The Days We Are Given

God’s love has given us more than something to anticipate at the end of history. Through Christ, He has established a relationship in which we can live now. We remain responsible for our choices, attentive to suffering, and willing to grow. But we need not spend the days we have fearing that whatever comes next will undo what He has already accomplished.

He created us for fellowship with Him. Redemption restores that fellowship through an act of God we could not accomplish for ourselves. Its purpose is not simply to spare us an eventual punishment. It gives us a life in communion with Him, with consequences for how we think, what we value, and how we treat one another.

What Christ has accomplished is permanent. A person joined to Him is genuinely forgiven, accepted, and made alive to God. Growth remains necessary; the whole person is not perfected at conversion. But what remains unfinished does not put salvation on probation. We live from what God has secured while awaiting the completion of His work in us.

That changes how I understand our responsibility for the days we are given. They are not merely an anxious interval before we discover whether God will accept us. They are a life to be lived within an acceptance He has already given. Peace in redemption ought to make us more available to others, not less.

The end times belong within that same redemptive purpose. Justice is an expression of God’s love: He takes seriously both the people He loves and the harm they can do to one another. Forgiveness does not make evil inconsequential. His purpose includes an answer to wrong and an end to the dominion of sin and death. The love expressed through the cross does not become a different kind of love when we turn to judgment, resurrection, and the future of creation.

This gives me reason to question some of the ways the end times are taught. Christians can use prophecy to cultivate fear, claim authority over others, or explain suffering without responding to it. Those failures deserve examination. I understand the desire to turn our attention from forecasting catastrophe toward repentance, compassion, and practical responsibility.

Yet the alternative of understanding apocalypse primarily as a recurring pattern of collapse and renewal also needs examination. Personal and social worlds do change. Loss can expose what needs to end, and a different way of living may follow. But that pattern does not, by itself, explain what Christ has accomplished, why redemption has a permanent effect, or what God’s love intends finally to put right.

My concern is how these understandings affect the life we are living. We can correctly identify failures in Christian teaching while overlooking the redemptive purpose that should govern it. What has God already done out of love? What does it change about our standing before Him and our responsibility to one another? Those questions give us a place to begin without making an unknown future the governor of our days.

The criticism deserves an answer

When a war interests us more as a prophetic development than as a human disaster, something has gone wrong. The people living through it need protection, food, shelter, and practical help. Assigning their suffering a place in our interpretation has done none of that.

It is particularly troubling when worsening conditions strengthen our confidence while leaving our compassion untouched. Expecting evil is no excuse for tolerating it. Believing that God will judge injustice does not relieve us of responsibility for the injustice we can address.

The concern goes beyond becoming distracted by predictions. Some Christians may conclude that an approaching apocalypse makes ordinary responsibilities less important. Why address a problem that God will soon bring to an end?

Because the person affected by that problem needs our help now. Someone who is hungry needs food whether history continues for another day or another thousand years. Children still need care. Commitments still need to be honored. An injustice we can prevent does not become acceptable because we think little time remains.

The reason is not simply that our expectations about the timing could be mistaken. Even if the end were near, God’s love would still govern our conduct. The amount of time remaining does not determine whether another person deserves our attention.

Redemption restores us to a relationship with God that has a purpose in the present. The love we receive is meant to become visible in how we live. Our accepted standing frees us to care for others without being consumed by securing ourselves; it does not excuse us from caring.

An expectation of meeting Christ should make us attentive to the people He identifies with, not less concerned about them. Neglect of what they need is taken seriously.

This is therefore a criticism Christians should accept wherever it describes our behavior. But correcting the neglect does not require abandoning belief in a final fulfillment. It requires correcting the conclusion we have drawn from it. We are responsible for the good we can do in the time we actually have.

We do not become ready for Christ by neglecting what He has given us to do. Trusting Him with the end means doing the good that is in front of us now.

Jesus challenged the assumption that tragedy identifies the especially guilty. Those killed under Pilate and those who died at Siloam were not singled out as worse sinners than everyone else. When asked whether a man’s blindness was caused by his sin or his parents’ sin, Jesus rejected those proposed explanations. In Luke, He turned the question toward the repentance of His listeners. We should be cautious about discovering God’s accusation against someone else in their misfortune. (Luke 13:1–5; John 9:1–3.)

Fear can be misused just as readily. When a religious leader makes obedience to himself seem necessary for surviving an approaching judgment, he has placed extraordinary pressure on the believer. Eventually, the person may carry that pressure without the leader’s presence. Doubt itself becomes frightening.

And dividing the world into God’s people and their enemies can become a convenient way to overlook our own greed, dishonesty, and appetite for control. A theology that enables that avoidance needs correction. The call to examine ourselves is welcome.

