#67 Eschatology & the End of the World: Hope, Not Fear + Dr. Fellipe do Vale

Today, we're going to be talking about eschatology. I didn't know what that word was. It actually means end of the world.

When we think about the last bits of the story, it ought to inspire hope in us. To me, end of the world is guaranteed fear mongering.

The end of the world is a comforting thing. It's a homecoming. It's a party. It's a wedding feast.

It's a... What would you say to someone who's terrified right now of the world ending? I would say they're...

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name's

Cassane Blino, and I'm your host. Today we're gonna be talking about eschatology, which don't sign off because I didn't know what that word was either.

It actually means end of the world. So hopefully you're still listening because that's what I'm here for, is what

I was taught in the end of the world was very scary, but today we have Dovale, Dr. Dovale, here to talk about how it's wonderful.

So stay tuned. But if you're listening, you probably have very similar questions about the end of times or eschatology like I do.

Like, is the world getting worse? And is Jesus coming back soon? Because I feel like that's all, he's coming back, he's coming back.

And what happens when we die? And do we get new bodies or do we just kind of float as souls forever?

And why is Revelation like a horror movie? I feel like all of us have maybe considered these questions.

Light work for Dovale though, because you are so credentialed to talk about this. You are a theologian, you're a professor at Trinity College, Bristol, that you just started, congratulations.

There you teach on moral theology, theological anthropology, but you got your degree from Calvin University, you got your master's from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and you have a

PhD from Southern Methodist. Very well qualified to talk about this because you essentially talk about how we have a newfound hope in Christ's return.

And I've never once thought, I can't wait for the end of the world. But I do feel like over time, we're getting there.

So I'm excited to not, I have such a vivid memory as a kid with my mom being like, end times, you're gonna have to proclaim your faith in the face of somebody who might wanna kill you and the mark of the beast.

We'll get into all of this, but to me, end of the world is guaranteed fear -mongering, guaranteed gotta get my life together so I don't have to face, tell me about it.

What is eschatology to you? Yeah, no, I'm familiar with a lot of those sort of connotations of the end of the world.

And a lot of Christians have spoken about it in ways that, yeah, like you said, fear -mongering. It's when we start talking about the end of the story, we do it to get people into shape and get them sometimes even politically motivated or something like that.

I think, I'm somebody who thinks that that's fundamentally a misuse of the, we're using the word eschatology, the study of the last stuff, basically.

That's what that word just means, thinking about the last bits of the story. And when we think about the last bits of the story, to me, that's an exercise in hope.

But I mean, if we're gonna use biblical language, it ought to inspire hope in us and also ought to inspire comfort in us.

It's God making all of those promises come true.

It's when we get from God all of the lovely things that he has promised, but we haven't yet fully, we've tasted it, but we haven't fully yet received.

And so we'll be free from sin, both in guilt, but also in doing sin.

Our bodies won't be difficult to love anymore. We'll be able to have resurrected bodies. We'll see

God face -to -face. We'll be fully reconciled with one another. And all of the things that we've lost will be brought back to us.

And that's - That's a much better view than Antichrist and 10 years of plagues and murder of the beast.

It's almost like the end of a party. Like it always sucks when a party ends, but it also is like the end of something, great night and coming into the next day.

But okay, how did you even get into this? That's a very biblical language.

A wedding feast, a big party at the end. Oh, wow. Yeah, you're on it.

You're on it. Okay. Oh, oh, oh. This is fatal. How'd you get into this?

That's a great question. So as you mentioned in the intro,

I think a lot about what nerds like me call theological anthropology, which is a $5 word.

It's just, what is it? When theologians think about what it means to be human, what does it mean to be human?

And what does it mean to understand the difficulties of being human?

Because there's a whole lot of being human. That's just really tough. We get sick, we die, we're tired and we don't want to be tired.

We're alert when we don't want to be, when we're not allowed to be tired. There's all of these frustrations about being human.

And one of the sort of oldest ways of thinking about eschatology or getting into eschatology, this is how

I got into it too, is asking the question, when will all of these difficult bits about being human be put to an end?

How do we get relief from the hard parts of being human? How do we, like, how do we get relief from the fact that we get sad and grieve or that we're estranged from our loved ones and all of these things?

And so I was thinking about an entirely different topic. What I work on most of the time right now is gender, theology and gender, which is a totally, it's a whole other kettle of fish.

Hard pivot. Yeah, yeah. But that's how I got into it is, a lot of people talk about the hardships of living lives as men and women.

When will we have relief from that? And yeah, and that's how I got into eschatology.

It was fundamentally a sort of like, how has God promised to relieve us of our sorrows?

And that to me, that's a hit home for me, you know? And I would talk to church people and things like that.

