Our time of comfort and joy with the literary seer, J.R.R. Tolkien, is coming to an end
and what is to replace it is the real-life glut of pain and atrocity that immediately precedes the good resurrection unto life, which glut is – with precision – called Armageddon.
It has indeed been a pleasure to sit with Tolkien and appreciate the literary vision of great wars in the ancient and modern battle of good against evil, and, in the midst of a present world filled with evil and deception beyond even our ken, be entertained and comforted.
But one cannot live in Tolkien’s world forever. Real hardships, injustices, suffering accompany us in our fragile lives, and the LOTR, being fiction, cannot enter into our suffering to comfort and sustain us. There is only One who can so enter our lives and hearts in reality.
Armageddon, technically speaking (having in mind its source, the Bible) is the global assault against God’s people – the Christians, the sorry lot of them (at that point) – by the antitype of Tolkien’s fictional Sauron who is known as Antichrist, aka “the man of sin”. Before his physical manifestation his spirit will be behind the “disinformation machine” of media, academia, corporate culture, and governments, grooming the world societies to form the corporate body in which he can exert his will across the world, and when that day comes it will be a bloodbath (very much like the cameo of October 7 but world-wide). There is the “mystical body” of Antichrist, competing against the mystical body of Jesus Christ, which latter is His true church, known also as His bride.
When Armageddon reaches its fevered pitch of evil – the entire world seen in its true God-despising nature, its guilt unquestionable – is when the Lord Christ will return to resurrect His bride, give each and every one of them a new and glorified body, and then execute vengeance against those who hurt them, who will be, at that point in time, every one who is not Christ’s – so great will Antichrist’s power be to infect the remainder with his hatred and evil, even the so-called best of non-Christian humankind.
The “sorry lot” will then be the royal children of the kingdom of heaven, which shall have come down upon the renewed paradise of earth, world without end. Perhaps Tolkien will be there, in a world of such glory and powers even his imagination could not fathom.