The End is (Not) Near
TORCH INDEX
What if Jesus isn’t taking too long? Maybe Christians are waiting for the next level while the objective is still sitting on the screen.
Christians have been waiting for Jesus to come back for roughly two thousand years, and every few years we seem to find a new reason to believe this is finally it.
A war breaks out in the Middle East. An earthquake hits somewhere unusual. Israel does something. Russia or China does something. Somebody starts talking about rebuilding the Temple. A red heifer is born. A new technology looks suspiciously like the Mark of the Beast. Someone crunches the numbers and suddenly 666 is the sitting president. Before you know it, the book of Revelation is open on the kitchen table and somebody on TikTok has a timeline with lots of emojis.
Maybe we have been looking at this backward.
Maybe it's not Jesus. Maybe it's us. Maybe it's you. The Bible spells it out pretty clearly. While we're looking for signs in all the wrong places, maybe we just need to finish the level.
There is a ridiculously simple analogy for this, and anyone who has played a video game will understand it. You're playing a game and waiting for the next level to start, except it won't. So you wander around. You collect things. You explore the map. You complete side quests. You build stuff. Eventually you start wondering if the game is broken.
Then you notice the objective in the corner of the screen that you've been ignoring for the last six hours.
You haven't completed the level yet!
Christianity may have been doing something like that for a very long time.
The Objective
Before Jesus left, He gave His followers an assignment:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations...”
— Matthew 28:19
That started out pretty well.
Twelve guys became dozens. Dozens became thousands. Christianity spread through the Roman Empire despite persecution, imprisonment and executions. Paul seemed almost obsessed with taking the message somewhere it hadn't already been heard.
Then Christianity eventually became legal. Then respectable. Then powerful. Churches became institutions. Institutions became denominations. Christianity spread across continents and eventually became the largest religion on Earth.
That's an astonishing accomplishment. But, it wasn't the whole assignment.
Jesus didn't say, “Become the world's largest religion.” He said to make disciples of all nations.
There is a difference between making enormous progress on an objective and completing it, and perhaps Christianity became so successful that we stopped noticing the difference.
We built churches, schools, universities and hospitals. We fought wars, split denominations, reunited some of them, split them again, wrote millions of books, developed elaborate systems of theology and spent an impressive amount of time arguing with each other about how the end of the world is going to happen. Every Christian today basically has their own "mini Christianity" they follow complete with ritual, tradition, and dogma. It's why no one can agree on the finer details.
Meanwhile, the objective is still sitting in the corner of the screen waiting to be completed.
Then the End Will Come
This gets considerably more interesting when we look at something Jesus said earlier:
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
— Matthew 24:14
Read the sequence again. The gospel goes to the nations. Then the end comes. In that order. And just because most, not all, of the civilized world has heard of Christianity, there is a large chunk of people who are definitely not disciples and whole countries where the gospel of the kingdom is not being proclaimed. Mentioned? Sure. Celebrated? Not even close. In fact, some might say things are going in reverse in some places.
To be fair, Paul does use expansive language in Colossians 1:23, saying that the gospel “has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.”
But what exactly was “under heaven” to Paul? Certainly not the Americas, for starters. Paul was describing the remarkable spread of the gospel throughout the world known to him, not announcing that every civilization and every nation on planet Earth had now been reached.
And Jesus didn't simply tell His followers to make people aware that Christianity exists. After His resurrection, He told them to make disciples of all nations.
That assignment continued after Paul, continued after the first century, and continues today.
It still isn't finished.
So, what if that's the box we're actually waiting to check?
God Apparently Isn't in a Hurry
Then we get to 2 Peter, where somebody essentially asks the question Christians are still asking today.
Where is He?
Peter describes people asking, “Where is the promise of his coming?” The answer is fascinating because Peter doesn't respond with a prophetic calendar.
He says God isn't slow.
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
— 2 Peter 3:9
There is an explanation for the apparent delay sitting right there in the verse. God is patient because He doesn't want people to perish. He wants them to repent.
Peter comes back to the point a few verses later:
“Count the patience of our Lord as salvation.”
— 2 Peter 3:15
That is an extraordinary sentence when you think about it.
We look at two thousand years and call it a delay. Peter tells us to look at God's patience and call it salvation.
Paul says something similar in 1 Timothy 2:3–4, describing God as one “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
If God says He wants everyone saved, and Peter says His apparent slowness is patience because He wants people to repent, perhaps asking why God is taking so long is the wrong question.
Maybe He's told us already.
What If We're Waiting for Things That Already Happened?
This is where partial preterism enters the picture.
Partial preterism doesn't argue that everything is over, every prophecy has been fulfilled and there is nothing left to come. The partial matters. It argues that a substantial amount of New Testament prophecy concerned events in the first century, particularly those surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
That creates an interesting possibility for Christians still waiting for end-times signs today.
What if we're waiting for things that already happened?
The events surrounding Jerusalem in A.D. 70 are an obvious place to look. And even weirder are the accounts surrounding the war itself.
The first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who lived through the Jewish-Roman War, recorded a series of bizarre signs preceding Jerusalem's destruction. Among them, he reports that chariots and armed troops were seen moving through the clouds around the cities. Josephus apparently realized how unbelievable this sounded, because he said he would have considered the account a fable were it not reported by eyewitnesses and followed by events significant enough to seem worthy of such signs.
Josephus wasn't writing the New Testament. He wasn't even a follower of Jesus. He was a Jewish historian writing about a war he personally lived through, yet he recorded events that sound remarkably similar to things Christians would later point to in biblical prophecy.
That's what makes his account so interesting. He wasn't trying to prove Christianity right. He had no reason to manufacture evidence for Christian prophecy. If anything, that makes him about as independent a witness as you could ask for.
