Preached · November 15, 2020
Series · Apocalypse
Introduction: What We Think About the End
Hello, Table Church. I'm Pastor Anthony, lead pastor here, and it is good to be with you. We are diving into a new series called Apocalypse: A How-To Guide. Because if it's not the end of the world already, then why not figure out how to deal with it when it comes?
So let's jump right in. Here's the main idea we're going to be talking about this week and next: what we think about the end affects how we think and what we do right now. What we think about the end affects how we think and what we do today.
How many of you have ever put together some furniture from IKEA, or something similar, flat-pack? The helpful thing about IKEA furniture — even if the directions are so-so; I actually think they're fine — is that it's nice to know what it is you're building. Imagine if someone handed you a piece of IKEA furniture, but you didn't know what it was. You didn't have a picture of it, and you just had to go for it. You could follow the directions a little bit, but it's really nice to know, "Oh, it's supposed to look like this at the end. Okay, I need to do this, this, and the other thing."
Or how many of you watch the Great British Bake Off? On British Bake Off, the second challenge is the technical challenge, and they don't get a picture of it. They don't get time to practice. They just get handed a sheet of directions that are very vague. And if you don't know what the thing is that you're making — some sort of tart, crumble thingy that they make in England — you just have to go for it and hope you get it right. And everybody's kind of looking over their shoulder to see, "Is that what it's supposed to look like?"
Or imagine putting together a puzzle, but you don't have the box, so you don't have the picture, and you're just trying to figure it out. Imagine there are no edge pieces; it's all just rough pieces. It'd be really, really difficult to get that done.
So what we think about the end — the goal, the picture, the piece of furniture we're making, the crumble tart we're supposed to be baking — affects what we do today. It gives us an idea of our direction, our trajectory, where we're going, and how we get to where we want to go.
Now, I don't know if you've heard, but there are some beliefs out there about where the world is going, what the end is going to look like, and what it's going to be like. And those ideas, I think, have dramatically shaped how Christians and believers behave today.
I don't know if you've ever heard the name John MacArthur. He's a preacher out in California, and he recently gave a sermon on — his words, not mine — the "false science of climate change." And this is what he said, denouncing that fake science: "God intended us to use this planet and to fill this planet for the benefit of man. Never was it intended to be a permanent planet. It is a disposable planet. Christians ought to know that."
And this is not some fringe lunatic off on a coast somewhere. This is actually a pretty common, standard position for a lot of believers: that we live on a paper-plate, styrofoam-cup planet that's meant to be thrown away, so do with it what you will.
This idea sprang from one verse that then kind of infected how folks read the Bible. It comes from 2 Peter 3:10. I'm going to read this in the King James, because I think this is actually where things for English speakers went awry. According to this verse, our planet is disposable. You can throw it away. We can use it up in whatever way we have to, because, well, it's all going to disappear anyway. It's all going to burn. So we can do what we want.
Now, that's weird. It's a weird passage, because it's the only place in early Christian literature, the New Testament, that says anything like that. And like I said, this view affects how you read the rest of Scripture. If you get this verse wrong, then you're going to read the rest of Scripture as supporting this verse — that everything is meant to be burned up and gone and destroyed.
So how did that happen? Based off this one single verse, a whole theology has been built up, and all sorts of other Scripture has been read through that lens: that the world would be destroyed. And therefore, based on what we think of the end — the picture for the puzzle, the piece of furniture we're building — an earth that's destroyed and gone and burnt up and melted down to nothing... well, if that's what we think is going to happen, then why not just let it burn?
So if you are into good old-fashioned Bible study, this is your sermon. If you do not want to hear about Greek words and ancient manuscripts, this would be a good time to go make yourself a latte or a cocktail and come back later for communion. Sorry, worship team, you don't get that option.
We've got three things to talk about today. Number one, we're going to talk about some biblical manuscripts — ancient papyrus documents and how they affect Scripture. Oh boy, I bet you're excited. Number two, we're going to talk about the word "destruction." Number three, we're going to talk about the word "new." So: some manuscripts, destruction, new. That's our outline for today.
