We Can See God At Work Here If We Pay Close Attention

 

Christianity, when interpreted properly, gets everything right. Here’s one of those profound things it gets right that virtually everyone would know if asked and were honest about it, but to which few pay attention. Picture a staircase, with humans near the bottom. Imagine this staircase represents an upward journey, where each step takes you to higher moral truths and more elevated standards. Moral standards ascend in accordance with God’s goodness and ultimate standard, similar to how true facts are objective imperatives that supersede all falsehoods in accordance with God’s Truth found in Christ.

From this we can recognise 3 key things: 1) All humans can keep tapping into higher standards than the ones in which they are currently operating. 2) However high we climb on the staircase of improvement, we can never reach a point at which there is no further improvement we can make. 3) These imperatives point beyond human ability to God’s holy and perfect nature, where God is at the very top of the staircase (Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”).

What this means is that we continuously recognise higher standards, but cannot fully attain them in our own power - and we can always go higher, but we can never reach the top of the staircase, because that is where God alone is. It’s the strongest indication that the highest standards cannot rest in human construction alone. If humans are the highest minds in the known universe, as atheists believe, then it’s extraordinary that every individual recognises the need for superseding imperatives but cannot ever reach them, and that the only consistent grounding we can conceive is idealised, perfect, transcendent standards. The situation makes sense with God’s nature (perfectly good, holy, just, and loving) providing the highest and ultimate imperatives, but it makes far less sense if we are just naturalistic beings. The true picture is this: 

1)    Human attempts (limited). 

2)    Human ideals (recognised but unattainable). 

3)    God’s perfection (the true grounding). 

Where the staircase illustrates our conception of the hypothetical climb.

The naturalistic, evolutionary reason alone only explains it in part, but like a house of cards, it falls down the higher we try to build it. The correct part is that, yes, humans evolved as social animals, and groups that developed shared rules and expectations (fairness, loyalty, prohibitions on murder, etc) survived better than groups without them. Over time, these moral instincts became deeply ingrained because they helped with cooperation, trust, and long-term survival. And because of this adaptive instinct, and the importance of cooperation and fairness, evolution may have “over-engineered” our sense of duty and obligation, making it feel more absolute and universal than it actually is.

But I think it shows itself to be inadequate, similar to the way that those who think we merely invented mathematics are inadequate – there is no way to construct something that high that is both a) based on ultimate, absolute truth, and b) an ever-ascending staircase of standards that is impossible to keep climbing without sensing further steps still to climb.

Let’s take something like justice as an example. In a Christian framework, the concept of justice can be seen as having an ever‑ascending trajectory, consistently moving from human approximations toward God’s perfect standard. We can start by recognising basic human justice, associated with honesty, keeping promises, treating others fairly, punishing theft, honouring contracts, that sort of thing. And then we can tap into higher standards of human justice, like deeper considerations of human needs, addressing systemic injustices, striving to reduce oppression, that sort of thing. And then, even with profound accomplishments in higher forms of human justice, we can still conceive of ideal aspirations that tap into both a quantitative and qualitative advance up the higher reaches of the staircase – a conceived radical transformation of the world in which full cosmic justice occurs (as per Romans 2:5-6, 2 Corinthians 5:10, and Revelation 20:12-13), but is beyond the scope of ordinary human achievement, however long our evolution carried on.

The whole staircase of justice finds its upper limit in God’s perfect justice, where the very best of our idealised human justice is fully integrated with His Divine love, grace, mercy, and holiness, bringing about perfect foresight of consequences, simultaneous mercy and righteousness, and eternal consistency in accordance with God’s love and goodness.

Consequently, what we have here is a profound sense of God at work in nature, both by what we conceive His ideals to be, and by how evident it is that we fall so short of those standards.

Giffen Beliefs

 

In economics, a Giffen good (popularised by economist Alfred Marshall, but named after the economist Robert Giffen) is something that people consume more of as its price rises, because it is a basic necessity and they can't afford alternatives. A classic illustration of a Giffen good is the humble potato, which served as the most affordable calorie source for impoverished Irish farmers in the mid-1800s. When the devastating potato famine struck, the price of potatoes soared. Ironically, instead of reducing consumption, this price hike forced people to abandon more expensive foods like meat and milk, leaving them even more reliant on potatoes. Whereas in economics, rising prices usually reduce demand - Giffen goods become an economic snare; the costlier the staple became, the fewer options remained beyond it.

