What do you believe? Are you a Christian? Do you believe the Bible?I've written many essays over the years. One night I was thinking about what people say that they believe and comparing that to how they act, and I realized that their Dispensational worldview was the cause of their inaction. This realization has led me to questioning the "Left Behind" eschatology. Here is the essay.
While most of my acquaintances would answer "Yes" to the second question, I suggest that they don't really believe the Bible. Not for this "dispensation" anyway. Let me explain.
Many Christians are concerned about the Harry Potter books and movies. A mother was on the local news just this past week with an effort to get them out of the local Elementary School library. They are afraid that it will draw their children into witchcraft and the occult. In a way, I find this a little curious.
I was going to say "humorous", but it really isn't funny. The reason that this strikes me as odd is that most of these same parents have done nothing to educate their children in the supernatural world. They generally stick anything that appears to be supernatural in this day and time into the same category as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Alien Abductions, Crop Circles, and Conspiracy Theories. While claiming Christianity, they have done everything possible to remove the supernatural from their natural worldview.
Our logical, scientific worldview has all but eliminated the idea of the Supernatural. We raise our spiritual shields against fictional kids in pointed hats riding around on brooms and winged fictional animals. We express a great deal of concern over people whose "magic" is scarcely more than "abracadabra".
Yet at the same time, we don't really acknowledge the real supernatural that the Harry Potter slippery slope is allegedly heading towards.
In many ways, most Christians approach the Bible as if it was a wardrobe into a different time and place. Much as the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe acts like a gateway to Narnia, a place of magic and special events not found in the "real" world, most Christians believe that the only pseudo-supernatural events are found in the Bible. It was a different time, a different place, and occurred to different people. Like a Christian cartoon that I saw one time, the kids opened the Bible and jumped into its pages and, in the time of the Bible, experienced a natural realm that interacted with the supernatural or spirit realm. At the end of the show, they were back home.
This visual effect was so easy for people to accept because that is how most people see the Bible. The supernatural events outside the Gospel message are not viewed as history.
To most people, the Bible is not relevant to us today except for the promises that we want to claim and the events that we want to intellectually accept as probably truth. We don't really believe everything there. We say that we believe the Bible, but are very selective in what we really believe. We philosophically believe, but don't literally believe. Let me give you an example.
If I were call you and tell you that your house was on fire, you would accept it. You would believe it on multiple levels and do everything in your power to get your loved ones and valued pssessions out. Your warnings of the danger would be clear and you wouldn't accept anyone's doubts of the situation. Their very lives, you believed, were in danger and you would not rest until they were safe. No one would doubt your belief. Your actions spoke louder than words. Your faith had legs and produced works, as the Book of James would say.
Let's contrast that with what most Christians that I know say that they believe: A supernatural being has always lived. He is responsible for the universe, the Earth, and everything on it. They believe that a lesser and rebellious supernatural being "tricked" the first woman into rebellion and that we all now are born into a state of rebellion against our Creator. They believe that a couple of thousand years later, the world was covered in wickedness and that a flood wiped out all mankind except for one family. The believe that God orchestrated history to such a degree that when the Messiah came, He fulfilled close to two hundred different specific prophesies. They believe that He performed many miracles and after His death, the Messiah rose from the dead. They believe that now, during the Church Age, we are at peace with God if we accept this as truth, and that one day in the future (probably soon), God will again intervene in the affairs of mankind.
But do you really and sincerely believe these things? Are you as convinced of these things as you would be of a fire in your house? Does your belief have feet, so to speak? Do you accept or doubt that Satan interferes in the course of history today? Is your first thought a skeptical one when you hear of someone in this day and time being demon posessed?
You say that you believe that we are approaching the end times, but do you accept the prophesies of the spiritual things what will be taking place then? It is easy to point to famines, earthquakes, wars, and rumors of wars, but what about the other? Are you skeptical about the idea of fallen angels bearing offspring today?
The irony of all this is that as Christians we should be the first to accept the supernatural realm. We should recognize, for example, that all of the major ancient civilizations had stories of offspring of the gods, just as in Genesis Chapter 6. We accept their ancient flood stories as evidence for the story of Noah's flood, but assign all the stories that could relate to "children of god and the daughers of men" into the category of myth.
We are skeptical and laugh at signs for fortune tellers and palm readers and shy away from them because we are warned to, but at the same time don't really believe that there is anything but fraud going on. We act as if the conversation between Saul and the deceased Samuel in 1 Samuel 28 never took place.
