Article
The Human Desire to Simplify Eschatology
Prophecy should not be flattened just because we want it to be simple. The first coming of Jesus warns us that true prophetic fulfillment can carry more timing, order, and detail than interpreters expected.
I have already written about the nuance of events in Revelation and the way the title "the rapture" can flatten different passages into one assumed event. But underneath both of those articles is something I think matters even more: the human desire to simplify eschatology.
That desire is understandable. Prophecy is difficult. The details can feel scattered. Timelines can feel hard to hold together. So we naturally want a clean system that makes everything easier to see.
The problem is that Jesus' first coming already warns us about this.
When Jesus came the first time, many interpreters flattened the prophetic words so much that they missed the details of His coming. They expected a king, and He was a king, but He was a servant king. They expected Him to be politically motivated, and He was, but His kingdom was far greater than the one they supposed. They expected promises of restoration, rule, judgment, and salvation to arrive in a way that felt immediate and simple, but the fulfillment was more layered than that.
Isaiah gives one of the clearest examples. In Luke 4, Jesus reads from Isaiah and announces good news, liberty, healing, and "the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18-19, KJV). But He stops before the phrase in Isaiah about "the day of vengeance of our God" (Isaiah 61:2, KJV). The prophecy was true, but the timing was not flattened into one undivided moment. The text itself allowed more distinction than many would have expected.
Daniel may give another example. A reader might have expected the final week of years to follow directly after the sixty-nine weeks in one simple sequence. But that is not how history unfolded. The Messiah was cut off, Jerusalem and the sanctuary were destroyed, and the final week did not simply appear as the next immediate event in a flattened timeline.
That matters for how we read the coming of Jesus again.
It is my belief that we are often doing the same thing now that many did then. We are not always being as nuanced as Scripture has already proven itself to be in the prophetic pattern of the past. Prophecy can be very distinct. It can divide itself suddenly in timing. It can speak of realities that belong together without forcing them to happen in the same moment. And humanity has a habit of wanting to flatten ideas and simplify what might not be so simple.
That is why I have pressed into Revelation the way I have. It is not to create a new formula for eschatology or some new dramatic claim about prophecy. It is to be as nuanced as I can reasonably be while staying as true to the text as I can be.
This is not an exercise in overcomplicating the text. It is an exercise in letting the text be complicated if it appears to be complicated. And when it is simple, letting it be simple.
I have no desire to force a specific interpretation into the book. My desire is to know what the text is saying by being attentive to every detail. So I invite you to be open to doing the same. Do not flatten the text of prophecy too quickly. Do not conflate identities without deep investigation. But also, do not avoid conflating or simplifying when the text itself invites it.
When we take the text as it is written, we can gain better insight into what it is saying. Once we know what it says deeply, then we can better know how to receive that text: literally, allegorically, symbolically, or sometimes more than one of those at once.