On my bike ride this morning, I started thinking of Giffen goods analogically in terms of Giffen beliefs, which would constitute bad beliefs that are harmful in society. Imagine false or harmful beliefs as the psychological equivalent of cheap potatoes - accessible, familiar, and “necessary” to make sense of the world in a difficult or unstable situation. Cults play on these types of belief. As the cost of these beliefs rises - in terms of emotional investment, social alienation, cognitive dissonance, sacrifice, and what have you - the individual becomes more dependent on them.

Like the Irish farmers who had to give up meat and milk to buy more potatoes, the cult member may shed better beliefs (critical thinking, outside relationships, and so forth) to afford the escalating demands of the bad belief system. And, of course, the cult leaders play on this too, because the belief system becomes a psychological trap; the more costly it gets, the harder it becomes to leave, because you’ve sacrificed so much else to stay in it.

Giffen beliefs, like their economic analogue, capture the self-reinforcing nature of harmful outcomes, where the loss of alternatives pushes people deeper into a dire situation, and where the more it costs, the harder it is to abandon.

Why Greatness Produces The Highest & Lowest

 

Christians are fascinating in many ways. Here are two examples from my experience that I’ve mentioned before, but haven’t ever fleshed out beyond succinct epigrams. The first is that I think Christians are both some of the best and worst arguments for God’s existence. Some Christians come across so consistently badly – in their conduct, their thinking and their manners – that if they were the only Christians one ever encountered, then Christianity would seem no truer or more virtuous than communism. Other Christians come across so impressively, with such grace and wisdom, that in them one can sense glimpses of Heaven on earth, and get the strongest indication that Christianity is the truth.

This dovetails with the second observation; that the most prodigious minds I’ve ever encountered are Christians, but so are some of the least prodigious. In other words, humans at their most brilliant in terms of depth of mind, profundity, and creative, emotional expansiveness are Christian – individuals like St. Paul, St. John, and St. James, or in other fields, Pascal, Kierkegaard. Yet some woeful Christians frequently sink to depths of mind that are more intellectually hollow and pitiable than many atheists ever seem to reach.

Given that Christianity is true, and Christians have access to the Creator of the universe, and to a depth of relationship and revelation to which atheists are not privy, this might be one of the strangest things in the world. It’s no surprise that in the greatest minds Christianity amplifies the extremes of human conduct and intellect, but one might be justifiably surprised to find that some Christians descend into the lowest rungs of intellectual sophistication, even below some of the shallowest atheists.

If it’s obvious why Christians reach the great heights – and it should at least be obvious to Christians, who know its truth – then it might not be at all obvious why the Christians reaching the lowest depths of the mind do so. I suppose what we are asking is quite a profound question; why is it that the thing that can engender such astounding cognitive expression at its best can also precipitate the most cringeworthy cognitive failings at its worst? It might be partly a sense of relative expectation, like when a village committee would think it worse if their vicar stole a bicycle than an ordinary member of the community. I think that’s a good prima facie case; we just should expect better from Christians, as they know the Lord, and those sunken defects merely seem exacerbated or magnified on that basis. And we must also remember that the Christian faith, in which God invites anyone to know Him on the basis of the free gift of salvation under grace, is going to include both extremes; the saints and, at first, the wretches – which is another key factor.

But I think the full story is even deeper; I think there are near-paradoxes about the very best things in the world that amplify the very worst things too - like how, in Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Lilies that fester smell even worse than weeds”. Because Christianity is both true, and the enabler of the highest potential in humans, it can magnify both glory and failure because of the power of its truths. When lived faithfully, it produces greatness; but when tainted or neglected, it can produce worse distortions than ordinary unbelief. And perhaps that’s what we should expect; for many of the most egregious failures in society are betrayals of qualities which, at their best, produce the greatest good - like how love inspires some of the most wonderful acts, but in betrayal or loss brings about the worst pain; or like how freedom enables the best human flourishing, creativity, and dignity, yet in excess and without discipline it can descend into chaos and harm; or like how great wealth can be a vehicle for some of the greatest acts of good in the world, but when love of money turns it into selfish greed, it brings about avarice, corruption and chronic discontent. 

