With a lifelong engagement in Adventist faith and tradition, I could not resist sharing this insightful analysis of recent developments by my friend and colleague Michael Peabody. Things are moving fast in today’s world.
I encourage you to become a subscriber to Peabody’s blog at ReligiousLiberty.tv. If you would like to write him, his mailing address is at the bottom of this essay.
The President Who Told the Pope to Shut Up (And the King Who Tried It 500 Years Ago)
Henry VIII wanted a church that would bless his decisions. Trump appears to want the same arrangement, without the bureaucratic paperwork. Pope Leo XIV’s response was unambiguous: “I have no fear of the Trump administration.”  Donald Trump issued a 334-word broadside on Truth Social attacking Pope Leo XIV as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” claimed credit for the pope’s election, and posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.  That last part he eventually deleted, but without apology.
JD Vance, a Catholic convert, was dispatched to Fox News to manage the fallout. His answer was remarkable for its candor: “In some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality… and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”  What Vance was really doing was drawing a jurisdictional line between the spiritual and the temporal, with Washington on top. It is a very old argument, and it has a very old precedent. Henry VIII made precisely this case in 1534 when Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring the English Crown the “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” Henry had a matrimonial dispute Rome would not accommodate, and his solution was institutional: if the pope won’t cooperate, rewrite the chain of command.
The parallels are not perfect, but they are instructive. Henry did not destroy Christian faith in England; he nationalized it. He kept the liturgy, the bishops, the vestments. What he eliminated was the one thing he could not control: an external spiritual authority with the standing to say no. Trump has no Act of Supremacy, and the Catholic Church is not subject to American statute. But the impulse is identical. The pope drew Trump’s anger by speaking about the war in the Middle East and the treatment of immigrants. Vance’s argument that these fall outside the Vatican’s proper domain collapses on inspection: by any reasonable definition, they are precisely matters of morality. 
This is where Trump’s instincts reveal a fundamental misreading of what the separation of church and state was designed to do. The Founders of the United States had watched European history closely enough to know that state entanglement with religion produced persecution, coercion, and the weaponization of faith for political ends. The wall Jefferson described in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists was erected precisely so that no president could tell a religious body what subjects were and were not permissible topics for moral instruction. Trump has inverted the principle entirely, treating the Vatican’s prophetic voice as an intrusion into his jurisdiction rather than recognizing that his jurisdiction ends where conscience begins.
To be precise: the United States government cannot silence the pope, and it cannot silence any other religious leader. The First Amendment remains intact, and Leo XIV is an independent sovereign head of state beyond any American legal reach. But the attempt to delegitimize religious moral authority, to draw a government-issued map of what faith may and may not address, is its own kind of pressure. Normalized over time, it shapes what religious leaders feel free to say, what congregations expect to hear, and what churches are willing to risk. The danger is not a single executive order. It is the gradual redefinition of religious liberty from a right that protects prophetic speech into a privilege that requires political permission.
Many Protestant evangelicals have cheered this confrontation from the sidelines, pleased to see a pope put in his place by a president they regard as their champion. That comfort is badly misplaced. The principle Vance articulated does not stop at the Tiber. If the state claims authority to define which religious pronouncements count as legitimate “matters of morality” and which constitute improper interference in public policy, every church is subject to that same standard. The Southern Baptist pastor who preaches on immigration, the Pentecostal bishop who speaks to criminal justice, the evangelical college that declines to comply with federal mandates on grounds of conscience: all of them are vulnerable to the same logic Vance just supplied to Washington.
Henry VIII’s Protestant heirs learned this slowly and painfully. The Church of England became a state instrument not because England abandoned Christianity, but because it handed the Crown a veto over Christian witness. Nonconformists, Baptists, and Quakers spent the next two centuries paying the price for that arrangement in fines, imprisonment, and exile. Five centuries ago, Thomas More went to the scaffold rather than sign a loyalty oath to a king who had decided he outranked the pope. The question now is a quieter one, but not entirely different: who holds the final word on what belongs to Caesar, and what does not? Protestants who think that question only concerns Catholics have not read enough history.
This article presented with appreciation to Michael Peabody, who provides amazing insight into current events.
I do not usually expound on political matters knowing that anything I say on the subject will polarize my audience and distract from the biblical/theological focus of the blog site. But the following essay rings too true biblically to ignore. And for those who like Trump Michael Peabody shortly after offered a counter-balancing perspective. Good stuff. Will share both here.
Jon
“Glory Be to God”: Trump’s Religious Framing of the Iran War and What It Reveals Inside a 24-hour window that also included an excluded Catholic service at the Pentagon. ReligiousLiberty.TV
Donald Trump posted three words on Truth Social this morning that deserve more attention than they are likely to receive: “Glory be to God.” The full post, published Saturday, reads: “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” CBS News Trump issued this ultimatum the day before Easter Sunday. Bloomberg An American president, on Holy Saturday, threatening what could be a catastrophic new military escalation, closed his message with a doxology. The glory of God invoked in the same breath as hell raining down on tens of millions of people.
Iran’s central military command rejected the threat within hours. Gen. Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi called it “a helpless, nervous, unbalanced and stupid action” and, echoing Trump’s own language, warned that “the simple meaning of this message is that the gates of hell will open for you.” CBS News Two governments, each reaching for the language of divine wrath on the holiest weekend of the Christian calendar. This is not incidental. It is a pattern. And for those of us who track what happens when state power fuses with sacred language, it is accelerating faster than most Americans realize.
The Rhetoric Stacks Up We have been tracking this pattern at ReligiousLiberty.tv since before the bombs started falling. When the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, the religious framing was already baked in. During a press briefing on the Iran war, Defense Secretary Hegseth told Americans they should take a knee and pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and elaborated separately: “Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better. The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” Prism News
Then came the March 26 prayer service at the Pentagon. Hegseth recited what he described as the “premission reading” given by a chaplain to troops involved in the capture of Venezuela’s then-president, reading from the Book of Psalms: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them. I did not turn back til they were consumed. I thrust them through so that they were not able to rise. They fell under my feet.” Military Times He continued: “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.” He closed “in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, King over all kings.” The Nation This was not a private prayer. It was delivered at a government-organized worship service inside the Pentagon, during an active war, to officials in the chain of command of the world’s most powerful military.
