I know what you’re thinking.
“He’s one of those fundamentalists who counts the letters in the names of the Iraqi prime minister and compares it to the number of verses in Ezekiel 38 in order to determine how soon the rapture will occur.”
“Hey, it’s the guy who forwarded me that email about the new bar-code scanners that the Anti-Christ will force us to use in order to buy food.”
Sadly, I’m not one of those types (though this blog would be much more entertaining if I were).
But the fact that some Christians are reading the book of history upside-down doesn’t excuse us from refusing to pick it up in the first place.
In the book of Luke, chapter 12, Jesus issues a firm rebuke to the crowds who followed him.
54 He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A shower is coming.’ And so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
We put our hands out the window and we can tell that it’s raining. We know how a low-pressure system works. (Well, I don’t, but the guy on Channel 3 does and he explains it to me). Jesus seems to be arguing, “If you know how to do the one, you should know how to do the other.” And first-century Jews didn’t.
Note carefully the problem. Jesus is not rebuking them for trying to interpret the present time. He was not rebuking them for trying to read what God was doing in history. He was rebuking them for reading poorly.
So then, one of the goals of this blog is to try to avoid Jesus’ rebuke. I’d like to explore what it means to “interpret the present time.” So posts in this category will be attempts to develop a “hermeneutic” of history and as well as attempts to actually read what God is doing in it. Lord willing, there won’t be too many facile, foolish readings a-going on. (But no promises.)
