This spring season has brought many natural disasters (due in part to global climate change?), but not the cataclysmic judgment day predicted by some “true believers heard ad nauseam on public radio. We (not God) may someday become responsible for the world’s destruction at which time God (not we) will save the day by making God’s final and decisive appearance to save God’s creation—including all of us, insofar as we are willing to have him as Lord.

In an article found in The Green Bible entitled “Jesus is Coming. Plant a Tree.” Dr. N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, England debunks popular theories concerning the rapture (The true believers are taken to heaven before all else becomes toast here.) Here is some of what he has to say:

“When we talk of Jesus “coming” we make it sound as if he is presently a long  way away, as though in order to “come” he would have to make a massive journey from a far distance. But “appear” is different. As we find in many passages in the New Testament, Jesus is not far away; he is in heaven. Heaven is not a place up in the sky—it is God’s dimension of what we think of as ordinary reality. This is one of the most fundamental things to grasp about the biblical structure of the universe, and it is the failure to grasp it that leaves many Christians puzzled about how to put together the biblical picture of the end times of God’s ultimate future.”

So let us cooperate with God to save the earth, knowing that if we fail we will, nevertheless, have been faithful to a God who cannot fail.

Michael