The language has filtered downward. According to a complaint from a noncommissioned officer, U.S. forces were told that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus” to spark events leading to Armageddon. The Guardian cited 200 further complaints received by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation that commanders were invoking Christian “end times” rhetoric in relation to the conflict. One said the operation had been framed as “God’s divine plan,” with references to the book of Revelation and the imminent return of Christ. Premier Christianity NPR’s Quil Lawrence also noted that Hegseth has used the phrase “no quarter” in connection with the conflict. That phrase has a precise legal meaning: it is illegal not to give quarter, not to take prisoners. That is a war crime. NPR When that phrase travels inside explicitly Christian prayer, the implications are not theological. They are operational.
The Pentagon Chapel and the Catholic Question Into this already volatile climate came the Good Friday episode, which unfolded on the same day as Trump’s Saturday ultimatum. Hegseth’s Pentagon held a Protestant-only Good Friday service at its in-house chapel, with no Catholic Mass scheduled. The setup drew frustration from at least one Pentagon employee after an internal email made the arrangement explicit: “Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel.” Mediaite
There is a legitimate liturgical footnote. Catholics do not celebrate traditional Mass on Good Friday. The Church observes instead a Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion. A Defense Department official later explained that the chaplain office’s priest was not in town, and that no Catholic Good Friday service had been arranged as a result. Yahoo! Some of the initial criticism overstated the canonical significance. But the liturgical detail does not resolve the larger concern. In February, Hegseth invited Pastor Doug Wilson to lead prayer at the Pentagon. Wilson has advocated for a vision of Christian governance that would ban public Catholic rituals, including Masses, Marian processions, and Corpus Christi devotions. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. military identifies as Catholic. Mediaite
The Washington Post reported that Hegseth has been hosting monthly evangelical Christian prayer services in the building. Last May, he brought Brooks Potteiger, his Tennessee pastor and spiritual advisor, to lead one such gathering, during which Potteiger described President Donald Trump as a divinely appointed leader. Hegseth said at the time he wanted to make the monthly services a permanent tradition. Prism News Hegseth also announced he was reducing the number of faith codes used in the military from 200 to 31, saying the move addressed “political correctness and secular humanism” in the Chaplain Corps. The Daily Beast A Pentagon employee who has worked there since 1980 said this was the first time in their tenure that a Catholic Good Friday observance had not been offered. Thelettersfromleo The cumulative picture is not one of religious liberty. It is one of religious preference institutionalized at the top of the chain of command, during a war.
The Archbishop Speaks The most significant development of this week may have come from an unexpected corner. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services and the senior Catholic leader overseeing spiritual care for all U.S. military personnel, told CBS that Hegseth’s invocation of Jesus Christ to justify the conflict is “problematic,” and advised Catholic service members to “do as little harm as you can, and to try and preserve innocent lives.” Inquisitr Broglio is not a progressive critic. He is a conservative archbishop. As recently as January 28 of this year, he praised Hegseth at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, saying Hegseth “definitely wants to return the chaplaincy to responsibility for religious services, religious instruction, and advising the commanders.” That earlier alignment makes his public break all the more significant as a signal that the rhetorical line between faith-informed leadership and sectarian war justification has, in his judgment, been crossed. Prism News
Pope Leo XIV condemned war during a Palm Sunday Mass, saying Jesus “rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war” and “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” The Nation The pope was not speaking abstractly. He was responding to a specific, named situation.
A Historical Pattern, With a Critical Difference Presidents have long reached for religious language in wartime. Lincoln invoked the will of God throughout the Civil War while carefully refusing to claim God was on the Union’s side alone. His Second Inaugural is a model of theological humility under pressure. FDR led the nation in prayer on D-Day, asking God to protect the troops and grant them endurance. George W. Bush used the word “crusade” after September 11 before advisors persuaded him the word was diplomatically catastrophic. Even Obama invoked the protection of the Almighty for fallen troops and their families. None of that is equivalent to what is happening now. Historian Ronit Stahl, a scholar of the military chaplaincy, said it is “rarely” the case that “an American military leader justified killing by declaring that God has sanctioned violence as an ultimate, higher good,” and that it is “highly unusual for high-ranking officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s name as a religious duty.” The New Republic What American leaders have historically done is invoke God as a source of protection and moral accountability. What Hegseth is doing is different: he is invoking God as the sanctioning authority for maximum lethal force, while simultaneously reshaping the institutional religion of the military to reflect one narrow branch of evangelical Protestantism, and while troops on the ground are reportedly being told their deployment is part of a biblical plan for the end of the world.
The Armageddon Question We have to say plainly what some of our readers are already thinking, because it needs to be said with precision rather than left to fever-swamp speculation. There are people inside this administration, and within the network of evangelical advisors surrounding it, who believe the current conflict in the Middle East may be connected to biblical end-times prophecy. Figures in this network have publicly described Middle East wars as signs of the “last days,” argued that geopolitical upheaval fulfills biblical prophecy, and framed American military action in explicitly dispensationalist terms. The Intercept Paula White-Cain, head of the White House Faith Office, operates within a theological tradition that reads current events through what is called dispensationalist eschatology: a system that divides history into eras, assigns a special prophetic role to the modern state of Israel, and anticipates a final global conflict before the return of Christ.
Certain evangelical voices have explicitly linked the Iran conflict to passages in Ezekiel 38-39, which describe a coalition including “Persia” (modern Iran) rising against Israel in the last days. One such commentator wrote: “I believe the Bible clearly foretold that Israel would be scattered and regathered, fulfilled on May 14, 1948, and that’s when the prophetic time clock began to tick.” Harvest
We want to be careful here, and precise. The vast majority of people who hold these theological views are sincere Christians interpreting ancient texts as best they can. Belief in the second coming of Christ is not fringe. It is held by hundreds of millions of people across the globe, including many of our own readers. The Adventist tradition has its own rich, carefully developed theology of last-day events, and we will address that directly below. The problem is not that people in government believe in the end times. The problem is when those beliefs shape the prosecution of an actual war, in real time, in ways that close off diplomatic options, license extraordinary violence, and tell soldiers that their deaths are part of God’s cosmic plan. U.S. forces were reportedly told that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus” to “light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” Premier Christianity That is not private theology. That is command-level religious instruction during an active combat deployment. And it has no place in a constitutional republic whose military swears an oath to a secular document, not a denominational creed.
