Jesus is coming back to earth to reign, and very possibly in the not too distant future! This is one of the most exciting, joyous, significant pieces of Christian doctrine! In a companion post on `Jesus’ Return: What Does It Mean For Me?`, we’ve tried to answer the vital – and indispensably preachable – question, what does this fact, that Christ our Lord and Friend and Master will visibly return, mean for us, in real-life terms, right now?
That’s the starting point for this whole wonderful topic: Jesus is coming back, and that has huge implications for our world and for each of us individually! And this much we can be joyously certain of! But there is so much more in this glorious area that can really bless us, drawing us closer to God and helping us grow in our discipleship. So in four more posts here we’re going to explore aspects of what Scripture says about the future that are more complex and challenging to interpret. And in this one we’ll consider two questions that are very important for us: What will happen next? Does the Bible tell us much about the time before Jesus comes back as King? And might it happen soon?
(This is an extended post!)
The day of the Animal
The answer to question two above seems to be, Yes; Scripture really does have plenty to say about the time before Jesus comes back as King, and we should seek to learn all we can from it. So the bad news first – because there’s plenty of fantastic news to follow!: Scripture seems to say that, before Jesus finally intervenes, there will be a brief period in which humankind learns the full horrendous consequences of what it means to live lives independent from God. In Matthew 24:3 Jesus has been asked, ‘What will be the sign of your coming?’, and He responds by speaking of wars, famines and earthquakes, then says that ‘All these are the beginning of birth-pains’ (v8). In other words, there’s huge glory to come when He returns, but there’s a seriously bad time along the way. (Whether we God’s Church will be around in this world at all to witness it is a huge and very debatable question, which we dig into in our companion post on the `rapture`; but let’s sort out the facts about this final period of history as we know it first.)
This final segment of history is one of the things the book of Revelation is about (besides, vitally, equipping us to ‘overcome’, to handle pressure in every generation), and we need to take it seriously. As we read Revelation from chapter 8 through to Jesus’ triumphant appearance at the end of chapter 19 – and to get a grip on all this we should do so; it’s only ten pages! – it’s impossible not to feel we are being warned: before Jesus reappears, things will get very dark indeed. We wanted our independence from God, a world free of God; and God has been restraining evil and protecting us from the full consequences of that choice. But for a very short time, in the final phase of history, He gives us what we have desired and allows our race to learn what rejecting God’s rule really means, to experience the full terrible
consequences of living without God. It is bad; in fact, Jesus says that it will be ‘great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equalled again’, and that unless God had strictly limited this period, ‘no-one would survive’ (Matthew 24:21-22).(1)
Revelation paints the picture unflinchingly: horrific slaughter in global warfare (look at 9:13-16; 16:14; 6:1-4), a poisoned world (look at 8:11; 16:3-4), famine (6:8), natural disaster (look at 16:8-9), disease (6:8; 16:2,11) and economic exploitation (6:5-6; 18:1-20). (The technical term for this horrendous period is the ‘tribulation’ [‘the great tribulation’, Revelation 7:14].) We are talking about reading these chapters with a more ‘literal’ understanding than some scholars are comfortable with, but it really isn’t so clear what they’re there for if we read them otherwise (and so I suspect that churches taught to read them more ‘non-literally’ can tend not to read them too often).(2)
And then there is the part that is most well known: totalitarian dictatorship leading to horrific persecution (look at Revelation 13). Satan suffers some crucial defeat in the supernatural world (12:9) and, knowing that history is coming to a climax, raises up the ultimate evil ruler (13:1-2). In popular parlance this individual is called the antichrist. (I’ve been intrigued to find my Muslim friends using this term for the end-time evil leader that their own prophetic traditions lead them to expect: the Dajjal, who they believe will be defeated and killed by Jesus when He returns.) ‘Antichrist’, however, isn’t the biblical term; in fact, the New Testament uses that for anyone who is anti-Christ (1 John 2:18; 2 John 7). Revelation’s term for the endtime dictator (eg in 13:5,17; 14:9; 19:19-20) is perhaps best translated ‘the Animal’.
