“Let the reader understand.” Yeah, right. The apocalyptic passages in the Bible are fiercely difficult to understand — so difficult that I think that to try to pry dates and details from such passages invariably leads to error, and yet there are sure lessons. Times of ghastly affliction are intense. Ordinary life is gutted. There can be unimaginable suffering, but the faithful are urged to pray with the implication that doing so can alter the way things will play out. In times of horrific misery, many of the faithful, eager for deliverance or comfort, become susceptible to following deceptive leaders and being seduced by attractive but false teaching. The temptation to find a way out of the suffering is overpowering. Or, almost overpowering. 

God will “cut short” the time of the suffering for the sake of the elect, which implies that the suffering is under God’s control. It happens by his leave, and is shortened at his command; affliction cannot ever have the last word. This pattern, written large for the end times, is often enacted in the individual lives of the faithful. Then we call it a “time of testing” or “being refined like silver.” In several places in the New Testament, we are taught that such a time is, in the end, good. “Those who endure to the end will be saved.” 

When Mother Teresa’s spiritual journal came out shortly after she died and revealed that she had suffered from “the dark night of the soul” for most of her adult life, one secular writer stated that she had been revealed as just an old woman who’d lost her faith. “The elect” know better: she was a saint who exhibited the grace of perseverance with an unshakable trust in God. Always, her face radiated joy. She was right.

David Baumann has served as an Episcopal priest for 45 years, 39 of them in the Diocese of Los Angeles; he is now retired. For five years he has served as part-time priest in charge of two small churches in rural southern Illinois.