4 common Christian misconceptions about end times

By Richard Ruhling

In Revelation 3:17, the True Witness tells the messenger (badly translated as "angel of the church") that he is blind and naked. Angels are not blind or naked, but preachers may be. Here are some misconceptions many have about the end times:

1. Preterism is the belief that all the end-time prophecies were fulfilled in the first century as with the destruction of Jerusalem. This is against Daniel's "vision at the time of the end" in Daniel 8:17, 20, where the kings of Media and Persia are now Iraq and Iran. We are "at the time of the end."

"What is to come has been already, and God summons each event back in its turn." (Ecclesiastes 3:15 NEB)

The book of Revelation is seen by most readers as applying to what's coming, not to events in A.D. 70. Early Americans saw the first beast in Revelation 13 as the papacy they fled for freedom in a New World. The clues describing the Mother Church in Revelation 17 were not fulfilled in the first century.

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2. The rapture is a misunderstanding of the wedding parables. The covenant God made with Israel made them His kingdom (Exodus 19:5, 60) and His bride. He said, "Return to Me, I am married to you" (Jeremiah 3:14). God got an ignorant bride at Sinai, and there is embedded in the wedding parables a provision that this not happen to Christ, as we will see another time, but just as Jacob was betroth to Rachel for seven years, we can have a covenant relationship with Christ and be protected in the end time as God promised Israel in Exodus 34:10, 11.

The rapture comes "at the last trumpet" (1 Corinthians 15:51, 52) and there are seven trumpets preceded by an earthquake that will shake the whole world when Christ knocks for his lukewarm church (Revelation 3:20) as He did for that ancient church of Laodicea, which ended in an earthquake. He knocks for the wedding in Luke 12:36. And "we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom" (Acts 14:22).

3. Conventional wisdom says, "wait and see." But if we think about it, it takes no faith to "wait and see," and without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6). We should study and see, because seeing it in Scripture is better than believing everything we hear. The Bereans were more noble – they "searched the Scriptures whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). Christ said we "must live by every word of God" (Matthew 4:4). Rather than starting with Genesis and trying to read the whole Bible, we might do better to search the Bible on topics where the Spirit impresses us of weakness.

4. One often hears that no one knows the day or hour, but this goes against other passages that God won't do anything without revealing it (Amos 3:7). Also, though Christ told the disciples that it wasn't for them to know "the times and seasons," Paul, putting himself into the end times of 1 Thessalonians 4 says in 1 Thessalonians 5, "Of the times and seasons, you have no need that I write, for you know them. …" So we have to consider the context of who it is said to – and the use of a concordance to see the meaning of the Greek or Hebrew word is helpful. The word translated as "know" means be aware, consider, understand. Eido does not mean we can't know or that no one will ever know. Truth is progressive, and maybe we need to know in our time.

An overlooked concept is that the good news, good spell, the gospel was different in Noah's time. It included a boat, but it took faith in God's word or message to perceive the good news, and most people thought Noah was crazy, in spite of animals going into the ark.

The gospel was different with Moses. It was freedom from bondage and going to the Promised Land, but Israel's faith failed when they heard reports of giants. Christ had a better gospel – freedom from the power and penalty of sin, and "in my Father's house are many mansions."

For us, the gospel is better because it includes all of them – "as the days of Noah" and the New Covenant Promise to write God's law in our hearts so that we will want to do the right thing. This is implied by Ezekiel 36:24-28, Jeremiah 31 and other passages like Isaiah 11:11.

Richard Ruhling is a retired physician who initially took Bible courses, planning to be a missionary, but when opportunity in Africa didn't work out he took Internal Medicine and taught Health Science at Loma Linda University. A 1986 Bible conference focused him on current events and end-time prophecies.

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