The persecution the Animal unleashes on the people of God, indeed on anyone who opposes him, is horrific. ‘All who refused to worship the image’ of the Animal are killed; and he forces ‘everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no-one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast [the Animal] or the number of his name’ (Revelation 13:16-17). The technology of an increasingly cashless, credit-chip society could make this all very easy to begin with. The authorities would express regret: your credit line is currently cut off, your grocery and electricity and medical bills are not being paid, and obviously you cannot run up further expenditure. Eventually, since you cannot pay your local property taxes, you lose your house. And all because of your intransigence on a minor matter of worship! Life could become increasingly impossible for whole families, yet very cleanly and with no unpleasant violence or brutality. At least, that is how it might start; it would not be how it ends.
If all this were only told to us in the apocalyptic book of Revelation, we might wonder how to take it. But look at how Paul talks about the final dictator in the context of a normal letter, 2 Thessalonians 2:1-9. Here Paul explains that a key feature of the period immediately preceding Christ’s second coming will be the rise of a satanically inspired individual who ‘will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God’. (It is striking to see in vv5-6 that Paul had seen it as a priority to explain these matters to the young Christians in Thessalonica during his brief visit there: he may have been there no more than three weeks.)
2 Thessalonians certainly isn’t a book that can be classed as ‘wildly apocalyptic’. For me this is a major reason for taking the ‘tribulation’ and the Animal very literally. (And the fact that strong proponents of the more ‘non-literal’, amillennialist approach, such as Kim Riddlebarger and Sam Storms, also foresee the rise of this ultimately evil end-time dictator(3) should be an added reminder to take this prospect very seriously.)
The information God gives us in these parts of the New Testament is tantalising, and we may well want to know more. How will we know when it’s upon us? In the passage we have just quoted, Paul seems to be highlighting, as the climax of this individual’s evil and the key warning point that the End has come, a moment when he desecrates God’s temple by entering it and demanding worship there. And we may well see a parallel with Matthew 24:15, where Jesus warns that the crucial sign to look out for, indicating that all hell is about to break loose and His people should take to the hills, is ‘when you see standing in the holy place the “abomination that causes desolation”’. Right now, of course, no such temple or ‘holy place’ exists in Jerusalem. Some writers (particularly those with a strong anti-Catholic bent) have noted the possible parallels to Ephesians 2:21 and 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, and seen this ‘temple’ as God’s Church. But then whatever could Paul be describing when he speaks of the Animal ‘setting himself up in God’s temple’, since biblically the word ‘Church’ means the invisible, supernatural, universal Bride of Christ, and not any earthly social institution such as the Catholic Church or the Church of England?
In contrast, back in the second century AD, Hippolytus saw this as a Jewish temple, replacing the one destroyed by the Romans in AD70; so did Cyril of Jerusalem two centuries later.(4) And this is more probable, surely, since the Jewish temple is clearly the ‘holy place’ that Jesus refers to in Matthew 24:15, and is equally clearly the subject of the Daniel references (presumably 9:27 and 12:11) to which Matthew explicitly links Jesus’ words.(5) That rebuilt Jewish temple doesn’t yet exist; but let’s hold that question over to our post on the `rapture`, where it will become important as we consider the vital issue: Will we Christians still be on earth during this horrific period at all?
Another – rather practical – question that has fascinated many ordinary Christians is where and from what part of the world will the Animal come? This is the kind of question that really annoys some academics, but the fact is that God has chosen for a surprising amount of Scripture to describe the international politics of the end time (see, almost certainly, the closing section of Daniel 11, which presents geopolitical events that haven’t occurred in history thus far; likewise Ezekiel 38 and 39 about the invader from the ‘far north’ attacking Israel(6); likewise Revelation 16:12). That being so, a gentle interest in endtime geopolitics seems legitimate – except that these are presumably passages that will only become clear when the time comes. It might not seem unreasonable to wonder whether the Animal will have something to do with Europe, or at least Rome, since when Daniel 9:26 prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple after the ‘cutting off’ of Christ, the destroyers are ‘the people of the ruler who will come’, and they of course were the Romans. Similarly, Revelation 17:7-9 links the Animal with ‘seven hills’, and any educated person at the time when Revelation was written would have made the link with Rome, which was famously built on seven hills.(7) (Still, I gather that Sheffield is too. Speculation may be intriguing in these matters, but dogmatism is highly unwise!)
