The Interminable Frozen Pond

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The Beginning and the End

Studying Genesis and Revelation in tandem is quite helpful in understanding what everything is all about, and what the Bible truly says about the beginning and the end. I would say, for the most part, I’ve never quite made the proper connections.

These bookends fit together like lock and key. They parallel each other and rhyme, and seem almost mirror images once you lay it all out. Remarkable symmetry.

We started out after Creation in a Utopian paradise. Sin introduced entropy into the world, which increased slowly over time. An easy life of leisure gradually declined into labor and toil, with ever-diminishing returns. Lifespans stretched almost a thousand years for the first 1600 years, until the earth was knocked off its foundations and rapidly fell into chaos and ruin. In the centuries which followed, lifespans declined rapidly over each successive generation, from around 500 years, to 400, to 300, to 200, to less than 150.

Revelation picks up the narrative in the very near future. A fantastic world war ends in ruin and once again knocks the earth off its hinges, bringing an end to another age of mankind, but not the end of the world. After Armageddon, entropy rapidly reverses, and the earth is transformed once more into a Utopian paradise. Lifespans jump back up to several hundreds of years. Wars and diseases cease. Food is plentiful, and poverty non-existent. Governments function without corruption. All news agencies tell the truth. Christ is the king of the earth — no longer an invisible abstraction or a concept to be debated. Yet, even then, in a perfect world with every excuse removed, many will choose to reject the truth and die in their unbelief. And after a thousand years of Utopian paradise, a final world war is waged (Armageddon II). Boom. Creation I ceases, and Creation II begins — and this time, the perfection is eternal.

Interestingly, this world begins and ends in Edenic paradise, both times disrupted by the Great Dragon, the Serpent, as he convinces humanity to join him against the Lord of Creation. And both times — first spiritually, then literally — he is defeated by Christ. Very poetic, I think.