There's a word to this kind of prophetic writing that projects God's final success onto the end of time: it's called "apocalyptic".

Apocalypse is a word Christians need to know. Actually everyone does know it-or rather, we're used to hearing the word. It means something like doomsday or the unraveling of civilization, the stuff movies are made of, like the depressing 70's classic "Apocalypse Now". Back in those days Americans cultivated a taste for being depressed. We'd become fixated on crisis. We knew we had problems that were bigger than we were. Something was wrong, and we felt powerless to change it.

The word "apocalypse" comes from the Bible. It simply means "unveiling" or "revealing". It's not about crisis in general, but the crisis of the final showdown between good and evil. The last book of the Bible is simply called the Apocalypse of John. We know it as The Book of Revelation. It "reveals" the spiritual conflict underlying human events. It portrays a final doomsday scenario involving the Second Advent or "second coming" of Jesus to earth. The positive message is, God's plan for His creation will triumph after all; good will conquer evil. The "apocalyptic" part is this: you can't get there from here.

In the text from Isaiah we see the world after the good has triumphed. The language is richly poetic, utopian and, of course, vague. It talks about the future, but when will it be? Is it any nearer now than it was then? How would we know? Some of the predictions sound like you're not supposed to take them seriously. The lion eating straw like an ox sounds like a different kind of green revolution. I was expecting some new kind of fluorescent bulbs. We think the prophet's saying something about heaven, then we're told a man will live a hundred years. I thought heaven was forever.

The apocalyptic message is draped in symbolism. It's not like the Greek myths, which are poetic illustrations of human psychology with its tragic conundrums. The Apocalypse unveils God's resolution of the tangle of good and evil.

In the early years of Hebrew prophecy the people of Israel expected God to restore the golden age of King David. There was a sense of national nostalgia, like we hear today of Americans longing to return to the 1950s or some other period when life seemed simple-when problems had solutions. The biblical drama goes a step further. Israel was conscious of a promised destiny. It always seemed remote, but at least it was possible. It seemed believable.

At some point it was no longer believable. It was not humanly possible for Israel to rise again-not with the heel of Babylon or Alexander the Great or Rome planted on their necks-with or without David or his anointed successor.

The Chosen People began to project a solution to their destiny outside of history-outside the realm of the possible. The prophets began to speak of a whole new creation-of new heavens and a new earth-beyond the corruption of human sin. God Himself would come to His people. He would personally write His laws on their hearts.

Apocalypse means you can't get there from here, and at the same time thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on this earth as on the new earth that's coming.

The apocalyptic hope shifts from humanity, incapacitated by sin, to the God of infinite capacity who knows no sin. It is the faith that God will make good His promises, even though, from our point of view, you can't get there from here. This is not magical thinking or escapism, where we find excuses to do nothing, or worse-where we do what we please as if the consequences didn't matter.

The key to the apocalyptic preaching of Jesus and the prophets is this: God will do what only God can do-He will manage the hopeless complexity of the world, including our world. He will even create a new world. He will literally trade places with sinners on the cross of Jesus, so we can stop destroying each other in order to prove that we are somebody. He even destroys the shroud that is cast over all peoples: in raising Jesus from the dead, He has swallowed up death forever.

Meanwhile His people are to prepare a highway in the wilderness of their hearts for their God, to clear away everything that separates us from God. Someone after the first service asked me an annoying question: you've told us WHAT to do; now, HOW do we do it? How do we prepare a highway for our God? I don't have a very good answer, but I have a first step. In order to build a highway for God to become active in your life, stop committing the sins that you know about. After that, God will reveal step two.

Here's the theme of the Apocalypse: NOW is the time to start taking God seriously. Remember Jesus' first sermon: Repent and believe the gospel. His message hasn't changed. God is not a therapist who eases the stress of our self-centered lives. He is outraged by evil in all its forms. We need to start living now in the new creation. Jesus called that "entering the Kingdom of heaven."

We need to do it now and not wait for some "sure" sign that God really means it. If we knew when Jesus was coming back, we'd put it on our calendars and forget about it-like those wicked servants in the parable who, when the master delayed his return, went back to eating and drinking and abusing one another.

Think about it. Nothing is more certain than the first Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. And he will just as surely come the second time. Nothing is more revealing of God's love for sinners than Jesus' death on the cross. And in his resurrection we literally have Exhibit A of the new heaven and the new earth.

Christianity, like the Judaism out of which it sprang, is an apocalyptic faith. God had revealed His character and His plans to establish a Kingdom for those who would follow him. He had proven Himself-first with the exodus from Egypt; then with the exodus from Babylon; finally with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Right now it appears unlikely that good will triumph in the world over evil. Let's be frank-it is no longer believable. We can't get there from here. What that tells us is that we haven't begun believing in God. We have talked about God, but we're believing only in ourselves.

It's time for us to believe the gospel. Not tomorrow. Not in an hour. He will build His new creation in us now. When we meet Jesus face to face, we'll be ready.

---The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and a regular columnist for VirtueOnline.