Two Journeys

Isn't it a marvelous, marvelous thing how it says in the scripture: Take delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. That's a beautiful thing, isn't it? All my life, I have wanted to fly. That's true. I have wanted to just be able to jump off the surface of the earth and go up to the clouds. It's a desire that I have, and I don't think I'm the only one that has this desire. It says in the book of Ecclesiastes - I bet you're wondering what's coming next - It says in the book of Ecclesiastes that God has put eternity in the hearts of men. But I think just from a common experience, I think he's also put flight in the hearts of men, too. We would love to be able to fly like the birds.

I remember when I was in Acadia National Park looking at birds of prey just soaring on thermals and just riding higher and higher, and I thought, I would love to be one of them. Sitting on a cliff overlooking Echo Lake there in Maine, at that beautiful park. And I saw the same thing in the Grand Canyon.

When I was a teenager, I had a dream, the most vivid dream of my life, literal dream, middle of the night. And I dreamt that I was standing on the parapet of an ancient castle, Bavarian kind of castle in the Alps. I just was standing on the wall, and then moved by some impulse, I just threw myself from the wall. And instead of falling, one of those falling dreams, I started to soar out over this beautiful Alpine lake.

It was an unbelievable thrill. And I thought, “Wow, this is incredible.” I saw these sailboats sailing below me. I saw birds next to me and I was doing better than they were. I was having the time of my life. Until, suddenly, I woke up. And with bitter disappointment, I realized that had just been a dream, but I still remember the details of the dream. It was in the Alps somewhere, I was on a castle and I was flying over a lake. I remember it distinctly. Thinking, “Oh God, I would love to be able to do that. I would love to be able to just soar through the air.”

Now, people, I think from ancient times past have had this desire. Ancient Greek mythology have Daedalus and Icarus who make wings out of wax and feathers, they didn't choose good engineering materials, dear friends. And they went up too high and they got too close to the sun god, and his heat melted the wax and they fell to their death.

But, I didn't realize this, in around the year 1,000 AD or 1,010, somewhere in there, a Benedictine monk in England named Eilmer of Malmesbury made a glider and flew 250 feet in it, till he crashed. He didn't die. But that meant this has been a desire that human beings have had for a long time. Leonardo da Vinci invented all kinds of stuff, on paper only, never built it, flying machines, including one he called an aerial screw. It looked like a kind of propeller that would just kind of screw you up into the air. I don't think that was gonna work, but he had some helicopters and some other things that actually look pretty much like what we have today.

Now, we all live in North Carolina, which has seized from the state of Ohio the claim “First in Flight.” I'm not a native of North Carolina. If any of you who are, wanna come and quibble with me, you do what you want. I see the license plates. I know what it says. Orville and Wilbur, two Ohio boys, brought their research from Dayton, Ohio, here to some sandy place where the winds were right, and they flew here. And the 20th century has seen a, has seen a tremendous development of flight, but you know something? That's not what I'm talking about.

I have taken 11 different flights in the last three weeks, up and down, take-off and landing 11 times. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of taking my shoes off in public places, having people rummage through my private things. I'm grateful for the TSA agents that keep us all safe. I would like them to know I am not a terrorist, and I'm not going to hijack any airplane, but they don't know me, so I don't mind taking off my stuff and surrendering my beverages and my shaving cream that's a little bit too big and didn't fit in the bag. But the fact of the matter is, that's not the kind of flying I'm talking about. I would just like to just slip from the earth and fly through the clouds. That's what I would like. And you know, the amazing thing is, the Lord has in some mysterious way, promised that all of us in Christ are gonna get at least one such flight.

Now, the closest thing I've seen recently, to any of this, is a crazy YouTube video of some base jumpers in a fjord in Norway. I don't know if you've seen these guys. They stand on a cliff and then they just jump, and they've got these tiny little parachutes behind them. They've got these web suits that look like flying squirrels. And they fly down, 120 miles an hour, near the cliffs, and they land safely, so beautifully. Isn't that wonderful? On their feet. Closest thing to flying you'll ever see. That's not flying, that's falling, dear friends. And they don't tell you that many of these base jumpers die for their sport.