Even more interestingly, the Roman historian Tacitus preserved a remarkably similar account. He described armies appearing to battle in the sky, weapons flashing, and other extraordinary signs surrounding Jerusalem.
Were they describing an actual angelic battle taking place over Jerusalem? Maybe a UFO invasion? Maybe timelines merged? There is obviously no way to establish that two thousand years later. Neither historian identifies the armies as angels, and ancient historians weren't exactly carrying iPhones.
But think about what they did report.
Two ancient historians preserved accounts of what appeared to be armies in the heavens during the events surrounding Jerusalem's destruction. Josephus was Jewish. Tacitus was Roman. Neither was writing Christian scripture or trying to prove Christian prophecy true.
That is at least worth knowing before assuming every spectacular heavenly sign described in biblical prophecy must still be waiting somewhere in our future. And that's the important part.
If some of the events Christians are waiting for already happened, then waiting for them again isn't going to move anything forward. They're not the unfinished objective.
Making disciples of all nations is.
What Temple Are We Waiting For?
And don't forget the Temple. There are Christians today watching efforts to rebuild a Third Temple in Jerusalem because they believe its construction is necessary before Jesus can return.
But Jesus had something rather interesting to say about the Temple Himself:
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
— John 2:19
The people standing there thought He meant the building. John specifically tells us they were wrong:
“But he was speaking about the temple of his body.”
— John 2:21
Jesus spoke constantly in parables, riddles and metaphors, and this one isn't even left for us to decipher. John gives us the answer. The Temple was Jesus.
And He raised it in three days.
And if that particular prophecy was fulfilled a long, long time ago, why are Christians waiting for another Temple to be built before Jesus can return?
Maybe we're waiting for the wrong building.
And What About 666?
Then there is everybody's favorite number.
Revelation doesn't simply drop 666 into the text as an inexplicable supernatural barcode. It tells the reader to **calculate** it because it is the number of a man.
One of the oldest and strongest proposed solutions is Nero Caesar.
Using the Hebrew numerical values of the letters in the form Neron Caesar, the name totals 666. Even more interesting is that some ancient manuscripts of Revelation give the number as 616 instead. Drop the final “n” from Neron to use the Latin form Nero, and the calculation changes accordingly to 616.
That doesn't settle the interpretation of Revelation. There are other proposed solutions, and Revelation is far too complicated to reduce to “Nero did it.”
But it makes sense of something that otherwise seems bizarre. Why encode the man's identity as a number and tell knowledgeable readers to calculate it? Maybe because writing openly against imperial power wasn't particularly healthy.
Revelation is apocalyptic literature. Beasts, horns, dragons, women, cities and numbers communicate through symbols. The original audience wasn't necessarily sitting around wondering what these symbols would mean to Christians two thousand years later. Some of them may have understood exactly what John was talking about.
If Nero or the Roman imperial system sits behind some of Revelation's imagery, then Christians waiting for a future political figure to finally become “the Beast” may once again be waiting for something whose original referent belonged to the world in which Revelation was written.
Maybe the Game Isn't Broken
None of this means there is nothing left.
Partial preterism is partial for a reason. There is still an ultimate Christian hope ahead: resurrection, restoration, the fullness of God's kingdom, however all of that ultimately unfolds.
The question is whether the apparent delay has been misunderstood.
Christians have spent an enormous amount of energy looking for evidence that God is almost ready. We watch Israel. We watch wars. We watch technology. We watch world leaders. We watch for temples and beasts and numbers. We watch the stars, the skies, and every YouTube video we can consume.
But perhaps some of those signs are behind us rather than ahead of us. And meanwhile there is one thing we know Jesus told His followers to do, and nobody can seriously claim it has been completed.
Make disciples of all nations.
This is where the video-game analogy stops being funny.
Imagine a player who has spent hundreds of hours wandering around a level. He has built an enormous base. He has accumulated more resources than anyone else. He has explored most of the map. He has written detailed guides explaining the game's lore. He belongs to the largest guild in the game, although his guild has split into several thousand smaller guilds because nobody can agree on exactly how the game should be played.
And he is furious because the next level won't load, complains endlessly on the message boards about it, and eventually somebody asks the obvious question:
Did you finish the objective?
Christianity began with a tiny group of people who apparently believed Jesus when He told them to go. They went. Then others went. Then others went. Somewhere along the way, perhaps we became comfortable being successful rather than finished. Life got in the way.
We built civilizations. We raised families. We accumulated property. We created traditions. None of those things are inherently bad. Many are good. But two thousand years later, we're still looking toward heaven asking when Jesus intends to finish what He started.
Consider for a moment that maybe that's backwards.
Peter says God is patient because He wants people to repent. Paul says God wants all people saved. Jesus tells His followers to make disciples of all nations. And Jesus gives us at least one prophetic pattern in which the gospel goes out to the nations before the end comes.
Does that mean Jesus literally cannot return until some divine progress bar reaches 100 percent? Scripture doesn't give us that equation. But the question is difficult to avoid.
And what would 100 percent even mean? New people enter the world every day, while others leave it having never heard the gospel at all. If God truly wants everyone saved, that raises another question entirely: What happens to the people who never got the chance?
But that's a rabbit hole for another day.
What if the apparent delay isn't evidence that Jesus has been slow to keep His promise? Peter specifically tells us it isn't.
What if God's patience has given the Church century after century to carry out the assignment Jesus left us, and instead of asking why He hasn't moved things along, we should be asking why we haven't?
For two thousand years we've been waiting for the next level to load while the objective has remained on the screen. Maybe the game isn't broken. Maybe we're just not finished.
And if that's true, then Christians may have spent an awfully long time asking when Jesus is coming back when the more uncomfortable question has been sitting in front of us all along:
You're not waiting on Jesus. He's waiting on you.