Pan-millennialists: “It’ll all pan out in the End.”

My seminary offered an End Times class in the school catalog, and I was really interested in taking it—for the obvious reason that I wanted to understand the End Times apocalypses better.

But in the three years I spent there, none of the professors ever bothered to teach it. Which I get: Years later I taught a Sunday school class on Revelation, and good Lord it was like herding cats. Nobody wanted to study the text! They just wanted to spout theories about the End—specifically their favorites, and most of ’em had grown up reading Hal Lindsey stuff, so they subscribed to his particular strand of Darbyism. I ended the class after we finally got through Jesus’s letters to the seven churches; I was so tired of listening to the small group’s members picking apart current events looking for omens.

Hey, End Times stuff provokes people! Especially fearful people, who are terrified the great tribulation is gonna be activated by their political opponents, and force ’em into hiding; they don’t all fully trust that Jesus will rapture them before tribulation starts. (Nor should they.) So they study End Times stuff so they can be prepared for every eventuality. Knowledge is power, right?

And then there are the people who don’t wanna study this stuff. Who roll their eyes every time End Times passages get quoted or referenced or alluded to. Who intentionally skip church services when they find out the preacher’s gonna talk about Revelation or the back half of Daniel. Who think Hal Lindsey’s a fearmongering charlatan, and not just because Hal Lindsey’s a fearmongering charlatan.

Ask these people whether the age is gonna end and Jesus is gonna return, and for the most part they’re gonna say yes. Because they’re not heretics; they do believe Jesus is returning for the living and the dead, exactly like the creeds say. It’s just… whenever we discuss the End Times, it just sucks. The fearful Christians take over the discussion, exactly like they took over my Revelation class, and suck all the joy and hope and grace out of it with their twisted revenge fantasies.

So what do these people believe about the End? That God’s in control. So it’ll all pan out. More than one of them have jokingly told me they’re “pan-millennialists” for this reason. It’ll happen however it happens. Till it does, they’re not gonna fret about it.

Some of ’em like to quote Jesus on the subject:

Acts 1.6-7 NASB

6 So, when they had come together, they began asking Him, saying, “Lord, is it at this time that You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” 7 But He said to them, “It is not for you to know periods of time or appointed times which the Father has set by His own authority…”

Jesus’s apostles figured Jesus had returned from the dead… so now it’s time for the End, right? Messiah would free Israel from the Romans and take over the world, and it’d be the millennium, right? And Jesus’s response was, “You don’t need to know when that’ll happen,” then get raptured. Ac 1.9 He’ll come back, Ac 1.11 but still: You don’t need to know when that’ll happen.

So these folks don’t worry about it. The End will come when God decides it’s time. The End will unfold however God decides it’ll unfold. We don’t need to panic, worry, agitate, or flinch at “signs of the times.” We just need to keep following Jesus.

It’s the correct attitude.

Lemme be clear: I absolutely agree we needn’t worry about it. It’s a trust thing: Do we believe Jesus when he says he’s coming back?

Do we believe Jesus is gonna rule the world fairly, righteously, and graciously when he does come back? Do we believe it’s our job to simply follow Jesus, and not worry about tomorrow, Mt 6.34 nor freak out at every “End-Times birth pang,” like Jesus teaches?

I mean, if we are following Jesus, we should be following him way more than we do Hal Lindsey. We should be practicing the Spirit’s fruit when it comes to End Times stuff, and not be driven by our fears, nor other unhealthy emotions; we don’t get to put goodness and temperance and gentleness on hold just because the End is nigh.

Because all that fleshly behavior is exactly what far too many End Times prognosticators do. And encourage one another to do. “The End is near—so join our culture war!” The End is near, so get your End Times bunker ready, fill it with freeze-dried food and guns, and practice shooting government agents in the face, ’cause that’d be the least-bulletproof part of them. Does any of that behavior sound like Jesus whatsoever? No, but way too many self-described Christians are totally planning to murder our police and guardsmen… even as they loudly claim they support cops and troops. Yeah… for now.

That’s what fear about the End will do to you: It’ll convince you it’s totally appropriate to suspend your Christianity—to deny everything Jesus ever taught us about loving our neighbors and enemies, and giving to Caesar what’s Caesar’s—because it’s the End, so all the rules fly out the window, and it’s every man for himself, so it’s okay to kill and steal and devour, same as Satan does. It’s okay to fight the enemy with its own weapons, instead of God’s.

