O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

God knows what He's doing. And praise to His name, one of the things He's doing, a real showcase for the glory of His power, is sanctifying me. It takes a special kind of sinner to turn Biblical ignorance into a badge of spiritual pride. But I am that special kind of sinner. I managed to do it, and no doubt I will yet do it again. While my brothers in the faith showed their own foolishness by disputing over questionable things like the end times, I, of course, wisely stood above the fray. Spiritual maturity, you see, meant leaving last things for last. It meant mastering first the really clear stuff, like Paul's epistles. Then we could get down to the fuzzy trivia of the end of the story. Like Luther before me, and Marcion before him, because of my zeal for one aspect of the Bible, I gallantly tossed other parts of the Bible overboard. Or to confuse the metaphor still more, it was justification and sanctification first, but eschatology, even optimistic eschatology, would have to go down with the ship.

I was not only a "pan-millenialist"—that is, one who believes that everything will pan out in the end—but like most of the rest of them, I was a smug one. (Jettisoning my pan-millenialism, however, sadly hasn't eradicated all my smugness.) But as God moves time forward, as He moves all the pieces toward the greatest of all climaxes, one of those moves is our sanctification. On His way to the ending that matters a great deal to Him, He, in His grace, made it mean a great deal to me. He woke me up from my own dogmatic slumbers, to my own contempt for His Word. You've all seen that bumper sticker that reads, "God said it. I believe it. That settles is." We need to beware that there is more than one way to not believe what God says. The first and most obvious, is to listen carefully to it, and then reject it. The other is to plug up our ears. The only apologia one needs for studying the end times is simply this, the Bible talks about it. Not only should we avoid speculation by adopting the wisdom of Calvin who wrote, "Where God has not deigned to speak, I will desist from inquiry," but on the other hand we must affirm that whenever God speaks, we will deign to listen. Whatever God's intention for putting the book of Revelation in our Bibles, it wasn't simply to provide a buffer zone between the harsh elements and the book of Jude. Rather, it was to teach us something.

There is, of course, mass confusion on the end times. Those folks who seem to have fallen off the other side of the four horsemen, who think all the Bible is either anachronistic or the pre-game show for the book of Revelation, are horribly confused. Much of that confusion grows out of the fact that they missed the first showing. That is, they are forced to construct elaborate schemes (like getting the Temple rebuilt, and worse, cloning to get the proper ashes from the proper red heifer), because while they know the Bible says the Temple would be destroyed, they don't realize that it already happened. Worse still, on the fringes of the Reformed culture, we have a bevy of noisy heretics who no longer long for the consummation, because they think it already happened. And then we have our friends who, when they do talk about the end times, are so busy telling us what they don't believe that they tell us nothing at all.

We are a selfish people, and so come to the Bible with our own agenda. We see therein that it teaches that we can be saved. And we stop there. Now that my eternity is taken care of, what else is there to worry about? But the Bible isn't ultimately the story about how we get to spend forever in heaven. Long before I'd ever heard of N.T. Wright—whom I still haven't read—I've been reminding people of what I learned after I stopped shushing God when He wanted to talk end times: soteriology serves eschatology. Or to put it a little more simply, we are saved for eternity. We tend to think that the kingdom of God is simply where God decided to put us after He had done the important work of saving our souls, that we have a doctrine of end times because we need a sort of denouement after the climax of our salvation. But the opposite is true. The plan begins with the kingdom. And then we have to figure out how to fill it, who will be its citizens, and how they will get there. As Gordon Clark wisely pointed out, the plan and the act work in opposite directions. You act from A to Z, but plan from Z to A. To figure out how to get from here to there, I have to start there and work my way back. So the story must begin with the end. Last things first.

But before you get your knickers in a twist because I've gotten unspiritual, before you complain that I've turned to the back of the book, there is still more to the story. Ultimately the story is only proximately about us. But ultimately it is also only proximately about the kingdom. The real end, in both senses of the term, is greater even than the kingdom, for the real end is the beginning, Jesus Christ. We exist for the kingdom, but the kingdom exists for the King. Soteriology serves eschatology. But eschatology serves Christology. First thing first.

Which is why eschatology matters—it's all about Jesus. The glorious thing about the return of the king is not so much the return as it is the king. And that in turn is why Christmas matters. By putting ourselves in the shoes of our fathers, the faithful Jews of the Old Testament, we can begin to understand what it must have been like to long for Messiah. While we live on this bright side of the cross, we too live in a time and place where God's people are as unwashed as the world around them. We too suffer under a strange and foreign empire. As the enlightenment experiment fades to black, we've found that there is darker than dark, blacker than black. And we live right in the middle of it.