It's also similar to how those who live their life in the safe, unremarkable middling currents of destiny face none of the great joys or exhilarations, nor any of the worst tragedies or heartbreaks  - they neither rise to grandeur nor sink to catastrophe – just playing it safe every day of their lives, in a way that at some point, with some honest reflection, should leave them sad and regretful that they never seized life with the passionate truthseeking, courage and wonder that brings about a full life.

This is what we are really reflecting back on when we observe that Christianity, in its vast and paradoxical scope, is not tame at its best or worst. It is the forge in which human greatness and human folly alike are tempered; the light that illuminates the loftiest heights of intellect, love, and virtue, yet casts equally deep shadows in the hearts that turn from its truth or taint it through raw human fault. And that is where some Christians can go astray in ways that those who don’t know God won’t in quite the same way. Like how faith-based deference to scriptural authority produces misinterpretations that cause them to reject established empirical facts about the world; or how binary thinking creates spiritual allegiance that oversimplifies the true complexity of God’s plan; or how, despite St. Paul’s warning in Romans, people under Christian grace can exhibit a haughtiness that puts even worldly pride to shame, as if proximity to divine favour heightens the hubris rather than humbles the heart.

Of course, the benefits of being a Christian far outweigh the alternative – in fact, not just outweigh, but illuminate and redeem every shadow of human existence in a way that false rejection cannot. But just as the Christian faith bears witness to the extraordinary potential of the transformed human soul, the taints and distortions become a testament to the magnitude of fallenness, like how fire, when left unchecked or misdirected out of control, soon razes forests and turns human habitats to dusty ash piles. 

Beliefs of Steel

 

Steel-manning is the opposite of straw-manning – it is the principle of presenting the strongest possible version of your opponent’s argument. I have frequently used steel-manning throughout my life, to understand opposing views more clearly, to sharpen my own reasoning, and to attempt to build the strongest arsenal of personal views and beliefs that I can. It’s an essential tool for intellectual honesty.

I have a theory that the harder it is to steelman a belief or proposition, the less likely that belief or proposition is to be true. It’s well within our ability to believe A over B - where if B has some merit or interesting tenets of consideration, but is still believed to be inferior to A – and yet still use the steel-manning technique to make a reasonable case for B. Out of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, I believe Charlotte is, by a small margin, the more accomplished novelist. But I could write a good steel-manning case for Emily being the better writer. I believe we have free will (to a certain degree), but I could write a steel-manning paper that convincingly argues that free will is not, in fact, built into the material substrate of a wholly deterministic universe. On interpretations of quantum theory, I believe that quantum collapse is an objective physical process, and that it occurs independently of human measurement. Still, I could steelman a defence of alternative interpretations - whether Copenhagen, decoherence, or many-worlds - and such an exercise would make for a stimulating discussion.

Now, when confronted with a belief or viewpoint that you find prohibitively difficult to steelman – where, even if you tried your very best, and made the most honest, rigorous attempt to argue for its case, you still found it’s not even possible to get off the ground - you probably have a very good reason to conclude that that idea is not just folly, but beyond even a reasonable defence of non-folly. For example, I find it prohibitively difficult to steelman young earth creationism – it is just so plain wrong that there isn’t a rational defence that can be made; the only defence occurs through lies, blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations of evidence. I know young earth creationism is wrong – not just because there is no evidence to believe it is right – but also because I find it impossible to steelman.

I find the same with Islam. While it isn’t built on the same kind of empirical lies, blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations of evidence as young earth creationism - as a Christian, I could steel man atheism a lot more easily than I could steelman Islam. There is just nothing about Islam that convinces me it’s anything other than a wholly man-made religion that has evolved into a very false dominant belief system through cultural contagion and hegemonic power structures. Where it speaks truths, its truths are already found in Judaism and Christianity, and where it speaks untruths or makes inaccurate deviations from better religions, it exposes itself as derivative and unreliable.

Sure, if you’re a Muslim young earth creationist you are probably not convinced (😊). But that’s only due to being wedded to the very falsities that steel-manning attempts to expose – it doesn’t undermine the efficacy of the proposition itself. Because you only need to pick something that does fall far from your intellectual purlieus – say, flat earth theory, holocaust denial, or astrology – and see why, to most people, they are just as un-steelmannable, because their claims have been tested and found wanting, and no rigorous defence can survive contact with empirical scrutiny.

So that’s my tip for today; the harder it is to steelman a belief or proposition, the less likely it is to be true. And if you are competent at steel-manning, and find something impossible to steelman, then that thing is almost certainly false.