But one practical thing is very important about this awesome final period, when the implications of our alienation from God are made terribly clear. As it describes the unleashing of one evil after another, Revelation continually repeats phrases like ‘he was given’ (6:2,4 [twice],8; 7:2; 9:1,3,5; 13:5,7 [twice]; 16:8). God is allowing the powers of evil free rein, but only for a brief, specific period. Jesus in Matthew 24:21-22 emphasises that this period is limited; and over and over again elsewhere its length is carefully stated, in three equivalent phrases: 1,260 days, forty-two months, ‘a time, times, and half a time’ (ie, presumably, three and a half years). (See Revelation 11:2,3; 12:6,14; 13:5; also Daniel 7:25; 9:27; 12:7,11.)
Are these time-limits literal or symbolic? It’s very hard to see that 1,260 or forty-two have any obvious symbolic meanings for the reader, so the natural way to view them is as describing a very specific, literal and limited period; particularly since Jesus Himself has flagged up the idea of this desperate time having strict limits from God.(8) (This, however – the fact that forty-two and 1,260 are hard to understand if not literally – becomes another reason for reading the passages we have discussed here in a fairly literal way overall.)
One major goal of Revelation seems to be to give a discipleship manual strengthening God’s people to be ‘overcomers’ in pressure, whether in the first century, the period since or the end time; and the truth that strengthens us here is that even the supreme example of evil will not be able to pressurise us one day longer than God allows. Whenever God finally says ‘Enough!’, it will be.
So we should worship (I mean, now!)! Even when evil is at its most rampant, Jesus is Lord!
So, might we live through this? Might it happen soon?
When will this climax of history come?
The most important answer is: We don’t know. ‘No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’, Jesus warned (Matthew 24:36). ‘Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come … be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him’ (vv42,44).
We need to be careful: there are apparent signs that can deceive us into a false expectancy, particularly at times of global crisis (Matthew 24:3-6). And that has often happened. A century ago many Christians saw Mussolini’s attempt to revive the Roman Empire as a clear sign of the end, and they were wrong; many Russian believers jumped to the same conclusion over President Gorbachev (because of the mark on his head) and Chernobyl (which some Russian dictionaries translated into English as ‘wormwood’, as in Revelation 8:11). Ronald Reagan apparently remarked about events in Libya that, ‘For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ’(9); and while he was president of the USA he wrote to the mayor of Jerusalem, `You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering … if we’re the generation to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of these prophecies lately but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.`(10) (The Guardian added, reporting this, ‘Have a nice day yourself, Ronnie.’) There have been many other examples throughout history, and as they fall away, one after another, they bring the Bible and the Church into disrepute.
And yet that’s not quite the whole story. Jesus also told His disciples, ‘Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door’ (Matthew 24:32-33). ‘These things’ are the signs of Matthew 24 (which is why we need to understand them as best we can); but His words demonstrate that the question ‘Will all this happen soon?’ is a legitimate one, even though we need to be cautious with our answers.
As we look at the pressures of global warming, increasing pollution, population explosion and much more, we may well feel that things cannot go on as they are, and the climax when God says ‘Enough!’ may not be far away. The chief economist of the International Energy Agency warned that our world is currently heading for six degrees of global warming this century, an outcome he said would be catastrophic (and that some scientists have argued will bring about our extinction). The population explosion which preoccupied many earlier futurologists no longer commands the headlines, but this isn’t because the problem has been solved, rather because it has proven to be too difficult. The United Nations foresees the world population being 11.2 billion – the present number plus half as much again – late in the twenty-first century.(11) It is hard to imagine what a world containing 11 billion people will be like, but we probably need to try. In recent decades the world for the first time began to need more food than it grew; and each year nearly 100 million more people are being added to its population. The World Commission on Water likewise reported that within twenty-five years we will need 56 per cent more water than is currently available, leading perhaps to water wars. ‘We are sawing through the branch that is holding us,’ said a UN report on world population, ‘and if we carry on as before, it may break and bring us crashing down with it … We are not talking about the interests of distant descendants. It is our own children.’