Now, I don't wanna die. I just wanna fly. When the space shuttle Challenger blew up, Ronald Reagan, president at the time, quoted this poem, “How they slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.” Yes, but they died. I wanna slip the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of Christ and not die. I wanna meet the Lord in the air. And so do you, don't you? And that's what we're talking about today.

We're talking about the doctrine of the rapture. The doctrine of the rapture is that Jesus Christ will return and he will dispatch angels and he will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. And we will meet the Lord in the air. And so we're looking at Matthew 24:31. I also want you to take time, while I'm speaking now, to put your finger or some bookmark in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17, which teaches the same thing. And by looking at these two passages of scripture, I think we're going to get a good grounding in this doctrine of the rapture of the church. And as I do, I'm going to present a positive doctrinal assertion of what the Bible does, in fact, teach about the rapture, what it is, what it means, what's happening with it. But I also have to do some negative work too, and I have to do my best to defend you, I think, from doctrinal error. And I consider the so-called secret rapture, which is very popular in most evangelical circles to be an error. It's not a major error. It's not a killing, a soul-killing error, but it's an error nonetheless.

I was speaking to Tom Geers before worship today, and I likened it to, remember those cartoons when you were growing up, and some character in the cartoon in the midst of some kind of frenzy, runs off a cliff. And he's doing just fine, he's floating in mid-air until suddenly, he stops and looks around. And he looks down in particular and realizes that there's nothing under his feet, and then he looks at us, and then he drops. Right. Well, I want you to have solid doctrine under your feet at all times. I want you to be able to trace everything you believe about the Christian faith to some passage of scripture rightly exegeted. I want us to rightly divide the word of truth. And so, I think it's important for us to have a right understanding of the rapture, and so I have to preach against a very popular view, and that is the so-called secret rapture.

What do we mean by the secret rapture? First of all, in one sense, the Rapture isn't secret at all. Some of those that defend it hate the term “secret rapture” and say, “We're doing everything we can to make the rapture very public and open and honest,” but that's not what I'm talking about. It's secret to those that are left behind. That's the point. And they don't know what happened after it's over. And so, to some degree, the second coming of Christ, the first version of the second coming of Christ in that doctrinal scheme is a secret to those that are left behind. They don't know what happened, and they kinda have to figure out what happened. To them, it's a secret. Jesus not only comes as a thief in the night, but he leaves as a thief in the night with the church, steals her away, saves all of the redeemed, brings them out just before the seven-year tribulation. It's called the pre-trib rapture, and what I call the secret rapture, because it's a secret to those that are left behind. They don't understand it. They don't know what's happened, and I find this un-Biblical.

I think that when Jesus returns and catches the church up in the clouds, everybody's gonna know it's the second coming of Christ. That's what I believe. Now, I think it's possible to disagree. I just wanna be sure that your methodology is right. I wanna be sure that you have, in fact, certain passages of scripture under your feet, and that you've understood them the best way possible.

Now, the secret rapture scheme has been presented and popularized in a lot of different ways, most recently, of course, the Left Behind series. Without the secret rapture, you don't have the Left Behind, because it's a real short time. Those that are left behind go to judgment by Jesus as he returns, so there's not enough time for... What is it? 15 books that are written after they're all left behind.

I do believe there are gonna be many people left behind, but they're gonna be left behind not for long, because Jesus is coming back in judgment, and destruction is gonna come on them suddenly as labor pains on a pregnant woman. That's what it says. Judgment is coming. I do believe that there will be many left behind. Matthew 24 teaches that. We'll get to that later, but the fact of the matter is, in this scheme, there's a long delay in time for a whole development, a whole history, the seven-year tribulation.

