"Is This the End?" by David Jeremiah. A Review

 

I know lots of people like this book, and like this stream of published material. I'm not a Dispensationalist (by conviction) and I am resistant to alarmism - that doom-and-gloomism that says "This is the worst time in all of world history!" or some such. And that is this book from cover-to-cover. I picked the book up to read because a family member had given it to me for a Christmas present and thought I should read it. And I was disappointed. But, in all of my disappointment, I was pleasantly surprised.

I was pleasantly surprised because Dr. Jeremiah actually pushes back against a certain mindset that normally walks along with Dispensational alarmism. Jeremiah asks "Will America revive again? Will we reverse our descent and regain respect, strength, and stability? ... those are not the questions we should really be asking. If the survival of America and the stability of the world are the sources of your hope, then your hope is sadly misplaced. The question you must address is not whether America and the world will regain their footing, but how will you respond whether they do or not... In this book i will show you how to find that hope. It is a hope that is not dependent on whether America falls or recovers or whether world order stabilizes or disintegrates" (x-xi). And this important theme crops up repeatedly, even in the overwhelming flood of the author's Dispensational doom-and-gloom. For that I happily applaud Dr. Jeremiah.

For me, there was a humorous point in the doom-and-gloom-we're-in-the-worst-age-ever-ism. It came in the chapter on Revival. The author, who wrote this work in 2016, quotes several people from ages past. For example, he quotes a sermon from Increase Mather in 1702 - remember, 1702 - who proclaimed, "Look at how the glory has departed...Is there not a sad decay of that glory? What a change there has been!...The special design of providence in this country seems to be now over. We may weep to think about it" (126). It's the worst era ever! 1702! Or, from a few decades before that, where Rev. Samuel Torrey in 1683 declares, "There hath been a vital Decay, a Decay upon the very Vitals of Religion...a great Death upon Religion...we are in great Danger of dying together with it" (127). Then, after the war of Independence in the 1790s, Jeremiah notes (Drawing from Mark Noll) that church attendance, that had been at 40-50 % of the population was at an all time low: 5-10% of the population. Even the Supreme Court Justice of that era, John Marshall, is reported to have declared, "The church is too far gone ever to be redeemed" (129). It was humorous to me, in that everyone seems to be blind to one obvious reality: every generation is the worst. Our grandparents often said of us Boomers, "The kids these days are the worst" and we Boomers say it about Millennials and Zoomers. But also, every era is the worst in all world history! Mainly because we only live in *this* era, and have never experienced another, and because we are all - in our hearts - narcissistic: our day is the most important and the most traumatic.

Let me end here. I am a theological conservative who holds to the Scripture as the final rule of faith and life. I am so socially conservative I make most right-wing talk show hosts look like liberals. And I do believe - with the Church throughout 2,000 years - that Jesus will return and resurrect some to everlasting life and others to eternal doom at the Day of Judgment. I also grasp the reality of total depravity in humans and human societies. I have concerns about our country and this moment in history. But this kind of alarmism just adds to the trouble. This doom-and-gloomism reinforces defeatism, which then fuels reactionism, etc. For whatever it's worth, that's my evaluation of the work.