And then when we do the Lord's Supper, you know, and we proclaim Christ's coming back, it's as though we're sort of like practicing for his, you know, for that day when we will be fed fully.

Right now we get a little snack now, but we're gonna be fed fully one day. And so all of these sorts of reflections on the hardships of life is how

I got into it and why I think eschatology is so important. Because was it, you needed something wonderful that it was all building towards?

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, maybe another way to put it is, Christianity is oriented around faith, hope and love.

And we have faith in the risen Lord Jesus. We have love for God and for neighbor, for enemy.

But what is hope? What is Christian hope? And Christian hope is this word that it, it's what helps

Christians know that when we look around and look at all the things that are really frustrating to us, we know that that's not the last word.

So the promise of hope is God saying, things are hard right now, but I'm coming.

I'm, you know, I will make things right one day. And so if we are people of faith, hope and love, if hope really is important, then we need eschatology.

Okay, that is beautiful. Let's get into a little bit more, the textbook of it. Eschatology, there's four views.

Like I said, I don't know anything about eschatology. Like I'm curious and confused about this. The reason that we're talking about this is because literally people, like I was like, what do you guys wanna talk about?

And I went to like followers and they were like eschatology. And so I was like, I don't even know what that is. So when we met and that's something that you was like, that was your zone of genius.

It was, you know, kismet, but there's four different views. Can we touch on those real quick? Yeah, yeah.

The typically, and so what you just heard, you know, we just articulated a sort of like, you know, you may have heard eschatology talked about this way, but I really like talking about it this other way.

And you're gonna see that theme sort of recur particularly in this question of the various different views.

Different ways to look at the end being one way or a purpose or, okay. Right, specifically the kingdom of God.

What does the arrival of the kingdom of God mean? And what is the kingdom of God?

And so when we think they're typically folks, depends on how you carve it out three, maybe four views, maybe more, but usually you say, okay, what is the kingdom?

And the nature of the kingdom, is it something that's literally 1000 years long?

Is it something that we're building up to gradually in society? Or is it something that is already, but not yet?

I see, kind of like that. We've been in the end times for forever versus like it is yet to come.

Yeah, and even when we talk about the end times, if we wanna use like the Bible's words, we're talking about the last days.

Are the last days right now? Are the last day? And a lot of this has to do how we interpret a particular text,

Revelation 20. Always does. Yeah. And we might even sort of pause to ask this great big debate tends to sort of orbit around the interpretation of just a few verses.

Theologically, should our alarm bells be going off in the sense that like, hey, maybe we should build this great big thing over just, we should have various biblical inputs going in rather than just a few select verses.

But this diversity of views within eschatology has to do with how people interpret the thousand year reign of Christ depicted in Revelation 20.

Is it literally a thousand years long? And if it is, are there sinners still in there?

It gets really complex really quickly. Where's the devil when this is happening and all this other stuff?

Or is that kingdom right now and the thousand years being understood more metaphorically?

Or is that kingdom understood metaphorically?

You can also use words like allegorically or figuratively. The Bible often does funky things with numbers, particularly

Revelation. There's all sorts of... So this thousand years and then how you interpret that in light of Daniel and so on.

But it's really easy to get lost in the weeds. And maybe the way to see the importance of a debate like this would be to say something like, we are promised the kingdom of God.

Jesus comes and he preaches the gospel of the kingdom. And he's saying, I'm giving you the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is coming. It's here and it's coming. It's like a tree that's been planted and it's blossoming, but it hasn't fully blossomed yet.

And then one day its branches are gonna be so big that all of creation will nestle in its branches.

I'm messing up the parable, but you know what I mean, right? I got the photo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so when we talk about the promise of the kingdom, we sort of measure up how we understand texts like Revelation 20 in light of the promise of the kingdom.

And that's why I personally interpret that text that the thousand years is not understood as a literal thousand years where usually it requires

Christ coming once and then after that, or at least finalizing the kingdom towards the end with the final judgment between good and evil.

I tend to think that there's one coming. So the view that often folks will use is the amillennial view to describe my own.

I think that once we start getting into the weeds, I think we come to find that there's actually a lot more diversity than just three or four views.

So your view is that it's an event that's yet to come, not that we're already in it. Well, it's an already and a not yet.

So yeah, so let me give you maybe a picture would help. The picture I like to use for my students is imagine you have been invited over to a friend's home for dinner.

And you get there and your friend is taking a little longer with dinner than you thought.

Just like maybe Jesus is taking a little longer to come back than we thought. We're always wanting Jesus to come back.

Come Lord Jesus, come, right? And sometimes we go to our friend's house and they're still preparing dinner and you're like, when is dinner coming?

