His Elect

 In our haste to believe something comforting to the flesh, we overlook glaring inconsistencies and gloss over things that don’t make sense. It does not just have to do with the end times or the return of Christ but with pretty much everything in life.

I can’t count the number of commercials I’ve seen over the years that promised me I could eat exactly what I wanted when I wanted, and just by taking one little pill per day, I would be a men’s bicycle shorts model in three months or less.

That’s a great deal. The bicycle shorts guys would pay something, so I’d be getting my pill for free after the first check cleared. They always said the secret to success was multiple income streams, and in three short months, my modeling stream will be up and running!

They even had before and after photos of guys, all sad and sullen with droopy bellies, then smiling and doing a double thumbs up at the screen, flat tummies, and new suntans to boot. It’s not that I was sad and sullen, but I wasn’t smiling from ear to ear doing the thumbs up to everyone I ran across either. They even had an extra special offer just for me if I acted within the hour, and the more the man talked, the better it got.

How could they do all this and still make money? Maybe they weren’t even trying to make money; they were just offering me a new body and modeling career out of the goodness of their hearts. What magnanimity!

I’d missed my hour-long window, but I knew someone that had ordered the package and decided to wait for their double thumbs up and beaming smile confirmation before I ponied up the sixty-odd dollars, including shipping and handling, that it would end up costing, even with the extra special offer. It was, after all, worth over $300 when all told, so you were getting a deal either way.

My friend got his package in the mail and followed the directions to the letter for the prescribed amount of time. Two weeks in, he was texting me asking if the stomach pains and oily discharge were normal and whether I thought it would happen gradually or overnight. I didn’t ask him what he planned to model at the end of his three-month shredding course, but I hoped it wasn’t bicycle shorts. That was my niche; he could find his own.

A month passed, then two, and my friend looked no different than when he’d begun his transformation journey, except for more puffiness around his eyes, but that was understandable since he said his sleep cycle was wrecked. He couldn’t manage more than three hours on a given night.

By the third month, he was getting the jitters even on a warm day and suspected he had stomach ulcers, but as far as the lean, muscular physique he was promised and believed he would have, it was still hiding behind years of bad nutrition and lack of exercise.

He was promised something, and he believed what he was promised, yet here he was, markedly worse off than when he started because what he was promised and what he believed were beyond the realm of reality. Sadly, my saving of sixty dollars came at the expense of his health, but I still saved sixty dollars.

Matthew 24:30-31, “Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”

Two questions: when’s then, and whom will the angels be dispatched to gather from the four winds?

I know I make it too easy sometimes, but this isn’t supposed to be complicated. You read the Book, and you believe the words it says, not what you would like them to say. It’s Occam’s razor all over again. It applies here as well. The simplest explanation is usually the best one.

We either take what Jesus said at face value or twist ourselves into knots, trying to force the Bible to say something it never said.

To answer the first question, when’s then, all we need to do is return to the words of Jesus and backtrack a verse or two.

Matthew 24:29, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

Are you saying you know better than the authors of the internationally bestselling Left Behind series? No, I’m saying Jesus does. If, on the other hand, you’re asserting that they know better than Jesus, then I’m all ears.

That’s the thing, though. We’re willing to believe the information we receive from some shady, questionable characters as long as they tell us what we want to hear. Tell me I can have the body of a twenty-year-old at fifty while doing nothing more than popping a pill every morning, and even if all anecdotal evidence points to the contrary, I may just be tempted to try it.

Tell a lukewarm Christian that God changed His mind about spewing them out of His mouth or that He reconsidered the elect having to endure to the end, and they’re on board, even though their claims have no definitive proof.

It must be nice having everyone like you because you always tell them what they want to hear, or as the contemporary Christian is fond of saying, because it bears witness to their spirit. What about His Spirit? Does it bear witness with His Spirit? Just asking.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.