God has told us everything necessary for faith. However he has not told us everything there is to know.
With all that is going on in the world, we are once again hearing prophecy updates and predictions about when Jesus will return. Christians have long lived with the expectation that their generation might be the last and in one sense, that instinct is right. Christ’s return is indeed imminent. But when expectancy turns into certainty about what God has kept hidden, we lose sight of what matters most. And when this happens Christ is reduced to a means, instead of the end.
Confident voices in the church connect the news cycle to predictions about the future. This conflict or that alliance of nations fulfills this prophetic passage of Scripture. Surely now, this is it. We read of wars and conflicts in the Middle East and wonder if this is the moment Ezekiel had in mind—the hook in the nose of Gog (Ezek. 38:4, 39:2). The impulse is understandable as all Christians certainly confess that Christ will return. We are called to wait with sober expectation for Christ’s return (Mark 13:32-37). As the Church we pray collectively, “Come, Lord Jesus.”
Our mission is to proclaim what has been revealed, not to speculate about what has not.
The future matters because God has promised to bring history to its fulfillment. But alongside that hope, something else quietly grows: a restless need to interpret current events in light of biblical prophecy. Speculation begins to take the place of proclamation. Somewhere along the way, faithfulness becomes confused with certainty—not about Christ and his saving work, but about prophetic details expressed in apocalyptic language. We have learned to speak with confidence where the text demands humility. But what if faithfulness is measured not by how much we claim to know, but by our willingness to say:
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know” is not a retreat from conviction, but a call to return to what the church can confidently confess: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Our mission is to proclaim what has been revealed, not to speculate about what has not.
There was a season in my life and ministry when I was certain about the end times. I had it all figured out. The pieces all fit together. The system made sense. The news didn’t just inform, it confirmed. We even had a phrase: “the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other.”
Scripture told us what would happen; the headlines told us when it would take place. There was comfort in that. The world felt less chaotic when every event seemed to confirm what we already believed. And yet the pattern repeated and every crisis revived the same voices. Predictions resurfaced, timelines shifted, charts were revised. The details changed, but the confidence remained.
Over time, something became difficult to ignore: the “clarity” I thought I saw in prophetic texts often owed more to my framework than to the text itself. When I stepped back from my presuppositions and simply asked, “What does this actually say?” I had to admit that, when it comes to eschatology, my most honest answer was often, “I don’t know.”
The prophetic passages of Scripture are a lot like Winston Churchill’s description of Russian foreign policy at the outset of WWII: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” That doesn’t make prophecy unnecessary—or completely unknowable—but it does demand humility. The purpose of the prophetic text is not to satisfy our curiosity, but to awaken our longing: to keep us yearning for Christ to return and make all things new (Rev. 21:5).
I began to see that the promises of God do not culminate in geopolitical events, but in Christ himself.
My shift came slowly, as I began to see that the promises of God do not culminate in geopolitical events, but in Christ himself. Jesus spoke of wars and rumors of wars not as a countdown, but as a condition of the age. Prophecy, I began to see, was not given to satisfy curiosity about the future, but to anchor our hope in Christ. And with that realization came a strange freedom—the freedom to say words that once felt off-limits: “I don’t know.” This freedom does not eliminate good exegesis nor does it prevent us from having theological opinions around eschatology.
The problem is not prophecy itself. Scripture speaks clearly about the future in ways meant to comfort the Church: Christ will return, the dead will be raised, evil will be judged, and the entirety of creation will be redeemed. These are not riddles for the clever. They are promises for sinners with ears to hear. The trouble begins when we claim precision where Scripture gives mystery. Prophecy does not train the Church to predict history nor to master the future. Instead, Biblical prophecy prepares the Church to rest in the hope of the One who entered it, to trust him who holds our future in his hands.
Scripture refers to Christ’s return as our “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13). This hope however is not described as something ethereal or other worldly. Our hope is that everything that is broken about our bodies, lives, and this world will be restored to its perfect created order. To quote Samwise Gamgee, “everything sad will come untrue.” Despite the Church’s long history with neo-platonic ideas (a rejection of the material world in favor of the spiritual), the Bible articulates a future for believers in Christ that is very much material and corporeal. Christ rose bodily and so will we. His return will usher in the resurrection of the dead in which those who belong to Christ will be given a new physical body and we will then live eternally on a redeemed earth. We can confess with the 80’s pop-song, heaven is most certainly a place on earth. The church is not going to be snatched away to some place far away. Christ is coming to earth once again – this time to set up his kingdom, and to rule as our conquering king forevermore.
After years of trying to systematize future events, I began to notice something both simple and freeing: the Church has never grounded its hope in timelines, but in promises. Christian certainty does not come from decoding symbols, but from what God has plainly said. Christ will return—bodily, visibly, unmistakably. The dead will be raised. Evil will end. Creation will be redeemed. These are confessions carried through centuries—spoken in creeds, sung in worship, and whispered at gravesides. The end result is clear, even if the sequence is not. God has told us everything necessary for faith. However he has not told us everything there is to know.
Saying “I don’t know” is not weak faith. It is the refusal to go beyond what God has revealed. When the disciples asked Jesus about timing, he did not give them a chart. He said, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7) Then he redirected them away from speculation to proclamation: “You will be my witnesses” (vs 8).
When prophecy becomes a code to crack what comes with it is anxiety instead of peace. Every headline feels urgent and every conflict feels final. But when prophecy is received as a promise, it produces patience, watchfulness, and quiet confidence in the confession Christ will come again.
Until then, the Church has work to do—proclaiming the forgiveness of sins in Christ, loving our neighbors within our various vocations, and trusting that God will fulfill what he has promised. It is human nature to want insider knowledge. The Gnostics of the early church claimed access to hidden truth, and we are not so different when we treat prophecy as a secret waiting to be unlocked. The future belongs to God and his plan is only known to him. There is peace in that recognition. There is freedom in realizing we do not have the answers. The Christian who is freed from the need to know everything is finally free to rest. To live. To trust. To pray: Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus.
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matt. 6:34)