The book begins with a pilot, Rayford Steele, who's a 747 pilot, flying out, I guess, over the Atlantic, the middle of the night. Suddenly, he sees a woman in the story, Hattie Durham, and she's just shaking inconsolable, doesn't know what to do. People are missing from the plane, hard to do on a plane over the Atlantic, but there's lots of people missing, dozens of them, and their piles of clothing kind of fully arranged in the original position, and they're just there, and people have gone. And it turns out to be not just on that plane, but all over the world. This is the rapture. Christ has come back in that story and taken the church, and off they go.

By the way, I want you to notice that in Matthew 24:31, it says he comes and gets the elect. It doesn't say he comes and gets all the believers. I believe elect equals believers at that point. All of the elect have come to faith by then. I believe that, okay. But at this point, it's all that all of those that are ready, those that have come to faith, and he comes and the Lord comes and gets them.

And so, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, they claim that while their series is fiction, they say it's based on absolute biblical facts, all of theology and good exegesis. That's the thing I'm questioning today. I don't think so. They have added some vivid details, which, I would like to know where the solid theology is for like the necklace around the lady's neck that's left, that the indentation in the pillow, that kind of thing. There are all kinds of vivid details that really capture the imagination, but where are the verses? How do we know the necklaces are gonna be left behind? And the clothing, too.

These are just surmisings. For me, I just want eschatology to be based on scripture, and to not speculate, but instead just see what the scripture says. And so, we're gonna look at Matthew 24:31, and 40 and 41. We're gonna look at 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17. Secret rapture is the definition that Christ returns not once, but twice. First time as a thief in the night to catch as many true believers that are ready at that point in the middle of life, leaving unbelievers to wonder where they went.

And I'm gonna say in this message that, that was the doctrinal innovation that came in in the 19th century. It was unheard of before then, for the most part, and instead, the doctrine of the Rapture is taught and we're gonna see that today.

Let's look at what it says. Look at verses 29-31 in Matthew 24. “Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened. The moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the nations of the Earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”

Well, first, let's deal with this word “rapture.” It's in the sermon title. I tell you, it's not found anywhere in the English Bible. It doesn't mean that it's not a biblical truth, that, that word isn't found in the Bible. We know that the word “trinity” is not found in the Bible, but we think it's a helpful term to help us understand the doctrine of the trinity, etcetera. The word “rapture” comes, I think, from the passage in 1 Thessalonians 4, like I told you to look there, just keep your finger in these two passages, we're going back and forth.

But if you look at 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, it says, “The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” Now, look at verse 17. “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up”- Caught up - “together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so, we will be with the Lord forever.”

That's the Rapture, caught up. The word “rapture” is really just an English version of a Latin word. The Latin word from which we get the word “raptor” also, kind of birds that come like eagles or vultures, that snatch up their prey or grab them up, or a falcon, something like that. And so, the idea in the Greek is of being caught up or snatched up in some way.

The Greek word here is passive, so something happens to you. It's nothing you do. You don't go get yourself raptured. You have to be raptured, something has to happen to you. 1 Thessalonians 4 doesn't say how, but that those who are left will be caught up together with them. And so, there's something sudden, I think, something passive that happens.

Back in Matthew 24:31, go back, we're going back and forth. But if you look at verse 31, it says how it's going to happen. Gives you the agents of the rapture, and they are angels. Now, the Bible says repeatedly in the second coming of Christ, there will be angels. Not a few angels, lots of angels, myriad angels, mighty angels, a mighty warrior host returning with Jesus. Matthew 16:27 says, “The Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done.”

And then in the next chapter, in Matthew 25:31, next from where we're at, it says, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory, and all the nations will be gathered before him and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep and the goats.” Mark 8:38 says this, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his Father's glory with his angels.”

I mean, it's again and again, it's not one or two, it's many. Even Enoch, seventh from Adam, foresaw this angelic host returning with Jesus. Jude 14 says, “Enoch, the seventh from Adam prophesied about these men,” false teachers, “Behold, the Lord is coming,” listen, “with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones.” I mean, that's the seventh man from Adam, and God showed him the second coming of Christ. The Lord planned this before the foundation of the world, how it was gonna be, and he was gonna come with angels.

