Would I recognise deception? I used to be certain.

Prologue · How Does It End?

I know what a book like this is supposed to look like.

I have picked up books like that. One had a date on the cover. One had a blood-red moon over the title. One had a chart drawing arrows from some ancient king straight to next year's headlines, and a man on the back flap who had finally cracked it and would tell me exactly when, for the price of the book.

I wanted that book too. For years I wanted the one that would hand me the date and let me stop worrying. But I could be dead by morning. Then the date would be no use to me at all. And a man who wants the date so he can slip in at the last minute is the same man he always was. He has changed nothing. He has only worked out when to show up.

I will not mock the people who reach for that book. I reached for it myself, and I reached for it knowing better. There is one line on this subject I had heard all my life: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man" (Matthew 24:36). I knew the verse and I wanted the date anyway. I wanted certainty, and I wanted it that week.

I walked in asking when. When is the wrong question.

The end of the world comes at me every day. It is in the wars, and in the markets, and in the films about the last city standing. I had never once sat down and thought it through.

So I sat down and took the Christian story as it stands, to see where it led. Why would Jesus come back at all?

Maybe He comes because everything has finally gone right, the world mended, the long ache healed. But a man does not interrupt a thing that is working. And that hope runs against the whole record, because the world has never once healed itself. Every time, it was God who stepped in.

Maybe He comes because everything has gone wrong, because it has rotted past saving.

Or maybe He comes because something is finished. Not a rescue and not a reaction, but an appointment kept and a job completed. "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come" (Matthew 24:14).

He comes because things have gone bad. That is the answer I had reached for, without ever noticing I had reached for it. I did not work it out when I sat down. I already had it. It is the answer I want to hold up to the light.

And I can see where I got it, because God has done it before. He sent a flood, and He scattered the languages at Babel. The flood came on a world that had grown so bad He would not let it stand any longer.

Then He came Himself. The world He walked into had gone the same way again. He stood in it and said so to its face. The world refused Him. He did not wipe it out. He sent the good news to every nation instead. The mercy was new.

What made Him come was the same thing as before, a world gone that bad. What He did once He got here was different. So there is a level of bad that moves God to act, and He has moved at it more than once. And the last time He steps in is still ahead. So a world can drift that far again.

But the instant I said bad, a question opened up underneath the word, and I had never thought to ask it.

Bad in whose eyes?

What God counts as wrong with the world may not be the wreckage I would point to. I measure by the size of the disaster, and I had always assumed He measures the same way. I cannot yet say what He weighs in my own day. But the thing that grieves Him most might not be the chaos on the news at all. It might be something much quieter and much closer to home. It might be who I trust and obey on an ordinary day, when no crisis is forcing my hand and I am free to go my own way without anyone noticing.

Before I started down this road, I assumed I already knew exactly what the day He comes back would look like.

Crisis. Fire in the sky. Cities going dark. Something so enormous, so obviously the end, that I would look up from whatever I was doing and know it at once. That was the picture I carried, and I never asked where I got it, whether from a sermon or a screen. I never noticed what it quietly promised me either. It promised that when it mattered, I would see it coming. Of course I would.

The Bible is where a picture of crisis and fire is supposed to come from. It never says I will look up and know. It takes away the very thing my picture had promised me. It speaks about that day in two places, one about the timing of it, and one about how people are living in the days that run up to it.

First, the timing. "For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2). A thief sends no word ahead. "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh" (Matthew 25:13). No countdown, and no date on the cover.

Second, the state of the world. I had read this part straight past for years. The same Book describes the days leading up to it:

"But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:37–39).

Nobody in that verse is looking up. People are eating. People are marrying. Men are out in a field doing a day's work: "Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left" (Matthew 24:40). Ordinary life runs on its rails right up to the morning the rain started, and they knew not. Paul puts the mood of it in their own mouths: "For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them..." (1 Thessalonians 5:3). Not when they say the sky is falling. When they say "Peace and safety."

The last days do run cold and cruel. "And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold" (Matthew 24:12). But from the inside it will not feel like the end. Life will look like it is still running, even while it rots underneath. It will look normal enough that I will talk myself out of it. I was never in danger of sleeping through a sky full of fire. The real danger is that the days which settle everything will run past me while I am still deciding whether they have begun. I will be standing in the middle of them, congratulating myself on how alert I am.

Paul knew a man could be caught out that way, and in the very next verse he named the way past it: "But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief" (1 Thessalonians 5:4). A thief only gets in because the house is asleep. Paul says the light is there for anyone who will keep his eyes open. That left me with a question I could not put down. I had always called what I did watching. Had it ever been anything more than telling myself I was awake?

Suppose I grant all of that and dig my heels in anyway. The world really will go bad enough one day to make Him move, I tell myself, and I will know it when I see it.

