Preparing For Bad Times Without Trusting In The World

Saturday of the Last Week in the Year (Dec 2) 2023

I heard a radio commentator say recently that he can’t remember a time when he heard as many people talking about the “end times” as he hears today. This being the last week of our Church year, we are hearing “end time readings,” particularly from the prophet Daniel. Today’s passage picks up from yesterday's, when some really nasty creatures are pictured as threats to God’s people, but God–shown as a very old, powerful and just judge with white hair–tries these threatening beings and executes judgement on them, in partnership with a “Son of Man” who Christians will recognize as Jesus, the Messiah, as pictured in Revelations.

So today Daniel sinks back into self-reflection, with symptoms reminiscent of what we today know as a “panic attack.” One of the angelic witnesses assures Daniel that the reality is not so grim. God will raise up God’s people, victorious, to rule over the world. Daniel is still quite nervous, especially about the last of the “beasts,” who is so awful in appearance that he does not have an analogy among the animals of the earth. The witness is reassuring. This awful beast represents a final human kingdom, beating down all opposition, blasphemous and persecuting of the people of God. But its time is limited to less than what we know as a presidential term. But this king, too, will be tried, sentenced and utterly destroyed. God’s rule, administered by His holy people on earth, will be absolute and everlasting and universal. It sounds like the doctrine of the universal kingship of Christ, doesn’t it?

I like to think of this passage as an illustration of a great Biblical principle found more than once in the psalms. “Trust not in princes,” it reads. Human leaders are prone to corruption, and it happens whenever the leader loses track of the primary task of any leader: to act always with good will for the good of his people. Whenever he or she becomes more interested in personal gain than in the common good, bad things are going to happen, first to the people, then, ultimately, to the leader and his family and his corrupt team. Look at human history and you will find numberless examples of that. Today in many places we see the twenty-first century realization of that scenario. If we trust human leadership to make everything wonderful, we will always be disappointed.

Jesus tells us, His disciples gathered as His Church, to “take heed” to ourselves, and to always be ready for the end by always acting toward that end. And that end is incorporation in the communion of saints as a saint with resurrected body in the kingdom of God. So dissipation, whether it be trashy novels or novellas or videos or gaming or any other near occasion of sin needs to be off-limits. And drunkenness, which is a single-word code for any satisfaction of our sensual passions in drunkenness, adultery, fornication, drug addiction–you know the list–must be outside our experience. And even “cares of this life” which might be spending all our time amassing wealth or hoarding or wasting time on things that don’t matter should be off the agenda. Instead we need to let the Holy Spirit motivate us to keep watch. Look out! We don’t have any idea when the trumpet will sound and our life, or the world’s life, will be declared finished. We must always be ready for the God who loves us too much to let us mess up our lives and end up as demon food. Blessed by our God, now and forever, Amen.