Daniel 7 implies that there are 100 million angels and the angelic host is going to come. And so, Revelation 19 makes it plain that Christ is returning at the head of an immense army of angels. Revelation 19:11 says, “I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse whose rider is called faithful and true.” And verse 14, “the armies of heaven were following him riding on white horses dressed in fine linen, white and clean."

And so, Jesus returns verse 30, in verse 31, he sends out his angels, he dispatches them. Verse 31, “He will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.” Christ is coming for the sake of his elect to rescue them in every way from this sin-cursed planet.

Now, the word “elect” means chosen ones. It's a biblical doctrine that God knows his elect. He knows his chosen ones, he knew them by name before the foundation of the world, chosen in Christ, before the creation of the world. The word elect is mentioned three times in this chapter, Matthew 24:22. “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.” Matthew 24:22. And then again in 24:24. It says, “False Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if that were possible. See, I've told you ahead of time.”

And now here in this verse, verse 31. Now, who are the elect? Well, they are the ones that God chose in Christ to be Christians. Ephesians 1:4 and 5 says, “He chose us in him,” that is, in Christ, “before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.” Chosen in him. These are love gifts from the Father to the Son, the elector, and not one of them can be lost. Isn't that a beautiful thing? Rest in that. Rest in God's sovereign election. He knows you by name, he has called you my name, you are his sheep, and he will not lose you.

And so it says in John 6:37-39, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me, I will never drive away. For I've come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.” Notice how Jesus says in John 6, “I have come down from heaven.” He's talking about his first coming, his first advent coming down from heaven to go to the cross and the empty tomb, all of that. But he's gonna come down from him, and the second time also for the elect, that he shall lose none of them but raise them up at the last day. Isn't that a beautiful thing?

And so, he sends out his angels and he's going to come and get you. Nobody's gonna get missed, there's no one that should be coming that will be left behind, no one falls through the cracks, he is perfect in what he's doing, the angels know you, and they're going to come and get you, and they're going to grab you, so be ready friends, be ready. I remember we were at a birthday party at the fire station for one of my sons, and the fireman came in in all of his scary garb, he had this rubber mask on and this breathing thing. Like that. And he's saying, “Now, don't be afraid, don't be afraid when I come in and get you, and rescue you because I'm here to help you. Okay?” Don't be afraid dear friends, when the angels break into your daily life, when the angel comes and gets you, he's here to help you, he's here to rescue you from this sin-cursed world. And so, not one of the elect is going to be missing.

And notice the extent of it. They're going to go all over the world. All over the world. The angels are gonna break into the middle of life, “As it was in the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man, because in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and given in marriage.” We'll talk about that next. Not today. But the angel's gonna be breaking in and they're gonna go all over the world, “He will send his angels and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”

Now, remember earlier in Matthew 24 and verse 14, it says, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world, as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” The gospel, dear friends, is going to be effective all over the world, there are going to be elect from every nation, and the angels have to go to every nation on earth and get them. Oh, what a beautiful and glorious gathering that will be, as the gospel had its way, and the gospel was triumphant and victorious, and missionaries spent their lives to go get those elect. Paul says, “I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” The gospel was effective dear friends, and the angels have to go, and they're happy to go all over the world to get them.

The geographic scope, and notice that standing next to one of these elect people will do you no good if you're not one of them. Proximity to a believer will not help you at that point if you're not a believer. And so look again in verse 40-41, it says, “Two men will be in the field. One will be taken, the other left.” Verse 41, “Two women will be grinding with a hand mill, one will be taken and the other left.”

Friends, it will be too late at that point to repent and believe, the door will have closed, there's no chance at that point for faith. The sign of the Son of Man is already shining in the sky, there's no chance for faith, the day is over. Those that are left behind there, they don't get a second chance during the tribulation, they're done, they're finished, it's over. Dear friends, don't be left behind then. He's coming to get the elect.

Now, you may say, how can I know whether I'm elect? It's very simple. This morning, you have already heard and you will hear again the gospel of Jesus Christ, you'll hear how Jesus came to earth and how he shed his blood on the cross for sinners like you and me, and how you are a sinner, and you violated the laws of God, and you're not ready to stand before God in judgment. The wrath will come on you, it's eternal wrath, not temporary, and you're in great danger if you're not in Christ, and all you need to do is flee to Christ, is trust in him. Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved.

The Bible teaches us the only ones that respond to that are the elect. You wanna know if you're elect, respond to that. Come to faith in Christ. You're to make your calling and election sure, you believed years ago? Okay, let your heart resonate with what I'm saying now and say, “That's my gospel, that's the message that saves me a sinner.” That's how you know you're elect, by response to the gospel of Jesus Christ, trust in him, call on the name of the Lord. I freely admit that the rapture is not one of the central doctrines of the Bible, I freely admit. But this one is, the gospel of Jesus Christ is, and if you will repent and believe in him, you will be saved. And part of that is he's gonna send an angel to come get you. So believe in him.

All over the world, the gospel is going to spread, and he's gonna send out angels, and what are they going to do? They're gonna gather the elect and they're going to meet the Lord in the air. The Lord is returning to the earth, he has a purpose. He's coming from heaven to earth to rescue his church and to destroy the antichrist and Satan and all of his works. And establish a righteous kingdom that will be eternal, and so the rapture enables us to meet him in the air. He comes back with the clouds, surrounded by the awesome turbulence of the clouds, they're always mentioned. We will defy gravity in the grip of an angel and fly up to meet the Lord.

Now, when will that happen? Now, that's an interesting question, isn't it? And here I want to just cling to the passage that was read, that Jack Evans read so beautifully for us. I think it gives us a very clear timetable. So look down in Matthew 24:29, “Immediately after the distress of those days.” Now, the word “distress” is translated in another version, “tribulation.” Okay, let's just stick that one in there because I think it's helpful. “Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.” Talked about that last time. Verse 30, “At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the nations of the Earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming with the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.” That is the second coming. Preached about that last time and the time before that.

Tribulation. Second coming. What's verse 31? What would you call verse 31? “And he will send out his angels, and they will gather the elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.” That is the rapture friends. Tribulation, second coming, rapture. And Second Coming, rapture, same time. That's it. I think that's a good order, don't you? Friends, let's just stick to the scripture, let's just go with the order that you find in the Bible, tribulation, second coming, and the rapture. I think that's it.

But if you need some more help, go over to 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Thessalonians 4 gives us the same teaching. 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, “According to the Lord's own word, we tell you, we who are still alive, who are left 'til the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up” - Rapture - “With them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” This is the second coming of Christ.

The word “coming” at the coming of the Lord is “parousia” in 1 Thessalonians, the Greek term for the second coming. Verse 16, in 1 Thessalonians 4 speaks plainly of the second coming, “The Lord himself will come down from heaven.” That sounds like the second coming to me. What do you think? “The Lord himself will come down from heaven.” If I were to say “What doctrine does that describe?” You would say, “Second coming.”

“The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God.” What is the loud command? I think he's commanding the archangels to go. The archangels then are commanding other lesser angels to go and, like an army, that's the way it is, Jesus is the commander of a great army and everything is orderly, and there's discipline and structure, just like the centurion saw in Matthew chapter 8. There's just order and he gives an order, and then it just goes down and the voice of the archangel, and then they come and gather us. “Bring forth my elect,” says Jesus, and they go.

And what is this trumpet call of God? Well, it's also mentioned in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, the great resurrection chapter, which according to 1 Thessalonians 4, that's when this is happening, at the second coming, at the rapture is the resurrection. I don't deny that there's difficulties when we read Revelation 20, it's hard to put all this together. You know what it seems with eschatology? It's like a puzzle and you put it in all these pieces and they fit so neatly except this one piece, and whatever scheme you have, there's always at least one piece that just doesn't seem to fit. What I do with that is, I don't take out scissors and trim off that offending tab, and fill in the other part that just doesn't seem to... I just say, look, I don't know how to put all this together. I'll do the best I can. In particular, millennium, how that fits together, difficult for me to say.

