The Oxymoron of the Endgame

Did you know that the word “oxymoron” is itself an oxymoron? No kidding. The English word is the combination of two Greek words—oxus, meaning “sharp,” and moron, meaning “dull.” How can you have a sharp-dull anything? (Just ask a schoolteacher!) But that’s precisely the point. Oxymorons are two contradictory words juxtaposed to create an arresting thought or perspective. We use them all the time: “controlled chaos,” “deafening silence” (ever hear that?), “jumbo shrimp,” et al. Oxymorons work because they pique our attention.

Take this one: “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid” (Gen. 3:10). Adam hears the voice of his Creator, his “the Maker of all things loves and wants me” divine Friend—and he is afraid? Afraid of a Friend? Talk about an oxymoron of the most tragic kind!

All because of an even more devastating oxymoron: “And war broke out in heaven” (Rev. 12:7). Why, the very thought is oxymoronic! Heaven (the place of universal peace) once upon a time engulfed in a war (the universal act of non-peace)? How could it be! But like any good oxymoron, it has our attention.

Heartbroken attention, really. Because existentially we all know all too well the knot-in-the-stomach fear when we sin, that poison of guilt from the fatal strike of the “ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray” (Rev. 12:9, NIV). “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid.”

So what is He to do, the Maker of all things who loves and wants us?

Through a progression of probing questions, God first lays ultimate blame on the serpent, then cryptically announces the cosmic conflict that would end in Heaven’s ultimate triumph: “And I will put enmity between you [the devil serpent] and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed [the first hint of a coming divine-human Messiah]; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15). For Adam and Eve it is the first glint of gospel hope in a future already feeling so dark and stormy.

What’s the point of calling ourselves Adventists if we’re too distracted to warn our culture of the most compelling endgame truth of all—’Jesus is coming, ready or not’?

Hebrew scholar Jacques Doukhan offers this stunning conclusion: “[In Genesis 3:15] the imagery of the prophecy suggests that the deaths of the serpent and of the Messiah are simultaneous. While crushing the head [of the serpent], he [the Messiah] is bitten at the heel. The Hebrew describes the crushing of the head and the bite of the heel by the same verb: shuf.”[1] That is, both the Protagonist and the antagonist will fall on the battlefield. “Both attacks are mortal.”[2]

“I’m declaring war between you and the Woman, between your offspring and hers” (Gen. 3:15, Message).[3] And so it came to be, the great controversy between the rightful King (Rev. 17:14) and the fallen prince (John 12:31, NIV)—a mortal battle so dark and bitter it had to be veiled atop that rock mound they still call Golgatha. “It is finished!” (John 19:31). And it really was.

“Satan saw that his disguise was torn away. . . . He had revealed himself as a murderer. By shedding the blood of the Son of God, he had uprooted himself from the sympathies of the heavenly beings. . . . Yet Satan was not then destroyed. . . . Man as well as angels must see the contrast between the Prince of light and the prince of darkness. [We] must choose whom [we] will serve.”[4]

Welcome to earth’s final season. It’s called the endgame, another oxymoron—since everyone knows this is no game, and nobody knows for sure when the clock runs out. But everybody knows we’re running out of time.

Just look at America! “Controlled chaos” indeed—has there been a time of such utter confusion and uncertainty haunted by the numinous sense that this grand experiment in democracy, equality, and religious liberty may be collapsing (for the last time)?

Here in the endgame let’s examine a troubling prophecy that has “America” written all over it, all over the world (Revelation 13). Because what’s the point of calling ourselves Adventists if we’re too distracted to warn our culture of the most compelling endgame truth of all—“Jesus is coming, ready or not”?

[1] Jacques Doukhan, Secrets of Revelation: The Apocalypse Through Hebrew Eyes (Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 2002), p. 111.

[2] Jacques Doukhan, Seventh-day Adventist International Bible Commentary: Genesis (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 2016) p. 102.

[3] Texts credited to Message are from The Message, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress, represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a division of Tyndale House Ministries. All rights reserved.

[4] Ellen White, The Desire of Ages (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1898, 1940) p. 761.