The Marks Along the Trail

I'll never forget the inauguration of US President John F Kennedy in 1960. The idea of having a Roman Catholic in the White House left a lot of Protestants feeling uncomfortable, especially those who strongly emphasized the imminent second coming of Jesus.

In fact, the inauguration was so prophetically significant in the mind of my parochial school teacher that all the students in my classroom went to the home of a church member to watch it on television. It was one of only two times that I remember watching TV as an official school function. Prophecy was being fulfilled before our very eyes, the teacher said. The coming of Jesus had to be just around the corner. But by 1963 John Kennedy was dead.

The next year, 1964, was the 120th anniversary of what Seventh-day Adventists have called the Great Disappointment—the failure of Jesus to return on October 22, 1844, as predicted by second-advent date-setter William Miller and his supporters. I listened as certain believers in the soon coming of Jesus theorized that since Noah had preached his message for 120 years, and Jesus had likened the time of his second coming to the time of Noah, it could well be that 1964 would be the year of Christ's return.

With equal clarity I recall the 1967 Middle East War. Our pastor stood up and said that the event was so prophetically significant that for the first time ever he had listened to the radio news and read the newspaper on Sabbath  morning—which he did so he could give us the very latest information in his sermon that day. We were only moments away from Armageddon, he said. But life soon settled back to normal.

The 1973 Middle East War and resultant energy crisis clearly were paving the way for the events described in Revelation 13, I heard fellow church members saying. They assured any who would listen that we were on the threshold of eternity. But before long it was as if the energy crisis had never existed.

More recently I encountered church members who predicted the coming of Christ no later than the end of 1994. The predictions were based on a deep Bible study of what was called the "Jubilee Principle.” But Christ didn't come in 1994.

Of course, Y2K hysteria filled many with certainty that the economy would collapse because of a computer glitch/anomaly, leading to earth’s final events. Instead of arriving with a bang, the new millennium arrived with a whimper.

September 11, 2001—and the death and destruction brought about by a group of radical Muslim airplane hijackers—will remain a day of infamy. And the loss of personal freedoms for average American citizens that came in the wake of the attack were alarming indeed. But Armageddon has yet to arrive.

These are just a few of the memories of an aging Seventh-day Adventist minister. But I know from reading sermons and magazine articles of the past that strong statements concerning the prophetic significance of various earthly events have been made for decades—two centuries, in fact. 

The problem is, with the passing of crisis after crisis that have been declared sure indicators of Christ's imminent return, the tendency is to become desensitized. Some give up their faith altogether. In fact, one of the most difficult challenges we as believers in the second coming face is knowing how to wait for the coming of Jesus. It's hard to sustain an all-consuming enthusiasm over an extended period, when prediction after prediction after prediction have failed to come true.

Years ago, while backpacking along the Florida National Trail with a group of youth, I gained what I felt was insight into the second coming of Jesus. The trail was marked with periodic orange paint splotches on the trees. As long as we could see the paint splotches, we knew we were on the trail. But the trail’s blazers hadn't put up distance markers telling us how far we were from our destination.

In Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21, Jesus describes the kind of things we can expect to see as we await his coming – wars, rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, pestilences. It seems that rather than being distance markers to tell us how soon his coming will be, these are rather the orange paint splotches on the trees to assure us we're still on the trail.

Commenting on the phenomena that would precede his coming, Jesus said in Matthew 24:6: "Such things must happen, but the end is still to come." And in Matthew 24:8 we read: “All these things are the beginning of birth pains.” In other words, we're going to see a lot of this before Christ’s return; we’re going to see a lot of paint splotches on the trees.

Certainly, the events transpiring around us should be noted and considered carefully. But they aren't dependable distance markers; rather, they are merely the splotches of paint on the trees to tell us that we're still on the trail.

Unfortunately, too many of us have confused the paint splotches for distance markers.

The preceding blog post is adapted from an essay I wrote in my book "A Different Church for a Different World.”