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We have all been left behind

10:42am Friday, 4th November 2011

Given we're all still around, the October 21 rapture date clearly missed the mark. Of course it didn't stop the prediction causing a great deal of grief for some. While Harold Camping has offered comments such as "we have to be very careful that we don't dictate to God what He should do", he stopped short of repenting of his fallacious prophecy claims. But Michael Jensen considers what the Christian position on certainty is.

According to Harold Camping and his followers, this certainly shouldn't be. When he fronted the media on Sunday morning the 89 year-old evangelist was reportedly "flabbergasted" that the rapture had not occurred on May 21 as he had predicted.
I am writing this on October 20, on the eve of Camping's revised prediction, but I am confident that you will be reading this sometime in November.
Never mind that this is one of the issues that Scripture quite clearly states is (to use the words of Donald Rumsfeld) a "known unknown". The declaration of a timetable for the end times evidently touches a need that people have for certainty about these matters.
Back in May, I was in the town of Strumica in rural Macedonia, of all places, and I saw the May 21 missionaries handing out leaflets on the street. I leaned out the window of the car when we stopped at the lights, and said to one of them "Hey, Jesus says ‘no-one knows the day or the hour!, doesn't he?'" But the guy was ready for this. He said "Yes, but in Ecclesiastes it says...", but I couldn't hear the rest because our car moved on. I am sure he wasn't thinking of Ecclesiastes 8:7: "Since no one knows the future, who can tell someone else what is to come?"
The May 21/October 21 crew are easy enough to ridicule. But their persuasive power, such as it is, lies in tapping into a feeling that is widespread - a feeling that we probably ought to own up to. And that feeling is, I think, best described as a disappointment and frustration with the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Basically, we just want more certainty than we have been given.
And yet, we cannot, we do not, have a knowledge of everything we would wish to know about. This leaves us - well, where does this leave us? Feeling insecure perhaps - or at least, with an insecurity that we seek to fill with certainties. We would like to know because a little extra knowledge would surely anchor our faith more securely against the winds of doubt that come blowing through from time to time.
Are we believers no better off, then, than our anxious unbelieving neighbours? Without belief in a personal God, the unbeliever has to reckon with whatever blind forces control the universe, a prospect that many people evidently find terrifying. The great Australian novelist David Malouf writes:
What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal - they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them ... We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.
Are Christians in a better position than this? And if so: why do we have so few clear answers to our most difficult questions? Isn't the Bible the answer book to all life's problems, the road map to life, the solution to all our difficulties? Why does a loving and powerful God permit terrible tsunamis to sweep away small children? Why don't people respond to the gospel if it is so evidently the truth?
These are all legitimate and profound questions for which there are no easy answers. In fact, if they don't trouble us, then I think we haven't really been reading Scripture all that closely. There is in Biblical faith, I would like to suggest, a right doubting. There is an appropriate reticence to it, a reluctance to say more than it rightly knows. Christian theology, it turns out, is about learning to say "I don't know" as much as it is about saying with confidence "I know".
And the important lesson of this right doubting is that we don't alleviate the uncertainty we feel by creating false certainties. Rather, our faith is strengthened, amidst the turbulence of this world, by fixing our gaze more closely on the object of our faith.
For indeed, we have been presented with a powerful revelation of God's nature and his purposes in the coming of the Son. We have in Christ the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past (as Paul calls it in Romans); Paul prays for the Colossians to "have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God"; and that they be "filled with the knowledge of God's will".
This mystery? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ - which is the revelation of God's plan for all things from before the foundation of the world. We are privileged beyond the angels, and stand in a place that the patriarchs and the prophets could only dream about.
And what is it that we now know? The mystery revealed to us is that the judgement of the judging God is not merely a balancing of the scales or a bringing of everything to account, but a great act of grace and mercy. The righteousness of God, from God, is revealed to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ who died for sin, so that God could be just and be the one who justifies the ungodly. It is in him that his reign over all things is established and in him that lies the future of all things.
It is decisive knowledge. The deepest truth of all truths, the mystery of all mysteries, has been written in the sky for us. Not as some arcane secret that you can only know if you are inducted into the highest level of a club. We know this mystery because it has been exposed to the full light of day: the greatest Wikileak of all time.
But notice what this knowledge is not. It is not comprehensive knowledge. It is not knowledge of the movement of the planets or of the paths of electrons. It is knowledge of the destiny of all things but it is not knowledge of the future. It is not even really an answer to the problem of evil. So - why does God do it this way?
Even we who have the knowledge of God's will in Jesus Christ cannot presume to know the particular plans of God, what the theologians call the "secret will" of God. Outside of Christ we cannot declare that this or that is his will, or not. We cannot predict what may happen. We cannot explain the inner workings of providence. We cannot explain history. In fact, to attempt to do so is a kind of blasphemy. If we could explain God in this way, or know his mind, he would not be truly God.
But notice how this lack of certainty does not leave Paul in an anxious state. Like our secular contemporaries, we believe we are in the grip of a power that is beyond our control. But unlike them, we are not in the grip of an anxious unknowing. The difference is that we know the crucial piece of information: we know what this "power" is like; we know that in "all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose". (Rom 8:28)
Our understanding of the gospel does not rid us of all our uncertainty. And so it is right that we express bewilderment when we are bewildered. It is right that we say "I don't know" when we actually don't. In fact, it is a dangerous temptation for Christians to say too much, i.e. to try to explain everything. This temptation has befallen Christians throughout the history of the church, and they have succumbed with embarrassing or devastating results.
We feel this particularly acutely at moments of great crisis. When the medical diagnosis is not what we had prayed for, or when the earth moves under our feet, or when we are overwhelmed by floods, what can we say? What can the plan of God be in such moments? How can I really have confidence in God when there is so much that is unknown to me? How long, O Lord?
But the Scriptural response to these doubting moments is not to resort to cheaply won answers, just as it is not to wallow in despair. Rather, our focus is drawn to what God himself has done, and to things he has revealed. The ground of Paul's confidence does not lie in an explanation that removes all doubt. It lies in the knowledge that God has revealed the true righteousness of his purposes in the just and merciful gospel of his Son.