But 1 Thessalonians 4, I don't think it's that difficult when it comes to the resurrection. The dead in Christ rise. We also meet them. 1 Corinthians 15 then says, “in a flash, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, we will be changed.” And there's your resurrection body, we have resurrection bodies that we're still alive, the dead in Christ get theirs as well, and so we will be with the Lord for how long? Forever, forever. And so there it is.

So I think we need to reject the concept of the secret rapture, secret rapture, basically says it's going to be a secret. It's going to be here in the inner rooms, or there out in the desert, and Jesus said, don't do that. As lightning that comes from the east is visible in the west, everybody will know what's going on. Everybody.

Secret rapture as I said, is a new teaching, I will not bore you with details, but it came in in the early 1800s was popularized by a Scottish pastor named Irving, Edward Irving, and he got it from a 15-year-old girl that had a vision of basically two second comings. J.N. Darby, who really started dispensationalism, I think, influenced C.I. Scofield. Scofield put it in a reference Bible that was printed a million strong up to 1930, and it just spread everywhere, the idea of the two-second comings and the secret rapture popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible. Then 1970, Hal Lindsey put it in The Late Great Planet Earth. 1972, there was a movie made called A Thief in the Night that popularized it, and now we have the Left Behind series, and so it's with us. And all I want you to do is just be noble Berean, that takes it and says, “Is it so? Is it so?”

I think that the secret rapture is driven by the desire to escape the tribulation. Look, who would want to go through the tribulation? Read the book of Revelation, find out just how horrible it is, but it all comes down to one verse, I think in particular, in Revelation 3:10, the Lord says, “Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test those who live on the earth.” So they take that one verse, which is to one of the seven churches, and they extend it out to all true believers, and all true believers will miss the final seven-year tribulation period.

First of all, the translation itself is questionable, could be, “I will keep you in the hour of trial that's gonna come on the whole earth.” And isn't that God's usual way? Not so much to whisk us out, but to preserve us, protect us so that we make it through, and doesn't that actually fit Matthew 24 a little bit better? Matthew 24:22 says, “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive but for the sake of” - who? “the elect, those days will be shortened.” Why? Because they're going through it, because they're suffering through it.

Frankly, even the Left Behind people, they tell you some of God's elect you do go through it, they don't talk much about election, I notice. But some of God's people, they call them tribulation saints. They go through the tribulation, they go through it. They weren't ready when Jesus came. And so therefore, in my opinion, I think they're being spanked, punished by God, so they have to go through the tribulation.

None of this makes much sense to me, and whether it makes sense or not, I don't find it in the Bible. To put the whole thing down on one verse, I think is inappropriate. Instead, isn't it God's usual way to preserve and protect his church in the midst of great suffering and trial? And that's what I think he does.

Frankly, in Revelation 16:12-15, it seems that the elect actually are going through the tribulation. It says, “The sixth angel poured out his bowl in the great river, Euphrates and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings of the East. Behold, I come like a thief!” Listen to this, “Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed,” Notice the thief statement, he says, “I'm coming, therefore, blessed are those who are ready and are…” And that's right in the middle of all the bowls and the seals of Revelation.

So I think actually, biblically, it's more likely that God's people will have to endure a time of great suffering before the end. But Jesus comes back to rescue us from it. Amen. Isn't that beautiful? He's coming back to get his bride and get her out of trouble, because those days had been cut short.

Frankly friends, when it comes to the second coming, someone is going to do a U-turn, it's either gonna be us or Jesus. Jesus comes from heaven down to the earth, or toward the earth, right? The rapture means we're gonna meet the Lord where? In the clouds, but neither Jesus nor us is staying in the clouds, that's not our final home. Somebody is doing a U-turn. Do you not to see it? Either Jesus gets the church and goes back up to heaven for seven more years, or we meet the Lord and we do a U-turn and escort him back to the Earth.