The direction of our Western culture’s spiritual development (which after all is its most important feature – and, because of our cultural power, is increasingly the development of our race as a whole) may point us gently towards similar conclusions. It’s not hard to see, in the evolution of our literature, art and music, our philosophy and ethics, the tragic implosion, one after another, of the ‘god-substitutes’ with which we’ve tried to fill the gap in our culture’s foundations left by the God we’ve rejected: reason, in the period we call the Enlightenment; then the very different gods of Romanticism; then the gods – or idols – of science, art for its own sake, and relationships (‘All You Need is Love’, to quote The Beatles), in which we placed our faith until modernity began to draw to a close. And here we are now in postmodernity, sceptical of all big-picture ‘metanarratives’, doubtful whether there are any real values that can give us identity and self-worth and our lives meaning and direction; and perhaps most significantly, having no real basis for that confidence in the reality of right and wrong, and no real counterweight for self-interest, without which our communities will descend towards the law of the jungle.(12)
Of course there have been ‘dark ages’ in history before. But these did not occur at a time of overpopulation and environmental crisis, or of terrorists armed perhaps with biological or nuclear weapons. The forces that then assumed control were pre-civilised, rather than from cultures marked by the collapse of faith in any ethics at all. Now, however, our all-conquering Western media are successfully exporting our individualism, our materialism and our collapse of values throughout the world, along with our hamburgers, cola and jeans. It seems probable that neither the Confucian-based family values of east Asia, the communal values of traditional African culture, nor even the Islamic values of the Middle East, are doing very well in the battle with the web and the satellite dish for the soul of the rising generation; Ronald McDonald marches irresistibly onward. This in no way proves that we have reached the end times; and yet perhaps there is increasingly a ‘sense of an ending’ to our world’s spiritual history.
And even without the looming environmental disaster, it is all too easy to see our future as one where law and order have collapsed along with their underlying ethics. (This was the experience in the Soviet Union after the reign of communism fell apart and was replaced by that of the ubiquitous mafia.) God makes clear in His Word that rebelling against Him leads us into the hands of evil. Freedom is not something inevitable and automatic in a liberal society: it is where the Son sets us free that we are free indeed (John 8:36; 2 Corinthians 3:17). So turning away from God means in the long run being given over to evil, and that means losing our freedom.
We see it starting to happen: the loss of God leads to a loss of ethics, which leads in turn to cynicism about democracy and leadership. It’s hard to see democracy thriving in a post-God culture that is both under threat and also sceptical as to whether ethics really exist or beliefs can have any certainty, and therefore whether elections are any more than tournaments for rival advertising agencies; where there is an increasing sense of ghettoisation, of different interest groups competing nakedly for position and power; and indeed where postmodernist thinkers are preaching openly that with God dead, ethics beyond discussion and truth unattainable, the universal struggle for power is all that really exists. Plus, with technological progress towards cashlessness in particular, possibilities now exist for a totalitarian regime to shore up its control in the ways we find in Revelation 13:17, far more than ever before.(13) In a highly pressured society, social control can be deeply attractive if it promises reduction of crime. Again, none of this proves that the End is near; but what Revelation does tell us is that our rebellion will one day climax in the emergence of a final dictator; and the environment in which the emergence of the Animal could make sense is clearly coming into being.
There are at least two other issues. Since 1948 Israel has been back in its land as a nation for the first time since its expulsion in AD135 (something Bible prophecies had led Christians to be looking for since at least the 1820s).(14) It is very hard for our own generation to grasp the impact of this astonishing event: Israel as a nation had been missing from the global map since the remote depths of antiquity, and with its re-emergence many Christians had a sense that the ‘prophetic clock had started ticking again’, and the end times could not be far away. Seven decades later, that argument cannot have quite the same force; but perhaps it is not negligible.