But every once in a while, your friend, so you're sitting in the living room and you can smell the aromas of the dinner.

Picture your favorite food and just friends is amazing cook. You can smell the aromas of the dinner coming from the kitchen.

And you're like, oh man, this is gonna be a great meal, you know? And then every once in a while, your friend comes out with like a wooden spoon and says, hey, try this, how does this taste?

And you get a little taste and you're like, oh my goodness, this meal is gonna be amazing. And then finally the meal comes and you're like, oh, what

I've been waiting for. And you find that waiting for the meal, knowing that you can smell it, that you can taste it, waiting doesn't feel so hard because you know what's to come.

That's the sort of tension of the time that we live in now. We can smell the meal coming.

And I use the image of a meal on purpose because as Christians, we celebrate the Lord's Supper by eating.

In the early church, they were just eating food together. And so we get little tastes now.

When we experience the forgiveness of our sins, we get little tastes now. When we love one another as Christ has loved us, forgive one another as Christ has forgiven.

We get a little taste. All of these are little tastes of what's to come. And then one day it's gonna come and it's gonna be, bam, so good, you know?

And so that's the tension. So yes, I think it's coming in the future, but we get all these little nuggets now.

Why am I crying? This is so beautiful. I was like, uh -huh, uh -huh.

He just kept talking. I was like, uh -huh, uh -huh. But that is so beautiful.

And that's not at all what I pictured. Like that is, that's not common. And I'm so grateful that you're pointing that out.

Like that it's a dinner party and that you get to smell it, that you get this taste of heaven and those miracles and those encounters with Christ.

And it really is building into something wonderful. Yeah, I mean, talk about modern

Christianity. Like I just wanna take a moment to kind of discuss some of the more surface level things.

So it really sheds like the value of what you just said, because in contrast to that picture that just brought me to tears is kind of the

Christianity that I was raised in, which was the passages that like shaped the end times.

And I think for a lot of Christians, there's this element of a lore that we're just kind of raised in. It's not like when we talk about the rapture, we reference first Thessalonians.

Like if I'm gonna be completely honest, I didn't know where the rapture came from. It was just something we talked about.

And then it was like culturized into, and then the left behind series. And so you're like a

Christian, like what other religion would be a rapture? And then you realize that it's based off one verse that says, and we're caught up.

So just real quick, can we talk about the rapture? So is it in the

Bible? Oh, that's a heck of a question. I think it depends on what we mean.

So we talked about, I don't wanna get caught in the weeds. It really depends on what we think good

Bible reading is. So the question of, is it in the

Bible is a tricky one because reading the Bible well is as much a matter of knowing what the words are in the book, but also a matter of us reading well too.

On a trivial, like I ask my students all the time, like, hey, do you pray before you read the Bible? And most of them say, yeah, of course.

I say, Lord, help me understand the word. And so that's an acknowledgement that something needs to happen in us in order to read the

Bible well. So there's a whole lot of, so we not only need the Lord's help, we need the

Lord's help to acquire the right kinds of skills and tools to read the

Bible well, to discern what's in the word. And one of those skills

I would argue, and I think this is a theme throughout much of the church, roughly until about the 19th century, so the 1800s, which is when the theology of the rapture fully emerged, there was threads before then, but right around that time, a big change happened in how we read scripture that I will, that I can mention.

But before then, how Christians read the Bible was like this, it's one book. It's made up of 66 different books, but it's fundamentally one book and it's

God's word, right? Is it also human words? Sure, but when we read the Bible, we read to discern

God's word. And it's God's, it's the word of God for the people of God.

And because of that, you can connect up various different images throughout the canon of scripture.

And so, you can, oh goodness, there's so many to pick from.

I recently did a podcast on the Song of Songs, Song of Solomon, which is, again, another conversation for another time, but that book talks a lot about gardens.

Where else do we know about a garden in scripture? Genesis one. And so, you can see illusions of gardens and then the garden of Gethsemane, you know?

And so, how can we trace out the themes of gardens throughout scripture? How can we trace out the themes of mountains throughout scripture?

Or how can we, you know, when it says the word was, when John says the word was God, it was with God, and it tabernacled, dwelt among us in John 1 .14,

the word there is tabernacled among us, you know? Clearly a reference to the tabernacle in the wilderness in the

Old Testament, you know? And so, who is Jesus? Jesus is the presence of God in creation, just like the tabernacle was, you know?

So, a lot of these, so when you read biblical commentators from before like the 1800s, that's how they read the

Bible. They were looking at, there's a YouTube channel called

The Bible Project, if you've ever heard of those guys, they call them hyperlinks, you know? You know how a hyperlink, where you go on Wikipedia and you click on a hyperlink and it brings you to another page?

