As we discussed in an earlier post, the end times are good and bad all at once. Similarly, the characters in play represent both heroes and antagonists. Some of these might be familiar to you, but others you might not have considered before.

A lot of people consider Revelation the "scary book" or just plain confusing; there are even some great memes about how confusing Revelation is.Everyone starts by being confused—but no one is supposed to stop there. How mean would it be of God to write an entire book of the Bible that He knew would be out of our reach?

Studying the end times is first and foremost about knowing Jesus—the "man behind the plan." Revelation 1:1 introduces itself as the "revelation of Jesus Christ", not the revelation of the antichrist or judgment or anything else. This is absolutely key because if we memorize facts and timelines and can argue eschatology inside and out, but don't know the heart of Jesus in it ("but have not love," as 1 Corinthians 13 would say), we've missed the whole point.

I've never written out the timeline in blog form before, but I've taught it in internship classes many times, so I'm just going to invite you into my classroom and pretend that I'm standing at the whiteboard and you're sitting at a table in front of me, leaning forward and asking questions.

There seem to be two major perspectives on the "good or bad"-ness of the season of time right before Jesus comes back. On the one hand, the end times are sometimes presented as all bad bad bad—judgment, destruction, persecution… On the other hand, the story is sometimes presented as all good and no bad—that we're going to experience massive global revival, the church is going to spread the Kingdom all over the earth... As is often the case, the truth is a bit of both.

The question of the signs of the times is of growing interest in the world right now. Even the unbelieving world is asking questions and wondering what chapter of human history we're in. Luckily for us, we don't have to speculate. When the disciples asked Jesus the question, "what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" (Mt. 24:3) He gave them two chapters of an answer!

Unfortunately, the study of the end times has been one of the areas that has been under attack in the church. The enemy is eager to create confusion about this most glorious and vital subject. In this post, I want to identify and briefly respond to some of the ideas that are currently floating around in the church.

If all God wanted us to know about the end times is that "Jesus wins," He wouldn't have put 150 chapters in the Bible about it. Therefore, if "all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable…" (2 Timothy 3:16-17) what purpose are these 150 chapters supposed to serve in our lives? Here are seven reasons I find studying the end times to be valuable.

A friend of mine used to call herself an "eschatological agnostic," saying, "Everyone was wrong about the first coming, so we'll probably all be wrong about the second coming!" However, that perspective is flawed because 1) not everyone was wrong, and 2) those who were got rebuked for it! Amos 3:7 says, “For the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets." How could we even imagine that God would do something as massive as the end time judgments and the second coming of Jesus and NOT want His people to understand?