Reflections on End Times 1: Date Setting

I am not an expert on this issue because, having considered it at some depth, I do not think it has the all consuming importance that some give it.

I am inspired to write this because of the story of the Sudanese woman Miriam Ibrahim sentenced to death for  apostasy from Islam, that is for becoming a christian. There was an international outcry  and the sentence was abrogated.

My point in making the observation is that Jesus said we, His people, would be hated by all nations. If this were the very last generation with the Great Tribulation just around the corner then instead of an outcry demanding that Sudan observe international conventions of religious freedom, there would have been a cry for Ms Ibrahim's blood as one of the hated Christians, and that  with no dissenting voices.

This did not happen.  Not only that but her death sentence was uncommon enough to be newsworthy. If we were hated by all such would be commonplace, and will be in due course.

That is to say we are not at this point in time  hated by all nations as is predicted for the time of the Great Tribulation, therefore we are not the last generation.

I regard it as a total failure of imagination to think that things could not get worse than they are. They will get much, much worse. I invite the reader to think about this.

I think a voice of sanity is needed on the issue of end times, and I hope to be somewhat instrumental in providing one.

Jesus said in Acts 1:6-8 "It is not for you to know the times the Father has set by his authority". He said this when His disciples asked if He was about to restore the Kingdom of Israel.

He also said in Matthew 24:36 that  " the day and hour [of his coming] no one knows,  not the angels in heaven,   nor the Son, but only the Father."

One would think that this were sufficient, but attempts to wiggle out of the plain truth of these passages have been ongoing and ingenious, particularly when Luke 12:39 tells us why we cannot ever know the time of the Coming of the Son of God before the event.

For Luke 12:39 does indeed tell us why we can never know. It says "And know this: If the master of the house knew at what hour the thief would come he would he would have watched and not permitted his house to be broken in to."  Jesus here is the thief in the night. The master of the house is Satan (for KJV readers: there is no sense of "goodman" in the Greek. This was an Elizabethan idiom only.)

If we know when the thief is coming so can Satan who need only monitor church communications.

Therefore we can never know before time and moreover have no need to. But even this has been defied by one who presumed to set the name of the antichrist,  namely president Erdogan of Turkey, to rise in 2015 in conjunction with some blood moons, that is to say blood red lunar eclipses to occur with an unusual frequency in the next year or so. My source told me that as he was not talking about  the Second Coming and rapture per se then it was a fair call to set dates.

Only the desperate would try it. The definitive sign is the antichrist's declaring his own divinity in the yet to be rebuilt Jerusalem Temple.  Historically speaking  predicting the peripherals has failed as much as predicting the Main Event itself. Until  the Man of Sin arises, to be seen not by numbers in his name but by what he does, then we are playing foolish games as if "pin the name tag on the antichrist" were a party game for children.  As to the rise of the Anti Christ I may write on this in a further essay

Some assert that the Acts 1 passage was addressed to the Jews and not the Church, therefore does not apply to us . This cannot be the case for it was not a public address to the nation of Israel, such as Jesus had made on other occasions. It was a private talk to his disciples, the last he gave before his Ascension. Even though the disciples were Jews to a man they were the core of the Church. Thus this was addressed to the church and therefore to us. It is not for us to know the times the Father has set by his authority.

But, some may respond, what about Paul's statement "But of the time and seasons there is no need that I write you, for you know very well . . . . . " I Thessalonians 5:1

Does this contradict Jesus or does it apply to a different set of people or situation?

It cannot contradict the words of the Lord, for then scripture would be errant and collapse. But he was addressing the  church, as was Jesus Christ , and because the situation of Luke 12:39 can never change before the Second Coming there is no possible way in which it can be got round

How to resolve?