Christ the Meta-Metalanguage: The Divine Ground of All Truth

 

Truth is told in propositional form. It is true that if all humans are mortal, and Socrates is a human, then Socrates is mortal. It is true that water boils at 100°C at standard atmospheric pressure. It is true that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. True propositions like the above are true because they correspond to logical, scientific and historical reality. In John 14:6, Jesus tells us that He is the Truth – THE Truth in absolute form because He’s God, and in personal form because He is the Divine Person.

Here’s how I believe we should frame it. True propositions are true because they correspond to reality; and in the deepest sense, they correspond to the ultimate reality, which is grounded in the nature and revelation of God - fulfilled and made manifest in Jesus Christ, who is the Truth.

To consider this philosophically, recall that Tarski showed that truth in formal systems must be defined in a higher-level language - a metalanguage - because a system cannot fully define its own truth. For example, in propositional logic or formal arithmetic, Tarski’s concept of truth requires a distinction between the object language (the language being used to describe the world) and the metalanguage (the language used to describe and evaluate the object language). This mirrors the idea that to fully understand the truth of things, we need something greater than the system itself to provide the proper context and evaluation.

Given the foregoing, if Christ is THE Truth because He’s God and the Divine Person (along with the Father and Holy Spirit – three aspects of the same One God), then Christ’s Truth is a Divine meta-metalanguage. You can think of like this. A metalanguage tells the truth about a language; a meta-metalanguage tells the truth about metalanguages.

In the same way Tarski's theory requires a higher-level "metalanguage" to describe the truth of a system, Christ, as the ultimate Truth, is the Divine meta-metalanguage through which all truths are made meaningful and coherent. Just as no formal system can fully define its own truth without reference to a broader framework, no aspect of reality - whether logical, scientific, or historical - can be fully understood or defined apart from Christ, who is the source of all truth. He is the Divine context and the Word (Logos) through which all things are revealed, ordered, and understood, and He is the ultimate frame of reference by which all truths are grounded. This Divine meta-metalanguage is not merely a system of rules or language; it is a living Person in whom truth is both revealed and enacted.

I get why this is hard to swallow if you’re a non-Christian, because we are talking about a hyper-reality on which this higher truth sits. But the corollary is that we cannot know truly apart from Christ, and all human knowing, especially when it taps into deeper truths, is fragmentary and only enhanced by Divine revelation, because Christ is being itself, sustaining reality (as per Colossians 1:17).

That’s also why, when it comes to salvation, Christ is the only way into truth, as His life, death, and resurrection bring us into communion with the Truth, where such fullness of Divine truth cannot be contained within human language alone.

Bring Enough Of Yourself

One piece of gradually accumulated wisdom I’ve discovered over the years is this. If you’re not thriving in some particular realm of life where there are rich rewards to be had, you’re probably not bringing enough of yourself to it. It’s only full engagement in giving the best of yourself to something that unlocks the full bounty. As long as the pursuit is something that yields rich rewards, then full reward necessities full presence. I’d summarise it with a formula - something like this:

Whole Self × Fertile Field = Full Harvest

Whole Self is your engagement and effort, Fertile Field is a pursuit with rich rewards, and Full Harvest is the abundance you can experience as a result.

Take something like the great works of literature as an example. You harvest what you invest yourself in, so if someone claimed to be underwhelmed by the works of, say, Joyce, Proust or Woolf, it will likely reflect a set of individual limitations or hesitation to fully immerse themselves in the rich experience of the texts, which are very hard to argue as ‘underwhelming’ with a Whole Self investment. Of course, at this stage of life, there might well be perfectly understandable reasons why they haven’t brought enough of their own curiosity and attention to the reading, just as there might be perfectly good reasons why a young boy is still drawing matchstick houses instead of more sophisticated models, but that doesn’t undermine the formula.

The same is true of virtually all domains with a potentially Fertile Field – religion, philosophy, science, economics, psychology, politics, art, history – if you withhold your Whole Self from the engagement and understanding, you’re going to be devoid of the Full Harvest, and as a consequence, you are likely to experience only a fraction of the perspective, and miss out on the more profound riches that life has to offer.

On Very Smart People Not Being Christian

 

Matters of God are different to all other matters in a number of ways. One remarkable way is that intelligence is a poor predictor of getting the God questions right, especially the question of accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour.