And frankly, the Greek word for “meet” in 1 Thessalonians is that precise term of a delegation sent out from a city to meet a coming king or dignitary, and escort him back into the city. And I think that's precisely what is happening at the rapture, we go up, we meet the Lord, and we come down to do some damage, friends. Although frankly, if you read Revelation 19, we don't need to do much damage, all the damage is done by Jesus, 'cause you got the sword coming out of his mouth, and he can slay anyone he wants any time, because he is the Sovereign God. And when he says to the antichrist, “Be dead.” That's it, because he slays them with the breath of his mouth. But we're gonna be there as witnesses, Amen. And we're gonna be with the hosts of heaven, and we're gonna meet the Lord in the air and we'll be with him forever.

Now, what about the thief in the night passages? Not yet. Later we'll come to them. But basically, if I can say simply, it's this. It comes like a thief in the night to those who don't read the Bible and are not ready. Jesus doesn't want us to be like that and so he's told us plainly what's gonna happen, and he's saying that they will not surprise you like a thief in the night, you will be ready. And part of the rest of Matthew 24 is to get you ready, so that you're ready for the second coming of Christ and live every moment for the second coming of Christ.

So what is the significance of the rapture? Well, it demonstrates Christ's power, we see his power in the clouds of the sky with great glory, specifically his power over the antichrist and overall force of evil, we will see that. His power also to raise the dead, because the dead in Christ will be raised at that point and Jesus's power over death will be open and obvious. Amen. At the rapture, we will see his power, we will be in resurrection bodies.

It demonstrates also Christ's love for the church. He said on the road to Damascus, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He takes it personally when his elect are beat up on earth and he's coming back to rescue them. Conversely, he takes it very personally when his elect are well-treated on earth in his name. And he rewards people, sheep and the goats, you'll see it, but he rewards people based on how his people are treated. And so He is coming back because he loves the church.

It's also, the rapture is, a reward for faithful and courageous service. Revelation 7:13-17, “One of the elders asked ‘These in white robes - who are they and where do they come from?’ I answered, ‘Sir, you know.’ And he said, ‘Well, these are they that have come out of the great tribulation. They've washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb, and therefore, they are before the throne of God, and they serve him day and night in his temple, and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them, and never again will they hunger, and never again will they thirst, and the sun will not beat on them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their Shepherd, and he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’” And it says at the end of Revelation 22:12, “Behold, I am coming soon, and my reward is with me.” Rapture is part of his reward. Catch you up in the clouds to meet the Lord,

And the rapture enables us to be with the Lord as he comes down. I wanna be with him, don't you? Don't you wanna see him, don't you wanna see him in his hour of glory, in his hour of triumph? To be there as an eyewitness? You didn't get to be there as an eyewitness with the first generation, those were the apostles, that wasn't us, but we get to be eyewitnesses of his second coming glory. We get to glorify him.

It signals also the end of the old order of things. The resurrection is the end. The old order of things will have passed away.

It begins also our face-to-face fellowship with Christ that will last forever, and our perfect unity with each other. We're not going to precede those that have fallen asleep, we're gonna be together, the dead in Christ, the living in Christ together, we'll be together from every tribe, and language, and people and nation, and we will be one.

And finally, it fulfills my lifetime yearning to fly, so at least I'm happy about that. If any of you else would just be honest and say, “I actually always wish I could fly too.” Then don't feel you're yearning to go. If you couldn't care less, it doesn't matter, you're going if you're a Christian, so he's going to come and get you and you will fly as well, at least just one time. 

So what application can we take from this? Well, first, come to Christ now, this could be your last chance to hear the gospel. I'm not trying to be melodramatic, but you don't know when you're going to die, you don't know how many more minutes you have on earth, come to Christ now, look to the blood of Christ, trust in him, don't put it off, not because the rapture might happen tonight, but because your death might happen tonight. Be ready at every moment.