The Bible's full of hyperlinks, you know? You click on one and it's like, oh, that's a reference back to that, and to that, to that, to that.

And so, it's this web of images. In the 1800s, when the reading of scripture became more academic, it was taken up into universities, particularly in Germany and places like Berlin, a different set of tools that were much more scientific were adopted in favor of this more image, one big book telling us about God.

You know, it's a lot harder to justify yourself as a discipline in a university, what do you study?

Well, I study molecular biology, what do you study? I study this book that tells me about God, you know? You know, your science colleagues are gonna start looking at you like you're a little sketchy.

And so, what ended up happening is this emergence of a very historicized version of reading scripture, where instead of reading to hear

God's word, what you did was read in order to hear the human words, and only in their context.

Now, I think context is really important for reading scripture, but what ended up happening is the meaning of scripture became restricted to just the human meaning.

And - In so many words, like before they were reading it, like literally, like the word of God, this is the word of God, do it, it is, what is it?

It's inerrant. Yeah. Whereas there's this change allowed them to say, what does this mean in my sense, in my eisegetical understanding?

Is that like a more like, in my context, or is that like, totally different, totally. Yeah, it's like, if I were reading, if I'm reading an old novel, you know, let's say

I'm reading, you know, one of my favorite authors is John Steinbeck, and he's obviously dead now.

Oh, do you love, oh, yeah, me too. Literally, East of Eden is my favorite. Yeah, oh yeah, it'll bring me to tears, like a little baby.

So good. Yeah, but when I read East of Eden, I don't think John Steinbeck is speaking to me.

What I'm trying to do is to discern his words and his world, and there isn't something above that, you know,

I don't, whereas the Bible claims to be speaking to us, for Hebrews 7, 10,

Hebrews 7 or 10 talks about how the things written were written for our benefit, you know.

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now back to the show. And -

So what would be like the difference of like how style, like let's say East of Eden's the Bible, just hypothetical. Yeah.

That was damn good. If I read East of Eden before and then after, what would be the different approaches?

Specifically with the Bible is what ended up happening is it became a focus on not on the big picture, but on the small picture.

So what we ended up doing is basically seeing our jobs as Bible readers as dissecting small little sections.

Why? Because you can't, if the human word is all we have, you can't assume that what

Peter's talking about is what Paul is talking about, you know, because they're gonna disagree.

They're gonna, they're just humans, right? Whereas before you might say, no, but guiding both of those authors was

God who ensured that the words that they spoke was God's words. But if all we have -

They broke it off into like little pieces. Exactly, exactly. And that became really, really influential.

And it trickled down to pastors. And so pastors saw their job not as teaching, teaching, here is

God's word to you, the congregation, but rather like, here's this, I'm the expert that's going to sort of dig out the gems from the mine, you know?

And we're gonna, you know, basically the pastor becomes a glorified time machine, you know, taking the congregation back to hear, you know, this human word.

And that, you know, that made, that prioritized a very granular reading of scripture.

Like what we talked about with Revelation 20, you know, why is it that we got so stuck on one verse as the sum total, you know, of our understandings about the kingdom?

And the Bible talked about - We got more fragmented versus like systematic. Precisely, yeah, precisely. Got it.

And the dangers with that are? Yeah, well, this is, so the reason why

I went into this whole detour is that around that same time is when theological teachings about the rapture began.

And - And then we got hyper -focused on that. Yeah, and so doctrines of the rapture tend to depend quite a bit on a very select set of texts.

Like you said, 1 Thessalonians 4. What it doesn't have is sort of canonical breadth.

We're not going to find, but our doctrines should have canonical breadth, right?

The things we believe ideally should be attested to in the whole big story of life.

The cross canonical breadth should be, I can see Daniel in Revelation. Yeah, yeah.

And you're like, the things we believe should fit within the story, right?

And so when you asked me, is the rapture in the Bible? It will depend.

If we take a very granular focus on texts and interpret them in a very particularized sort of way that developed in a very particular time period, then you can see an argument for the rapture being in the

Bible. Whereas I would say, if we read the Bible a bit more like the

Christian tradition has always read it, as a bit more of an interconnected big story of God, it becomes quite a bit harder to see the rapture as fitting within the flow of the biblical story, which is a very different sort of argument.

It's not, I'm not trying to say it's not there, but I'd say it doesn't fit, which is a different kind of, and sometimes that's the best we can do is argue for this doctrine fits better than other doctrines, you know?

Yeah, so. Okay. I've given you a mouthful, sorry about that. It's like,

I ordered one thing and I got a completely different meal. The meal's still delicious, but oh my gosh. I hate it when that happens though, isn't it?

