God's Problem (31 page)

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Vindication.
But intervene he will, in a cataclysmic act of judgment on this world. God is the one who created this world, and he is the one who will redeem it. He will vindicate his holy name, and the people who call upon his name, in a show of cosmic force. He will send a savior from heaven—sometimes thought of as the “messiah”; sometimes called “the Son of Man”—who will execute judgment on the earth and all who live on it. Those who have sided with God and the powers of good will be rewarded when this day of judgment appears; they will be brought into the eternal kingdom, a world in which there is no more pain, misery, or suffering. But those who have sided with the Devil and the powers of evil will be punished, sent away to eternal torment to pay for their disobedience to God and the suffering that they caused for God’s holy people.

Moreover, this judgment will affect not only those who happen to be alive when the end of this age arrives; it will affect
everyone,
living and dead. Jewish apocalypticists developed the idea that at the end of this age there would be a resurrection of the dead, when those who had previously died would be brought back to life in order to face judgment, the righteous to receive an eternal reward and the unrighteous to be subjected to eternal torment.

Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible there is no idea of a future resurrection. Some authors (most) thought that death led to a shadowy existence among the shades in Sheol; others seemed to think that death was the end of the story. But not the apocalypticists. They invented the idea that people would live eternally, either in the Kingdom of God or in a kingdom of torment. The first expression of this view comes, in fact, in the book of Daniel (chapter 12). The point of this view is clear: you shouldn’t think that you can side with the forces of evil in this world, become rich, powerful, and famous as a result (who else can acquire power in this world other than those who side with the forces in charge of it?), and then die and get away with what you did. You can’t get away with it. At the end of time God will raise you from the dead and make you face judgment. And there’s not a sweet thing you can do to stop him.

(4)
Imminence.
And when is this end of the age to come? When will God vindicate his name? When will the judgment day arrive? When will the dead be raised? For apocalypticists the answer was clear and compelling: It will happen very soon. It is right around the corner. It is imminent.

The reason for asserting that the end was almost here is obvious. Apocalypticists were writing in times of terrible suffering, and they were trying to encourage their readers to hold on, for just a little longer. Do not give up the faith; do not abandon your hope. God will soon intervene and overthrow the forces of evil, the powers of this world that are bringing such misery and anguish upon the people of God, the cosmic enemies who are causing the droughts, famines, epidemics, wars, hatreds, and persecutions. Those who are
faithful to God have just a little while to wait. How long will it be? “Truly I tell you, some of those standing here will not taste death before they see that the Kingdom of God has come in power…. Truly I tell you,
this generation
will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 9:1; 13:30).

Jesus of Nazareth was not unique in preaching that a good kingdom of God was coming very soon, that it had already “drawn very near” (Mark 1:15), that people of his own generation would see it arrive “in power.” In the essence of his proclamation, Jesus was preaching an apocalyptic message of hope to those who were suffering in this world. They did not have much longer to wait until God intervened. This was a message preached by a range of Jewish (and, later, Christian) apocalypticists, both before Jesus’ day and in the days after.

Jesus as an Apocalypticist

Most Christians today, of course, do not think of Jesus principally as a Jewish apocalypticist. This is certainly not the view of Jesus taught in most Sunday schools or proclaimed from most pulpits. Nevertheless, this is how the majority of critical scholars in the English-speaking (and German-speaking) world have understood Jesus for more than a century, since the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s classic study,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(in German it had the more prosaic title
Von Reimarus zu Wrede,
1906). I will not be able here to provide a full discussion of all the evidence that has led scholars to understand Jesus in this way—that would take an entire book, or more.
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And, in fact, for the point I’m trying to make, it does not much matter whether the historical man Jesus, himself, was an apocalypticist. What I’m trying to show is that the Bible contains apocalyptic teachings—and it is beyond doubt that throughout our earliest sources describing Jesus’ life, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is portrayed as delivering an apocalyptic message of the coming end and the need to remain faithful to God in anticipation of the judgment soon to occur.