Some Manuscripts
Let's talk about manuscripts. When you're putting together a Bible, there are some steps you have to take. When you pick one off the shelf at a bookstore, or from Amazon, or wherever you get your Bibles — handed down to you from your grandparents, whatever — there are some steps that have to be done to get you that Bible.
For instance, it has to be translated. People have to make choices: okay, there's Hebrew and there's Greek and there's Aramaic; what kind of words am I going to use? But what are we translating it from? These languages were written and spoken many, many years ago. Where do those come from? We have manuscripts — the ancient documents that scholars collect from libraries and archaeology and all those kinds of things. You have the manuscripts, which are then translated into a version you can buy at a store.
But those manuscripts — where do those come from? They're found across deserts and libraries and monasteries and cathedrals and old churches, buried in caves. Some people found them behind furniture. They're found all over the place. And remember, prior to the 1500s, there was no movable-type printing press in the West. China had something similar to it, but there weren't a lot of Bibles in China prior to 1500, believe it or not.
So people had to make copies by hand. If you were a priest or a monk or a nun or something like that, your job would be to take a piece of papyrus — you wanted your buddy down the street to have a copy of the book of 1 John or 2 Peter — and so you would write it down by hand. It's a painstaking process, of course.
Now, imagine you come across something that looks like a typo, a mistake, a word that seems out of place, or maybe somebody misplaced a letter. Do you copy it down word for word, jot and tittle for jot and tittle? Or do you think, "Well, whoever handed me this papyrus must have made a mistake, so I'm going to fix that myself"? Different people did different things.
So what scholars do is research the different manuscript schools — from Alexandria, Egypt, and Antioch, and Syria — all these different schools of manuscripts, where they can trace, "Oh, somebody made a copy here; they changed a letter over there. It looks like somebody tried to fix a mistake, but by trying to fix a mistake, they added a different one." There's a whole line of work, a career, you can go into where you compare all these different versions.
So something happens in 2 Peter 3, where we get this phrase, "and the earth and everything done in it will be burned up." Because after the King James Bible was printed, we kept finding older and older and older manuscripts. And logically, the older the manuscripts, the more accurate you'd think and hope they would be, because they would be closest to the original. We've got copies of the book of John from really late — the first century, the 90s, 100 A.D. We've got copies of 2 Peter from like 100 and 200 A.D. So ancient, ancient manuscripts, and we keep finding older and better ones that show us, "Oh, somebody who wrote this made a typo — or a right-o, I guess." And when we get to the older ones, we see what the originals said.
So after the King James Bible was printed, we find that "the earth was burned up" wasn't there. Here's what it says. If you go to a modern translation — NIV, ESV, New Living, anything like that — it says this in 2 Peter 3:10:
And the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
Now, that's a surprise. Imagine you're the person writing out these manuscripts. Things are going to be burning with fire. Something's going to be destroyed. Fire, destroyed... and then, the earth and everything in it is going to be revealed? Laid bare? That's a surprise. So you can imagine why someone would think, "Somebody made a typo. I need to fix this." And that typo got copied and copied and copied for many years, until you have John MacArthur many years later saying, "The earth is disposable." That's how things like this happen.
Now, modern translations have fixed this. If you use the King James or maybe even the New King James, it still says "burned up." And even in modern translations, there's a footnote that says some manuscripts say "be burned up." But our oldest and best manuscripts don't say "be burned up." They say "be laid bare," or "revealed," or "disclosed." That's actually what the word apocalypse means. Apocalypse means a revelation — for something to be revealed. In the book of Revelation, John receives an apocalypse, a revelation, something revealed to him by Jesus. So the same idea is here: the earth will be destroyed by fire — we're going to talk about the word "destroyed" — the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be revealed, apocalypsed, laid bare.
Now, the consensual Christian view is important here. What do I mean by the consensual Christian view? I mean how Christians have talked about the end — the picture on the puzzle box — across centuries and geography and time and space. It has not been that the earth would be burned up and destroyed. Rather, it has been that it will be revealed.
