The Four Last Things

Well, we’re getting towards December now already. I wonder if you remember when you were a child, and it seemed to come so very slowly. But the older you get, the more likely you are to be saying, “Where did the year go, and what have I accomplished?”

Long before Einstein’s theory of special relativity, people used to say, “Time is relative.” And the fact is that the more time there is in your past, the faster you seem to hurdle into the future. So I thought, perhaps, this week would be a good time for us to think about the future. I don’t mean making plans for the holiday season, or for next year for that matter. Most of us do that anyway. I mean the future that we sometimes, perhaps even often, don’t like to think about: our own individual, ultimate future.

The big word, as you know, is eschatology, speaking about final realities. And theologians sometimes subdivide that topic into corporate and personal eschatology—that is, what is going to happen to the whole cosmos at the end of history, and on the other hand, what happens to us as individuals at the end of our lives. And it’s the latter that I thought we might reflect on this week.

I don’t know when this way of putting it arose—it certainly goes back to the Middle Ages—but Christians have often spoken about personal eschatology in a fourfold way. In fact, in some traditions, these four topics were the themes that ministers were expected to preach about on the four Sundays before Christmas, as a way of preparing people for the knowledge of salvation, the coming of Jesus Christ.

I suspect that today, if your minister were to do that this year, some people in our churches might be a bit upset, and your poor pastor might be seen as the Reverend Mr. Grinch, stealing Christmas. But maybe that says more about us than about our forefathers. Maybe we don’t want to be that serious at Christmastime. And yet, I suspect that such a series might actually have a very beneficial effect on our Christian lives and help us to live more clearly to the glory of God. So, this is what I want to think about this week.

We might say that these four things are death, judgment, heaven, and hell, and all of those words can send a little shiver up our spines, and we can be quite resistant to them. Certainly, three out of the four of them are not pleasant thoughts for sinful men and women. And we might say, “Well, the people who thought about these things in the past lived much nearer to these things than we do.” Of course, in one sense that’s true of death. In those days, people almost always died at home without the pain relief that we may often have, surrounded by their family members, and usually conscious. But the death rate wasn’t any higher in the seventeenth century than it is in the twenty-first century, was it? It’s still 100 percent. But that alone wasn’t the reason Christians were encouraged to think about these things; it was the sheer frequency with which the Bible itself refers to them.

And there was another deeply biblical reason why meditating on these things was encouraged. Our Christian lives are shaped according to the way we think about the future. It’s not possible to think about these themes without becoming a more serious Christian than we were before or might have been without them. And in addition, since life is short and eternity is long, meditation on the four last things weans us off our addiction to the things that are seen and temporary and helps us focus our gaze and reorient our lives to the things that are unseen and eternal. Don’t you find that our times constantly encourage us to look through a microscope at the things of this world when we need to be looking through a telescope at the world to come?

So, meditation on the four last things helps transform us from being this world oriented, microscopic in our Christian vision, and turns us into Christians who are oriented to the world to come. And as C.S. Lewis once famously commented, “The Christians who make most impact on this world are usually the ones who think most of the world to come.” So, that’s what we’re going to do the rest of the week, and I hope you’ll join us tomorrow on Things Unseen.