Description
A vision of the future is an incredibly powerful force for change and action. By ‘vision’ I don’t necessarily mean in the sense of fortune-telling. I do, however, mean the kind of vision that declares: this is what should be and this is where we should go… This kind of vision is all the more powerful when it is spiritualised. When people claim that God has either revealed to them what the future will be, or (based on their understanding of the Bible) how the future will unfold, the power of vision increases exponentially! I want to challenge the predominant vision of the future that most Christians hold and present a radically different one that I believe could change the world!
Consider the late 1800s when men, like philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, gave the world an atheistic vision of the future when he described a world without God. About 100 years later after the bloodiest fifty years in human history, Time Magazine wondered whether Nietzsche’s vision had been fulfilled when its front cover featured “Is God Dead?” Nietzsche’s vision of the future had been the manifesto for Adolf Hitler and the atrocities of the Nazis and indirectly inspired state-sanctioned racism and bloodshed throughout the twentieth century.
Consider also the idea that arose in the 1800s when the notion that God’s plan for the entire earth depended upon Jews becoming a nation and the sole occupants of the “Holy Land”. This led to the formation of movement called “Zionism”. Christians aligned their ideas of the future to this new idea and called it “Dispensationalism”. These two ideas have led to the death of thousands of people and given rise to the “Palestinian Crisis”, the “War on Terror” and even who becomes the President of the United States!
Read The Most Embarrassing Verse in the Bible to have a clearer understanding of why C. S. Lewis described this verse as “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible” — and why he didn’t need to!
