Do we live in Apocalytic times?

1 Samuel 4:1b-11
Acts 4:32-5:11
Luke 21:20-28

This a trifecta of violence and warfare. We start with the Israelites battling with the Philistines quite unsuccessfully, then have a couple dropping dead when Peter calls them out on cheating the collective, and Jesus in one of his apocalyptic moments.

The passage from Samuel tells the story of a battle in which the Israelites bring out the ark as their secret weapon, but the Philistines figure they just need to stand up and fight. Which they do, and they capture the ark of the covenant and kill Eli’s two sons Hophni and Phinehas. Of course their victory is short-lived—having the ark around creates all sorts of disease and death in their city. So they give the ark back after 7 months.

The story is really about Eli’s failure to protect things and letting his sons run amok. The Lord sets him back, as the Lord is wont to do.

In Acts, after again explanatory that the earliest church held everything in common (champions of collectivism might point to this as a prescription for Christian life, and as much as I’d like them to be true, it never seemed that way to me—it reads more like a practical solution developed at that time), the story describes how Ananias and Sapphira sell a piece of property but lie about the price so they can hold some back for themselves. Peter knows about it (God told him, or Peter checked comparables), confronts Ananias, points out that he has lied to God. Ananias points out that he has lied to God, and Ananias falls straight out and dies. 3 hours later his wife Sapphira shows up, Peter puts her through the same routine and she dies. Rough justice, if you assume Peter “zapped” them. Or an indicator of the terrible burden you take on by deceiving yourself into thinking you can deceive God.

Finally, Jesus prophesizes the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Coming. “These are the days of vengeance,,,Woe to those who are nursing infants in those days.” Earlier in the chapter he started this tale of end times: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” Earthquakes, famines, plagues, portents and signs from heaven.

As Jesus describes it, those end times are near. This generation, i.e., the one he’s talking to. But he obviously didn’t mean quite that, unless you look at the last 2,000 years of human history as an extended time of days of vengeance, with every successive outrage and holocaust part of the same. You can definitely make this case.

You can also make the case we’ve been given a pretty wonderful world to live in, and one in which we even see glimmers of humans getting their act together. We understand genocide is wrong (not clear anyone much in the 18th or 19th century saw anything wrong say in wiping out Native Americans so my ancestors could take over their land). We cure some diseases. Life spans lengthen (some places, some times, some groups). Women get treated more like full participants in human society. And so on.

We live in fairly apocalyptic times. I think the next 5 years are going to be telling. I think we’re going to get an idea of what global warming is going to do. It may be hard to get away from things like this passage in Luke. My little litany of positive advances may seem more and more ridiculous. There is some attraction in living in a world of imminent violence—defeat by the Philistines, getting struck dead, and those grand battles of ignorant armies on the darkling plain. It's all so dramatic.

Maybe there’s a couple of things to take from this. First, as the horrors and disasters of the world seem to crowd in, maybe words like Jesus’ account of the Second Coming in fact caution us against embracing the pessimism about the world that goes along with it. This Second Coming exists on some other plane, spiritual or metaphorical, and you can’t count on the end of things. No, you count on them continuing and behave accordingly. And the people of God will suffer setbacks, but you have to keep reading to the end.

I let these pasages lead to this question: do we live in Apocalyptic times? That leads to the idea that we always live under the shadow of the Apocalypse, each successive generation. It's there, a place we slip into during our lives, but one we have to pull ourselves out of as well. In Biblical and religious terms, it is by remembering the other parts of the book and the story. The Psalms of forgiveness and plentitude.