But for me personally, the most striking insight in all this is one I owe to Nigel Lee, formerly the deeply respected campus ministry leader of UCCF, the student Christian Union movement in Britain. Jesus said the gospel will be preached ‘to all nations, and then the end will come’ (Matthew 24:14), bringing about the completion of the global Bride of Christ that is a key purpose of history (Revelation 7:9). With the staggering growth of God’s Church all around the world in the last century, it’s very hard to see this process needing more than another hundred years, probably less.(15) And once it is completed, said Jesus, the End will come. In that case, very possibly either we or our children’s generation need to be prepared for the climax of history that Revelation describes.
If this is a genuine possibility (and hopefully friends who take a different view will recognise that the possibility exists), then it’s best to face up to it. In particular, this means we must cultivate a Christianity that is not consumerist, not one we follow for our own therapy or just because it makes us feel good. One day it may not! The reason we follow Jesus is that His gospel is true – and in the end our response to it will lead us to an eternity in either heaven or hell. Our prayer must be: Lord, I will live by following You, and if need be I pray that You give me the strength to die for You. Apostle Peter wrote, `Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed` (1 Peter 4:12-13). How would we live now if we knew that would be our situation in ten years’ time? Our answer will tell us a lot about how much we love Jesus. The sensible thing is to prepare ourselves for the possibility(16); if we or our kids might be the ‘hero generation’ called to live through this, we’d better get trained…
And let’s be clear: that training will pay huge dividends in other situations too – just as meditating on the themes of Revelation will do – because ‘days of evil’ (see Ephesians 6:13) do come to each of us from time to time. In this world we will have trouble, said Jesus (John 16:33); in our family sometimes, in our workplace too. Reading In God’s Underground, Richard Wurmbrand’s hugely inspirational story of persecution in communist Romania, helped me enormously as a young Christian. I read of the incredible pressures he survived, and couldn’t help thinking that I shouldn’t complain about what happened in my own life. God does strengthen the weak (Hebrews 4:16). Reading Revelation and being aware of the possible coming of the Animal will help us cope with pressure, will help us cope with inconveniences now; and, just possibly, it will also one day give us the guts to take our place in the hero generation, and ‘after you have done everything, to stand’ (Ephesians 6:13) for God.
But then again, perhaps this is not what will happen with us at all. What about the ‘rapture’? See the companion post in this section on that…
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(1) Surely this verse makes it very hard to see this part of Matthew 24 as limited to AD70, as some interpreters suggest.
(2) I say ‘more literal’: it would presumably be obvious to any sensible reader that, while the Animal might be an absolutely literal dictator, his ‘seven heads’ in 13:1 would be metaphorical, like those in the dream-visions of Daniel, rather than literal – but to make that quite clear they are given an interpretation in 17:9-10. Again, ‘Babylon’, so central to chapters 17 and 18, seems from 1 Peter 5:13 to be contemporary slang not for literal Babylonia but for literal Rome. But it isn’t obvious why war, famine and dictatorship need mean anything but literal war, famine and dictatorship.
(3) See Kim Riddlebarger in A Case for Amillennialism (eg pp146,155,272) and Sam Storms in Kingdom Come (pp536,546-47).
(4) `What temple then? He means, the Temple of the Jews which has been destroyed. For God forbid that it should be the one in which we are! Why say we this? That we may not be supposed to favour ourselves. For if he [the end-time satanic dictator] comes to the Jews as Christ, and desires to be worshipped by the Jews, he will make great account of the Temple, that he may more completely beguile them; making it supposed that he is the man of the race of David, who shall build up the Temple which was erected by Solomon. And Antichrist will come at the time when there shall not be left one stone upon another in the Temple of the Jews, according to the doom pronounced by our Saviour’ (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 15).
(5) But whether the temple is to be understood as a literal temple still to be rebuilt in Jerusalem, or (somehow) the ‘temple’ of God’s Church, Paul’s presentation of this as the key moment in the rise of the ultimate evil end-time individual seems to parallel Matthew 24:14-16 so clearly that one of two things surely follows. Either we must understand Matthew 24:14-16 as being about the end times, not (just) about AD70, as is sometimes suggested. Or, we must think of the key events of history as having a spiral, foreshadowing character – which is exactly what many of the ‘literalists’ say about the puzzling relationship of Matthew 24 and Luke 21. More about all this in the post on Matthew 24 in the Bible intros 3-1 section of this site.
