Lesson plan: The Little Apocalypse

20 June 1999
Mike Tueller

I'm going to need a lot of help with this lesson. You may remember from last year that I had a lot of trouble with the apocalypse in Daniel. We talked about ways in which millennial thinking can be good or bad for us. My real problem with the lesson is that I'm just not fond of apocalyptic thought--I guess I see examples of its bad results more than of its good results.

You may think I would just avoid this lesson entirely, but I think that my own preference is a lousy reason to skip a lesson--more likely, I need this experience so I can learn something. Now, here's the key: if I'm up here primarily because I want to learn something, then you need to be the ones teaching; so today is going to be a lot of discussion. I've got a few things I want to say, but hopefully one of your primary goals will be to convince me to pay better attention to the apocalyptic teachings of the gospel.

1. Background and predictions.

Let me give a little background on the reading we did for today. Some of this may already be known to many of you--if so, bear with me.

The Pearl of Great Price was published in 1851 by Franklin D. Richards in Great Britain. At the time, more than half the church's members lived in Great Britain, and the church in Utah found that it was not yet technologically feasible to publish on a large scale in the newly-settled West. Answering the needs of both the church and the British saints, Elder Richards made a selection of works on his own initiative, and published it as the Pearl of Great Price. He included a number of hitherto unpublished works, along with selections from the Doctrine and Covenants. What we have today as the Pearl of Great Price is basically Elder Richards' compilation, somewhat expanded (in making the selections from the book of Moses continuous) with the parts that were duplicated in the Doctrine and Covenants omitted.

The Pearl of Great Price was accepted as one of the church's standard works in 1880, and with that action were canonized the only selections from Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible ever to receive that designation. The books of Moses and Joseph Smith--Matthew are those selections; they are Joseph Smith's new translations of Genesis 1:1-6:13 and Matthew 23:39-24:51.

Matthew 24, along with its synoptic parallels, Mark 13 and Luke 21, is known as "the little apocalypse," to differentiate it from the big Christian apocalypse of Revelation. If you read and compare Joseph Smith--Matthew with Matthew 24, you will find that there are not too many differences (certainly not as many as in Moses), but those that are there are significant. Most important is the reordering of several verses and labelling them to give a better chronology to the signs of the last days.

In the new chronology, we see two sequences of events, not one, as in Matthew. They are:

Before we pass on to the next section, I have to comment on the "abomination of desolation." This is specifically referred to the prophecy in Daniel. This prophecy had already been fulfilled once before Jesus was even born. The phrase "abomination of desolation" may be opaque in English, but it means the desecration ("abomination") and abandonment ("desolation") of the temple in Jerusalem. This happened when the Seleucids took Jerusalem and desecrated the temple in 167 B.C. Jesus's reference presumably means that Herod's temple would be similarly desecrated and abandoned--which happened in A. D. 70. Interestingly, no-one that I have seen has connected the prophecy of a latter-day "abomination of desolation" to the destruction of a modern temple within a generation (JS-M 1:34) before the return of Christ.

2. So what do we do?

While all that is interesting enough, it's not what I wanted to focus on. Jesus has a number of parables of how to handle the last days, but I want to tell a little personal parable that may strike home a little more (at least among the computer-savvy).

(By the way, this story is completely true.)

A little while ago, I was innocently typing my latest Sunday School lesson (not this one, but this one was already on my mind), when my computer, a mild-mannered but pretty old laptop, emitted a loud "crack!" I was perplexed, but the computer showed no other sign of a problem, so I assumed that I must have heard something else, and went on with my work. About a minute later, I tried to save my work, and discovered that I could not. It rapidly became evident that my hard drive, as far as my computer was concerned, no longer existed. A few days later, the repair shop to which I brought the computer confirmed that my hard drive had snapped and my data was unrecoverable.

It's times like this that a geek like me is happy for a habit of regularly backing up data. Had I known the day and the hour that my hard drive would turn into a paperweight, I would have backed up just moments before it happened--but I didn't. I only knew that such things were possible, so I had to back up regularly in anticipation of possible disaster. As it was, my habit only extended to backing up once a month--and, as I was far along in this backup cycle, I lost a month's worth of data. Things could have been far worse. Of course, if I had backed up weekly or daily, things could have been much better.

For me, major computer faults are truly apocalyptic. I was glad that I was as prepared as I was. My actions in preparation for apocalypse were correct (if perhaps a little too infrequent). Now, I'm sure that if Jesus's contemporaries had used computers, Jesus would have told this parable. But as they didn't, He had to rely on something different. Let's read it:

Read JS-M 1:46-48.

Let's talk about the term used here, "watch." This might be appropriate if you're looking for a thief, but it wouldn't apply that well to my hard drive: no amount of looking at it would have given me a warning of its impending suicide. However, "watch" has two meanings in English. One is to "look at," as in to "watch television." But you may remember that Shakespeare and his generation (including the King James Version translators on which the Joseph Smith translation relies) almost always used this verb to mean to "stay up late at night, or through the night." In fact, the original Greek of Matt. 24:42-43 is unmistakeable: it means to stay awake. What's important, then, is not looking for Jesus, but just being awake--by extension, being ready--when He comes.

Jesus's second parable makes His meaning clear:

Read JS-M 1:49-54.

The servant never knows when his master is returning. But if, when his master returns, the servant is at work, and is fully prepared, having done what he was supposed to, with no complaints to be reported, his master is happy. He may have had no idea when his master was returning--that was not the point. The point is that he was a steady worker, and so was always found ready.

This readiness seems to be Jesus's point. And, in that respect, an apocalypse coming we-know-not-when can encourage us to make frequent backups.

3. Jesus as apocalyptic prophet.

Although Jesus's apocalyptic prophecies occupy only one chapter in each of three gospels, many scholars (but by no means a consensus) believe that they are a key to the historical Jesus--who Jesus really was. We know that Palestine was full of apocalyptic prophets at the time, and, say these scholars, Jesus was just another one of them. Citing the apocalyptic orientation of both John the Baptist before Jesus and early Christians after Him, they say, "How could both the beginning and the end be apocalyptic if the middle was not as well? Jesus himself must have been a Jewish apocalypticist" (Ehrman p. 219).

Let's think about this, and consider Jesus's teachings. Jesus asked people to do some very hard things, like give their wealth away to the poor, accept the castouts, forgive sinners (apparently without making them undergo the complete process of Mosaic purification), follow Him without concern for how they were clothed and fed, and love absolutely everyone. Did He do this because He thought we could build a society that way (has anyone yet built a stable society on the basis of love and caring rather than power?) or because the end was near so we could surely hold out until then. I personally prefer the former, but I want to quote a paragraph for you from one of my favorite beginner's introductions to the New Testament:

These examples make it clear that the guidelines for living that Jesus gave, that is, his ethics, were grounded in his apocalyptic worldview. They are probably misunderstood, therefore, when they are taken as principles for a healthy society. Jesus did teach that people should love one another, but not because he wanted to help them lead happy and productive lives or because he knew that if love were not at the root of their dealings with one another society would fall apart. He was not a teacher of ethics concerned with how people should get along in the future. For Jesus, the end was coming soon, within his generation. The motivation for ethical behavior, then, sprang from the imminent arrival of the kingdom, to be brought by the Son of Man in judgment. (Ehrman, pp. 227-28)