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Holy Week resources and reflections

You’ve been left behind

As a teenager I lived in constant fear of missing the rapture and being left behind. Wake up late on the weekend to find no one home but me? Panic. A little too early for youth group on Wednesday night and nobody was there to play foosball with me? Panic. Over at friend’s house and they took too long coming back from the bathroom? Panic.

Even today – long after I learned I have nothing to worry about because not only is the idea of the rapture unbiblical, but the idea that God magically whisks the people of God away to safety instead of walking with them through tribulation is actually anti-biblical – I still have brief moments of panic when I find myself unexpectedly alone.

But while the rapture might not be a biblical concept, the idea of being left behind is — just not in the way we’ve been taught to understand that phrase. We have been left behind — not from the rapture, but with a calling from Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit to see that calling through. When Jesus ascends into heaven after his resurrection, he leaves his disciples behind with a calling and a gift. That gift was the Holy Spirit. The calling? To become an apocalyptic people. But here again is a word we think we know so well, but that actually has a very different meaning than many of us have been led to believe. Apocalypse isn’t necessarily about the end of the world. It simply means “to reveal.” In biblical apocalypses it is the truth that is being revealed. Which is why Revelation is less about predicting the future and more about revealing biblical truth.

However you define it, the early church was thoroughly apocalyptic in every sense of the word. They lived, breathed and moved throughout the world as if they really were living in the end times, as if Jesus’ resurrection really had changed things, as if the kingdom of God really had begun to dawn on earth as it is in heaven. The writings of Paul, the book of Acts and even the Gospels themselves are thoroughly apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word. They reveal the truth of the good news that God is already at work in the world making all things new.

But the writers of the New Testament don’t just tell the good news, they invite us the readers to answer the call of Christ, the call to not just say the words of the Lord’s Prayer, but actually live out, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Which is why the apocalypse we read about in Revelation isn’t a secret chronology of the future, but a guide for living in the present. It teaches us to not just hope for a better day, but to begin living out that hope here and now by seeking justice and loving our neighbor just as Christ first loved us.

ZACK HUNT  is a blogger, speaker and the author of “Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong.” Zack is an ordained pastor in the Church of the Nazarene. He and his wife and two daughters live in Tennessee where he spends his free time trying to smoke the perfect rack of ribs on his beloved Weber Grill.

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