning about the End Times is to find comfort, strength, and hope for the challenges of today. There is much more to explore along these lines. At this point I just want to say that I will be tenacious about keeping this book practical and grabbing every opportunity to see us changed for the better through what God has to teach us about the return of his Son.

Now back to the first question: What did Jesus and the leaders of the New Testament era really say about Jesus’ return and the end of the world? It’s here that we first face the temptation to go off the rails and get mired down in all the views, theories, and weird confusions that people have about the End Times. There are a lot of books on the return of Christ that spend the first twenty to fifty pages defining multi-syllable words that aren’t even in the Bible and explaining theories that run the gamut from brilliant to wacko. There’s another group of books and web sources that use world events as their launching point. These authors give us their commentary on global events and attempt to show us how today’s news is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Many of these writings spout theories on how soon the end will come.

While these different ways of talking about the End Times aren’t all bad, we are going to take a different approach. Our aim is to stick very closely to the Bible and let the scriptures set the direction, not world events or theories.

Too often, books, blogs, and other teaching materials on the End Times focus on the mechanics and timing of events in Jesus’ return and miss the heart of what the Bible is saying. The truckloads of books and other media on the End Times may have done more to promote ignorance of the Bible than knowledge of it. This happens because many authors ignore the heart of Jesus’ teaching and focus only on those parts of the Bible that they can use to push their points of view. Because of this, rather than having a real knowledge of what the Bible says about the end, many Christians only have an assortment of opinions that they’ve heard repeated enough times to believe. So much of what is out there on the End Times misses the point of Christ’s teaching so completely that I tend to agree with Kim Riddlebarger when he says, … those who speak about eschatology the most have the least to say about it.¹

In this book we will go to places in the Bible that are seldom explored by most End Times teachers. We won’t ignore the theories and controversies—we will address a range of the most current and relevant ideas about the return of Christ—but we’ll do this by selectively introducing these discussions as we explore the Bible. When we come to a place in the Bible over which people disagree, we will deal with the most important issues and then move on. Our attention will be on exploring what the Bible says about the Second Coming of Christ.

One advantage of this approach is that you won’t need to treat what I say as some kind of expert opinion. Wherever we are in the Bible, you’ll be able to take your own Bible, read it, evaluate what I’m saying, and draw your own conclusions.

Learning Tools

Part of my purpose in this book is to equip you to evaluate arguments and spot fallacies on your own. By the time you are finished you will be exposed to a number of tools you can use to make your own judgments about what you read and hear about the End Times.

Let me give you an example of a tool that will help you tell the difference between good and bad teaching. Earlier we looked into 1 Thessalonians 5, and I mentioned that whenever God tells us about the future it is always to help us live stronger lives today. With this in mind, there are a number of simple questions that you can ask as you evaluate any End Times book, video, or blog. For example, you can ask, What does this teaching produce? Is this writer/teacher helping people live vital lives for Jesus Christ? If the teacher is spending a lot of time interpreting signs or trying to show how prophecy is being fulfilled in today’s news, but little time talking about how to live for God today, then his message is missing essential pieces of the truth.

You can also ask yourself, As I listen to this, how am I affected by it? Is it giving me a greater hunger to know God and live for him? If you can’t answer the second question with a clear Yes then it’s probably time to move on.

You can also consider people who listen to a particular teacher. What impact is the message having on their lives? The messages that the Thessalonians heard caused them to be fearful and even obsessed. Do you see any of those symptoms in the people you know? Do they appear to be more captivated by world events and the Second Coming than they are by prayer, living faithfully for Christ, or telling others about Jesus? If you see signs that people are obsessing too much on details and not enough on the bigger things of life, chances are that there is something wrong with what they are hearing.

As I said before, when God teaches on the Second Coming, he is relentless about bringing the focus back to daily life. If a message on the End Times fails to challenge and encourage us to live for Christ, then it’s probably not worth our time.

Starting in the Right Place

Before we go on, there’s one last question I want to talk about. A year and a half ago, when I was teaching a series on the End Times in my church, a man came up to me after a service and asked, Are we ever going to get into the Book of Revelation? You might have the same question after reading the first few chapters of this book. Let me set your mind at ease and tell you that we will certainly get into the Book of Revelation.

