(Jason Boyett has written 314 books. I don’t know if that’s the exact number but it should be, because he’s really funny. And kind too as evidenced by the post he’s sharing with Stuff Christians Like. I am a huge fan of Jason and the variety of awesomeness he provides in both book format as well as on the Internets.)
Christians are passionate about some weird stuff, to be sure. If it were not so, this site would not exist. Nor would Holy Land theme parks, or television programs hosted by people who may or may not have purple hair, or those little figurines of Jesus as a football player trying to evade a little kid intent on tackling him (“Come unto Me, children. Oops — that’s called sandal dust, boy-eeee!”).
But one of the strangest things Christians like has got to be this: the end of the world, and anything related to it. This worrisome period is otherwise known by a variety of other names, including (in no particular order) The Last Days, The End Times, The Apocalypse, The Second Coming, The Crazy Stuff That Goes Down in the Book of Revelation, and The Deal That Left Behind Guy Kept Talking About a Few Years Back. In academic circles, this fascination with the world’s end is known as eschatology, a word that is difficult to spell but fun to say, because it’s only a few letters and one syllable removed from scatology, which is the study of (or a fascination with) excrement. Sometimes, sadly, eschatology and scatology can be indistinguishable. That’s why I wrote a book called Pocket Guide To The Apocalypse
Our last-days mania takes several forms. I get the feeling lists are important in the scheme of this blog, so I’ll make one. Here are the multiple things we like about the (potential) end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it:
1. Predicting the Second Coming.
I think we can all agree that it would be helpful to know when Jesus was going to come back. We could get all prayed up, get all our sins confessed, delete all the improper files from our computer, put on our Christian t-shirts, and get our personal business settled before the apocalypse began. We could also plan a “Welcome Back, Jesus” party, because you know whoever pulls that one off will get extra credit, in the heavenly sense. (Mine will be in the form of a huge refrigerator stocked with perpetual cases of Dr. Pepper, which will have been reconfigured in heaven as a health drink.) That’s why some Christian or another has predicted the Second Coming of Christ exactly every year since Jesus first announced he was headed back someday. Our batting average so far? A big, fat 0-fer. It’s not surprising that our predictions keep failing, seeing how Jesus himself said he wasn’t even sure when it would go down. And if the Son of God himself doesn’t know, why should we believe some random televangelist?
2. Identifying the Antichrist.
People love a good mystery, especially when the stakes are as high as decoding who may, in fact, be planning RIGHT NOW to deceive the entire world in order to eventually drag them into the fiery abyss of hell. That’s why it’s important, apparently, for us to figure out which contemporary public figures may eventually morph into the Antichrist. Back in the day, people thought it might be Hitler (evil, racist) or Gorbachev (communist, splotchy forehead) or JFK (Catholic). Other less likely choices, including Prince Charles of Wales, have been pegged as Potential Enemy #1 by well-meaning End Times aficionados. If you ask me, though, the Beast is more likely to be someone with more social than political power, someone with the ability to dictate what people buy, what they eat, what they watch, and who they listen to. Someone with immense influence over our consumption habits. Someone like…Oprah Winfrey. If you ever see her give away pitchforks or pentagrams on her “Favorite Things” show, watch out.
3. Over-Emphasizing Triple Sixes.
Related to the above, thanks to the cryptic specificity of Revelation 13:18. In the 1980s, some believers suspected President Reagan might be the Antichrist because each of his three full names, Ronald Wilson Reagan, had six letters. Six-six-six. This was a powerful enough example of evil nomenclature that it counteracted his being a Republican, because everyone knows the Antichrist will be a Democrat. Or a communist. Speaking of, did you know that the numerological equivalent of “Mikhail S. Gorbachev” in the Cyrillic language computes to 1,332, which is twice the Mark of the Beast? For real. Did you know that Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, and was captured on December 13, 2003? Which made him 66.6 years old on the day they hoisted him out of the spider hole. Chilling, I know! (But considerably less chilling now that he’s dead.) Anyway, it’s easy to find some way to connect a world leader to the Triple Sixes. Just takes a calculator and some creativity.
4. Awaiting the Rapture.
Quiz time. Which of the following is true?
A. I once was scolded by a Sunday School teacher when he saw me wearing an Earth Day t-shirt. Why? Because environmentalism was a waste of time, as “we’ll all be raptured up by then anyway.”
B. There is a website that will let you write a post-rapture letter to your friends and family, promising to send it in the event you are permanently lifted skyward when the trumpet sounds. Just so they’ll know why your Twitter updates stopped so suddenly. (“Think I just heard a really loud trumpet outisde. Was that you, @JesusChrist? Wait, where’s my –“)
C. Jesus is OK with you putting a bumper sticker on your car that says “Caution: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.” Because traffic fatalities and chaos on the interstate highway system is super-hilarious when viewed from heaven.
Answers: A and B are absolutely true. I’m guessing C is false, but you’d never know it based on the quantity of those stickers I’ve seen in local church parking lots.
5. Decoding Revelation.
This is related to #1 and #2 and, well, #3 and #4. Because you’re not gonna figure out all the previous stuff if you can’t crack the code of John’s whiz-bang dream-while-in-exile that we now know as the Book of Revelation. Lots of people who otherwise talk about the need to take the Bible literally don’t quite know what to do with the metaphorical weirdness of Revelation. Obviously it must be some sort of blueprint for the Last Days, right? But what in the world are those locusts with the faces of men and women’s hair and lion’s teeth and iron breastplates and scorpion tales and wings that drone like a squadron chariots supposed to represent? (Rev. 9:7-10) It’s such a strange description — fanciful and yet precisely detailed — that it HAS to stand for something, right? Obviously, then, the girly-haired scorpion assassins represent secret black UN Apache helicopters. Check that one off. Now, what’s the significance of the star in Rev. 8:10 being named Wormwood? Surely there’s some ancient European artifact made of wormwood and containing some pretechnological world-destroying virus that must be discovered prior to The End. It’s like solving a crime in the CSI lab, only with universal devastation instead of a Vegas murder.
6. Apocalypse-as-Entertainment.
This post is getting long, so let me just say this as succinctly as possible. Without the prevalence of end-times fiction and end-times films, we wouldn’t be blessed with the following: the resuscitated acting career of former Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover girl Carol Alt (Apocalypse II: Revelation)…and of Howie Mandel, Margot Kidder, and Gary Busey (all of whom starred in Apocalypse III: Tribulation)…and of Corbin Bernsen and Mr. T (Apocalypse IV: Judgment)…and of that Mike Seaver kid (Left Behind: The Movie). Also there was a popular series of novels about the End Times. I forget what it was called.
(For more Jason, make sure you check out his site, jasonboyett.com and his blog.
