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Kingdom of God - Nativity Cycle - Prophecy

The Last Judgement

Please make sure that you have read the "Kingdom of God" page first.

Setting the Scene

The kingdom of God may have been breaking through into this world as Christ healed, delivered, taught and worked his way toward the hour of his Passion but the final showdown with evil and death was yet to come.  Of course, the resurrection of Christ constituted the beginning of the End in the sense that death was now on the way out and Satan had been put to flight but there remained all those prophecies of Christ's earthly ministry concerning the End itself. 

Although the first Christians expected the early return of Christ in judgement, already in the New Testament a second generation of believers needed to hear from St. Peter why that coming had been apparently delayed (2 Peter 3:8-9).  St. Peter argues that God's time is not our time and that his forbearance is to give more time for repentance. 

It is important to recognise at this point that the Church's understanding of End Time prophecies did change as decades turned to centuries and even centuries to millennia.  Never has the expectation of the Second Coming and the Resurrection to New Life and Judgement wavered but the Church soon came to its final interpretation of these prophecies, resisting both a literalist expectation of an earthly reign of Christ for a 1000 years and a "normalisation" that would have all the future references removed in a sanitised present fulfilment.   Orthodox interpretation held both to those prophecies that were clearly fulfilled in the apostolic age (for example the destruction of the Temple in the first Jewish revolt of AD 65-70; cf. Mark 13) AND to the future hope of the Judgement and Second Coming, but without the endless destructive fevered speculations of the heterodox (false believers).

The book of the Revelation was received late into the canon of Scripture precisely because in the wrong hands and without the guiding hand of Tradition it could so easily be misused by the literal minded into frightening subsequent generations of believers that the End was near because this or the other tyrant had qualified as the Antichrist or (in more recent days) the claim that the establishment of the State of Israel marked the dawning of Armageddon itself.

Reading prophecies in this way as runes of an ever present crisis is to misuse them.  Christ prophesied the End but refused to map out the precise territory of how and when it would happen.  Orthodox Christianity maintains both the same expectation but also the same sobriety and restraint.  It's terribly tempting to yield to culture pressure for the "mother of all (spiritual) battles" and jump on the bandwagon of contemporary fears and loathings, but to do this is to play the devil's own game.  Far better to pray calmly for the Lord's Second Advent and for mercy on our souls at His appearing as befits those who both serve and have confidence in their Saviour.

Practical

Reconsider the "Our Father" - the Lord's Prayer.  Re-evaluate what it is saying in the light of the prophecies of the coming Kingdom and the End which is the Judgement of the living and the dead.

Has your appreciation of the prayer changed?  If yes, how?  Explain with reference to the individual clauses of the prayer.

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