So is the insistence that we enter suffering rather than explain it from a distance. Grieving honestly, acknowledging failure, relinquishing destructive habits, and rebuilding responsibly all have a place in Christian life.

The disagreement begins when those valuable responses are asked to explain the whole of redemption. They describe things we can participate in. We still need to ask what has gone wrong in the person participating, and what that person cannot accomplish alone.

Why we need redemption

My understanding begins with a distinction between the soul and the spirit. In the framework I call Neo-Trichotomy, body, soul, and spirit describe interconnected dimensions of one person, not separate occupants competing for possession of us.

The body is our embodied life and the means through which we act. The soul includes reason, memory, imagination, emotion, and ordinary choice. The spirit is the moral and Godward dimension: our capacity for moral discernment and volition, and for communion with God.

This matters because clearer thinking and restored communion are different things. Intelligence can serve compassion or exploitation. Emotional discipline can help someone care for a neighbor or become more effective at manipulating one. The faculties are valuable; the moral direction in which they are employed matters.

The human spirit, in this account, is created. It is neither a portion of God awaiting recognition nor an illusion we must overcome. It bears God’s image and was made for fellowship with Him. The problem of sin is a breach in that fellowship, not simply a mistaken idea about ourselves. The spirit has not ceased to exist, and conscience has not been erased. What has been lost is living communion with God.

A person can improve conduct, understand a painful history, and become more considerate without those achievements themselves restoring that communion. Their value is real. Their reach is limited.

The faculty that would have to do the mending is the faculty that is broken.

That is why I cannot make self-understanding the sufficient answer to the human condition. I may come to understand my estrangement very well and still need God to end it. Acknowledging that need is not a rejection of thought or personal responsibility. It is the point at which grace becomes necessary.

The question I would put to an account of recurring death and rebirth is therefore specific: does it describe how people change, or does it also explain how our relationship with God is restored? The first does not establish the second.

What the cross does that a pattern cannot

A forest growing after a fire may help us imagine renewal. It cannot explain forgiveness. Neither can a story about rising from ashes tell us how guilt is answered or communion with God becomes possible.

The Christian claim concerns an act of God, undertaken out of love. In Christ, God enters the human condition and does what that condition cannot produce for itself. Jesus is fully human, able to stand in our place, and fully divine, able to give the life we lack. His work is more than an example of enduring hardship successfully.

If the cross becomes chiefly an illustration of a universal rhythm, its necessity remains unexplained. What does Christ accomplish that would not occur merely because suffering was followed by change?

My answer is atonement: Christ bears the consequence of sin and opens the way to reconciliation. The offended God has undertaken the cost of restoring the relationship. The cross does not persuade an otherwise unloving God to become loving. It expresses the love that moved Him to act. (Romans 5:8; 1 John 4:9–10.)

In my paper, I describe this as the movement from covering to cure. Christ’s sacrifice does more than conceal an unchanged condition. It reaches the severed spirit and makes it alive to God. Justification concerns our forgiven and accepted standing; regeneration concerns the new life God gives. Neither is an accomplishment of emotional insight. (Hebrews 9:12–14; 10:10–14.)

Cure does not mean that conversion instantly completes the whole person. Regeneration restores communion at once. Sanctification develops that communion and its influence throughout our lives. In the Wesleyan understanding I develop, entire sanctification is a further work of grace in which the spirit becomes fully surrendered to God in love. It is not immunity from error, human frailty, or the possibility of sin. The soul continues to mature; its full healing awaits glorification, and the body awaits resurrection.

These distinctions keep us from making two opposite mistakes: treating salvation as nothing more than gradual improvement, or treating genuine salvation as proof that all improvement must already be complete.

The grieving, examining, and rebuilding belong here. They can become willing participation in a life God has made possible. They do not have to carry the impossible responsibility of generating that life.

Resurrection likewise identifies God’s action, not a power inherent in dying. Death does not redeem us simply by occurring. Nor is someone who suffers obliged to produce personal growth to justify the suffering. A tragedy does not become necessary or good because someone later manages to live well.

Justice belongs within God’s love

Some wrongs are not ours to put right, and some are not put right at all in this life. That does not lessen our responsibility to help someone, oppose injustice, or make amends for harm we have caused. It means our responsibility is not the whole of His redemptive purpose. Final justice expresses God’s commitment to address what remains.

Consider the people who suffered under an oppressive government but did not live to see it fall. Those who survive may gain freedom and begin building a better society.

A better society matters. But its improvement does not give those people their lives back. It does not, by itself, answer the wrong done to them. An account of renewal can describe what comes afterward while leaving their claim unanswered.

I cannot find an adequate expression of God’s love in that omission. The person who suffered matters in his or her own right, not merely because someone else eventually benefited from the change that followed.