It's one of those things though, it's like my conversation about like, okay, so are we gonna get taken up?

Okay, the left behind series, like these questions are now like inherently, I don't wanna say moot,

I mean like these are valid questions that our culture has brought us to. Like we wonder, are we gonna get taken up? What is the sign of the beast?

Like the rapture, all of these end time questions are valid because that's what our faith is. We want clarification, but what you just said is like, almost like it's almost too, it's more distracting to focus on that.

Like it's not even the point, like why would we focus on those things at the end of the day when like at the end of the day, that's not pointing towards Christ?

Absolutely, yeah, that's exactly right. I think when it comes to talking about the end times, the thing we cannot lose sight of is what has

God promised us? That's, because that's Christian hope. What has God promised us?

And - What has God promised us? Oh, what has God promised us? Yeah, Christ has died, risen and will come again.

And he sort of modeled, whatever is in Christ will be ours, right? That's Ephesians one, that's first Corinthians 15.

And so what is in Christ? Christ was risen again to die no more. Like that's gonna be ours.

Christ has put an end to sin and put an end to death. That will be ours too. You know,

Christ has, you know, perfected the law of love so that we can live in perfect harmony with one another.

That will be ours too. Christians won't try to be like hurting one another anymore as we do so often now.

We won't die, we won't get sick. I'm sorry, that's on my mind a lot. We've been having some medical challenges in my family right now.

And so often I've been thinking to myself, because my son has been sick and I keep thinking,

I feel death right now, right? In Christianity, death is more than just the end of our biological lives.

It's this force. Romans talks, Romans five to seven. And if you ever wanna get a really vivid picture of how death reigns is what

Paul says. It's this power that exerts itself on us day in and day out, makes life so hard.

With my son's sickness, I feel death so often, you know?

And what God has promised us is freedom from death and all that it entails.

And I always think of this Coldplay song. Coldplay's been in the news recently. They've got a song that he talks about he doesn't wanna participate with death and all of his friends.

And that's what we're freed from. We're freed from death and all of his friends. The thing that made Genesis three so bad, the introduction of death will be the thing that we're released from.

And we know people won't express it, people won't exploit one another anymore. The earth will not be trampled down. The beautiful things that we experience in the earth won't be exploited any longer.

These are the things that God has promised us. The lion will lay down with the lamb, you know? Food that tastes good will be good for us, you know?

I don't know. There's all, you know how, you know, the food that tastes the best is the worst food for us.

That won't be the case any longer, you know? What are you eating? Well, I don't know.

Maybe I just have a bad palate, but yeah. It's not London food. It must be.

It must be. I'm just kidding. You said it was delicious. We already asked. Okay.

Then this kind of leads me into the next set of these questions in a really beautiful way. Why are we so afraid of the end of the world then?

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Yeah, that's a really, I mean, that's a really good question.

I think my guess, when I became a Christian later in my life, so I didn't have this sort of cultural

Christian upbringing. I became a Christian when I was 14. And was the first in my family.

And so I, what I hear from my friends though, who did grow up Christians is that when, and you alluded to this at the beginning of our conversation, when the end times gets talked about, it gets talked about in a really aggressive kind of way.

And there's a spectrum there. But at the end of that spectrum, people are using it to make people feel really afraid at church.

People are using it to, I mean, my wife talks about how she went to, they're like haunted houses, but it's of hell, you know?

So she went in her neighborhood, and people would go, and then at the very end, you know, there'd be like the devil, you know, threatening you with eternal damnation, and you have to give your life to Jesus, and it's hosted at a church, you know?

And I was like - What? I know, isn't that wild? Yeah, yeah. And apparently they're coming. They're all over the place.

Yeah, anyway, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's laughable.

That's insane. It is. And I think to varying extents, people have had these negative experiences with eschatology because of this kind of stuff.

Like it's been, or, you know, you turn on the news, and here's, you know, another politician using the kingdom of God to promote their own agenda, you know?

And you're like, man, if that's what talking about the kingdom of God is,

I don't want anything to do with it. And I get that, because I don't want anything to do with that either, you know?

People just co -opting God's word for their own purposes. And I think that's quite a shame, you know?

Because it's such a powerful set of, such a powerful part of the

Christian confession that to sort of reduce it and to use it to hurt people, to use it to make people scared,

I don't think it, it's a misuse of God's word at the very least. And it's a misuse of our authority as well.

If you're in an occupied position of authority as a pastor, you know, that's not what you're there for.

You're there to proclaim the consoling word of God in the gospel.

And if people come away feeling like, nervous, anxious, and scared that God might not love them after all, like that's not what you're supposed to be doing.

You know, that's not what a pastor is supposed to be. Pastor is supposed to be there to remind them that no matter what you do, the love of God, you can't be separated from it, you know?

