The Blood Moon: Jesus is Coming Soon

The Blood Moon: Jesus is Coming Soon September 26, 2015

blood moonI will see Jesus soon. He (almost) certainly will return for me in the next sixty years.

This is because I will be dead.

If human, we live in constant knowledge that the end is coming. I will not see Super Bowl CX even if the Packers are in it. There will be more glorious and jolly games afoot in a better world. I love the good of this life so very much (Christmas! Kittens! Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String! The Sound of Music!), but every good here is a cheap gif of the everlasting, varying joys of Paradise.

The gif is fun, but the Real will be better. A gif is repetitive humor bound to grow stale over (a short period) of time, Heaven will be infinite joy forever.

Of course, it is not just people who die but also nations and cultures. The end came if you lived in the nation of Ammon or Edom. The end came (and it still brings tears to my eyes) to the noble city and Empire of Constantinople. The West fell to barbarian hordes and Arthur (if Arthur was) had to sail away from Camelot to Avalon. Nothing human lasts and we are always in danger of bringing an end to any good organization, institution, or project of which we are a part.

The sack of Rome was not the End of the World, but as Augustine saw, it was the end of the world for a certain sort of Roman. 1453 is no happier for a Byzantine, because somewhere else life goes on. There was still an England, but 1066 was an end forever of Saxon England. The Trail of Tears marked the end of a homeland for the Cherokee nation. Ends come: some brought on by decay within (like the Roman Republic) and some by evil forces from outside (as in the case of the Cherokee).

This is not the only end. Christians know that God will bring an end to human history as it is. The Creator will wind up creation and begin again. We do not know what will happen to other sentient beings He may have created, but we know the human story will wind up. We will live the mortal and put on immortality. Jesus will be our King.

This truth makes preaching on the End forever necessary. I came to Christ after a full-of-truth sermon Dad preached on the Second Coming. Dad knew of all three ends and he has never confused them. Not for us “88 reasons Jesus would come in 1988.” Dad rejected fads about the end, not because he did not think that Jesus could bring the End soon, but because he knew Jesus would bring the end soon for him and for all his congregants.

We will die. Our nation may die. Jesus will bring an end to all the dying at the End. I will see the first, may see the second, and could see the third. This made preaching the End important. To worry whether Stalin or ISIS is the Antichrist when they were or are imbued with the Antichrist spirit made little sense. It was an idle waste of time. As you died in Stalin’s gulag for being a Christian, you did not care if this was the End. Your next waking thought would be Jesus. If you are decapitated by ISIS, foolish speculations about the End are irrelevant. You are living your own personal revelation. That cryptic book is real to you in a way it is not (yet) to me, but will be whether the reality comes in an accident on a highway, a hospital decades from now, or in the fall (again) of the West.

There is a different kind of end time preacher from my Dad. This preacher twists Scripture into foolish theories about “blood moons” or dates. He almost always sells massive amounts of product, follows the money and peddles fear. This man is never right, but since fear always sells, he will be back to his graft soon. He makes us too confident that the End never comes, because his particular predictions about the End do not turn out.

He is the accidental tool of the Devil to make us forget the end and the End.

Jesus is coming soon for each one of us. Endings will bring doom and judgment at first, but life, grace, mercy, and joy to those who will receive it now. Why not get ready? The signs of the heavens, the changes there, do point to the inevitable seasons of the cosmos. The “blood moon” is cool, but also weird and a good moment to consider the times. My mortality is real, the USA faces a deep moral crisis, and Christians globally are being killed. This outer sign can be used of God to point me to other realities. They always do. The Fall of the year points to the winter all of us face. The decay of human institutions into tyranny and then persecution is inevitable as the crooked tries to resist the straightening of His rule.

Why not prepare? It is as simple as turning to Jesus and throwing yourself on His mercy and grace. Do it now.


Browse Our Archives