“To every thing there is a season, and a time to

every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die”

(Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)

We are living in difficult and perplexing times. Martin Malachi says that people feel that “nothing seems to be working as it should.” He writes in his book Three Popes and the Cardinal: “The judicial system does not work. The prison system does not work…. Control of drugs and pollution (air and ear) does not work…. Congress does not work…. Our cities do not work…. Marriage does not work…. Parenthood does not work…. Nothing, in fact, seems to work, to achieve at least a satisfactory minimum of its intended purpose.”

The events of the last few weeks constrain us to add that millions of people in Eastern and central Europe no longer believe that communism works.

What’s happening? Who of us understands the way our world is going? How are our times to be interpreted? What is the meaning behind the strange, startling events?

One of the most beloved Advent cantatas is Bach’s “For unto Us a Child Is Born.” John Mackay, in his book Heritage and Destiny, tells us that for “two centuries after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach the meaning of all his chorales remained obscure and enigmatic to the most ardent students of his music. The solution was not found until Albert Schweitzer discovered that the chorales must be interpreted in terms of the Biblical text which had inspired their composition.” The most competent students and critics of Bach compositions for 200 years were “puzzled by his excessively abrupt antitheses of feeling.” These enigmas were made plain only after Schweitzer matched the music with the Scripture texts that had inspired them.

Mackay, in Heritage and Destiny, offers us a clue to interpreting the puzzling events of our time: “The Bible, containing as it does the record of the self-disclosure of God and His will for human life, is the only Text that can explain to us our thoughts and aspirations, our aberrations and our tragedies. When this Text is studied the enigma of life’s strange, meaningless music becomes plain, and the nature of our predicament is made clear to us. Modern culture went astray by giving to man the place that belongs to God. Let us therefore heed the prophetic words: `Cease from man.”‘

But how to apply the Scripture to the strange, sad melody of our fitful times? How wring from the Bible an intelligent divine interpretation of our times?

There came to the church office one morning a man who introduced himself as Brother Langford. He told me that he had come to give his testimony, but before he had finished, he also made his touch for some travel funds. He was under deep conviction, he said, that we were living “in the latter days,” and he quoted his Scripture texts to prove his point.

Brother Langford said that a prophet of God named Terrell, in Dallas, Texas, had revealed that God was sending a great famine in 1975 because of the exceeding wickedness of the world. Again, he quoted texts at random to prove the point. But God, in his mercy, was establishing three havens in the United States. One was in Alabama, around Fort Payne, twenty-five miles square. Another was in the neighborhood of Brownwood, Texas. And the third place of refuge he mentioned I’ve forgotten.

The people were already pouring into these places, according to Brother Langford. “God has revealed to my wife, ” he said, “that she should go to Fort Payne, and I’m on my way there now to join her and my four daughters. I’ve been in prison out in California. I lived in sin, but God came to me and changed my life. My mother came to see me in prison. She had on one of those abomination pantsuits. The Bible says it’s an abomination for a woman to wear pants. [Again he quoted text for this judgment.] Some people say I’m a `clothesline preacher.’ I can’t help it. If it’s in the Bible, I preach it. My mother is a good woman, but if she transgresses the word of God, she’s going to be damned.”

Finally, Brother Langford made his pitch for me or Idlewild Church to finance his travel from Memphis to Fort Payne, Alabama. When I signaled my coolness to his proposition, he handed me a slip of paper on which he had written two Scripture texts describing dire calamities to come and a three-word exhortation: “Repent or perish.”

Now, I can’t believe that the Scriptures can be used to interpret our times through any such hopscotch method of picking random passages and putting them together to predict coming dire events of the latter days or the next few days. This is to misuse the Bible, to handle it as a guidebook for sorcery.

The basic biblical principle I believe in for interpreting our time and all times is expressed in the Advent doctrine. The Advent doctrine affirms that this is God’s world. Both the physical universe-the creatures made in God’s image who inhabit the earth-and the historic drama composed of the events of men’s lives are God’s world.

But God did not make his world and then just tuck it away in a corner of his universe and go off, leaving it to its own devices. He comes in judgment and in salvation. He came in the past; he will come again and again in the future. He is coming now, in our present. This is the Bible story.

But the nature of his Advent, or coming — past, present, and future — is not some mysterious, strange phenomenon, predictable or unpredictable. The nature of his coming is supremely revealed in the birth of the babe in Bethlehem who grew to manhood as Jesus of Nazareth.

The words Jesus spoke about God and the way Jesus treated people and accepted the experiences of his life as told in the gospel story reveal the ultimate principles of God’s love, his righteousness, his justice, and his mercy. These, and only these, will always characterize God’s coming.

There is no magic, no legerdemain, no soothsaying, no literal reenact­ment of ancient predictions about God’s advents. Though men cannot know the time or the exact nature of God’s coming in judgment and salvation, nevertheless always his coming will be as the Scriptures have revealed in an increasing fullness of God’s love and righteousness and mercy and justice. God cannot contradict his revealed moral character.

The Scriptures are given us, then, not to foretell events, but that we may know the truth about God and about ourselves, that we may recognize the right and the merciful and love it and do it. As Thomas Carlyle put it: “Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

The approach of the comet Kohoutek in the Advent skies stirred up among some people an end-of-the-world panic as astronomical spectacles always have. One man called Dr. Kenneth Franklin, the astronomer, at his office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, saying he had heard that Kohoutek was going to collide with the earth. “Listen,” the man said. “I have a mortgage payment due on my house and the kids’ tuition to pay, and if it is all going to be over soon, I’d like to go out and have a good time.” Dr. Franklin told the man that he had better pay his bills.

To give up before threatening catastrophe, real or imagined, is surely not the Christian way of life. But neither is the Christian called to overcome evil through joining forces, however temporarily, with greater evil, but to seek to overcome evil with good, in the Christ-like way of love.

The Christophers have a radio program called “The People Who Are Changing the World.” The biblical Advent doctrine would change that title slightly to read, “The People through Whom God Is Changing His World.” Are you and I among that company?