How Long, O Lord?

The German philosopher Schopenhauer was found sitting disconsolately on a park bench after closing time and was asked, “Who are you?” He replied, “I wish to God I knew.” So wish untold millions. Today, boredom is a major problem in the Western world. It is largely because of this unanswered question. Those who never answer the park warden’s question will ultimately sink into overwork, overindulgence, despair, or suicide. A similar question is this, “Is the world a ship or an iceberg?” Is the world going some place and does it have a captain? For thousands of years the heathen world and its priests and philosophers favored the symbolism of a circle merging into a snake as a picture of reality—the circle declared that existence was a matter of constant repetition as though a snake swallowed its tail and ultimately emerged again as a snake. Nietzsche taught this “eternal recurrence” also, so there had always been Nietzsches infinitely teaching the same, and there would be for all time. In other words, the world is going no place, only around and around. The world goes round and round, like a mill Grinding forth life and death, good and ill. The Christian view found in Scripture is very different. It pictures existence not as a circle but as an arrow going to a target, a target reached by the Cross and consummated at the Second Coming. What Christians call eschatology discusses this, drawing from the prophetic Scriptures. Some of these Scriptures are apocalyptic, that is, they consist of unusual symbols expressing messages about coming days. Apocalyptic has been called “the mother of Christian theology” because its themes are central to the teachings of Christ as found in the Gospels. The first great Apocalypse was Daniel, the book that, according to many scholars like the famous Westcott, “exercised a greater influence upon the early Christian Church than any other writing of the Old Testament.”