When a government begins believing its own war is divinely ordained and prophetically necessary, it loses the flexibility that peace requires. You cannot negotiate your way out of Armageddon. You cannot accept a ceasefire if the bombs are God’s plan. This is precisely why the fusion of prophetic end-times theology with military command authority is among the most dangerous things that can happen in a nuclear-armed state.
The Adventist Perspective: A History That Has Been Waiting for This Moment Seventh-day Adventists have been watching what is happening in Washington with a particular quality of attention. For the broader public, the events of the past several weeks are alarming but novel. For Adventists, they are alarming and deeply familiar. The Adventist Church was born, in large part, out of precisely this concern. The church emerged from the Millerite movement following the Great Disappointment of 1844, and its founders almost immediately turned their attention to the question of church and state. They saw in Revelation 13 a prophetic outline of how religious coercion would return to the earth in the last days: a great power, initially characterized by religious liberty and republican government, would eventually unite church and state, use civil authority to enforce religious observance, and persecute those who refused to comply. They identified that power as the United States of America.
This was not a peripheral concern. It was central to Adventist identity. As early as 1851, the denomination began to preach that the second great prophetic symbol of Revelation 13 represented the United States. By the late 1880s, when Sunday law legislation was moving through Congress, Adventists collected 250,000 signatures against it, organized what became the International Religious Liberty Association, and made religious freedom for all people, not just for themselves, a defining institutional commitment. Ellen G. White Writings Ellen G. White, the church’s most influential early writer, articulated the theological stakes with precision. She wrote: “The union of the church with the state, be the degree never so slight, while it may appear to bring the world nearer to the church, does in reality but bring the church nearer to the world.” General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists Her concern was not merely institutional. It was eschatological. She believed that when the United States, the nation she saw as history’s great experiment in religious freedom, began to use government power to enforce religious observance, it would signal the approach of the final crisis of earth’s history. White’s prophetic concern was not that the U.S. would become too secular, but that it would lose its Protestant commitment to religious liberty through church-state union and coercive religious laws. Her ideal America was not a state enforcing Christian belief, but a nation protecting freedom of conscience for all. Spectrum Magazine
The Adventist Church’s official position has consistently held that government enforcement of religious observances is incompatible with biblical and constitutional principles, and that “God desires from all His creatures the service of love, service that springs from an appreciation of His character. He takes no pleasure in a forced obedience; and to all He grants freedom of will, that they may render Him voluntary service.” Adventistliberty This is why Adventists have historically been among the most vigilant, and most principled, defenders of First Amendment religious liberty, not only for themselves but for everyone. The church stated explicitly: “We would be as earnest against a law compelling people to keep Saturday as a law forcing all to cease from labor on Sunday. We want freedom for all. We regard religious liberty as the cornerstone of all true freedom.” Ellen G. White Writings Now consider what Adventists are watching in 2026. They see a Defense Secretary with Crusader cross tattoos hosting mandatory-adjacent evangelical worship services inside the Pentagon. They see the number of recognized military faith codes cut from 200 to 31. They see a Protestant-only Good Friday service in a chapel that serves a military force that is one-quarter Catholic. They see active-duty troops being told their war is part of God’s plan to trigger Armageddon. They see a president closing military ultimatums with “Glory be to God” on the day before Easter. They see the White House Faith Office populated by dispensationalist end-times theologians. They see Project 2025’s proposal for a uniform Sunday rest law moving through policy discussions. The North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists formally stated that the Sunday rest proposal “represents a dangerous desire to use state power to advance religious objectives” and is “irreconcilable with America’s rich heritage of protecting the religious freedom of all its citizens.” North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists
The day the United States and Israel bombed Iran, one Adventist writer received a message from a friend that said simply: “Jesus is coming soon.” Adventist Today That writer went on to reflect, thoughtfully, on what it means to deploy prophetic language responsibly, and on the danger of crying end-times so often that the warning loses its force. It is a fair caution. Adventists have been saying “Jesus is coming soon” through every major crisis of the last 180 years. The church has learned, sometimes painfully, that date-setting and event-mapping are spiritually and intellectually treacherous. Some within Adventism have argued that the church’s “watertight non-negotiable chronology of events leading up to the second coming” has become its own Maginot Line: a defense built for a war that arrives from an unexpected direction. Spectrum Magazine
But responsible caution about prophetic speculation is different from failing to name what is plainly visible. What Ellen White warned about was not an abstraction. She described, with remarkable specificity, a scenario in which the government of the United States would use religious rhetoric and official state power to privilege one form of Christianity, marginalize dissenters, and frame its military and political ambitions in the language of divine mandate. She warned that this process would begin gradually, that it would seem reasonable and even pious to many observers, and that its early stages would be dismissed as alarmist by people of good will. The Adventist tradition does not claim to know the day or the hour. It does not know whether the Iran war is the beginning of Armageddon, or one more chapter in the long, terrible history of human conflict dressed in religious clothing. What it does know, with 180 years of institutional clarity, is what the early warning signs look like. And it knows that silence, when those signs appear, is not wisdom. It is abdication. Ellen White wrote: “We are not doing the will of God if we sit in quietude, doing nothing to preserve liberty of conscience.” General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists This is not quietude.
