It’s Always the End of Someone’s World

It’s 2025 and we’re still here! While going through my library for a research project I’ve been working on, I came across Nicholas Guyatt’s 2007 book Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World. This past weekend, I was given a book that claims it’s all coming to fruition in September of this year. The author is a premillennialist, so his view is optimistic, but so were the views of many premillennialists before him. He’s discovered things that no one before him had discovered. The Bible has been a mystery until he developed the chart to show how it all fits and makes sense.

On the first day of this year, I read an article by Jeff Thomas with the title “It’s Not the End of the World.” He lists three different approaches to the future:

• Declare the End of the World
• Turn a Blind Eye
• Accept the Truth, But Do Something About It

Thomas points out that it’s always about someone’s world that’s coming to an end. The history of the world is about worlds ending and new worlds springing from the ashes. The question is, What should we do when an existing world is disintegrating before our eyes?

I embrace the third approach. Unfortunately, many eschatologists are in a fourth category: it’s the end of the world and Jesus is going to rescue us from it. Fortunately, there are enough of these “we’re living in the last days” eschatologists who are schizophrenic. Some full preterists I’ve listened to don’t seem to have a worked out a biblical worldview about the future or that there is even such a thing. I can’t abide such a “reduction of Christianity.”

The Reduction of Christianity

Has the church been seduced, or has it been reduced as well? Cultural surrender has swept over the modern Church in a tidal wave of heresy, error and seduction. A number of valiant defenders of historical Biblical orthodoxy have risen to the challenge, most notably Dave Hunt. Unfortunately, while ably sounding the alarms and capably rousing the troops, Hunt and many of his colleagues have reduced the breadth and depth and power of the Faith once for all delivered to the saints. Unwittingly, they have offered the Church a shrunken and truncated version of the Gospel. We don’t have to accept reduction in order to avoid seduction. We can contend for the Faith without condensing or abbreviating it.

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I’d rather work among the schizophrenic dispensationalists than some preterists and non-dispensationalists.

Back to Thomas’ Number 3:

This, of course, is the hard one. Begin by recognising the truth. If that truth is not palatable, study the situation carefully and, when a reasonably clear understanding has been reached, create an alternative.

When governments enter the final decline stage, an alternative is not always easy to accept. It’s a bit like having a tooth pulled. You want to put it off, but the pain will only get worse if you delay. And so, you trundle off to the dentist unhappily, but, a few weeks after the extraction, you find yourself asking, “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

If a person’s eschatology (secular or religious) is focused on doom with no possible solutions, there is no room for doable alternatives. It’s like putting a square peg into a round hole until you die, and then you’re told, “You know, there was a square hole for that square peg.” Professor Richard Gaffin, Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1999 to 2008, said, “The church wins by losing.” I kind of know what that can mean, but it rarely comes across as a hopeful message with particulars for day-to-day living civilizationally. In a more severe statement, John MacArthur said, “We lose down here.” Here’s the full context:

“We don’t win down here. We lose. You ready for that? Oh, you thought because you were a postmillennialist, you thought we’re just going to go waltzing into the kingdom because you took over the world. No, we lose here. Get it? They killed Jesus, they killed all the apostles, we’re all going to be persecuted. If any man come after me’, let him what, ‘deny himself’. Garbage of prosperity gospel. No, we don’t win down here. Are you ready for that? Just to clear the air—I love this clarity—we don’t win. We lose on this battlefield, but we win on the big one—the eternal one.”

Do you recall reading “we lose down here” in the Great Commission or how Paul ends the book of Acts, “preaching the kingdom of God” (28:31) that John the Baptist (Mark. 1:15) and Jesus (Matt. 4:17) said was “near”? What would have been the result of “we lose down here” thinking for 2000 years? What would have become of our world if the early Christians had acted on the theme of “losing”? This statement by MacArthur is infuriating: “you thought we’re just going to go waltzing into the kingdom because you took over the world?” There is no waltzing. Life is hard work. Change takes time and sacrifice. No one ever waltzed in the development of a skill. Gutenberg didn’t waltz into making the printing press. Take the following to heart.

Life’s tough. Failure is the fruit of success if we persevere. The development of Western Civilization was no stroll in the park. MacArthur should read Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book that Made Our World and D. James Kennedy’s What If Jesus had Never Been Born? Look around you. All the potentialities for change are at our fingertips.

There’s something going on among the young that gives me hope. “The increase in Bible sales comes even as polling shows a decline in religiosity across the country.” Why is that? I believe it’s because the Christian message has been downgraded. A compressive biblical worldview is not ringing from the pulpits across the United States. People want to be fed and then given marching orders to apply the Bible to every area of life. Part of the problem is that many pastors don’t have a comprehensive biblical worldview or don’t believe there is such a thing beyond the family and church. There is no neutrality. Our lack of a comprehensive biblical worldview does not mean that other worldviews are being developed and implemented.

God and Government

With a fresh new look, more images, an extensive subject and scripture index, and an updated bibliography, God and Government is ready to prepare a whole new generation to take on the political and religious battles confronting Christians today. May it be used in a new awakening of Christians in America—not just to inform minds, but to stimulate action and secure a better tomorrow for our posterity.

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources