Even in the time of the Conquest of Canaan, it had become the case that yearning for a "spacious land" was a well-known aspiration of a people. By the beginning of the Common Era, further "filling" of the earth was in most cases to be dependent on the development of technologies and their unforeseen drawbacks and costs. In many instances, the "development" (so-called) of virgin territories was made possible by the implementation of brutal social structures. In the modern era, of course, the supposed blessing of God for humanity to "fill the earth" has been expressed in the pillaging and befoulment of certain regions in resource-mining to gain the means to venture into other inhospitable lands--lands in their turn subject to pillaging and befoulment.
Why not imagine that the earth had been "filled" by Jesus' time? More to the point, is it not the case that the Gospels depict an earth ripe unto harvest, and not merely likely to end at any time, but manifestly rendered into a state likely to end? It is, after all, the case that Jesus indicated two things at once: that the End could happen at any time, and that the earth would show itself as being ready for such an end when it came. It is inescapable that Jesus' depiction was of a world that had already expended itself and was merely in its death throes--whether for seconds or centuries.
It was a matter of real wonderment and respect for me to speak to a man of great--and largely conventional--Biblical faith about a prophecy of Daniel. The prophecy in question was the one about "to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." My contention, which the gentleman was forthright enough to ratify, was to the effect that every generation has cause in good faith to regard their time as one in which "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."
The same manner of analysis can be directed toward Jesus' statements about "wars and rumors of wars" and "the beginnings of birth pangs"--the world is always ending, and always ready to end. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that the world has already "ended," insofar as the Genesis account of the world's beginning is considered. The world of the start of Genesis--viewed in its physical state--was (prior to what might be really called a narrative) a dark chaos surmounted by a mighty wind. Suffice to say that the chaos of the formless deep and the presumably roiling atmosphere above it would surpass our greatest apprehensions.
This chaos is hearkened to by Jesus when he describes our plight on earth--buffeted by the wind that blows where it pleases--and when Jesus is in his agony on the cross, the skies are darkened and the earth is convulsed. Moreover, we are to live always as though the sky might open or the ground might open--the earth of God's good Creation Week is no more, and it has not really existed since the advent of Jesus' ministry. The earthly expression of the Kingdom of God in Jesus' utterances is simultaneous with the delivering of a (suspended) death sentence on the kingdoms of the earth.
Similarly, we are each issued a personal death sentence--a sentence that we can hope to escape only by a dwindling number of moment-by-moment opportunities to trade effectual death here on earth for life in heaven. This hope of attaining citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven is illustrated for us, in the most pertinent way, in the giving-up-of-life demonstrated by John the Baptist. It is often foolishly thought that John is to be understood most importantly as a near-attainer of that citizenship, both because of his query of Jesus about whether John is to wait for another, and also because Jesus says in Matthew,
"Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." This statement can mislead us, if we do not remember that in the teachings of Jesus, NO ONE has attained the Kingdom this side of the grave--and no one ought to think of themselves in such a way. (At least, no one ought to count on such assurance as obtained by the Good Thief in his unusual circumstance.) This is probably why Jesus tells one man that he is not far from the Kingdom, and then does not tell him what he lacks. Similarly, Jesus tells the "rich young ruler" that he lacks one thing (the selling-away of his wealth) and then proceeds to tell him that he needs still to do another thing (". . . and come, take up the cross, and follow me.")
We are in a world that has already come to an end, and we are living in such precarious tumult as would characterize such a state. The tumult of our expired world is shown in the very sentence that Jesus appends to his fulsome description of John being as great as any "born of women": "And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." Of course the Kingdom of Heaven was available to the Patriarchs and others of old--Jesus' description of the Kingdom of Heaven does not involve a change in the Kingdom, but rather a change in the earth from which we might strive to attain the Kingdom.
Moreover, Jesus describes an earth in practical effect returned to its original state of chaos, even as the other elements of Creation are returned in a progression back from their humanly-caused travails (such travails felt most deeply by Jesus through whom Creation was made.) The predicament of Creation was not the conventionally-described Fall (a point I have described incessantly.) Rather, Adam rejected God's company as sufficient, attached himself (with all the connotations) to another human, and fathered a race that splintered into a warring mass of sub-attachments. Jesus declared the divisions of humanity as meaningless in the face of everyone's duty to worship God; Jesus worked the whole male-female thing back (first through faithful monogamy as a human duty, and then through sober questioning of what fleshly fixations can do to detract from our total lives); and Jesus demanded of us a striving for communion with God that challenges all other attachments.
In short, Jesus directs us to travel back against the course of humanity's stepwise decline, and Jesus deprives us of the claim that we have duties to "the world" and in "the world." "The world" is dead, and not merely dead in sin (so that we might feel that the trappings of religion, such as the conventions and concoctions of the non-Gospel New Testament, are part of our duties to God.) The world, in everything that matters to the teachings of Jesus, is all dead, and our duties are such as would be fitting in the echoes of its death-throes: Are duties are to reach out in response to the echoes of Jesus' sufferings we hear in the sufferings of our fellow creatures--to reach out reflexively and without regard to doctrines.
And when the End in all its implications does finally come, it with be a recapitulation of God's "Let there be light"--it will be such as a flash of lightning from horizon to horizon.
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