What Religious Liberty Actually Requires One source told the Washington Post: “I don’t approve of cramming your religious faith down people’s throats, and when the top of the chain couches these operations in this hyper-Christian tone, it flies in the face of the freedom of religion that the Constitution enshrines and that our men and women in uniform sign up to defend.” The Daily Beast The military context makes this uniquely urgent. Civilians can walk away from a boss who proselytizes. Service members cannot walk away from a chain of command. When the Defense Secretary organizes monthly Christian worship services inside the Pentagon, reduces the military’s faith codes by 84 percent, marginalizes chaplains who do not share his theology, and prays in the name of Jesus Christ for overwhelming violence against the nation’s enemies, the constitutional concern is not abstract. It lands on real human beings who are already being asked to risk their lives. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America put it well: “The idea behind faith in the military, whatever your faith is, is really useful in combat. However, being weaponized is the opposite of what the original intention is. People tune out, and that is really, really dangerous.” The Daily Beast
Iran’s general, responding to Trump’s Saturday ultimatum, reached for his own divine framing. The “gates of hell will open for you,” he wrote, echoing Trump’s language back at him. Two nuclear-adjacent powers, trading the language of holy wrath across an international crisis. The mirroring is not coincidental. It is precisely what happens when the leader of a nominally secular republic begins framing military action in the language of cosmic religious conflict. It licenses the same framing on the other side. It narrows the space for diplomacy. It raises the cost of backing down. And it tells everyone who might be persuaded toward peace that to stop fighting would be to defy God. The archbishop of the military services said the war is hard to view “as something that would be sponsored by the Lord.” The pope said God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war. Ellen White said the union of church and state, be the degree never so slight, brings the church nearer to the world. On Saturday, the president closed a military ultimatum with a doxology. The theological tradition these leaders claim to represent has a word for that. It is not “glory.” ________________________________________ ReligiousLiberty.tv is reader-supported and carries no advertising. Subscriptions fund original reporting and analysis on faith, freedom, and the First Amendment. If this work matters to you, please consider supporting it. Share ReligiousLiberty.TV
The following blog is shared by permission. I share it because I find his commentaries on religio-political issues balanced and insightful. Shared with his permission from behind a paywall.
Before I share, let me just note that I have been overwhelmed the last six months for a number of reasons, hence the lack of any blogs. Hopefully, this will be a step toward regular sharing again.
WIDOW SAYS ‘SHABBAT SHALOM’ — CANDACE OWENS CALLS IT A CONSPIRACY As antisemitism spikes nationwide, America’s most-watched podcaster turns a Hebrew greeting into a murder theory ReligiousLiberty.TV
Seventh-day Adventists have kept the Saturday Sabbath for nearly two centuries, endured the “Judaizer” charge from their earliest critics, and built an entire theology of religious liberty around the conviction that the day you worship is nobody else’s business. They should be paying very close attention to what is happening right now in American public life, because someone is treating the word “Shabbat” as a confession of guilt, someone spray-painted a swastika on a Seventh-day Adventist church last Saturday morning, and the two developments are not unrelated. ________________________________________
The Sarcastic Greeting There is something almost poetically grotesque about what led Candace Owens to open a recent podcast episode with a sarcastic “OK everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” replacing her theme music with “Hava Nagila.” Three days earlier, Erika Kirk had appeared on CBS and mentioned that she and her late husband Charlie had visited and admired Israel. That was apparently enough. A widow, promoting Charlie’s posthumously published book about his personal embrace of Saturday Sabbath-keeping, offered a Hebrew greeting. Owens treated it as a tell. The conspiracy Owens has been constructing since Charlie Kirk’s assassination involves, at various points, France, Egypt, and most pointedly Israel. She has implied Israeli government involvement in the murder, claimed Egyptian aircraft had tracked Erika Kirk’s movements for years, and called the evidence in the police affidavit “fake and gay.” When Erika Kirk sat with Owens for four and a half hours, bringing phone records and legal counsel to address the claims, Owens emerged unmoved. After the “Shabbat Shalom” episode, Blake Neff, producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, pointed out that Owens had “aggressively ridiculed” Erika Kirk for using the phrase, and noted that Charlie’s book was specifically about his love of Shabbat observance. Owens replied: “They need the world to know that Charlie loved Shabbat. We are beyond parody.” She also suggested the book was a fabrication designed to make Charlie appear more pro-Jewish than he actually was. So in Owens’ framework, a man who kept the Sabbath, wrote a book about it, whose widow uses a Sabbath greeting while grieving, is exhibiting suspicious Jewish entanglement. The ancient Hebrew practice of Shabbat has become a red flag. A greeting becomes a tell. Faith becomes proof of a plot. That is not anti-Zionism. That is not geopolitical criticism. That is antisemitism, and it is worth being precise about that before moving on. ________________________________________ A Swastika on a Sabbath-Keeping Church On February 28, 2026, a Saturday morning, San Francisco police responded to reports of antisemitic and homophobic graffiti on California Street in Pacific Heights. They found the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church painted with swastikas and slurs, damage estimated at more than $20,000. A suspect, 51-year-old Sadat Mousa, was arrested on the scene and booked on charges including felony vandalism with a hate crime enhancement. The target was a Seventh-day Adventist church. Not a synagogue. A Saturday-morning Christian congregation whose primary distinguishing public feature is that its members worship on the biblical Sabbath. ________________________________________ The remainder of this analysis is available to ReligiousLiberty.TV subscribers. Given the sensitivity of what follows, including the historical and prophetic implications for Sabbath-keeping communities, we’ve placed this content behind our subscriber wall. If this reporting matters to you, please consider joining the readers who support independent religious liberty journalism. ________________________________________ The Deep Architecture To understand why this matters for Adventists specifically, it helps to revisit history the denomination tends to footnote rather than foreground. From the movement’s earliest days, the charge of “Judaizing” was leveled at Sabbatarians. Nineteenth-century critics taunted that Saturday worship was the Jewish practice and therefore suspect. The denomination spent decades distinguishing its Sabbath theology from Jewish law, arguing that the seventh-day Sabbath predates Abraham as a creation ordinance. Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi spent a career documenting how anti-Judaism drove the early Christian shift from Sabbath to Sunday worship. The social pressure to not look Jewish in a Roman empire hostile to Judaism reshaped Christian liturgical practice for two millennia. Sabbath-keeping was suppressed not primarily through theology but through the ambient cultural force of antisemitism. Which raises an uncomfortable question for the present moment. Could a sufficiently intense resurgence of antisemitism generate renewed pressure on Sabbath-keeping communities? Not necessarily through Sunday laws enacted by legislatures, but through the ambient social violence of a culture that has learned to treat Jewish practice, and practices adjacent to it, as suspect? What the Numbers Say The data is not reassuring. A recent American Jewish Committee poll found that 41% of American Jews are avoiding publicly displaying identifiers of their faith out of fear, and 66% feel less secure than a year ago. In January 2026 alone, New York City recorded antisemitic hate crimes at a rate 182% above the prior year’s baseline. In 2025, violent antisemitic incidents included an arson attack on a governor’s mansion during a Passover celebration and a shooting outside a Washington museum that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members. Into this environment, a podcaster with one of the nation’s largest audiences treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker. The algorithm rewards her for it. The mockery is directional: Saturday worship is suspect, the language of the Hebrew Sabbath is suspect, and the people who use it are suspect. She is not carefully distinguishing between Jewish Shabbat observance and Adventist Sabbath theology. The hostility is not that precise. The Pattern Adventists Should See The Adventist prophetic framework has long anticipated conditions under which Sabbath observance would become socially or legally costly. Those discussions tend to focus on Sunday law legislation, on formal legal coercion. But formal coercion is rarely how persecution begins. It begins with ambient hostility, with culture, with the slow normalization of the idea that people who worship differently are not merely wrong but dangerous. A man primed by that ambient hostility sprayed swastikas on a Seventh-day Adventist church on a Saturday morning. A podcaster with tens of millions of listeners turned a widow’s “Shabbat Shalom” into a punchline with a conspiratorial edge. The Adventist Record in Australia noted plainly that “a threat to the Jewish faith community is a threat to our faith community.” That observation no longer needs to travel across the Pacific to find its application. The right response is not panic. It is clarity, solidarity, and preparation. What Adventists Should Watch For This is not a theoretical exercise. Here is what to monitor concretely in the months ahead. Copycat vandalism. The San Francisco incident will not be the last. Adventist churches that display Sabbath-related signage, operate visible Friday-evening or Saturday-morning programming, or are located in urban areas with elevated antisemitic incident rates should be reviewing their physical security, documenting their facilities with photographs, installing security systems and cameras, and establishing a direct contact at their local police department before something happens rather than after. Conflation in public discourse. Watch for commentary, particularly from the conspiratorial right and the anti-Zionist left, that treats Adventist Sabbath observance as a form of Jewish sympathy deserving the same hostility. The logic is already present in the Owens framework. It does not require a large additional step to apply it more broadly to Saturday-keeping Christians. Legislative activity around Sunday. The Heritage Foundation published a study in January 2026 specifically promoting Sunday-closing laws, a development that followed directly on the heels of Charlie Kirk’s posthumous book about Sabbath-keeping gaining a wide readership. Watch state legislatures, not just Congress, for Sunday rest proposals framed as worker protection or Christian heritage measures. These will not arrive labeled as Sabbath restrictions. They will arrive labeled as something else. Social media targeting of Adventist content. If the cultural logic that treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker continues to spread, Adventist pastors, educators, and communicators who use Sabbath language publicly online may find themselves on the receiving end of coordinated harassment. Screenshot threats. Report them to law enforcement and local conferences. Keep records. The thread connecting Owens’ podcast to a spray-painted swastika on California Street is not difficult to follow. Ambient hostility finds its targets through cultural permission, and right now that permission is being issued from some of the largest microphones in the country. Adventists, of all communities, should recognize that pattern. They have read about it in their history books. They are watching it form in real time. What Candace Owens is doing has a name. A grieving widow using a Hebrew phrase for a peaceful Sabbath should not have to defend it. ________________________________________ Michael Peabody is an attorney and publisher of ReligiousLiberty.TV, tracking First Amendment and religious freedom cases across the United States.
The following is a rewrite of the conclusion of my paper on the mark of the beast. I have concluded that Sunday laws in our future remain the likely reading of Revelation 13 and certainly that of the Great Controversy. But given what we know about fulfilled prophecies in the Bible, they may well come from a surprising direction. For example, Clifford Goldstein offers a path to international Sunday laws that would make sense in today’s world. All the world religions anticipate some future figure that will dramatically impact the course of history. For the Christians, his name is Jesus. For the Jews, he is the Messiah. For the Muslims, he is the Mahdi (although many Muslims also anticipate a major role for Jesus). For the Hindus, he is Kalki. For the Buddhists, he is Matreiya. Second Thessalonians (2:8-10) and Revelation (13:13-14; 16:13-14) anticipate a great end-time deception in which Satan impersonates Christ before the world (GC affirms this idea). His dazzling, end-time appearance could evoke the hopes and dreams of people of all faiths. Seizing upon these expectations, Satan could call the world to worship God on Sunday as a sign of loyalty to Jesus/Messiah/Mahdi/Kalki/Matreiya and the highest hopes of their faiths. Such an outcome would fulfill Great Controversy and Revelation 13, but in an unexpected way, something fulfilled prophecy in the Bible would lead us to expect.
Ellen White herself hints at something like this in the following statement: “As we near the close of time, there will be greater and still greater external parade of heathen power; heathen deities will manifest their signal power, and will exhibit themselves before the cities of the world. . . .” In the same context she also says, “. . . the Lord has called His people and has given them a message to bear. He has called them to expose the wickedness of the man of sin who has made the Sunday law a distinctive power, who has thought to change times and laws, and to oppress the people of God who stand firmly to honor Him by keeping the only true Sabbath, the Sabbath of creation. . . .” Maranatha, 140. To me this statement suggests the possibility that a movement toward Sunday will not be a natural philosophical progression from where the world is today, but the result of dramatic shifts in the popular mindset, grounded in miraculous displays that transform popular opinion almost overnight, much as Goldstein suggests. But for those who are waiting for some “sign of the End” to get serious about their faith, such rapid movements may not signal themselves the way we might hope, and also may not leave any time for spiritual preparation. “The final movements will be rapid ones.” Testimonies for the Church, volume 9, page 11.
