The Apocalypse - Are we living in the End-Time? What does Last Judgement mean?

Old-fashioned – and nevertheless of the present; supposedly outdated – and yet current; incomprehensible – yet strangely true-to-life: the concept “Apocalypse”.

Werner Huemer

Are we really standing before the end of the world, as biblical texts would have us assume? Is there an end time, a Divine Judgment, in which the wicked are condemned and the good are uplifted into heaven? Or are such conceptions finally outdated? An apocalyptic body of thought has left its impression on society for thousands of years. Out of the fear of the “Day of Judgment”, religious communities and sects have grown and are still growing, and also present-day politics is not free from images of a partly dangerous end-time.

What really lies behind the concept To start with, apocalypse, according to its Greek meaning, has to do with “exposure” of something hidden, which is not accessible to general knowledge. Sources of apocalyptic thoughts are mostly writings, which are evaluated by believers as revelations and hence appear raised beyond any doubt. This privileged position, however, naturally harbours a danger, because something, which one can, for whatever reason, only believe in but which cannot be proven, will not easily be accepted by everyone as truth. In addition, the doom scenarios are very suited – as history shows – to unsettling people or driving them into the “protective lap” of a religious community. These are the reasons why apocalyptic ideas appear to many people today as outdated, fuddyduddy and no longer to be believed.

Faced with the present situation, an anxious question nevertheless arises: Is our helplessness as humans not clearly manifest in the escalating environmental and climatic problems, in the rising scale of natural disasters, in the virtually uncontrollable population explosion?

Do we not obviously live in an “end time” – because the erroneous path we have cultivated must come to an end in the foreseeable future?

Do we not inevitably have to speak of a “Divine Judgment” if on the one hand we recognise that the concepts “God’s Will” and the “Laws of Creation” are one, and on the other hand have to admit that we have often offended against the Natural Laws – which cannot remain without consequences? If the upbuilding, lifeenhancing Will of God rules the world and we human beings contravene this Will, the time must come when all this has to be righted again and led back to the natural order.

According to this thought, it could well be that the Biblical Apocalypse, the “Revelation of John”, for example, picturesquely describes developments, which we human beings will actually have to live through.

To put it another way: If we ignore all the fundamentalist interpretations, every denominational illusion and all the historical events associated with the apocalyptic ideas, it still appears very likely that further world events hold the prospect of drastic, painful experiences for us – which ultimately are salutary, because, graphically expressed, they lead back to the correct course. And it appears just as possible that this “judgment happening” has already commenced.

Such an overall picture also emerges from the work “In the Light of Truth – The Grail Message” by Abd-ru-shin. Therefore we do not have to expect an end of the world, but rather the advent of a new time, the birth of which will not be painless. There is the hope for an epoch that has grown out of materialism and mainly serves the spiritual development of mankind – as well as at the same time furthering every form of life in Creation. In other words: the hope for a life in which the human sense of responsibility is adjusted to the Will of God.

To what extent and in which concrete form this hope can be fulfilled, the future will show. In accordance with the Grail Message, there are no divine arbitrary acts; the Creator does not interfere in developments as He sees fit. Rather the entire world happening follows a wise lawfulness – and just these Laws of Creation offer the human will considerable freedom, which we do not always use to advantage. We can clearly impede the right developments by wrong decisions.

To sum up, a “judgment happening” can thus be said to be necessary with regard to correcting erroneous developments, which began long ago with the “Fall of Man”. But Abd-rushin points in his Grail Message to yet another crucial connection to do with the traditional picture of a sifting of the bad from the good:

The meaning of our life on earth lies in spiritual development. For this development there is not just one earthlife at our disposal but several, and it must be completed in a finite period. If a person does not mature within this period of time – just as a plant seed must also ripen at a given time – then it can happen that he “decays”, thus dying in soul and spirit. His personality developed up to that point is lost, he thus suffers a real death (Biblical Revelation also speaks of the “second death”), while death of the physical body for the human being merely leads into a new state of being.

The danger of spiritual death is the greater the more a person clings only to material things and the less he strives for inner development. During the “Judgment”, Creation, as the Grail Message describes, is intensely permeated with power, whereby everything is set in motion,

“including that which has hitherto been inactive or dormant. It is awakened, strengthened, and thus must become active; in this awakening activity it is, so to speak, dragged before the Light, even if it wishes to hide. (..) So is it also with all the qualities of the souls of these earthmen. What has hitherto appeared to be dead, what has slumbered in them, often unknown to men themselves, will awaken and become strong under the pressure of the Power, will develop into thought and deed, so that according to its nature it will in manifesting judge itself by the Light!”

This process is an “awakening of all that is dead” – as, according to Abdru- shin, it should be rightly called – and describes, seen in its entirety, a natural purification process. It strengthens and empowers human beings of good volition in their qualities, while the others ought to recognise in their suffering the right path and should change – or finally of their own accord must be lost.

It may well be the foreboding of these spiritual realities – our responsibility towards Creation, our obligation to develop spiritually, our integration into the great Laws of Life – which made the concept of “apocalypse” survive to this day, a concept, which admonishes us inwardly and urges us to use the time of our life meaningfully and in the spirit of neighbourly love.

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