What kind of message does this send to our kids? It is no wonder that today's generation of Christians are more likely to take the Bible less literally than the generation before. We have all but neutered it.
The other irony about this is that while Christians are back-peddling as fast as they can from a belief in any supernatural action, the world around us it embracing it more and more. You have to look no further than the local bookstore or TV line-up to see the facination with the supernatural. It reminds me of the origins debate. Science tells us that the universe and time came to exist out of nothing a finite period ago. Most Christians, instead of saying "that sounds like Genesis 1 to me", tell the world that they are wrong because we don't like the date that they came up with.
The same goes here. Instead of taking the interest in the supernatural and pointing the world to the Bible, most of Christiandom is backing away from the supernatural aspects of the Bible. We shouldn't really take those passages literally, should we? Not according to recent statements from the Vatican.
Most Christians, if actions based on true belief were an indication, believe that the Church Age is devoid of the supernatural. Miracles, demons, demonic possession, and any kind of supernatural interference or involvement in history died with the last of the apostles. To most people, every action produces a reaction, every cause an effect. And, in our 21st century scientific worldview, there are no effects or reactions without a natural cause. If we don't know what that cause is, we just accept that or look for a natural one.
To make my point, when was the last time you saw something that you believe was caused by something supernatural? Other than possibly the birth of a baby, I doubt most people could think of one. Yet they say that they believe that all these interactions in the affairs of men will occur in the end times. Oh, and by the way, we are living in the end times. The natural signs are all around us. We will forget about those signs that may involve the supernatural realm though. Can't see those anywhere. Must not be literal….
Yet the Bible never promised us a world in which the supernatural was reigned back before the end times. We accept that God was involved in history so that Christ's coming and life here would match all of those prophecies. Yet we act as though it is going to be a coincidence that, after centuries of uninvolvement, the end times will play out as prophesied. A Dispensational worldview has all but neutered the supernatural in our minds. This nebulous gap in Daniel's seventy weeks is a "time out" in God's working with humans. Miraculous involvement of God is something limited to His dealings with Old Testament saints and Jews in history, and will one day return to Jews after the church exits the scene. In a play with many acts, the church has a solo act on the stage. But where is this in Scripture?
The Apostle Paul said, "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known." Most people act like they believe that Paul didn't quite know what was going on when he said, "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." They don't believe that our enemies are anything more that the flesh and blood natural things around us. "Powers" and "rulers" must refer to the politicians. They skim over or try to turn into metaphor any reference to the "high places" and the idea that the prince of this earth is not the Good Guy.
I don't think that Paul was dim-witted when he made proclamations like this. I believe that he was only able to see a part of the nature of what we are fighting, and that part was pure evil. Not just a philosophical concept, but a real presence and natural manifestation of the the supernatural realm. Instead we believe that until the Antichrist fools everyone with his deception, we all have a much clearer view of the world around us than those people like Paul that didn't know that the earth was round. We are the enlightened ones. Nothing gets past us!
We act as if Christ's life here was an intersection between the supernatural realm and the natural realm that we live in. Nothing could be further from the truth. We see the world around us as a natural world because we have shut our eyes to the supernatural.
If you believe the Bible, than you have to believe that Christ and angels visted men all through the Old Testament. You have to believe that Satan was able to take on a physical form and carry on a conversation with Eve. You have to believe that it is possible to host and entertain angels without being aware of it (Hebrews 13:2). You have to believe that Noah and those after the flood lived in a land of men whose lineage was supernatural as well as natural. And, if you believe that we are in the last days, you have to believe that the same things are going on now (Luke 17).
Do you really believe? Is it more than an intellectual or philosophical acceptance? Is it as real as a belief that your family would perish if not warned about the house burning down?
If you really believed that an inferno greatly exceeding a burning house was coming to all that didn't accept Christ as their Savior, would you be shy about telling them? If you sincerely believed that we are living in the end times, would you waste time before telling those that you know would be "left behind"? Can you put your faith and trust in the supernatural for your salvation, yet have a worldview that denies the supernatural around us?
In a worldview that contains no current supernatural events, is it any wonder that most Christians that believe in a "Left Behind" theology don't really act like they do?
Can a totally natural worldview with no current supernatural influence even include a God?
What do you believe? Does your life show it? Does your priorities show it? Does your wallet show it? I wonder….
