Apocalypse Now

Imagine that many years ago you experienced first-hand a tsunami while vacationing along the coast. You and a few others you love were enjoying the beach when you saw the ocean water rushing away from the coastline. You didn’t know what to make of it, but a stranger nearby knew exactly what was coming, briefly explained it, and told you to run up as many flights of stairs as you could in your nearby hotel. You paused at the third floor to catch your breath and take a look at the ocean now rushing toward you. You and your group managed to get to the fifth floor before the devastation hit. You were delivered, and those with you could do nothing but hold each other and weep.

 

Now imagine the same scenario, except you’re the stranger on the beach who knows what’s happening. The reason you know what’s coming is that your father is a seismologist who called you forty minutes earlier to let you know about an earthquake far offshore that would generate the tsunami. The advance warning meant you had time to not only safeguard your loved ones but to also tell as many others as you could about what was coming.

 

When the father in scenario two shared what was, what is, and what is to come, the revealing itself is what we call an apocalypse (e.g., the book of Revelation in Christian Scripture is an “uncovering,” akin to pulling a curtain back to see what’s going on). Surprisingly, perhaps, is that the apocalypse God’s Spirit gave to John happens to report more about Christ and our present reality than it does of future calamity.

 

That said, since Christians are told in advance via Scripture of the whole arc of human history and that the story ends in joy, then shouldn’t that affect how we interpret and respond to the cultural and historical space we currently occupy? And since the sections of the New Testament that are apocalyptic happen to be optimistic in tone, despite ongoing and lived tragedy, shouldn’t Christian’s attitudes, speech, and behaviors reflect that hopefulness?

 

The answers are obviously yes, but what should that look like when it appears that there are multiple categorical tsunamis inbound? I’m going to invoke the late B.B. Warfield for my reply. Warfield was the last principal of Princeton Theological Seminary (1886-1902) before it succumbed to liberalism. While at Princeton, Warfield wrote a lengthy essay entitled, “The Emotional Life of our Lord,” the contents of which are timeless. I’ll briefly summarize his first main point.

 

Warfield observes, “The emotion which we should naturally expect to find the most frequently attributed to Jesus is no doubt ‘compassion’. In point of fact, this is the emotion which is most frequently attributed to him.” He cites Matthew 20:34, Mark 1:41, and Luke 7:13, among others, as examples. Warfield continues, “The Divine mercy has been defined as that essential perfection in God ‘whereby he pities and relieves the miseries of his creatures’: it includes the two parts of an internal movement of pity and an external act of beneficence’.”

 

Any thoughtful Christian knows and has felt our heavenly Father’s pity and ongoing acts of beneficence (primarily through the forgiveness of our daily sins). Because God’s kindness toward us is all of grace, we’re humbled and ask ourselves the question, “Why me?” That’s a good posture to maintain for this reason: pity is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder’s eye is shaped by what one spends time looking at.

 

If, for example, you spend time looking in the mirror and are impressed by what you see, I suspect you’ll have too discriminating an eye on the beach when it comes time to have compassion on those around you. Conversely, if you look in the mirror and loathe what you see, I suspect you’ll not be compassionate to anyone on the day you’re called to help.

 

What, then, allows us to unhesitatingly extend compassion, even as God does, indiscriminately to rich and poor, to black, brown, and white, to native and immigrant, to those on the left and those on the right? It has everything to do with what, or to whom, you take repeated looks. It has to do with training your eyes. And I cannot say what that is more clearly than this man (although please forgive the stiff and stodgy men in the background who amazingly seem unmoved by the Good News): (3:52 minutes)

https://youtu.be/xk9wgJBoEd8

If the Spirit of Christ has compassionately revealed the Gospel of his grace to you, how will you steward that mercy while you have time? Since Jesus has given us his name in good faith, then let’s give Jesus a good name to others in the way we treat them.

 

Because I remain undone by the Man on the middle cross when he compassionately welcomed me in!