But we have not yet so matured in our faith. We still haven't learned. We too, like those who are likewise our fathers, those unfaithful Jews of the Old Testament, need to be reminded that this is not the end, that the pax Americana is not only not the consummation of the kingdom, but is in fact just another manifestation of the kingdoms of this world. The triumph of "democratic capitalism" is less a giant leap toward the consummation than it is a grand illusion, a cover for the apotheosis of the state. We are at ease in Babylon, and so do not long for the return of the King. We do not long for the return of the King, and so are at ease in Babylon. We do not look for the city whose builder and maker is God. We are at peace where there is no peace. But we will not be ransomed until we realize we are captive.

We are called, however, to a paradoxical peace. We are called to manifest a peace that can only come by war. We are called to an ease that can only come through tension. If we are satisfied with the not yet, we have missed the already. That is, we will only long for the return of the King when we remember that He is not yet here. And when we suffer through this longing, then we will see that He is here already, that He is already God with us, and lo, He is with us always. We cannot dance until we learn to mourn. Once again, we first must lose our lives, and only then do we gain them.

We so need to get things in order. How often are we challenged to evangelism or prayer, this spiritual exercise or that, this program or the other, so that we can "reclaim America"? Our dispensational brothers, the heirs of the anabaptists, insist that it's all about getting souls saved, that we ought to be faithful for the sake of the lost. Our brothers on the eschatological right, however, insist that it's all about the institutions, that we need to clean up Babylon, that the glory of kingdom building is that we get to be kings and queens. The former do not work but wait. The latter are mere hirelings, working for wages. Of course we are to proclaim the good news. We long, as we sing, to see His churches full. We are to love our enemies, praying that they will become not merely our friends, but our brothers. And of course we are likewise to build His institutions. We are to bring not just every thought but every thing captive to the obedience of Christ. And those on the right are right that we will be, and even now are, kings and queens. But our goal in manifesting the kingdom, in expanding the boundaries wherein the Son is kissed, is not more power for us. The dispensationalists want us to occupy until He evacuates us. The theonomists just want to occupy. What we are called to is to conquer not just until He comes, but so that He comes. We labor with vigor in His vineyard so that His return will be all the sooner. Our power is here, that our end, our omega, is, again, the Alpha.

Simplicity, we argue, is not found in home-grown eggs, home-brewed beer, or home-made music, as wonderful as those may be. Rather, it is found in seeking the one thing. It is found is using Occam's razor to shave away every distraction, every bauble, every bell and whistle, everything that tugs at our attention, so that all that we are becomes focused. And that focus is not ultimately on simplicity, or separateness or deliberateness. It is not even the kingdom. The one thing is the One Thing—Jesus, the Messiah. Simplicity means that when we hold even as glorious a blessing as a newborn child, what we see in that child is the glory of the Only Begotten.

To be separate, as the Messiah told us, isn't a matter of leaving the boundaries of this earth. It is, however, to remember that we are citizens of another kingdom. We have a separate agenda, a separate worldview, a separate end, a separate peace. What separates us from the world around us is that they will do anything to avert their gaze from the King, while we look only for Him. That separateness which is not yet, is the same as the separateness that is already. The hell that awaits them isn't separation from God, but His very presence. The joy that awaits us is the same—His very presence. The agony in which they now live likewise is His presence, as is the joy in which we live.

It is a good thing to see in the everyday, even in the latest eye candy from Hollywoood, signposts of the return of the King. But if we are more eager for the release of a movie than we are for the revelation of the King, we know whom we worship. Let us instead, with both forethought and fervor, deliberately and passionately cry out in love, in joy, in peace, in patience, in kindness, in goodness, in faithfulness, in gentleness, in self-control, for His return. Let us deliberately long for nothing else, save what serves this true end.

Our prayer is as He taught us to pray. We long for two things that are but one. We cannot separate the King from the kingdom. And You cannot separate the King from the glory. Thus we pray "Thy Kingdom come," even as we pray "Maranatha Lord Jesus. The land and the King are one. And He is the express image of the glory of the Father. Our labor then is all for the glory of God and for the building of His kingdom. And as we labor in His fields, even as they groan in their waiting, may we not only pray expectantly but sing joyfully. And may we sing not only O Come O Come Emmanuel as those who waited ransom, but as those who await consummation, who await His return, may we sing the Messiah—He shall reign for ever and ever, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Alleluia.