I distinguish between a relative chronology and an absolute one . We cannot know the times before hand so as to set dates, but as were are told to watch and pray we can recognize events as they happen, but not before, and will take encouragement from this  that the Lord is near. We can know the order of things to come, the relation of events, hence my term relative chronology, but not the dates, not, as I term it, an absolute chronology. For instance: the man of Sin will not appear until there has been a great apostasy. He will declare himself God in the Jerusalem Temple, yet to be rebuilt, and stop the sacrifice. But  When? When these things happen? It is not for us to set dates.

To summarize we are to know the relative order of events and watch for them.  This is  the meaning of the injunction "watch and pray" which in fact would be vitiated if we could set dates.

Others have said that Matthew 24 passage has been mistranslated. It  should read "no one yet knows the day and hour." and presumably the time limitation here has passed and we not only can but must know

But this fails on both linguistic and logical grounds

Oudeis, the word for no one is declared without warrant to be two words OUD and EIS. This is excused on the grounds that ancient Greek was written in all capital letters with no letter spacing. But this never gives license for people to make word breaks arbitrarily in order to get around the plain meaning of a passage.

Oudeis appears 98 times, as an electronic concordance tells me. And each time the meaning is plain . It is not only a clear meaning but a decidedly emphatic meaning. There is contextually no basis whatsoever to adduce another meaning here in Matt. 24:36.

However opponents are nothing if not resourceful for  it gets worse than that. One source for this idea is the      Concordant Version of the Sacred Scriptures. They claim that the OUD is a corruption of OUPO  which does indeed mean "not yet."  But this is a species of desperate gymnastics. First a word break is invoked without any reason then to back it up special pleading is employed  to make a plain syllable a corruption of a word. When I asked my source, a creationist scientist, to justify these things as being necessarily so  I got no reply.

Eis, or more properly Heis (the rough breathing, or letter h, has to be guessed by context, but, I ask why should it?) means "one" as in the master who gave  five talents to one servant and three to another

This split word  interpretation  of "no one yet  knows" also fails on logical grounds. One cannot get around it by saying that this passage does not speak of the Second Coming, or that dates can be set if we appeal to this verse on things other than the Second Coming Matthew 24:36 in its plain context is about the Second Coming exclusively.

Therefore to vitiate the plain meaning of the passage is to set up a contradiction with Luke 12:39

 There is. an old dictum of Bible study I heard years ago. "If plain sense makes common sense seek no other sense". There is no reason to go beyond the consensus of NT Greek scholars on this one and all arguments of those keen to do so have failed

The meaning stands. No one knows the time of His Coming, nor, I might add, of the future at all, for the passage speaks in the plural, "no one can know the times"

To summarize: Matthew 24:36 applies to us and still applies  to us if there were any doubt about that, and must do or else Luke 12:39 is violated.

Acts 1:6-8 is addressed to us  the  Church, is not modified or contradicted by I Thessalonians 5:1 and also stands necessarily so because of Luke 12:39.

On this bedrock of scripture I unreservedly stand and say that date setting of any kind concerning future events in the End Times is blasphemous futility.

If we had any regard for the reputation of the gospel as to when these predictions fail, and fail every one of them has, we would refrain and seek to repent of our presumption in making them. I acknowledge the role of the prophet. They can predict the future subject to the limitations that they would never contradict scripture. But those who predict any future  down to dates on the basis of real or imagined scholarship are on shaky, even perilous, ground indeed

To conclude I ask why is this matter important?

For centuries people have set dates, and been egregiously spectacular in their failures. William Miller of 1844 springs to mind, but at least he repented  and retired into deserving obscurity. Most lately the late Harold Camping came up with an elaborate scheme, absurdly so in my opinion, to prove that the Rapture was on the 21 May 2011

Each failure promoted jeering among those who regard themselves as enemies of the Gospel . But too many making such presumptions  have no regard for the fact that the Name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of us.

For such folly in open defiance of scripture brings the Gospel into disrepute, and that we need to know beforehand what the Lord has told  us to recognize as it happens is simply a sign of bad faith and disobedience on the part of His people.

Let us cease and desist lest we bring His wrath down upon us.