In the New Testament Gospels, this apocalyptic view does not originate with Jesus, for it is already proclaimed by Jesus’ forerunner, the prophet John the Baptist. According to one of our earliest sources, John had the following to say to his opponents:

For John, the wrath of God was soon to appear. In a vivid image he likened this judgment scene to the cutting down of trees, which—like sinners—would be burned with fire. How soon would the chopping begin? The ax is already “lying at the root of the trees.” In other words, it is ready to begin, now.

Jesus delivers a similar message throughout our earliest sources. In the oldest surviving Gospel, Mark, Jesus’ very first words are an apocalyptic proclamation of the coming kingdom: “The time has been fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is very near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). When Jesus says that the time has been “fulfilled,” he is using an apocalyptic image: This age we live in now has a certain amount of time allotted to it. That time is almost up; it is like an hourglass that is full. God’s kingdom is about to arrive, and people need to prepare for it.

Jesus repeatedly speaks about this coming “Kingdom of God” in the early Gospels. For Jesus, this is not the destination of souls that leave the body and “go to heaven.” The Kingdom of God is a real place, here on earth, where God rules supreme over his people in a utopianlike state. But not everyone will be able to enter into it:

In particular, Jesus taught that a cosmic figure, whom he called the Son of Man, will bring in this kingdom in a cosmic act of judgment.
⁶
When Jesus refers to the Son of Man, he is probably alluding to the passage in Daniel that we saw earlier, in which “one like a son of man” comes on the clouds of heaven at the time of judgment on the earth. Jesus too thought that someone (whom he appears to have taken as an individual), called the Son of Man, would come on the clouds of heaven in judgment. In fact, this one will judge people based on whether they have listened to Jesus’ proclamation, done as he demanded, and repented in preparation.

This appearance of the Son of Man will involve a worldwide judgment, sudden and comparable in scope to the destruction of the world in the days of Noah:

This judgment will not be a happy time for the evildoers of earth, but the righteous will be rewarded:

This future kingdom will be an actual place, ruled, in fact, by the twelve followers of Jesus himself:

The kingdom will be inhabited by the “chosen ones” (for Jesus: the ones who adhere to his teaching) and will come only after this world, which is controlled by the forces of evil, is done away with:

In our earliest Gospels Jesus teaches that when this judgment day comes, there will be a complete reversal of fortune for those on earth. Those who are powerful and exalted now will be destroyed; but those who are poor and oppressed will be rewarded. There is an apocalyptic logic to this way of thinking. How is it that people in the present age can become rich, powerful, and influential? It is
only by siding with the powers that control this world; and those powers are evil. Who is suffering in this world? Who are the poor, the outcast, and the oppressed? It is those whom the powers of this world are afflicting. In the new age to come, everything will be reversed. The powers now in control will be deposed and destroyed, along with all those who sided with them. That is why the “first will be last and the last first” (Mark 10:31). This wasn’t just a clever one-liner that Jesus came up with one day to give us something to say when we’re trying to make the best of things while standing in a long line at the grocery store; it’s something he actually meant. Those prominent now will be taken out of power; the oppressed now will be rewarded. “All those who exalt themselves shall be humbled and those who humble themselves shall be exalted” (Luke 14:11). That is why “whoever is least among you, this one in fact is great” (Luke 9:48); and it is why “whoever humbles himself as this small child, this is the one who is great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:4).

The relevance of these teachings to the question of suffering should be obvious. For the Jesus of our earliest Gospels, those who are suffering in the present world can expect that in the world to come they will be rewarded and given places of prominence. Those who are causing pain and suffering, on the other hand, can expect to be punished. That is the point of the famous Beatitudes, which are probably given in their oldest form not in the well-known Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, but in the so-called Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6. There Jesus says: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” One might wonder what is so great about being poor. Is poverty really to be celebrated, something to be happy about? The saying best makes sense in an apocalyptic setting. The poor are “blessed” because when the Kingdom of God comes, they are the ones who will inherit it.

The same interpretation applies to “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” It’s not that it is inherently a good thing to be starving. But those who don’t have enough to eat now will
enjoy the fruits of the kingdom, when it arrives. Comparable are those who are wracked with other kinds of misery: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” All things will be reversed in the coming kingdom. That is why you should rejoice “when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you.” There will be a reversal in the age to come. Among other things, this means that those who have it good now had better take heed: when the kingdom comes, they will face dire consequences for the actions in life that have produced such good results: