David M. Clark’s new book, The End Times: Our Future: A New Heaven and New Earth, tells the prophetic story of God’s eschatological plan to bring about a new heaven and new earth through His Son, Jesus, and how we as believers get to participate in this incredible journey. This book interprets passages of the Bible through the lens of a contemporary stream of biblical scholarship as it applies to world events.
Clark focuses on the book of Revelation and shows readers how various passages and biblical themes come together to help illuminate God’s intended plans. He believes that the church age began after the resurrection of Jesus and that this church age is a time during which God saves believers in Jesus through the forgiveness of sins. One day, believers will ascend into heaven, and a seven-year period of tribulation will commence, during which time Satan will deceive the masses as the antichrist. In the second coming, Jesus will destroy Satan and punish non-believers while rewarding believers and begin a 1,000-year rule.
It is through this interpretive lens that Clark writes about the 144,000 Christians, as presented in Revelation, as an exact number of people who will proclaim the gospel of Jesus during the tribulation period, and he argues that the mark of the beast is a real mark that will be applied on the right hand or forehead of those who follow the antichrist. He believes that demonic locusts will be released to torment the masses along with other plagues that will destroy a third of the human population during the tribulation.
Readers will find a lot to wrestle with in this book, especially biblical prophecy as it is used to think about what may unfold in the future. Clark speculates that artificial intelligence will be used by the antichrist to perform apparent miracles that will deceive people from believing in God’s true miracles, and he asserts that Jesus will descend from the clouds with masses of Christians to slay the world’s soldiers that gather in the ultimate battle of Armageddon. Finally, he says, “After the sentencing and the unbelievers have been cast into the lake of fire, the Earth and the universe will be incinerated by fire. God will uncreate His creation as we know it, and there will no longer be a universe of time and space. At this juncture, there will only be the eternal state.”
Clark then speculates about the interpretation of the New Heaven and New Earth referenced in the Book of Revelation. He invites us to wonder about what this new reality will look like. He offers a description of what it might be like using physical, spatial attributes and even theories about square mileage.
Ultimately, this new universe will exist outside of time and space, says Clark, and “God will physically and visually live alongside his people in the new Jerusalem of the New Earth, and He will be their God. Here’s another exciting link of biblical continuity to the New Heaven and New Earth. At Christ’s birth, He was called not only Christ the Messiah but also Immanuel, which is the Hebrew meaning ‘God with us.’ How cool is that?”
At the end of the book, Clark appeals to readers to get right with God and prepare for the coming events as he has laid them out.
The End Times: Our Future: A New Heaven and New Earth offers fascinating insights and speculation from a certain flavor of Evangelical Christianity that interprets prophetic scriptures in a more literal sense and imbues it with the ability to comment on the present and predict the future. It offers a glimpse into God’s plan and a synopsis of Clark’s particular eschatological framework that is popular among many contemporary Christians. Whether we agree with Clark’s conclusions or not, reading this book can help us think more clearly about social developments and reveal underlying motivations in our current political movements.
David Clark is the founder and director of Grace Now Ministries, a nonprofit organization committed to teaching the principles of God’s word verse by verse. Clark attended Azusa Pacific University’s School of Theology, receiving a Master’s degree in Ethics and Theology in 2008.