My concern, and the main point of the whole treatise on the mark of the beast, is that by focusing on a prediction that seems as specific and measurable as a national Sunday law in Congress, we could distract ourselves from the real thing when it happens. In a changing world things could come from a different direction and in a different way. We need hearts that are open to revelation and open to the Holy Spirit as we navigate the challenging waters ahead. The desire for certainty causes us to focus on specific details rather than on understanding the larger picture of prophecy. That understanding is difficult work, but it will keep us safe in the perplexing times ahead of us. Prophecy was not given to satisfy our curiosity about the future, it was given to prepare our hearts to meet the one that we worship and adore. I suggest we prioritize that task.
The first of the best-known statements of Ellen White on Sunday laws at the End is in The Great Controversy, page 573. I will quote the full statement and then make some brief comments: “In the movements now in progress in the United States to secure for the institutions and usages of the church the support of the state, Protestants are following in the steps of papists. Nay, more, they are opening the door for the papacy to regain in Protestant America the supremacy which she has lost in the Old World. And that which gives greater significance to this movement is the fact that the principal object contemplated is the enforcement of Sunday observance–a custom which originated with Rome, and which she claims as the sign of her authority. It is the spirit of the papacy–the spirit of conformity to worldly customs, the veneration for human traditions above the commandments of God–that is permeating the Protestant churches and leading them on to do the same work of Sunday exaltation which the papacy has done before them.”
Note first that this statement concerns “the enforcement of Sunday observance” in the United States. It is something that had been commonly done in Europe when the Roman Church had much more authority there than she ever had in the United States. But in this case the driving force behind the drive for enforcement was the Protestant leadership of the US government in the Nineteenth Century. Ellen White is not talking about some distant, future event, the movements to enforce Sunday observance were “now in progress in the United States”. She was speaking about current events in her context and the outcome of those current events for the future.
She returns to this matter on page 579 of The Great Controversy: “It has been shown that the United States is the power represented by the beast with lamblike horns, and that this prophecy will be fulfilled when the United States shall enforce Sunday observance, which Rome claims as the special acknowledgment of her supremacy. But in this homage to the papacy the United States will not be alone. The influence of Rome in the countries that once acknowledged her dominion is still far from being destroyed. And prophecy foretells a restoration of her power. . . . In both the Old and the New World, the papacy will receive homage in the honor paid to the Sunday institution, that rests solely upon the authority of the Roman Church. “Since the middle of the nineteenth century, students of prophecy in the United States have presented this testimony to the world. In the events now taking place is seen a rapid advance toward the fulfillment of the prediction.”
In this statement she is clearly making reference to Revelation 13 when she mentions the beast with the lamblike horns (Rev 13:11). She indicates that this prophecy will be fulfilled when the United States as a nation shall enforce Sunday observance. In some form this will also occur in the “Old World”, a common reference in Ellen White’s time for Europe. And, once again, she makes it clear that this is not some distant, future event. The movement toward Sunday enforcement is already in motion and moving rapidly toward an outcome that would include both the United States and Europe. Her prophecy of the future was a natural extension of things occurring in her day.
All in all Ellen White makes perhaps a hundred references to Sabbath-Sunday issues at the end of time. But this statement is different from all the earlier ones. What is different about this statement is that it is not referring merely to Sunday legislation here and there in various states, but something that would occur as a whole nation. To see the significance of this, it is helpful to know that the story of the Great Controversy came in seven editions (Early Writings, Spiritual Gifts, Spirit of Prophecy, Story of Redemption, and three editions of The Great Controversy—1884, 1888, 1911). What may surprise some is that the first five editions (through GC 1884) speak in general about Sunday legislation without the specifics of a national Sunday law legislated in Congress. It is only in the year 1888, the same year that Senator Henry Blair introduced a national Sunday law into the US Congress, that we see the addition of a national move to enforce Sunday in her projections of the End. I have gone through two collections of all of Ellen White’s statements on Sunday laws. There are actually only two statements about a national Sunday law, and both of them were written in the year 1888 (later statements, like the 1911 edition of GC, are reprints of the earlier statements). We will come to the second statement in the next blog.
How shall we understand the “mark of the beast” in the context of Revelation 13? The most obvious parallel to the mark is the seal of God. The seal is placed on the foreheads of God’s servants (the 144,000) to protect them from Satan’s destructive efforts when the four winds of the earth are released (Rev 7:1-3). An evident parallel to the seal of God is the 144,000 having the Lamb’s name and His Father’s name written on their foreheads. In the Hebrew context names are associated with a person’s character. So the seal of God seems to have something to do with the character of those being sealed.
This is supported by the wider use of sealing in the New Testament. In Ephesians 1:13, sealing by the Holy Spirit is the consequence of a faith response to the gospel. It represents the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. This sealing is a lifelong experience of the Spirit after conversion (Eph 4:30). It is the evidence that a person truly is known by God and belongs to Him (2 Tim 2:19). In the Second Christian Century, sealing was associated with baptism. So the seal of God has to do with the character transformation that happens as a consequence of a genuine relationship with God.
Revelation 7 and 14 place this sealing in an end-time context, as does Ellen White: ““(The seal of God) is not any seal or mark that can be seen, but a settling into the truth, both intellectually and spiritually, so they cannot be moved.” SDABC, vol. 4, 1161, Last-Day Events, 219-220. Ellen White understands the last-day sealing to be deepening of commitment and a completion of Christian maturity. Those who have to pass through the trials of the end-time cannot be the kind of believers Paul talks about in Ephesians 4:14, “Tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine. . . .” Likewise, at the End, Satan is forming his image into those committed to his side of the conflict. That makes the mark of the beast the mirror counterpart of the seal of God. The three angels (Rev 14:6-12) and the three frogs (Rev 16:13-14) both go out to the nations of the world. The end result is three types of people, as mentioned earlier. Those fully committed to God (the sealed), those fully committed in opposition to God (marked on the forehead), and those who go along with the beast and its image in order to preserve their lives and economic opportunities. Just as the seal of God provides protection to God’s people at the End (Rev 7:1-3, cf. Ezek 9:1-7), so the mark of the beast provides “protection” against the death decree and economic boycott of Revelation 13:15-17.
