Eschatology literally means “the study of last things,” so when you hear people talking about eschatology they’re talking about what they believe happens in the end times.

At first, people in our culture often fail to realize how incredibly forward-looking (how eschatological) the New Testament is. Even outside of the passages we know are concerned with the end (e.g. Isaiah, Daniel, Matthew 24, “The Sheep and the Goats”, and the Book of Revelation), there is this pervasive sense that we are moving toward a time when nothing will be as it is now.

Then there are others who seem obsessed with the end times, constantly trying to draw parallels from the book of Revelation to current events or calculating timelines for when Jesus will return.

However you feel about eschatology, for the Christian, it seems to me there are four major questions a person can ask themselves to find where they sit on the spectrum of eschatological views (and there are many). They question are:

1. What is the ultimate destiny of the Christ-follower? (i.e. an eternal disembodied heaven, or life in the New Heavens and Earth)
2. What is the ultimate destiny of the unrepentant? (i.e. eternal conscious torment in Hell, destroyed/put out of existence, the same as Christians, or nothing at all)
3. What is the nature of the Revelation? (i.e. futurist, preterist, or partial-preterist, or idealist)
4. What is the nature of the Millennial Reign of Christ? Specifically, how do you understand Revelation 21:1–6? (i.e. dispensational premillenialism, historic premillenialism, postmillennialism, or amillenialism/realized millenialism)

How would you answer these questions? Maybe you’ve never thought about these questions or maybe some of these terms are new to you and you’re thinking, “Preter-dispen-illenial-huh?” That’s okay, you’ve got to start somewhere!

But why bother? Why is it important for us to nail down what we believe about the end? For starters, as I said above, the New Testament seems to have a major bent toward it. But also, I think what we believe about the end massively effects how we live in the here and now. It creates (or dispels) in us a sense of urgency. It gives meaning to our suffering and serves as a constant reminder that what we do with our lives actually matters. If in the end, for example, you believe the world will be destroyed, how might that affect how you treat the earth today?

In future posts, I hope to unpack each of these questions; explore the predominant views and explain those funky words like dispensationalism, amillenialism, and preterism; and share my own views.

In the meantime, think about how studying eschatology might benefit you personally and share your thoughts on Twitter or Facebook.