Against the backdrop of the terrible events of the apocalypse, when "people will faint from fear," amid wars and darkness, Christ's words sound paradoxical and astonishing: "...Then straighten up and raise your heads, because your deliverance is drawing near." This is precisely the dimension that has always been lost in all kinds of final predictions about the end of the world. People expected nothing good from it, and in any case they did not expect from it a meeting with Christ. Yet this is a relevant question, and not by accident these words are addressed to everyone: "this generation will not pass away until all is fulfilled." However the history of the earth as a whole unfolds, each of us has ahead of us our own personal end of the world, when history will continue its course without us. And here the most important thing is to remember that meeting God is joy and deliverance, including deliverance from fear.

When we see the signs of the approaching end of the world, which the Lord speaks about, we are filled with terror. Fear and confusion take hold of us when we see famines and earthquakes in various places, when nation rises against nation and kingdom against kingdom. "Where is this world going?" People in many different eras have asked this question, no less in our time than in any other.

Yet the Lord, who told us about all this in advance, does not expect either fear or confusion from us at all. "When these things begin to happen," He says, "straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." This, it turns out, is the feeling with which we should await the end of the world. Not with fear, but with hope and trust. And the only thing we should fear is that we will not have time to fulfill what Christ has entrusted to us, that we will not bring the witness of this hope to all who need salvation.

We so want to know exactly when the events indicated will take place, and for two thousand years people have been puzzling over the dates of coming catastrophes, even though the Lord clearly warned us not to do this. In speculation about times and dates there is a substitution, when our attention is diverted from how we live before the end comes to the search for the date of the end. And yet what follows from His words is that it is far more important to be ready at every moment, which means that at every moment we should live worthily before the face of the Lord.

Among the hardest sayings of Christ in the Gospel are those in which He reveals that the time He indicates is near. But twenty centuries have passed, and the world still lies in evil. Was He speaking about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, and not about a global judgment at all?

There is reason to say that He was indeed prophesying about events of the coming decades, but like the Old Testament prophets, through the images of the catastrophes His listeners were to witness, He was also revealing the meaning of other events. By earthly measures these events are far from the "present moment," but on the scale of eternity they are near. Therefore it is not worth guessing how much earthly time the rule of evil in the world will last, even if it lasts for a very long time. The sentence on evil has already been passed, and it is doomed to disappear.