Now, how does "revealed" make sense in the context of fire? My two kids, Audrey and Wesley, ages four and two, love dinosaur oatmeal. So, dinosaur oatmeal: you have a little packet of oatmeal, you pour it in the bowl, and there are these little tiny eggs mixed in with the oats. Then you pour in your water or your milk — maybe you preheated it — and you start to stir. And what happens is that that sugary little dinosaur egg dissolves and reveals a little tiny dinosaur made out of pure sugar that my children love to eat.
So imagine the little dinosaur egg. I've tried this to show my kids. Drop it in cold water and stir and stir and stir — nothing really happens. Drop it in hot water — fire — and it dissolves and reveals something therein. So what 2 Peter is getting at is that this fire is going to dissolve, is going to reveal, what is actually true about God's creation. It's not that the world is disposable. It's not that everything is going to be destroyed and burned down and so we're just going to abandon it. Rather, this fire is a revealing fire. It's going to show the dinosaurs hiding in the eggs, so to speak.
The Word "Destruction"
So let's talk about the word "destruction." We've talked about manuscripts. We've talked about this whole "being burned up" — that's not the word that's been used; rather, it's "to be revealed." But the word "destruction" is used here. So if we go back to 2 Peter, we see "destruction" used a couple of different ways.
Verse 7 — this is chapter 3, verse 7:
By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
So, not going to lie, destruction has something to do with what is going to happen at the end — specifically, the destruction of the ungodly. And I know some of you are dying for me to preach a sermon on hell and all of that. We'll get there, I promise.
So the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment, the destruction of the ungodly.
The day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
We see it again in verse 12:
That day will bring the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.
So, "Okay, Anthony, yes, fine. There was a manuscript that somebody copied down wrong. It's not going to be burned up; it's going to be revealed. But there's still an awful lot of talk of destruction in here. What's that about?"
So in the Greek, we've got two words for destruction. Reading our English translation here in the NIV, we're getting just one word translated from those two words. So let me introduce you to those two words.
The first one is apoleia. Apoleia is what we think of when we think of the word "destruction." After it's been destroyed, it's gone. It doesn't exist anymore. Say goodbye. It's over. That's apoleia.
Now, there's a second word in the Greek for destruction, and that is luo. Luo can be translated "destroyed," as we see here in 2 Peter. But it's usually translated as a loosening — to loose something, like when you untie your shoe, or you untie your robe and it falls open. Sorry for the weird image, but that's how it's actually used in Scripture. It can mean something to be dissolved, like dinosaur eggs in oatmeal, or to be unwound, like a clock that's finally coming to a stop, or a string on a sweater being pulled — the more you pull, the more the sweater dissolves, comes apart, is loosened, is luoed.
So we see the word destruction in verse 7: the heavens and the earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction — apoleia — the "say goodbye" to the ungodly. But then when we get later into the passage, verse 10: the day of the Lord will come like a thief, the heavens will disappear, the elements will be luoed by fire — loosened, untied, undone, unwound, dissolved, as some translations say. The elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. Verse 12: that day will bring about the luo — the loosening, the dissolving, the unwinding, the tugging on the sweater until it's all pulled apart — of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.
So whenever you see "destroyed" in verses 10 through 12, that's a different kind of destruction. Not a destruction and therefore it's gone, but a taking apart — like a thousand Legos all taken apart and put back into the box.
Think of a caterpillar in a cocoon. The caterpillar, you know, on Monday eats one apple and is still hungry, on Tuesday eats two blueberries and is still hungry. Yes, I read a lot of children's books in my spare time. A caterpillar eats and eats and eats, and then it forms a cocoon, or a chrysalis, around itself. In that chrysalis it begins to release digestive enzymes until it turns into a goo. It dissolves itself, actually. If you were to slice it open, it would just kind of pour out. It's a terrible thing to do to a caterpillar that's worked so hard. Don't do that. And then that goop reconfigures itself into a butterfly.
Now, here's something that's absolutely wild to me. Scientists would expose caterpillars to certain kinds of odors and scents, and when the caterpillars got exposed to those scents, they would give the caterpillar an electric shock to train it to avoid those odors. So then the caterpillar creates the chrysalis, turns into the goo, and reconfigures itself into a butterfly. The butterfly comes out — and that same butterfly remembers to avoid those odors.