There is one further element to the mark of the beast. It is part of the beast’s counterfeit of the first four commandments of the Decalogue. The forehead and the hand echoes Moses’ call for Israel’s complete commitment to the commandments of God (Deut 6:4-8). In contrast, the beast and his image violate the first four commandments. The first commandment says to have no other gods before Yahweh. The dragon and the beast seek to be worshiped as gods (Rev 13:4, 8). The second commandment forbids the worship of images, the beast sets up an image to be worshiped (Rev 13:15). The third commandment forbids taking the Lord’s name in vain, the beast is full of blasphemy (Rev 13:1, 5-6). The mark of the beast is in defiance of the Sabbath, which is brought in on God’s side in Rev 14:7 (cf. Exod 20:11). If the law of God is a transcript of His character, you can see what is happening here, a rejection of God’s character and an affirmation of Satan’s. Satan’s character, in contrast with God’s, will be fully revealed in the final conflict.
The previous paragraph underlines that the Sabbath is a crucial issue in the final conflict. It also suggests that some counterfeit of the Sabbath will be central to the beast’s actions in the same conflict. What is less clear in the text is exactly what form that counterfeit will take. I can think of four options: 1) Another day (as in Sunday), 2) no day is a Sabbath (abolished), 3) every day is a Sabbath (not much different than two), and 4) force work or forbid worship on Sabbath. When dealing with Revelation 13 Ellen White normally works from number 1) above, but on at least one occasion mentions number 4). In the blogs that follow we will look at the evidence of Ellen White herself in the context of American religious history.
The deception of Revelation 13:13-14 results in the formation of an image to and of the beast, presumably the first beast of Revelation 13 that came up out of the sea. “And he [the land beast] was permitted to give breath to the image of the beast, in order that the image of the beast might speak and might cause whoever does not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” Rev 13:15. Typical of Jewish apocalyptic literature, the book of Revelation never quotes the Old Testament, but it alludes to it very frequently, using key words, phrases, ideas and structures to signal the reading to incorporate OT knowledge into the interpretation of a passage. We saw such allusions to the OT in 13:13-14: the experience of Elijah on Mount Carmel (fire from heaven) and the deceptive miracles of Pharaoh’s magicians.
The combination of image and breath is an unmistakable allusion to the early chapters of Genesis. God created male and female in His own image (Gen 1:26-27), using His breath to install the software of life into Adam’s earthy body. More than just oxygen, God was installing the life principle, with its unique personality and traits and that life principle included the “image of God.” That phrase is not used for the creation of animals. So there was something very godlike about Adam and Eve. They reflected God’s character in their own.
The beast from the sea is in the image of the dragon (Rev 13:1, cf. 12:4), which is also defined as the ancient serpent, Satan (Rev 12:9). So the phrase “image of the beast” implies a similar relationship to Satan as Adam originally had to God. Revelation 13:15 is telling us that at the end of time Satan will seek to implant his image into the human race in contrast to the image and character of God. Just as God’s breath installed His design into the human race, Satan at the End will seek to install his own design into the human race. The contrast could not be more stark, as noted in the previous blog in this series. Satan’s character prized lies and unreality (deception—Rev 13:13-14), intimidation and force (Rev 13:12, 15-17). Both qualities are summed up by Jesus in John 8:44. In contrast, God always speaks the truth (Rev 3:14; 15:3) and prizes human freedom (Rev 22:17). God never forces anyone. So the two sides in the final conflict grow increasingly apart as they model more and more the character of the God they worship.
The ultimate outcome of the formation of an image to the beast is to exhibit the murderous character of Satan (John 8:44) in a death decree. When the image of the beast comes to life it will “cause whoever does not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” Rev 13:15. This is a clear allusion to the Plain of Dura event in Daniel 3. There an image was set up for worship. All who would not worship Nebuchanezzar’s image would be thrown into the fiery furnace. Likewise, at the end of time, a decree goes forth that all who would not worship the image of the beast, all who will not conform to the beast’s (Satan’s) character, will be killed. Two other OT death decrees may also be in mind here, the lion’s den incident of Daniel 6, and the genocidal decree of Haman in the book of Esther (3:6, 13). The final era of earth’s history will include a replay of earlier attempts to destroy God’s people. But that is not all that Satan has in mind for the End-time.
When I was eight years old, I stood with my parents in front of our home and watched Sputnik (the first man-made satellite of earth) move with surprising speed across the night sky. Shortly after that an earnest fellow believer declared, “God will never let man land on the moon, Jesus will come first.” For him, as for many Christians, various events in today’s world provide evidence or signs that the coming of Jesus is truly near. He felt that since it would be inappropriate for human beings to defile another planet (having already messed up this one!), the approach of human exploration of the moon and the planets became a “sign” that the second coming of Jesus was at hand.
A few years later I got up at three in the morning to witness the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. Jesus did not come to intervene. Evidently human occupation of the moon was of less concern to God than my fellow believer had assumed. It turned out not to be a “sign of the End.” Incidents like these make people wonder: Will we ever know with absolute certainty that the return of Jesus is at hand? Are the signs really signs?
When we examine the New Testament, we discover that many world events that Christians take as “signs of the End” are really “signs of the age” instead. Rather than pointing to the timing of the second coming, they confirm that His predicted return at the end of the age is secure. They encourage us to believe that if Jesus knew the character of the whole age in advance, He will not be mistaken about the event that brings it to a close.
For example, when the disciples asked Jesus (Matt 24:3) about the “sign”of His coming and the end of the age, He replied, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” Matt 24:6 (NIV). Wars and rumors of wars made great signs of the End in the Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, but in Matt 24 they do not herald the End, they are part of what life is like before the End.
To fully understand what Jesus was doing in Matthew 24, it is helpful understand how the Judaism of Jesus’ day handled the same ideas (an excellent summary of the early Jewish perspective on signs can be found in D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964], 271-276). The Jewish understanding of signs, which the disciples of Jesus would have shared, was based on the Day of the Lord passages in the OT. It was felt that the near approach of the End would be marked by wars, wickedness, earthquakes, famines, and heavenly portents, among other things. So Jesus is not inventing the concept of signs, He is moderating their impact on the disciples. So it is fascinating that Jesus’ “signs” are generally used for the opposite of the purpose He intended.