Bad enough in whose eyes?

God has stepped into history before. When the flood came, the verdict was already in long before the water: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5). When Sodom fell, God said "the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and... their sin is very grievous" (Genesis 18:20). And once He told Abraham, plainly, that his descendants would come back for the land only in the fourth generation, "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (Genesis 15:16). There was a level the Amorites had not yet reached, and until they reached it He would not move, not even to hand His own people the land He had promised them. He said it centuries early, to the face of the man whose children would do the waiting, and He said in the same breath what the waiting would cost them, four hundred years of affliction (Genesis 15:13). Not at my pace. On His.

The evil He weighs is not always the evil I would name. A whole society can call a thing admirable while Heaven reads it as corruption. "That which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15). His measure is not mine. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8–9).

He weighs by a measure of His own, and then He does act. In the flood, at Sodom, and with the Amorites, He set the limit and He chose the hour. And when He finally moved, He moved in a way nobody standing there had drawn up in advance. The generation of the flood did not wake up that morning thinking today was the day, and neither did Sodom. Jesus said as much of Lot's town: "Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded" (Luke 17:28). They were eating and drinking. They thought there was time.

All along, I had been letting my own gut tell me how bad the world had got. It kept saying things had not got bad enough to worry about yet, and it was never built to read God's scale at all. It cannot tell me how bad is bad. It cannot tell me how late is late. I do not get to set that measure, and I was never handed the one He uses.

I can tell you what that gut looked like in my own house. For years my praying rose and fell with the headlines. On a morning when something had gone wrong at home, or a deadline had landed that I could not possibly meet, I prayed like a man who meant it. On a quiet morning I skimmed a verse over coffee, decided that would do, and drove to work. I was reading the world each morning to work out how worried I had to be that day, and I called the result watchfulness.

Every generation thought it was the last one.

Christians have set dates and been wrong, in the first century and many times since. The boy cried wolf so often that a sensible man learned to stop looking up. Jesus told His disciples to expect men who would say the time was near, and He told them not to go after them: "for many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye not therefore after them" (Luke 21:8). So when I say the picture I carry is wrong, and that the moment may be closer than it looks, why should I be treated any differently from the last hundred men who said the same thing?

The false alarms do prove something. They prove something about the men who rang the bell, and nothing at all about the wolf. The gut that screams now and the gut that shrugs not yet are the same organ. Every scream got written down and not one shrug ever did. Nobody wrote down the quiet morning I skimmed a verse over coffee. So the shrugging has never been checked by anybody. If I am ever going to tell a true warning from a false one, it will not be by feel, mine or anyone else's. It will have to be by some standard I did not invent and cannot quietly adjust when it tells me something I do not want to hear.

The problem was never only out there in the confusing world. Part of the problem is the man doing the reading. Me.

If my own gut cannot do the reading, then somebody else has to do it for me. And if the picture I carry is wrong as well, then how could anyone know what is coming, in advance, at all?

Only one thing could answer that. Someone who already knows the end would have to tell us ahead of time. That is what prophecy claims to be, and the Bible claims this is how He works: "Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7).

The claim is that God does not act without warning first, and that the warning comes through the prophets. A man can go and check that claim for himself. Either there is a track record or there is not. Either the warnings are specific enough to be useful or they are fog.

The bad news is already in. The day is not on offer, and no man can feel his way to it.

The good news is that the day was never the point, and losing the date cost me far less than I feared. The same Book that bolts the door on the date is generous about everything around it. It tells me what kind of world the end arrives into. It puts up things that were written down long before they happened. Whether those things came true is not for the Book to settle. That is a matter of record. None of that is a date. All of it is on the page, where a man can read it and see whether it held. That is the whole reason this can be a case and not a guess.

So if the claim holds, the warnings are not missing at all. They are in plain sight.

If they are right there in the open, why did I never see them?

I would not be the first man to walk past a thing he had been told to watch for. Scripture is full of men and women who were warned in plain sight, in words they understood, and who went on exactly as before. The truth was not hidden too well to find. People who could have known, and who in some cases did know, carried on anyway. That keeps happening, and I put my own name into it before anyone else's. I have no reason to think I would have been the exception.

So the question stops being what is coming. It becomes whether I would recognize it, or miss it while it stood right in front of me.

What does the world look like when He comes?

What I know about that now, I drew from the text and not from a feeling. I had to wait for it, and the waiting is most of what I learned.

I wanted to know how the world ends. Another question comes before that one, and until I had answered the earlier question, knowing how the world ends would have done me no good at all. Not when, and not even what. Whether I would have known Him if He walked up and looked me in the eye.

I used to be sure I would have.

Let me tell you what changed my mind.