But Revelation is not going to be our first stop. Remember, our focus is to discover what Jesus and his followers taught about his Second Coming. In the New Testament era there were over fifty years worth of teaching done on the End Times before Revelation was written. Much of what Jesus and his Apostles taught was also drawn from Old Testament scriptures that were completed half a millennium before Revelation. To bypass all this and dive directly into Revelation would be to ignore the foundation that Revelation was built on. It would be like trying to start a conversation with someone who speaks a language you don’t know. We need to learn the language of End Times prophecy first before we attempt a conversation with the Book of Revelation. So be patient, we’ll get there.

In Part 1 of this book, "First Things," we are going to focus on the essentials of what Christ and his Apostles taught about Jesus’ return. Then, in Part 2, we’ll set out to explore Revelation.

Thanks for joining me on these travels. I hope the end of the trip finds you happier and more encouraged in Jesus Christ.

Part 1: First Things

Chapter 2

Living for what Lasts

I shivered as I stood in line on the pool deck. About forty feet out in the deep end, a guy twice my size was slapping the water and pretending to be a victim in trouble. This victim was a tall, well-muscled life saving instructor who was a better swimmer than I would ever be. I was a slightly pudgy, thirteen-year-old Boy Scout hoping to earn my life saving merit badge. The idea was that I was supposed to swim out to this guy and save him by grabbing him in a certain way that, in the manual, looked like a form of water ballet. If I did this right, I could pull him all the way to safety while attempting to preserve my own life as well.

As he played the drowning victim his job was to pretend to be desperate and resistant. He was taking his job seriously. While I watched each would-be life saver ahead of me jump out into the pool to face the victim, I noticed that the action taking place out in the water looked more like alligator wrestling than anything the manual described. While I didn’t see anybody getting seriously maimed, I saw plenty of bodies thrown around amid lots of splashing, rolling, and thrashing.

Then it was my turn. I jumped into the cold, morning water and swam out, looking ahead at the bobbing image of my victim as he grew bigger and bigger. Once I got to him, I did a modest job of turning him and getting him into what’s called a chin tow. But after I got my arm around him and started back to the poolside, it wasn’t long before he flicked me off himself like I was a bug. To put it short, I didn’t pass. It was early in the week yet, and I would have another chance to try again.

I had most of the week to think about that life saving test. As I evaluated my situation, I realized I had plenty going against me. The other guy was bigger, stronger, and more skilled in the water. There was also my own fear to contend with. It’s not that I was afraid of drowning or being seriously hurt. Failure was the thing I feared most. As I thought about it, I realized there were two ways I could fail. I could fail by being timid, or I could fail by throwing everything I had into getting that guy back to the edge of the pool but not being able to do it. Thinking it over, I realized that if I put everything I had into it, I had a chance to succeed. My only option became clear. I needed to forget about fear and go all out. This way I would open myself up to the possibility of success.

On the final testing day, as I waited in line, I carefully watched and learned from those who were succeeding. When it was my turn to step up to the pool’s edge, I leaped into the water and swam at the victim. When I got to him, I turned him so that his back faced me, put him into a chin tow with my right hand, and locked my left arm under his armpit with the strongest vice grip my biceps could make. Then I started to scissor-kick back toward the pool’s edge for all I was worth. We rolled like a log in whitewater for a short distance until I was able to bring him to a stable back float. I suppose that once he could tell I had confidence, he settled back and let me pull him in. That week I earned my life saving merit badge and came away with one of the best feelings of satisfaction I had ever known.

This chapter is about living for what lasts. As you look at your life, what do you have working against you? Maybe you struggle with fears. Is there something looming on the horizon that has you anxious? Or are you afraid that an outcome you long for will never be fulfilled? Fears like these can be like a big adversary mocking us from across the pool, hindering us from diving fully into the lives God has for us.

Or your struggle may not be fear—you may just be running up against the reality that this life isn’t heaven. People don’t admire you or value you enough. The people that you depend on the most let you down all too often. Even the best things this world can offer have a way of disappointing you. On top of that, you can lose the things you value at any time: your work, your health, your loved ones, your self-image, and the list goes on. Like a little girl going through an emotional meltdown in the long, hot lines of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, we are sometimes tempted to ask, Is this all there is?

The problem is, when we face frustrations like these, there are plenty of temptations that invite us to ease our pain in sinful ways, such as addictive shopping, pornography, unhealthy entertainment, outbursts of anger, gossip, and so on. But in the next few pages, we are going to see that the message of the return of Christ and the end of the world is a truth so powerful that if we fully embrace it, there is strength in Jesus Christ to fight through our challenges and live for God. To see this, we will go to the letters of 1 and 2 Peter.

The Inheritance

Peter wrote two letters to a number of communities of Christians living in towns scattered over what is now western and central Turkey. Some of the churches who