It’ll convince you it’s “spiritual warfare” to listen to every “out-of-the-mainstream” pundit on your favorite news channels, and be forewarned about how “they” are out to get you and your children; and how it’s totally right for your favorite politicians to suspend democracy and declare martial law and fill the streets with brownshirts, lest the pagans take over. Yeah, this might resemble Germany in the 1930s, but this time it’s somehow different… even though Germany in the 1930s was likewise using End Times imagery to justify themselves. “Thousand-year reich” means exactly the same thing as “millennial kingdom.”

Is any of this fear, any of this threat of tyranny and open warfare, even justified? Not when you trust that Jesus knows what he’s doing, and trust him to handle the big-picture stuff while we obey him and deal with the small-picture stuff. But that’s not what people are doing. They don’t trust Jesus. Polls show many of them trust their favorite politicians more than they trust Jesus’s pastors; that they reject the Sermon on the Mount when it goes against their partisan views. They want that thousand-year reich, but not the only King who’s meant to, and suitable to, reign over it. They have other guys in mind.

On the one hand, it’s good that their fears are making ’em come out in the open, so we can learn exactly who the hypocrites are. On the other hand, there are a lot of hypocrites out there. It’s a bit discouraging to see how many people there are who never seem to have known Jesus at all Mt 7.23 —despite thinking they totally do.

But I do trust Jesus, and I encourage you to trust him too.

Can do without the apathy part of it though.

Now. There are those who are “pan-millennials” because they trust Jesus has everything well in hand… and there are people who are pan-millennial because they no longer care about the End. They don’t expect Jesus to return in their lifetime (and to be fair, he may not; he hasn’t yet!) so the End Times stuff is therefore never, ever gonna apply to them.

Thing is, in nearly every Christian interpretation of the End, it totally will. ’Cause when Jesus returns, he’s bringing us with him. We get resurrected. We don’t have to be alive when he returns… because if we’re not alive, we will be.

1 Thessalonians 4.16 NASB

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

If I’ve died before Jesus’s second coming, I’m still not gonna miss a thing; I’m gonna be there. As will every Christian. I’ll be there to witness all the events which follow. Not just the eternal life stuff; all the events which’re in the bible—including events which’re part of the visions Jesus gave to John in his Revelation. Events I certainly may not be able to understand, but which’ll make total sense once they do finally happen.

That is, if I bothered to read the book! And Jesus encourages us to read the book.

Revelation 22.7 NASB

“And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”

I’ve known people who avoid End Times topics like the plague. Sometimes because they figure nobody but Jesus knows anything, so they find it endlessly annoying when “prophecy scholars” talk about the subject as if they’re authorities who know precisely what’ll happen—who even have timelines! The hubris of these “prophecy scholars” bug them. Which I get; the absence of humility in any Christian bugs me.

But even though we admittedly don’t know what most of Jesus’s revelations mean, doesn’t mean we should be ignorant of them. When Jesus blesses those who keep the words of his prophecies, he doesn’t mean those who keep ’em in an unread book in their library. We need to keep ’em in mind. He expects them to be useful to know later. After he resurrects us, they’re gonna come up constantly.

I’ve also known people who are terrified to read about End Times stuff. I knew a former nun who admitted she had never read Revelation because it scared her. She didn’t share what it was about it which scared her, but I’ve known other Christians who consider End Times stuff part of the horror genre. True, there have been a lot of awful End Times horror movies (and not just because they’re poorly-made, badly-acted, and full of unbiblical stuff), so the heebie-jeebies are understandable; especially when Christians spend way too much time on the evil excesses of the Beast. But this horror is misplaced. Revelation is full of freaky stuff and gory images, but if it scares you, it’s primarily because of all the personal and cultural baggage we bring to it. In itself it’s not scary.

And it’s meant to be a reminder that in the End, Jesus wins. Evil ends. He gets his kingdom. We’re invited to be part of it. Come!

But as for the timeline… yeah, don’t insist it can only be interpreted your way, following your timeline. Likely we’re all wrong. That’s okay. It’ll pan out with or without our comprehensive understanding. But do read the book for a general understanding.