(6) Here, interestingly, the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament translation that Christ and the apostles used and quoted, describes the leader of this invasion from the ‘far north’ as the ‘prince of Rosh’ (38:2 and 39:1); see also the NIV margin. Might this be Russia?
(7) The continuity in Daniel 7:19-25 between the fourth empire, presumably Rome, and the final evil ruler points the same way. Let me add here too that Hal Lindsey’s huge bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, written in the 1970s heyday of the Jesus Movement and described by The New York Times as the ‘no.1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade’, offered a wide range of speculations about the geopolitics of the end-time and how they might fulfil prophecies such as Daniel 11 and Ezekiel 38. It’s actually still worth getting from Amazon: some of his proposals may one day turn out to be right. Anyway, here’s one that Lindsey missed: ‘Europa’ was originally a woman in Greek mythology who is usually pictured riding an animal (Zeus embodied as a bull). This image has been used in various ways in European Union contexts, and is for example the theme of a sculpture outside the European council building in Brussels. The strong parallel between the woman riding the animal in Revelation 17:3 and this Europa has not gone unnoticed by those who study these things… Whether Europe would become the heartland of the Animal was a significant election issue when Norway was voting whether to join the European Community.
(8) We should note too that when Daniel himself is interpreting a prophecy involving seventy years in Daniel 9:2-3, he clearly takes that seventy absolutely literally.
(9) articles.latimes.com/1988-01-03/opinion/op-32475_1_president-reagan .
(10) www.notable-quotes.com/r/reagan_ronald_iii.html .
(11) World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, published in June 2017 by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
(12) There are hugely important issues here which help us see why it’s inane to say, as so many people do, ‘You believe in God, and I don’t, and it doesn’t really matter either way’. If we really understand our ‘loss of God’ we’ll see that it’s the key factor underlying many of our culture’s most serious pressure points. It matters enormously whether He’s there or not! For a fuller survey see the posts in the `Literature & Culture` section of this site on `The Loss of God As Key To Western Culture` and `How The West Tried To Replace God`; or more briefly the post there on `Western Literature And The Death Of God`.
(13) We are now much closer to a cashless society where all transactions are carried out by ‘smart card’, or indeed by body parts. The savings for the banking system could be enormous. But if everything is bought or sold in this way, then our individual behaviour and activities can be tracked very extensively. Yet the idea is so efficient and cost-effective that is hard not to envisage it becoming fairly universal in the developed world sooner or later.
(14) W H Harding’s biography of George Müller records how, in the 1820s, war broke out between Russia and the Turkish Empire that controlled Palestine, ‘and many good, excellent Christians said, “Now the Turkish Empire will be destroyed and Israel will be restored”’ (The Life of George Muller [Oliphants, n.d.], p329). They were wrong about the timing; it took another 120 years. But arguably they were right about God’s promises and His rule over history.
(15) This vision was a major passion when the student Christian Union movements arose in the English-speaking world; ‘Evangelize to a Finish to Bring Back the King’ was the watchword devised by Howard Guinness, the British Christian Union leader whom God used in the formation of the evangelical student movements in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
(16) One route to survival (as in the earlier European dark ages) would no doubt be in small communities deeply committed to shared values, and deeply committed and supportive to each other, based together on the rediscovery of the empowering of the supernatural (particularly in prayer), and seeking together to be sources of renewal or sanity for the wider community around them. This passage from 1 Peter has helpful counsel for communities facing the prospect of apocalyptic collapse: ‘The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others’ (4:7-10, NIV). These are key ingredients for communities seeking to survive amid social disintegration: clear Bible-shaped thinking; disciplined determination; release of God’s power into their situation by prayer; commitment to deep mutual love, with a broader degree of mutual forgiveness than might be called for in less difficult circumstances; and availability of the resources and talents of each member to the needs of every other, building on the assumption that, because there is a Holy Spirit, each member has an ability and a contribution to make.
(This is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my A Guide to the End of the World, available on Kindle or in book form from https://instantapostle.com/books/a-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world/ .)
