Troublesome Topic: What Can We Know for Sure about the Future?

The perspective I offer is that the vision we call Revelation is intended as an encouragement to believers in persecution rather than as a means for predicting what will happen. In light of this perspective I ask, “What can we know for sure about the future?”

1. There Will Be a Final Judgment

We must acknowledge that God does judge or reward individuals during one’s lifetime, and we must acknowledge that the Bible makes more of an emphasis on this than we do. However, we must also agree that He will have a moment of ultimate punishment or reward. We don’t know much about that event. The meaning of the color white in the passage about the “great white throne” is that God’s judgement will be right, justified, and true. For the people of John’s day it would have been obvious that the color white was being used as a symbol. The message of the passage is in the meaning of the color, not the color itself. I repeat, there is very little we can know about that final judgment other than the fact that final judgment will occur, and we know its quality will be right and true.

Judgment is mentioned throughout much of the Bible and it is often presented as final or conclusive. It is presented that way because it is unavoidable and irreversible. We also know from the Bible’s use of words like Hades and Paradise, that the souls of the dead are being held in waiting for the final judgment. Revelation fits that pattern but does not add much to it.

2. Jesus Will Return to Punish and Reward

We know that Jesus will return. The purpose of His coming will be to punish or reward according to what each one has done. Revelation is clear that the punishment of the wicked will be severe. However, we cannot know much more than that with any degree of certainty. Nowhere does the Bible teach that the purpose of His coming is to whisk us out of here so we won’t have to suffer during an exceptionally brutal period of persecution. Our “meeting Him in the air” will be for the purpose of ushering Him to earth, not so He can usher us to heaven (see my lesson called “Is Harvesting the same as the Rapture?”). We do not learn anything of substance about Christ’s return from Revelation because that is not its purpose.

3. Heaven Is Real

We know that in heaven we will have unbroken communion and fellowship with God. That is the most important aspect of it. As Christians we are convinced it is “real,” meaning that it is a type of real existence. it may not be a physical place like we are used to. But it can be real even if it is not physical. Although we cannot say with certainty what heaven is like, we can be sure it is not just a figment of our imaginations. We also know that to arrive there one must be pure of heart, which requires a cleansing with the blood of Jesus. Other than that, we don’t know very much about heaven. Chapter 21 of Revelation is the passage commonly used to teach us details about what heaven looks like. But that chapter is intended as a picture of the church, not of heaven, so we need to unlearn most of what we have been taught about heaven.

CONCLUSION: So there you have it; those are the three things we can be confident about. Are you underwhelmed? What’s more there is very little about these things that we can be sure of beyond saying that they are true. We see from this that most of the discussions about eschatology are arguments about things that we have no way of knowing anything about. Those things that have been interpreted to mean something about the future are all symbolism and we have largely missed the truths being communicated through those symbols because we have been focused on something else.

The next lesson in the study on Preliminary Info on Revelation is: The Purpose of Revelation

The next lesson in the study on The Most Important Excerpts from this Study of Revelation is: KEY #7 Interpret the Symbols as the Original Audience Did