And so I think that's part of it. There's a cultural history there as well, particularly in the

United States. That's, you know, that's quite distinct. But people have always used the millennium to, you know, build communes or to separate themselves out from the world.

And they started doing really weird stuff, you know? You know, walking around naked and things like that.

It's very strange that what people have done in the name of the millennium. And so, yeah,

I think it just, it strikes us odd at best, scary at worst, but it's never comforting, which is just such an odd thing to me, you know?

Do you think there is an element of this, let's just call it fear -mongering, just to kind of encapsulate everything we just talked about.

Yeah. Do you think this like fear -mongering, this fear of judgment, do you think it's like a healthy dose of motivation and correction or like a complete miss, like a complete misunderstanding of it?

It can be. I think it wouldn't be fair to scripture to not say that, that God said, you know, make sure that you're walking in the faith.

You know, make sure that you, that what you claim as your Christian faith isn't a distortion, isn't just cultural pressure, isn't just because you want to be accepted by your peer group, isn't just because, you know, it's what your socioeconomic class does, you know, or whatever.

Or, you know, and make sure that like your life reflects the Christian faith that you profess.

That's there. I think that's there. And that I would say is like the pull of holiness, right?

God has given you a responsibility to live, to be holy as he is holy. Check, check yourself, check yourself before you wreck yourself, right?

That's the idea there. Now, people take that way too far, you know, and what that doesn't do, you know, is call into doubt your assurance of salvation.

What that doesn't do is, and what I mean by assurance of salvation is, I'm tossing out, you know, big words like it's nothing,

I shouldn't do that, doesn't call into question whether or not you are really saved because you were never saved by your works, right?

You were always saved because of something Jesus has done, right? The question is more, are you living in line with your salvation?

Are you living in a way consistent with the gospel of grace? What this doesn't do is to say, you know, hey, if you're not, if you don't got your stuff straight, you're probably not a

Christian, so you better, you know, better figure it out. You know, the way you got in is the way you stay in.

That doesn't change, you know? The way you got into the Christian faith is the way that you stay in the Christian faith.

There was always grace and there will always be grace. Martin Luther said that the whole Christian life is one of repentance.

And I think that's right. Sometimes we, and so I think if we change how we stay in from how we got in,

I think it's, by the way, this is the whole point of Galatians three, by the way.

If you're, you know, that's a whole Bible chapter. I love Galatians. Yeah, no, no, go on, go on. Have you not experienced so much?

Remember how you got here and now you're talking about adding new stuff. What's going on? You know?

And so sometimes eschatology can get roped into that as well, where like, oh, you stay in because you better work hard to stay in because what's coming, you know, you better be on the right side of it.

And I think that's, when we start going that direction, that's when it starts getting scary, you know?

I think scripturally, yeah, we should be working hard to make sure that through grace, we are living in light of the gospel of God.

What we don't need to do is question whether or not God loves us, whether God is abandoning us, whether if we have bad days, that God is like, oh, forget them, you know?

I'm done with them. I gave them a chance and now they've blown it. Forget that. No, like how we got in is how we stay in.

And if the anxiety pushes against that, then that's when I think we've gone a little too far on that front.

Okay, so people probably listening are like, you know what? Kind of looking forward to it. Kind of stoked about this.

Now I have more positive feelings about the end times and what to look forward to. But again, the enemy's quick.

How do we avoid making the end feel like an escape rather than like a renewal? Yeah, yeah, this is, there has to be continuity,

I would say. You know, what we're not doing - What do you mean by that? Oh, good, yeah, good. What we're not doing is saying

God is taking, that the end time is like a divine Etch -A -Sketch. You know the Etch -A -Sketch?

Where you draw the little knobs and then you make a picture and then to erase it, you shake it, right? What God isn't doing is doing the shake on the

Etch -A -Sketch with the end times. He's not just wiping everything clean. But God remains committed to what

God has created. Right, and - I thought we were getting some brand new things at the end.

And we are, and we are. So what's happening is the fulfillment of creation, not its erasure, you know?

Got it. And so what we've seen, when I talk to my seminary students about this, I tell them

Genesis tells us that creation was good. What it doesn't say is that it's perfect.

Good and perfect are two different things. Perfect implies that the process is complete, right?

And what we see in the storyline of scriptures is that the process is not complete. No, the garden is blossoming into a city.

Jesus is coming to dwell among us. And there's all these other things that are yet to come. What we get in the garden is the beginning, the beginning of the story, and the story goes wrong.

And what redemption does is it brings it back to its trajectory. And then what we get in the end is the perfection of creation.

So that the garden of God becomes exactly what it's supposed to have been. And if sin had never entered the picture, that's what it would have become.