For example, if a very smart computer scientist disagrees with your theory about the time complexity of your sorting algorithm, you should probably look into it more; if a very smart astronomer disagrees with your theory about the composition of Saturn’s rings, you should probably look into it more; if a very smart economist disagrees with your interpretation of the Laffer curve, you should probably look into it more; and if a very well informed Tudor historian disagrees with your take on the causes of the English Reformation, you should probably look into it more. But very smart people of this calibre, even people who probably wouldn’t get a lot wrong in most empirical subjects, frequently get the big God question monumentally wrong, and come to entirely the wrong conclusions about many of the most important questions in existence. There are clear reasons why, which I’ll explain in a moment – but I think it is a peculiar anomaly in the intellectual landscape of human consideration.

What lies at the heart of this strange and consistent aberration across many very smart minds, even some highly brilliant ones? Why does the highly competent astronomer, so precise in calculating the orbital path of a newly discovered exoplanet or pinpointing the cause of unusual dimming in a distant star, and the computer scientist with a masterful grasp of the validity of a proof about P vs. NP or the scalability limits of a distributed system, go so far off course when faced with the most important question of all – accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour?

It’s obviously a complex and multifaceted set of reasons – and, of course, the most intuitive answers are that, at the heart level, 1) people only believe what they want to believe; 2) the answer to this question is primarily an emotional response; 3) there is a reluctance to submit to a God who requires our humility and repentance to see the truth; and 4) there is unwillingness to give up certain superficial or hedonistic habits or ways of life that faith in Christ would require revising or abandoning.

And I think they are all satisfactory pretexts for why many very smart people remain wrong on the biggest question – the one regarding their own salvation. But I think it does remain peculiar even at the intellectual level, because very smart minds have the cognitive artillery and resources to arrive at a similar conclusion themselves, not just about the truth of Christ as a proposition on the table, but about their own process map and potential areas of improvement for arriving at the right conclusion.

A Flawed Idea About Billionaires

 

Quote from a friend on Facebook that's doing the rounds: 

“Elon Musk’s wealth is projected to more than double over the next five years, placing him on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Here’s what that actually looks like:
- $1 trillion = $1,000,000,000,000 — that’s a million million dollars.
- A worker on £30,000/year earns around $38,000/year at current exchange rates.  It would take that worker 26.3 million years to earn what Musk could be worth.
- If Musk dropped $10,000 on the floor, it wouldn’t be worth his time to pick it up — he makes more than that in under 10 seconds.
- If you spent $1 million a day, every single day, it would take 2,740 years to spend $1 trillion.
In a world where millions struggle to eat, there is no moral or economic justification for billionaires to exist — never mind trillionaires.”

My response: If you’re worried about ‘millions struggling to eat’ then the anti-billionaire logic is backwards. Billionaires tend to do disproportionately more for the poor than any other group, because the more money that comes into one person’s treasury, the more they can scale up their beneficence in the wider globe (through investment, job creation and charitable causes). Here I make no comment about Musk as a person, but generally, as wealth accumulates for an individual, every increasing pound or dollar increases the chances of it doing some external good elsewhere. This is because very rich people accumulate wealth with capital that has declining marginal utility.

If you look at the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution, significant individual or corporate wealth is frequently tied to large-scale economic impact for good, like investment in companies, global job creation, infrastructure, technological innovation, philanthropy, aid and lifting millions out of poverty. And as wealthy people’s personal spending needs become more and more trivial compared to their capital, their positive global influence just keeps increasing, where their own personal declining marginal utility engenders rising utility for the world’s poorest people.

Because of declining marginal utility, one single billionaire is likely to do more good across the world than one thousand millionaires, because a single billionaire has more concentrated resources, which can enable very large-scale projects that the single millionaires would not likely facilitate on their own (most single millionaires would have invested a significant chunk of their million in a decent home).

On Positive Discrimination

Refusing to treat someone fairly because of their skin colour used to be the epitome of the racism we've tried so hard to weed out of society. It has always been so obviously wrong that it's shocking to learn anyone ever entertained the idea. If when reading that you pictured the person being discriminated against having black skin, I'm sure you will agree with me.

Remarkably, though, when some people make the same statement but with the signs reversed - that is, by saying that it's ok to refuse to treat white or Asian people fairly because of their skin colour by hiring people on the basis of their black skin, they don't feel as outraged, and simply call it positive discrimination.

