Why Your End-Time Beliefs Matter.

I am in the midst of prepping a message about Satan's fall and final judgment, as predicted in the book of Revelation. I'm struck by how important Biblical eschatology is to present-day living.

It protects us from the despair caused by materialism. I don't mean the love of money, I mean the belief that nothing exists but matter. That is an absurd belief just on the face of it -- molecules don't think, feel, choose, or talk, and so any materialist thinking, feeling, choosing, and talking about it is disproving it.

Materialism = no hope. But materialism produces nothing but despair, since it means everything, and I mean everything, will die. The Bible tells us that isn't true. Jesus lives, and so shall we.

It protects us from the madness of mysticism. I'm pretty sure most people have given up on the Age of Aquarius from the 1960s, but I'm also sure that the election of Donald Trump was a slap in the face of everyone who clings to the belief that we are on the cusp of evolving to a level of higher consciousness.

New Age expectations = no reason. You have to turn your brain off, to accept it. The Bible bases its prophecies on the resurrection of Christ, which is evidenced by eye-witnesses and was predicted by men who lived thousands of years prior.

Bible prophecy protects us from pantheism. Pantheism = no end to evil and death. If everything is part of eternal God, and eternal God is the hidden reality behind everything, then that means evil, suffering, and death are also eternal.

That means there is no end to them. No end to cancer, no end to murder, no end to child predation, or crippling viruses, or governmental corruption. It's all baked into the nature of reality. But the Bible says evil, suffering, and death are alien invaders, and God will completely purge them out of the world.

Bible prophecy protects us from Communism. Communism has no foundation. It's an opium-pipe dream of an allegedly perfect world (even though its atheism means nothing is "perfect", since in atheism there is no objective, unchanging standard).

​Communism is about being forced into a man-made humanistic concept of perfection by means of law, schooling, and, underneath it all, fascist violence. But the Bible and daily experience tells us that people are bad, so bad they can't be trusted with all that power, and so bad you can't build a good society out of them. The Bible, on the other hand, says that Jesus Christ, not us, will bring about that perfect world.

Bible eschatology works backwards in your thinking, to vaccinate you against the fever dreams of a fallen world.