How should eschatology affect how we live today?

Question 10154.

Practical eschatology is not a phrase you will find in Scripture, but it describes something the New Testament does constantly: it tells us about the future and then immediately tells us how to behave on Monday. Prophecy in the Bible almost never arrives without an application attached.

That is worth saying, because end-times teaching has acquired a reputation for charts, arguments and speculation. The apostles were interested in none of that for its own sake. They were interested in what kind of people we become when we know how the story ends.

The Apostolic Pattern

Watch how the writers do it. Paul spends fifty-seven verses on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 and then finishes: therefore be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Peter describes the heavens dissolving and asks what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness. John describes our future likeness to Jesus and adds that everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself.

Even the great rapture passage ends not with a chart but with a pastoral instruction: therefore encourage one another with these words. That is practical eschatology in its purest form, doctrine handed over for immediate use.

If our study of the last things leaves us better informed and no more holy, we have used it in a way the apostles never did.

Urgency Without Anxiety

The first effect is a certain quality of urgency. If Jesus could come at any moment, then today matters, and the things that seem permanent are not. Paul says the appointed time has grown very short, and tells the Corinthians to deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it, because the present form of this world is passing away.

But notice what this urgency is not. It is not panic, and it is not the frantic energy of people trying to work out dates. Jesus commanded watchfulness and forbade calculation in the same discourse. Practical eschatology produces alertness, not agitation, and you can tell the difference by whether a person is more prayerful or just more excitable.

I have watched believers wreck their peace and their witness over prophetic speculation. See why date setting is wrong for why I regard it as more than a harmless enthusiasm.

Accountability at the Judgement Seat

Every believer will stand before the judgement seat of Christ, where our work is assessed and rewarded, though our salvation is never in question. Paul says we make it our aim to please Him because we must all appear there.

That prospect changes small decisions. It gives dignity to hidden work, because nothing done for Him is lost, and it takes the sting out of being overlooked, because the assessment that matters is still to come. The volunteer who sets out chairs at seven in the morning with nobody watching is working for a different audience. I write about it in the Bema seat.

Comfort in Grief and Suffering

Practical eschatology does its finest work at a graveside. Paul’s stated purpose in describing the resurrection and the rapture was that the Thessalonians would not grieve as others do who have no hope. Their grief was not forbidden. Its character was transformed.

The same is true of suffering more widely. Paul weighs present affliction against future glory and calls the affliction light and momentary, which is a startling thing to say from a man who had been stoned and shipwrecked. He was not minimising pain. He was measuring it against something enormous.

Revelation was written to churches under real persecution, and its purpose was to show frightened believers who is on the throne (Revelation 21:4). Every tear wiped away is an eschatological promise doing pastoral work.

Evangelistic Seriousness and Loose Hands

If the resurrection of the unjust is real, then the people around us are heading somewhere. That conviction is what put Paul on the roads of Asia Minor, and it is what has emptied comfortable Englishmen out of their armchairs and onto mission fields for three centuries.

It also loosens the grip on possessions. Jesus told us to lay up treasure where moth and rust do not destroy, which is a straightforwardly eschatological investment strategy. Peter calls us sojourners and exiles. You do not redecorate a hotel room. Practical eschatology holds property, career and reputation with an open hand, not because they are worthless but because they are temporary.

Practical Eschatology and Endurance

There is a kind of stamina that only comes from knowing the ending, and the New Testament appeals to it constantly.

James tells suffering believers to be patient until the coming of the Lord, using the picture of a farmer waiting for the early and the late rains. A farmer does not stand in the field demanding immediate results. He works, waits and trusts the season. That is practical eschatology applied to the long haul rather than the dramatic moment.

Hebrews does the same for a congregation on the edge of giving up, reminding them that they have need of endurance so that when they have done the will of God they may receive what is promised, for yet a little while and the coming one will come and will not delay (Hebrews 10:36-37). Endurance is fuelled by the future, and a believer with no eschatology has nothing to burn.

Where Practical Eschatology Goes Wrong

Two distortions are worth naming, because both have real histories.

The first is withdrawal. If everything is going to burn, why plant trees, treat illnesses, or trouble with education and politics? That reasoning has emptied some churches of any usefulness to their neighbourhoods. Yet Jeremiah told exiles to build houses and plant gardens in Babylon and seek the welfare of the city, and they were only there for seventy years. Knowing the world is temporary is not a licence to be useless in it.

The second is idleness. The Thessalonians had some who stopped working altogether because they expected the Lord imminently, and Paul’s response was blunt: if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. Practical eschatology never produces a man sitting on a hill in a white sheet. It produces a man at his bench, doing good work, with one ear open.

Between withdrawal and idleness sits the New Testament’s actual counsel, which is unremarkable and demanding: keep doing your duty faithfully, and be ready. See the doctrine of imminence for how expectation and ordinary faithfulness belong together.

Practical Eschatology in the Local Church

Most of what I have described is worked out not in private but in a congregation, and that deserves saying plainly.

Hebrews tells us to stir one another up to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near (Hebrews 10:24-25). Notice the logic. The approaching Day is given as a reason to gather more, not less. Practical eschatology drives believers together rather than into private survivalism.

That has consequences for how a church spends its time. Teaching that prepares people to stand, relationships strong enough to bear bad news, and habits of prayer that do not depend on circumstances. Those are the things that hold when a diagnosis arrives or a job goes.

I would rather pastor a congregation that could not draw a prophetic chart but knows how to sit with a grieving family than one that has the timeline perfect and no one to phone at midnight.

Two Questions Worth Asking Yearly

I find it useful to put two questions to myself once a year, usually somewhere between Christmas and the new year when things are quiet.

The first is whether anything I am currently anxious about will matter at the judgement seat. Most of it will not, and naming that out loud tends to shrink it to a workable size.

The second is whether anything I am currently neglecting will matter there. That question is less comfortable, and it usually produces a name rather than a project: someone I have not forgiven, someone I have not visited, someone I have never spoken to about Jesus.

Those two questions have done more to order my diary than any book on productivity I have ever read.

So, now what?

Here is a test I use on myself. Has what I believe about the future changed anything about my week? Not my opinions, my week. My diary, my giving, my patience with difficult people, my willingness to speak about Jesus to somebody who might laugh.

If the answer is no, then the doctrine is sitting in the head like a book on a shelf. The apostles never left it there. Every time they wrote about the end they reached for the reader’s hands and feet.

So pick one thing. One relationship to mend, one habit to drop, one person to tell, one sum of money to release. Do it this week, on the assumption that He might come next week. What would you want to be found doing?

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

1 Corinthians 15:58 (ESV)