It is peculiar to me that they can use the same type of reasoning and the same type of unfair prejudice as the racists of the past, but one gets deplored and the other gets lauded. Racism against black people is deplorable, whereas racism against white people and Asians is laudable if you just call it 'positive discrimination'.

Positive discrimination on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity is not only racist against white people and Asians, it's actually damaging to black people too. Suppose we have a university that practices positive discrimination. Among the black students there will be those who got in on merit and those who did not. Many of the latter group will be out of their depth, and many of the former group will have their achievements called into question, under the suspicion that they were chosen on the basis of skin colour not competence.

 

Gratitude For Good & Bad Things

Back when I wasn’t a Christian, in the late 1990s, I made the following kind of argument to Christians who said that God had healed them of condition x and illness y:

“It’s all very well saying God healed you from x or y - but through, at best, the universe’s laws or, at worst, God’s unwillingness to intervene pre-emptively, He still enabled these things to happen in the first place. If Jill has painful cancer for 2 years, then gets miraculously healed, it’s strange how God gets thanked for the healing, but not dismissed or condemned for the 2 years of painful cancer in the first place. If Jack breaks my leg by kicking me, I should not praise him for handing me a crutch."

Even then, I could accept the proposition that God doesn’t directly cause the suffering, and that there may be good reasons why He allows suffering for character-building, perseverance and growth.

But when I became a Christian, He showed me through Christ that He’s the one who comes into the wreckage, binds the wounds, and then teaches me to walk again. I also learned as a Christian that even when it seems He’s not noticeably coming into the wreckage, binding the wounds, and then teaching me to walk again, He’s still present - sustaining me, shaping me, holding me up when I can’t feel it, quietly, patiently, weaving grace into the cracks, and writing a story deeper than my immediate relief.

Understanding this helps make sense of Paul’s instruction for us to “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) and “Give thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20), even the really hard times. But it was only when I spent several years watching my dad suffer and slowly die with dementia that I began to understand more intimately what it means to give thanks in all things – even the very hardest things - because God is always good and always present and working in and through them.

This wisdom also applies to when we give thanks to God for everything that others might see as trivial. Before becoming a Christian, I used to find it strange that Christians would give thanks to God for food they’d just cooked, the weather, a car running well, and so forth. But after becoming a Christian, I began to understand why. It’s beneficial for us to be grateful for all things that we know are, in the long run, for our own good – and the kind of God who loves us enough to suffer and die for us as Christ did is bound to be doing immeasurable good in all kinds of ways that we can’t yet see or understand.

Are We In The Last Days Before Final Judgment?

 

Following on from parts one and two about the current nation of Israel, I want to talk now about this subject in relation to end times (or more precisely, the end part of end times). At some point, Christ is coming again, not as a humble servant this time, but as a righteous King and Judge. No one knows exactly when that will be (Matthew 24:36), but it will happen, when the right Biblical prophecies have been fulfilled. And many Biblical scholars, especially on matters concerning Israel, believe that the end times will come in our lifetime (say, the next 50 years). I’ve often thought about how the world is changing so rapidly in recent times, and with exponential technological capacity and transhumanistic endeavours, I wonder whether there might be a reasonable supposition that the end times are imminent (this is a topic I explored more fully in an essay called “Will God intervene before we become gods?”)

Scripture has a lot to say about the process of God’s Final Judgement. First there’ll be some kind of Rapture event (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) when Jesus comes for His church, taking believers to be with Him. Quite what that means literally we don’t know. Then we’ll have the Second Coming (Revelation 19:11-16) when Jesus comes with His church to establish His 1,000-year reign. Again, we are not sure what that literally means, or whether the 1,000 years are literal either, but we know His return will be dramatic, and it will bring justice to the world, rewarding the faithful, and judging those who have rejected Him. The Bible declares, ‘For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16). His coming will be unmistakable, and every person will stand before Him to give an account (Revelation 20:12).

If all this sounds strange to you, you have to remember first that this is exactly what we should expect from a God who made Himself known with the Word of Truth, and who has shown Himself to be reliable, loving, just and merciful every step of the way thus far. You also need to be aware that the Bible is a book full of fulfilled prophecies – most have been fulfilled, in fact – and there aren’t currently many still left to be fulfilled. Remember too that the Bible is alive and active (Hebrews 4:12) and continues to play out in the present and the future, as the final prophecies become fulfilled. It’s a dynamic set of books, where God’s plan is at the heart of every stage of the narrative, right up to the present day, and every future period.

