This is Faith in Play #98: Apocalypse, for January 2026.
There is a book which in Protestant Bibles is called The Revelation of John, but in Roman Catholic ones The Apocalypse of John. It is a distinction without a difference–Revelation is Latin for unveiling, Apocalypse Greek for uncovering. It is so named because it in theory reveals or uncovers events to come, peering into the future.
The degree to which the book actually reveals the future could be debated–but I covered that, and gave my own thoughts, in my web page The Sandy Becker Theory of Eschatology, suggesting that perhaps everyone is wrong. What is important about the book isn’t that it gives us a roadmap for the future, but that it assures us that God is in control.
What intrigues me, though, is that we have an entire genre we call post-apocalyptic, that is, after the apocalypse. This usage of the word suggests that the events predicted have happened, or more generally that something like the end of the world as we know it has come to pass, and there are survivors. That’s not consistent with our Biblical text–but it is a big part of popular culture. We had the concepts of the world following the nuclear holocaust, and of a pandemic worse than COVID, and most recently the Zombie Apocalypse, something infecting people and causing them to become effectively undead creatures spreading the disease. We imagine that something could happen that would destroy civilization, end the world as we know it, but leave people alive and struggling to survive.
I’m no stranger to the concept. I read On the Beach and Alas Babylon in high school English, and recommend the latter. Gamma World was the first role playing game I ever played (I refereed Dungeons & Dragons, first edition Basic and Advanced, before that, but didn’t play them). I’ve run a few “post-apocalyptic” scenarios in Multiverser. They are interesting and challenging, within their limits. But they raise an issue for me: given what we know, are these worlds even possible? That is, would God permit devastation on that level, or is that outside his plan?
As I write that, I am reminded that I have elsewhere written that we should be very careful about suggesting what God might or might not permit. People have often thought God would not permit something, only to be proved wrong–nuclear weapons, spaceflight, cloning, genetic engineering. I hesitate ever to suggest that God will not allow something man has imagined. I cannot say that a nuclear war, or a pandemic, or even a zombie apocalypse, would derail God’s plan.
What I can say is that God’s plan, whatever it is, will come to its completion, and those who have turned to Christ will be saved while those who reject God will be lost. What that means is probably beyond our knowledge, but we will always know that God is in control–even if there is a zombie apocalypse.
Thanks to The Min/Max Podcast for pointing my mind in the direction of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories.
Previous article: Ironic Endings.
Next article: Sidekicks.