And so what God isn't doing is saying, oh, forget creation.

I did that, but I was wrong. But God doesn't make mistakes. God isn't caught by surprise.

God didn't go, oh man, they blew it. Now I gotta start something new. God remains absolutely committed to what he has created.

And what he does in redemption and in the hope of glory in eschatology is he sets it all back to where it's supposed to have been and then brings it to its perfection.

And so we're not in the perfection yet. We're on the way to perfection right now.

And that's where those tastes and glimpses come through. So that's, and that's where the continuity comes in.

Like, I'm gonna give a really concrete biblical example.

We've talked about faith, hope, and love. The Bible tells us, you know, that faith will go away because faith that is, faith and hope are opposed to sight in scripture.

Can't hope for what is seen. You can't have faith in what is seen. It's Hebrews 11, a couple of other places.

But love, love never fails, says Paul. And love continues forever and ever.

There will come a point where we will no longer need faith and hope because we will see

God face to face. And by the way, if you want a really nerdy $10 word, that's called the beatific vision.

It's 1 John 3. I keep churning out these verses. Let me know if you want me to read them.

Just - I am holding back tears. Please keep talking. Yeah. And so what we get is faith fulfilled, hope fulfilled.

Love, love never ends, says 1 Corinthians 13. So, so much of what we need to do now in the

Christian life is learning how to love rightly. Love in a way that God loves.

You know, Romans 14 talks about how the sum of the law is summed up in the command, love your neighbor as yourself.

That's the Christian life, is this command to learn to love your neighbor, to love your enemy, to love

God and to love yourself in the right sorts of ways. And so, and those are all blended up together in confusing ways, right?

Sometimes the call to love our enemy is the first thing we see in the morning because when we look in the mirror, our first enemy is looking right back at us.

You know, sometimes it's really hard to, sometimes we perceive ourselves as an enemy. And so the Christian life is a life of learning how to love our neighbors, how to love

God and how to love our enemies rightly. And that's what the whole Bible's about. So what does right love look like?

Because this doesn't just look like anything. It looks like something very particular. Yeah, I think in -

But love continues to the end. And that's where like the same love that we have now is the love that we're gonna have in the end.

It's so funny because I feel like my question is like, okay, continuity, what do we do until the end? Because at the beginning of this conversation,

I've been like, how, like what prepper materials do I need to prepare for that seven, 10 years of plagues and the, like what do we do in the meantime type of thing?

Or like, you know, like the answer Christ, all the things. So knowing what we know now, you know, everything you've just said, believing in this

Christ's return, having hope and faith in it, how should that change how we live today? Yeah, I always get drawn back to 1

Corinthians 3 and 4 in light. And so Paul is talking about ministry there, right?

And there's this bickering that's happening in the Corinthian churches. Some people are saying, I follow

Paul, I follow apostle or Apollos, I'm sorry. And Paul's trying to correct this misunderstanding.

You know, you're all following God and Paul and Apollos were just coworkers bringing you to God.

Then he says something really interesting. He says, this is 1 Corinthians 3, 10. And then in the verses that have come after it, by the grace

God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder and someone else is building on it, but each one should build with care.

That's the important bit there. Each one should build with care for himself. No one can lay any foundation than the one already laid, which is

Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or things that make you look good in the eyes of the world, you know, their work will be shown for what it is because the day will bring it to light.

That's eschatology, right? When God comes back, the work that they had done will be shown to be worthless because it was built on the wrong foundation.

It will be revealed with fire and the fire will test the quality of each person's work.

The fire will test the quality of each person's work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward.

If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss, but yet will be saved, even though only as one escaping through the flames.

So what we have here is this picture of testing. Now, everybody is summoned to work for the sake of the

Lord. Already, I'm like full of fear of being like standing in front of God, being like, will I get burned up too?

Like already I have that fear. Yeah, well, it's not you that's getting burnt up, it's our work.

That's the important difference. What's really tempting sometimes to, you know,

Paul is talking about people who are using gold and silver as the foundation of their ministry, people who are exploiting other people for the sake of wealth.

You know, they're the people who use God's name to make themselves richer, to make themselves look better.

Now, that stuff, the stuff that's inconsistent with the foundation of Christ, that gets burnt up.

They, they won't, right? Their work will, and that's an important, like there's gonna be, it's a summons for us to make sure that our work is reflective of the right loves that Christ has given us to love rightly.

If we're loving gold, silver, costly stones, if we love the praise of the world, if we love ourselves to the extent that we can't love our neighbors, if we love, if we fail to love the least of these, these are the sorts of things that God looks at and says, that's not what

I want you to be spending your time on. I want you to be spending your time on the things that won't get burned up, the things that will survive.

