Two Simplifications
The next age, I believe, will in at least two important ways be simpler than our own. When I look back over my own career, I am struck by how much of my thinking has been given to dissecting and explaining lies told within church precincts by clergy of the faith. This was not a task I desired or took upon myself. Rather, it simply falls to believers with the necessary gifts as a natural responsibility of where we have been placed. But such contests eventually sort themselves out into historical kairoi. The curtain will be drawn down when all that can be said has been said and things will have become as clear as they need to be for those who have ears to hear. The deceivers and their answerers will have had their day and fall silent, for the time of decision is at hand.
The second great simplification will be the far greater ease with which believers and those coming to belief can be discerned and identified by each other. At present, this desideratum is very much obscured by differences in beliefs which speak of a difference of faith. But under the hard pressures of the last times, these shall begin to fall away, until at last they themselves shall be obscured —or so we have been taught by the experience of Christians under persecution in our own day: the One Thing Necessary shall become evident to all, and in this, much of the devil’s work will be undone.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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