Facing the Apocalypse: Reactions from the Bible
By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS
I reflect on the disorder of my digital files while I was reorganizing them, and in so doing re-discovered a commentary I’d forgotten I had. It is by John Phillips called Exploring Genesis. Phillips recounted different reactions to apocalypse, including Jonah, Abraham, and Jesus. In this essay I urge readers to remember the impending apocalypse and to respond as Abraham and Jesus did, with prayer and tears.
I’ve been cleaning out files on my computer, and re-organizing the ones that remain. Things we collect get so disorganized, don’t they? If I need something I like to put my hands on it right away, not hunt for it. Hunting for something I know I have and need RIGHT NOW drives me crazy. It’s the same with files.
I was looking on my computer for a photo of a chandelier I knew I had, but could not find. I have thousands of photographs, so hunting for it was aggravating. I never found it, which was more even irritating. I do have folders for my pictures but it’s hard to categorize them all.
Anyway, on Saturday mornings when I am at the beginning of the coffee wake up time, I try to organize my files. I re-discover many of them I forgot I had. In this way, I keep them fresh. I have a Genesis commentary in digital form by the Puritan John Bunyan, and another excerpt from a Genesis commentary from John Phillips who published his in 1980. Good, solid, biblical commentaries on Genesis are hard to find, so I keep them when I find them. I had forgotten I had the Phillips commentary so refreshing my files helps me remember the resources I already have.
The excerpt below is from the commentary Exploring Genesis by John Phillips. He was the assistant director of the Moody Correspondence School as well as director of the Emmaus Correspondence School, one of the world’s largest Bible correspondence ministries. He also taught in the Moody Evening School and on the Moody Broadcasting radio network. You can find the Commentary in digital form for free at the Internet Archive, here. Of course, you can find it in hard copy at the usual book-selling outlets like Amazon, etc.
Here is an excerpt. It’s about Sodom, but ultimately it’s about our reaction to facing apocalyptic truth. Whatever your stance on the Last Things and their timing, Jesus WILL return one day and He WILL judge the world. The world and its non-Christian citizens will face horrific times and a harsh judgment one day. How do we feel about that?
It is so easy to go through each day doing the tasks set before us. Sometimes those tasks become rote and we are mindless about them. Commute, work, commute home, cook dinner, do dishes, tuck kids into bed…whatever repetitive tasks you perform in your daily life, they return day after day, week after week, year after year. But there is an expiration date on this world. There will be an end.
History has been long, but it will end and there will be a new heaven and a new earth and a new history. Just prior to the newness will be terrible badness. Apocalypse. Don’t forget the apocalypse. We may not be alive when it begins, but even if we pass away first, who’s to say our loved ones remaining on earth after us won’t experience it?
What is our reaction to this truth? See Phillips’ take on this fact:
SOURCE – Exploring Genesis by John Phillips
VII. THE PRAYER OF FAITH (Genesis 18:1-33)
Lot was very fond of Sodom, but Abraham had no liking for the place at all. Lot seemed to think Sodom to be a great place for raising a family; it had so many social, educational, and business advantages. Abraham kept well clear of the place; it was a sink of iniquity. Sodom and Gomorrah and the other townships of the valley were disgusting centers of pornographic filth. He marveled that God did not simply wipe them off the map. Sodom itself was so debased that it gave its name to the vilest form of perversion known to man.
The time comes in the history of all places like Sodom when God decides to act. Before proceeding against Sodom, however, God took Abraham into His confidence and revealed to His servant a new line of truth-apocalyptic truth, truth concerning the impending overthrow of an utterly vile civilization.
The revelation of that truth was an interesting test of Abraham’s growth in grace and of his increase in the knowledge of God. How does a faithful, maturing, obedient child of God react to the truth that a holocaust of judgment is about to engulf a world of vile and godless men? Jonah, faced with apocalyptic truth, was glad. He pondered the impending doom of Nineveh with glee, determined to do nothing to stay its fall, careless of the thousands of little children who lived within its walls. Jesus, faced with apocalyptic truth, was moved to tears. His prophetic eye envisioned Jerusalem as it would be within a generation, the surrounding hills black with crosses and on every cross a Jew. And He wept, wept for the city whose sins called for vengeance so thorough and so complete. Faced with apocalyptic truth, Abraham prayed.
–end Phillips commentary excerpt
Are you convicted in your spirit on behalf of the souls who will go to perdition because of their Gospel-less, unrepentant life? Sometimes as I fall asleep or wake up, in the dimness of my room, from the corners of my mind, these thoughts enter in. I keep them at bay because the knowledge of God’s wrath and the destruction of millions and billions of souls is too big for my puny mind to handle. But they are facts. It will happen.
Jude even said that the destruction of the Cities of the plain (four cities, not just Sodom & Gomorrah, the devastation also came to Admah and Zeboiim too), that the destruction was a not only God’s wrath for gross sin, but to serve as a warning to us,
just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these angels indulged in sexual perversion and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. (Jude 1:7)
As a result, we need to try our best to share the Gospel, and live a life honoring Christ in these increasingly dark days. We need to keep heaven’s glorious vision before us, which we sometimes forget to do, but also the wrath of God before us as well. Grace and wrath, Law and Gospel.