In Revelation, the faithful who have been killed appeal to God to judge what was done to them. Their appeal is part of the vision. They are not instructed to find consolation simply in the possibility of a better society after their deaths. Their suffering is known, and they await an answer. (Revelation 6:9–11.)

This is where final justice belongs in Christian hope. It means that wrong will be exposed, those who have been denied justice will be heard, and evil will not retain its power indefinitely. It also means that the people who died have not been excluded from God’s purposes merely because history continued without them.

Apocalypse means unveiling. Catastrophe is not its definition. In these visions I understand disclosure, vindication, an end to evil’s dominion, and encouragement to remain faithful now as related purposes. Present meaning and future fulfillment need not compete. The promise of what God will complete gives the present its urgency.

An endless succession of beginnings still leaves another generation to endure the next collapse. Christian resurrection promises more. The person is raised, not merely replaced by someone who benefits from a changed world. The whole person is brought into the wholeness God intended. Paul calls death an enemy to be overcome; Revelation describes a creation in which death and mourning no longer belong. (1 Corinthians 15:20–26; Revelation 21:1–5.)

Uncertainty about a timetable does not require uncertainty about that distinction. I can question an interpretation of events without reducing the promised completion to another cycle.

Secure before God, responsible to one another

But does retaining final judgment mean retaining the fear and control we began by criticizing?

It should not. Christians already have a working knowledge of the redemption on which their hope rests. Forgiveness, reconciliation, new birth, and growing communion with God are present realities. The future completes that work; it does not suddenly replace the God who began it with someone whose disposition toward us is unknown.

Justification is not probation. In the understanding I am setting out, acceptance through Christ is a settled gift, not a tentative arrangement awaiting enough evidence of good behavior. Paul connects justification with peace before God and affirms the absence of condemnation for those in Christ. (Romans 5:1; 8:1.)

Yet an accepted person remains accountable. Paul’s judgment seat of Christ concerns what has been done in the body. His image of a building distinguishes the foundation, Christ, from the work erected upon it: the work can suffer loss while the person is saved. I read this as a distinction between standing and stewardship. Grace does not oblige God to approve everything a believer has done. (2 Corinthians 5:10; 1 Corinthians 3:10–15.)

I distinguish that assessment from the Great White Throne judgment in Revelation. Combining every judgment passage into one undifferentiated threat obscures both the assurance Christ gives and the responsibility He retains. Believers share the basis of their acceptance; their lives do not all produce the same harvest. (Revelation 20:11–15.)

This matters for the frightened believer. A Christian can struggle with fear without that fear proving God has rejected him. A soul still being shaped does not become evidence that regeneration failed. Assurance rests in Christ’s work and the Spirit’s witness with our spirit, not in our ability to maintain an uninterrupted feeling of certainty. Telling a frightened person to interpret the fear itself as evidence against salvation can turn a struggle into an accusation. (Romans 8:16.)

It matters just as much for the complacent believer. An inward change cannot be inspected by someone else, but its effects enter our shared life. This is the relation between communion with God and conduct toward others that I describe as vertical and horizontal holiness. The spirit leads; the soul participates; the body expresses that direction in action. The soul is involved, not bypassed.

In Matthew’s account of the sheep and the goats, the judgment exposes care and neglect. People needed food, water, welcome, clothing, and company. Both groups are surprised by Christ’s identification with those they encountered. The failures named are omissions. They had opportunities to respond and left the needs unmet. The kingdom is an inheritance prepared beforehand; the punishment is described as prepared for the devil and his angels. Provision and accountability are both present. (Matthew 25:31–46.)

I read this as a warning against confusing our religious self-description with God’s knowledge of our lives. It directs attention toward what we did with the person before us, not how confidently we identified evil in another group. A claim to communion with God cannot excuse indifference to the people He loves.

That is the practical correction I would make to end-times teaching. Begin with God’s love as expressed in Christ. Explain the redemption already given and the life it makes possible. Teach accountability without putting believers on perpetual probation. Present final justice as the completion of God’s work, not as permission to neglect what remains within our responsibility.

When the next report of suffering arrives, look for the people who need help before looking for a prophetic interpretation. When someone is afraid, offer the grounds of Christian assurance rather than another reason to doubt. And when a person’s loss cannot be repaired in this life, do not require them to call it growth before their grief deserves to be heard.

We can participate in recovery without mistaking it for the whole of redemption. We can await God’s final justice while opposing injustice now. We can acknowledge that our work is limited without using that limit as an excuse to stop.

God’s love gives us reason to do what we can, and reason to trust Him with what we cannot put right. We do not need to resolve the future before we can live faithfully today. The days we are given are ours to spend in communion with God, at peace in the redemption Christ has secured, and responsible to the people we can love and serve.

The understanding of body, soul, spirit, and redemption developed here is set out more fully in my paper, Understanding the Nature of Humanity: An Anthropological Framework for Christian Doctrine (2026).