Jesus goes on: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” Matt 24:7-8. Wars, famines and earthquakes do not signal the End, they signal the beginning! The disciples asked for a sign of the End, Jesus gave them signs of the age. These “signs” are not intended to stimulate speculation regarding the timing of the end, they are to remind us of Jesus’ words, which encourage us to be watchful for the End at all times (Matt 24:42).
Jesus does seem to give a measurable sign of the nearness of the End in Matt 24:14. The End will come when the gospel has been preached to the whole world. Yes, the gospel must be preached to the world before the Lord comes, but it is not the kind of sign you can base a calculation on. After all, Paul had the impression that this sign had been fulfilled already in his day (Col 1:23). The only sign that meets the disciples’ intention is the “sign of the son of man” in 24:30. But this appears to be the literal glory that surrounds Jesus Himself at His coming. Those who wait for this sign will be too late.
Jesus’ response to His disciples is disappointing to me in a way. It would seem easier for us if He would have given us all the details about the End, and the events leading up to It, then we could line them all up, see exactly where we are, and know when we have to get ready. But apparently that wasn’t Jesus’ purpose. Apparently that wouldn’t have been the best thing for us. What then was His purpose in this chapter? He gives us that in Matt 24:42. “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”
Someone noticed number 26 was missing. I wrote this and somehow never posted it. So here it is, in belated fashion.
The result of the dragon’s attack in 12:4-5 is to split up the woman and the child. He is snatched up to heaven and she flees into the desert, under God’s protection but still on earth (Rev 12:6). When the male child reaches heaven war breaks out there, with the result that the dragon and his angels lose their place in heaven and are hurled down (evblh,qh) to earth (12:7-9). When did this casting out take place? Verse 10 clearly addresses the same point in time as the war of 7-9. “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers has been hurled down.”
The time of the war in heaven is the time when the kingdom of God and the authority of Christ were clearly established (12:10). In the book of Revelation, this took place at the enthronement of the Lamb in as a result of His overcoming at the cross (Rev 5:5-6, cf. 3:21). Throughout the New Testament the Kingdom of God was seen as a present reality in the person of Jesus (Matt 12:28; Luke 17:20-21, etc.) and was established in force at His ascension when He joined His Father on the heavenly throne (cf. Heb 8:1-2, etc.). “Accuser of our brothers” (12:10) is a play on the Hebrew meaning of the word Satan (12:9), which means “the one who accuses.” Apparently up until the cross, Satan and his accusations still had a certain credibility in heavenly places (Job 1:6; Zech 3:1-2), but now this is all over. The accused can now overcome Satan by “the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony” (verse 11). Beale addresses this matter in a fascinating way, “The emphasis on Satan’s accusatorial role in 12:10 reveals that the angelic battle of vv 7-9 was figurative for a courtroom battle between two opposing lawyers, with one losing the argument and being disbarred for employing illegal tactics.”
The language of 12:7-9, however, is also reminiscent of 12:4, where the dragon hurled (e;balen) a third of the stars from heaven to earth. But that event occurred before the birth of Christ, and the war of 12:7-9 occurred after the ascension. So there are two separate events in this chapter in which a hurling down from heaven occurs, one is prior to the birth of Christ (12:4), and the other is after His ascension (12:7-10).
How long before the birth of Christ did the dragon sweep a third of the stars from heaven to earth? The traditional Adventist answer is “before creation.” The exact timing of that action is not addressed in this chapter, but a strong hint is found in Rev 13:8, where the Lamb is described as “slain from the creation of the world” (tou/ evsfagme,nou avpo. katabolh/j ko,smou). This comment finds no context in the entire book unless the dragon’s action in 12:4 represents that primeval attack on the Lamb. If that is the case, the war in heaven of 12:7-9, while clearly in the context of the cross in Revelation 12, nevertheless speaks in the language of that earlier conflict, as noted by scholars such as Adela Yarbro Collins. In His earthly life, therefore, Jesus was participating in a war that had begun in heaven before His arrival on earth (Rev 12:3-4,7-9). At His ascension, Jesus establishes His kingdom and casts the “accuser of the brothers” (Rev 12:10) out of heaven. Since the dragon had already been cast out of heaven physically, according to the symbolism of 12:4, the language of 12:7-12 implies that after the Christ-event, Satan has no more influence over heavenly deliberations. This casting out is, therefore, more spiritual than physical. It is interesting, that while the dragon appears in all four stages of the conflict in chapter 12, the actions of Jesus, expressed in the images of the male child, the Lamb, Christ, and probably Michael, are confined to the second stage, the time of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and heavenly rule (Rev 12:5-10).
Even in apocalyptic prophecy God meets people where they are. Although He knows the end from the beginning, He does not choose to express Himself beyond the comprehension of the original writer and audience. Historicism, therefore, is built on passages where the time element is not explicit at the point of first reception. Events can be portrayed as a long time in the future (Dan 8:26-27: 12:11-13) or extremely near (Rev 1:3; 22:10). Whether the sequence of Daniel 2 would take a lifetime or thousands of years was not evident in the vision itself, but becomes evident with the passage of time.
So it is also with Revelation 12. The vision clearly begins with the generation of Jesus and John and moves to the final events of earth’s history. But the great length of the intervening period is not obvious from markers in the text, being hidden in the use of days instead of years among other things. As history progresses and the time of fulfillment comes, the sequences and their historical fulfillment become more plain (John 13:19; 14:29).
It is probably true that none of the biblical writers foresaw the enormous length of the Christian era. The passage of time has opened up new vistas in terms of the Lord’s patience and purpose. Having foreseen such a delay, would not God prepare His people to understand the great events by which He is bringing history to its climax? Historicism is grounded in the conviction that God knows the end from the beginning and cares enough for His people to share an outline of those events. While it is only from the perspective of the Parousia that history will speak with perfect clarity, each generation must make the attempt to understand biblical apocalyptic or risk being surprised by God’s final acts (Rev 16:15 cf. 1 Thess 5:1-6).