And inevitably there will be things that, cause we're, none of us are perfect. There will be things that do get burned up that we have done.

But what the other promise that we - It's like that judgment moment of like, hey God, here's my whole life in a box.

And he's like, hey, you did horrible. All of it's trash. And that's - Right.

Well, for the most part, what he'll say, and I think you'll say this for every Christian who's, you know, he's gonna say, first thing he's gonna say is,

I love you and I know you did your best. You know? And the other thing he's gonna say is, you're a mixed bag.

You're a mixed bag, like everybody else. There's a lot of good that you did and there's a lot of junk that you did.

But what we, another promise we have a little bit later in 1 Corinthians, this is 1 Corinthians 15, 58.

It's the very last verse of 1 Corinthians 15. He says this, therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm, let nothing move you.

Stand firm. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord. Because, and this is the most important part, you know that your labor in the

Lord is not in vain. Nothing you do for the sake of the

Lord is pointless. Even if it is one of those things that gets burned up, that's a valuable lesson that's learned.

That's a growing moment. That's a sin that's forgiven. You know? And that's okay.

It won't be in vain. And I'm totally speculating here, but my sense is that when we look back on those moments, the things that do get burned up in our lives will be things that we understand now why.

We understand what went wrong. We've learned from our mistakes. We've seen how God was tolerant of us and forgave us in that moment, even if we didn't even know we needed forgiveness.

You know? That's not, even that moment is not in vain because the promises all come together all at once.

So that's, so I would say, yeah, we should be concerned that the way we live now conforms to how

God wants us to live while knowing that when we fail and we will fail, that's not pointless.

That's not God saying, I'm gonna throw you away now. You know? That's God saying, here's a learning moment for you.

This is discipline, you know, that Hebrews talks about. This is, these are moments of development and growth and closer to holiness.

So - Oh my gosh. Okay, final question. And then I wanna make sure that we plug all of your work, but what would you say to someone who's terrified right now of the world ending, especially after what you just said of like, crap, my box of works is not good.

All of it will get burned up. Or I have no, like, I don't even know what you guys just said. I'm so far behind.

Like, how could I possibly be like prepared in any, like, what would you say about terrified right now? I would say there's no test, that when

God comes, there's no test. There's no quiz. There's no, it's, there's no ranking.

There's no, like, God's gonna come, like, with a big, I love you.

Like the prodigal son, the father welcoming the prodigal who totally messed up the relationship.

And the father just says, I'm just glad you're here. You know? And that's, that's, that's really what it's about.

And then, and then some, because then he says, you know, I'm gonna clothe you. So the prodigal son is an eschatological parable.

You know, he comes home and then he's clothed further. You know, it's, and that's what

God's gonna do. He's, it's, we're gonna learn that it was never really about how well we did in this life, because the good stuff we did was because God enabled us to do it.

It's not, and, and it was all about God and it will always be all about God.

And, and he welcomes us with, and the end of the world is a comforting thing.

It's, it's a homecoming. It's a party. It's a wedding feast. It's a, it's a time to.

You gotta hit me with that again. Are you kidding? It's a, it's a time to come home. You know, so we can say, you know, like with that nineties post -punk song, it's the end of the world as we know it.

And I feel fine. You know? Oh my gosh. I never thought

I'd be like so filled with love and like, these are tears of like overwhelming emotion.

They're not at all about sadness or fear. So like, not at all what I expected when we entered this conversation.

So, wow. That was so moving. Oh my gosh. DeVail. Wow. How do people get in contact with you for more?

Like books, classes, seminars, whatever you're doing. Yeah. Philippe DeVail. I don't know if I have a webpage yet on my new,

I'm just in between institutions right now, but I teach at Trinity College in Bristol, England.

So, and what we talked about today is what my classes are like. But most of the stuff I said, I said in class already.

So you can come and take classes with me if you want. But I'm also, I have a book on gender, which touches on some of this stuff.

It's called Gender and Love. Which you should come back on and talk about.

Yeah, I'd be happy to, I'd be happy to. But I'm on all the other stuff as well.

Email. Instagram? What? Okay. Instagram, Blue Sky, all that stuff.

I don't check it very frequently, but if you send me an email, a message, or some sort of carrier pigeon, chances are

I'll respond. I'll link everything in the show notes below for anybody that wants to email you or send a pigeon.

Brilliant, brilliant. All right. Well, thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on.

Are you kidding me? Thank you so much for staying up late, even though the 11 hour difference. And just like,

I've honestly never heard this before. I've never heard any of this before. So thank you. Oh my goodness.

It was a massive pleasure. You let me talk about the things I love talking about. So thank you. Thank you.