According to scripture, several major prophecies must happen before the Second Coming, including: The tribulation period (Daniel 9:27, Matthew 24:21), The rise of the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, Revelation 13), The battle of Armageddon (Revelation 16:16), and the Gospel preached to all nations (Matthew 24:14). After the prophecies leading up to the Second Coming of Christ, there are still a few major prophecies that remain after Christ returns. We have the judgment of the nations (Matthew 25:31-46). After Jesus returns, He will judge the nations based on how they treated His people during the tribulation. Then, Satan will be bound for 1,000 years (Revelation 20:1-3), where we are told an angel will seize Satan and lock him in the abyss for 1,000 years, where he will no longer be able to deceive nations. Then we have the millennial reign of Christ (Revelation 20:4-6, Isaiah 11:1-10), where He will rule from Jerusalem in a glorified and more direct way on Earth for 1,000 years. During this time, we are told there will be peace, righteousness, and restoration - but mortal humans will still be living and having children. Furthermore, some people born during this time will still choose to reject Christ, which says a lot in itself. We can expect that Satan is released much later on for a short time and there will be final rebellion (Revelation 20:7-10). During that time, Satan will deceive the nations once more, leading a final rebellion against Christ. But God will destroy this rebellion instantly with fire from Heaven, and Satan will be thrown into the Lake of Fire forever. Then we’ll have the final judgment of all unbelievers throughout history (Revelation 20:11-15), and the New Heaven and New Earth (Revelation 21:1-5, 2 Peter 3:10-13), where there will be no more death, pain, or suffering - only eternal joy and reign with God.

I grant you that if you’re not familiar with this kind of language, it sounds absurd. But once you become familiar with the genius of the Bible, and the notion that God created everything and is enabling His plan to unfold, this narrative isn’t just palatable, it is inevitable. Now, as I said, I don’t think we can comprehend to what extent some of these numbers are literal, or to what extent the drama and eventual denouement symbolises or reflects knowable things in the present day global unfolding, but it can be interesting to speculate on these things in relation to a current world that promises to be so radically different from anything we’ve ever experienced, certainly in terms of scale and magnitude. Because once you understand that the Bible is an active set of prophetic revelations, this stuff becomes interesting at a level beyond the narrative with which everyday social commentary preoccupies itself.

There are still several significant prophecies that believers and scholars believe have not yet been fulfilled, though there aren’t many unfulfilled prophecies left relative to the number of prophecies that have been fulfilled. That is why there are a growing number of the ecclesia who believe we are in the very last period of end times, and that Christ will return very soon. Of the key prophecies that have not yet been fulfilled, there is the rise of a global government or institution (Daniel 7, Revelation 13), and a future world leader (often referred to as the Antichrist) who will establish a one-world government and economic system. Famously, Revelation 13:16-17 describes a "mark of the beast" that will be required for buying and selling. There will also be the rebuilding of the third temple (Ezekiel 40-48, Daniel 9:27, 2 Thessalonians 2:4), where a new Jewish temple will be built in Jerusalem before the return of Christ. The battle of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38-39 speaks of a coalition of nations (presumably Arab) that will attack Israel, and we know that this has been a reality for Israel especially in the past 60 years. I note too that in the Psalm 83 war, it looks to be describing a future war where Israel’s neighbouring enemies (again, probably modern Arab nations, though likely Iran too) will unite against it (perhaps the nations listed - Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Tyre, and Assyria correspond to modern-day nations like Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and maybe even fundamentalist Islam in the Palestinian regions). Revelation 13 prophesies the emergence of a charismatic world leader, making a peace deal with Israel, with a false religious leader supporting him, deceiving people with signs and wonders.