So this is important, friends. This is like the crux of what we're going to be talking about these two weeks. What happened to the caterpillar in its first life has repercussions for its second life. The pain and the hurt and the electric shocks that these terrible scientists gave it, it remembers — even though it's been dissolved, luoed, brought back down to its elemental parts, and then rebuilt again. What happened earlier has repercussions for what happens later. This is important.
So we see: the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear. The elements will be luoed — dissolved, brought back down to their basic parts — by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be revealed, laid bare, shown for what it really is. And since everything will be luoed in this way — loosened, unwound, dissolved — what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives.
The Word "New"
Verse 12: as you look forward to the day of God, speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction, the luo, the dissolving, the melting down of the heavens by fire and the elements in the heat. But in keeping with this promise, we are looking forward to our new keyword — a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.
Okay, fine. It's not burnt down; it's revealed. Okay, it's not destroyed; it's dissolved, like caterpillar goo. "Fine, but Anthony, it says a new heaven and a new earth. The earth is disposable; we're going to get a new one. We're throwing away the old model; we're going to get something better. So just let the old one burn, right?"
No, no, no, no. So, again, there are two words in the Greek for the word "new." The first is neos. Neos — N-E-O-S, looks like "Neo," like from The Matrix. Neos is what we think about when we think of the word "new." Chronologically new: it didn't exist, and now it does. It wasn't there, and bam, it is there. It's new. That's neos.
Now, the other word is kainos. Kainos refers to the quality of something, not its timeline, not its chronology — not that it didn't exist and now it does. Rather, it describes something that has already existed, and its quality, the "somethingness" about it.
So verse 13: keeping with this promise, we're looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. This is kainos, not neos. It's not that it didn't exist and now it does. Kainos has the quality of being new. It's renewed, and restored, and refreshed, and rebuilt. This is what Jesus says in Revelation 21: "See, I am making all things new." Jesus does not say — and never said — "Look, I am making all new things." That's different. That's not what Scripture teaches. Rather, Jesus says, "I am making all things new."
So let's read this again:
By the same word the present heavens and earth [verse 7] are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and the destruction — here today, gone tomorrow — the destruction of the ungodly. But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promises, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
Something about the quality of God — his character, his goodness.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. And since everything will be loosened, unwound, dissolved in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the loosening, the unwinding, of the heavens by fire, and the elements will be dissolved in the heat. But in keeping with his promise, we are looking forward to a renewed, restored, refreshed, and reconciled new heaven and new earth where — as one translation says — justice makes its home.
What Kind of People Ought You to Be?
Verse 11: since everything will be loosened and undone and unwound in this way, what kind of people ought we to be? This is the big question.
Because for John MacArthur and many, many others just like Ken — and this is the way I was raised, this is the way I was taught to believe — if the earth is disposable, if the world is just going to be destroyed completely someday, then we don't need to give a care. Climate change? Let the world burn. Systems of oppression that keep poor people poor and rich people rich and marginalized folks marginalized? Not our problem.
This is the origin, in fact, of rapture theology. Rapture theology is a form of escapism that says Christians — as long as they've, remember those banners we talked about, prayed the prayer, made a decision, et cetera — will fly away to Jesus in the sky and live in heaven while the world goes on to burn.
But listen to verses 11 and 12 again. What kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. Now wait a second — this is interesting. Peter seems to be implying that the dissolving of the elements — everything being melted down and shown for what it is, brought back to its elemental parts, the caterpillar being turned to glue, the dinosaur egg being dissolved and revealing that magical little dinosaur within — is in some way up to us, and how we live our lives. The decisions we make right now, today, in this moment, are in some way able to bring about the end of the world, or what I should probably call the beginning of a new world. It's like a caterpillar and a butterfly: the way the caterpillar lived its life has actual implications for what the future is going to look like.
So how do we skip to the end? How do we dissolve the elements and bring about the renewal of heaven and earth? That's what we'll talk about next week.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
