‘End Times’ – One of the greatest lies ever told
You’ve heard it before. Pastors of today preaching that the end of the world is coming, that Israel will be attacked by an army with 100 million men, that God will intervene and wipe them all out to defend Israel, that the 3rd temple will be destroyed, the mark of the beast being forced on the people, blood running as high as the horses bridals, 6-7 months it will take to bury all the dead, and on and on.
Famous preachers push this story on the public because it fills church pews. The fact is that nothing gets a group of men together at 6am in the morning better than a discussion of ‘the end of the world’. That’s how men are from an early age. We see a stack of blocks, we knock em down. Put an explosion in a chick flick movie, and we’ll watch it. We’re made to find violence interesting. Do you think preachers know this? You bet they do. Just like they know that if the increase the volume of church music just before the preaching starts, you’ll be more emotional. It’s manipulation. It’s unnecessary if the church is more interested in feeding the sheep than in marketing numbers. But I’m off topic.
In my day job, I deal in words and phrases. I build web pages that contain keywords in the right places, with just the right mixture to get Google to rank the page well. I also deal in synonyms and other word related issues. I am very focused on how words are used.
‘End times’ has been misunderstood. Its meaning has been lost. The new testament was written in mostly Greek. Let’s think about that for a minute. In Spanish, the word ‘agua’ means water, but it also means ‘rain’ ‘leak’ or even ‘tide’ if you’re speaking in pure Spanish. When someone translates Spanish to English, they have to figure out what the original intent was for the sentence. This is exactly the same thing where you see ‘end times’ in the Bible. Someone had to make a decision between ‘end times’, ‘end of the era’, and ‘end of the world’ and there may be more.
Now think for a minute how English changes over time. “doh!” was never a word before Bart Simpson made it one. Now it’s in the dictionary. So is ‘aint’. Another concept to keep in mind is slang and how it has invaded the English language over time. “Phat” wasn’t a word and probably still isn’t today, but people use it and have written it, so someone will run across it in the next 50 years and wonder what it meant. Will they decide it means ‘an obese person’ or will they just know it stands for ‘pretty hot and tempting’? That all depends on when and where they discover it.
Now you’re beginning to understand my point. When was your Bible translated? The 1700s? The older the bible translation is, the further it is away from our language of today. If ‘end times’ today means end of the world, what did it mean in the 1700s? And even more important, when the translator was choosing English phrases, what were his choices? In the case of “end times”, in today’s language the most appropriate choice is ‘end of the era’.
The end of an era means the end of a period of time. An expanse of time where one situation meets its end. The end of an era happens every night at midnight when PM changes to AM. Those are ‘eras’, but they are not the ‘end of the world’.
Why do I believe in eras instead of end of the world? Evidence for ‘eras’ fills the Bible, not to mention the fact that we’re still here. While the Bible says the world was destroyed by water, the world is still here. Our English says one thing, but the Hebrew, in this case, means something else. (Likewise, Jonah was not swallowed by a whale, he was swallowed by a ‘big fish’.) Other eras include the old testament and new testament, the length of time the Jews lived in exile or the amount of time they lived in the desert, even the amount of time Jesus began his ministry to the time he was nailed to the cross.
Look for my other related posts on the book of Revelation and the war of AD 70.
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