Isaiah 17:1 has a famous prophecy that predicts that Damascus (Syria’s capital) will be completely destroyed and left uninhabitable – and I don’t think this has ever happened in history, even though Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities. We all know what’s happening with Syria’s ongoing conflicts, and the wider Middle Eastern instability continually on a knife edge. The third horseman of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6:5-6) describes hyperinflation and economic turmoil during the last days, and with digital currency and the spectre of a one world overarching institution, we could be vulnerable to this sooner than we think. We read of a massive falling away from the faith that will occur before the return of Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:3, Matthew 24:9-12), a significant division of Israel (Joel 3:2, Zechariah 12:2-3) – and this could be fulfilled when there is a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, where a major peace agreement ironically causes conflict and division in the long run. Revelation 16:12 predicts the Euphrates River will dry up, making way for the armies of the east, and there will be an increase in natural disasters & pestilences (Luke 21:11, Matthew 24:7), where Christ warned of earthquakes, famines, and plagues in the end times – which I’ve always been unsure of, but then years ago I was unsure if we’d ever live through a global pandemic, and now we have, with more to come, surely.

I’m not denying the speculative nature of some of the specifics above – and nobody knows just exactly how all this will play out in terms of specific world events. But in all of this - amid the prophetic signs, global uncertainty, and rapid transformation of our world – we can have confidence that at the heart of the Biblical message is hope, where the culmination of God’s plan will be rooted in mercy and truth. And we don’t understand this properly until we understand that Israel is central to God's unfolding plan - past, present, and future. To understand God’s end time plan, we must understand the significance of Israel, both as a nation and as a people still chosen and cherished by Him.

 

Luxury Beliefs

 

Society is awash these days with what psychologist Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs” - which are beliefs that are designed to make you look good at a cost to those less fortunate. Like the purchasing of designer clothing to signal material status, luxury beliefs are intended to signal virtue and status, but at a cost to society’s poorest people.

Perhaps the most obvious case in point is climate alarmism, where well-off people call for policies that make energy more expensive for the world’s poorest people who need cheap energy the most. It’s the height of hypocrisy to see middle class commentariats lecture the public on carbon footprints while paying no regard to the ill-effects this posturing has on the lower-income people. These same elites often live in comfortable homes, use high-end electronics, rely on fossil fuels (directly or indirectly) for virtually everything they do, and outsource their energy-heavy lifestyles to poorer countries. That’s why it’s even more repugnant when rich celebrities jump on the bandwagon.

Another clear example of a luxury belief is the insistence of well-off individuals and the cultural literati that the UK should be ceaselessly welcoming and tolerant of all immigration, while labelling those who express concerns about the social tensions and pressures on services it can bring as ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic’. Those who virtue signal with calls of ultra-tolerance and spout ‘Everyone’s welcome!” platitudes rarely experience the direct costs of highly concentrated influxes of immigration in areas already strained on public services, housing or social tensions, which disproportionately affect residents in deprived areas. This disconnect allows the belief to function as a status signal of moral superiority, while the real challenges are left to be borne by the most vulnerable communities.

Socialist rhetoric is another luxury belief - popular among wealthy students and cultural elites who benefit from capitalism but call for its dismantling, without facing the consequences of the economic instability such systems often bring. The anti-Israel stance often seen in elite academic and media circles serves as a moral status symbol, yet disregards the lived realities of ordinary citizens affected by terrorism and conflict, especially those in Israel, who have faced decades of bloodshed and persecution from militant Islamists who wish to wipe their nation off the map. Cancel culture is another classic example - it is embraced either by those with institutional or economic protection, or those with no real skin in the game - who can afford to make mistakes and recover - while it devastates the careers and reputations of the majority of people trying to make society a better, more truthful place. 

In each case above, the luxury belief serves more as an expression of virtue-signalling and a desire to look good than a genuine attempt to improve the world. Luxury beliefs often come at little cost to the elites or comfortably off people who hold them, but invariably come at a big price for less comfortable and less well-off groups if widely adopted. As a society, I think we should become more familiar with instances of hollow status symbols dressed in virtue - and never shy away from calling them out before their cost is passed on to those who can least afford it.

God Only Commands Of Us What We Should Command Ourselves

 

God only commands us to things that are good for us and good for the world. Therefore, He instructs us to do things that would be good even if He hadn’t instructed them. It’s like how a good parent tells their child to eat their vegetables, brush their teeth, and be very careful on busy roads. The child would benefit from doing these things after being taught by their parents, but would still benefit from those things even if they had worked it our from their own experiences and hadn’t been told to do so.

If God commands us, it’s because the thing being commanded is already good for us. That’s why, when Jesus says, “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God” – the corollary is that in doing what is good for us in God’s eyes, we come to see more clearly who He is, and that His commands are rooted in truth.