And delight in the power of Christ in protecting his church. Relish the togetherness of the unity of the church, so we're gonna be together forever. Yearn for that.

Think carefully about the secret rapture. If I haven't persuaded you, then go back and look at the passages on rapture and see if you can place it. See if you can find a place where Jesus comes secretly, gets the church, and disappears for seven years. And if you can support it and believe it, show me the passage, and I'd like to learn as well.

And one final thing from a hymn we sang earlier for all the saints, it's powerful while we're seeing it just hit me how important this is, you know why we need to teach on the second coming of Christ? You know why this is important? Well, listen to this verse, and for all the saints, “And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again and arms are strong. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.” If you're feeling weak in your battle with sin today, hear the distant victory song today and say, someday you're going to triumph over all sin. So be strong today against temptation. And if you're weary of evangelizing and the whole missionary endeavor, let the distant victory song steal in your ear and get brave again in sharing the gospel. Let your arms be strong one more time. Close with me in prayer.

Have any of you ever spent a night just stargazing, just out on a beautiful night, looking at the stars? Looking up and seeing the beauties there are up there, and the mysteries, really. I think, for centuries, human beings have done that. They're just laying on their backs on those starry nights and looked up, studied the sky, enthralled by its lights and its complex movements. Ancient peoples trying to predict the movement of the stars and the planets, which are very complex, erected elaborate observatories like Stonehenge in England, and Tonantzintla in Mexico. And there's this other place just south of Berlin, that's the oldest of them all.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians combined careful observations of the movements of the celestial beings, the stars and the planets, that science called astronomy, with superstitious religious ideas of how those stars affect events on earth, and that's astrology. First is astronomy, the second astrology. Kings like Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon would consult with the stargazers and the experts in the stars, to try to find out if the stars were favorable to a military invasion or some other grand endeavor. And so, astrology, the idea that the stars somehow affect events on earth. Now, the march of knowledge about the heavenly host is fascinating to historians of science.

Recently, I was watching a program that was aired on the History Channel about the history of the study of the stars and planets, and the human race, and this program gave me a sense of the infinitude, again, the infinitude of our universe, just its immense scope and how small the Earth really is. Our tiny planet revolves around the sun, massive sun, which converts 700 million tons of hydrogen to 695 million tons of helium every second, generating just almost incalculable power, which heats the earth, generates light. The Earth is just one of seven planets revolving around the sun. However, the sun itself is moving.

Our entire solar system, science tells us, is spinning and moving, flying through space at 134 miles per second, turning in circles as a tiny part out of a wing of the galaxy known as the Milky Way, where we make our home. Estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at 200 billion. Furthermore, astronomers tell us that the Milky Way is one of 125 billion such galaxies that together make up the visible universe. The universe is immense, and scientists tell us it's expanding. It's getting bigger.

Now, these facts make some Bible verses just explode with power. How about when King Solomon dedicated the temple? 1 Kings 8:27, he's kneeling down, he's got his arms spread up to the heavens. And he looks up, and after having dedicated this beautiful temple, I think he's struck with a moment of humility, and he says, “But will God really dwell on Earth? Heaven, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. How much less this temple that I have built?”

So also David in Psalm 8, verse 3 and 4, he says, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers.” Think about that, the word “fingers,” God's fingers making the cosmos. “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man, that you care for him?”

Now, the History Channel had a typically smug attitude about the Christian faith and its resistance to this inevitable march of cosmology. At the core of its presentation was a story of how man moved from belief in the Earth as the center of the universe, until we came to realize that it isn't. Following is a quotation from the program, wrote it down word-for-word, “Simple observations can lead to fundamentally wrong conclusions. When you look out at the universe, the first sense you get is that the universe is revolving around us, stars go across the night sky, the sun goes across during the day. The sense was that the Earth was fixed and that the universe was revolving around us, but that perception is completely wrong. Earth isn't fixed, it's not the center of everything. It's actually not the center of anything.” Hold on to that thought for a moment. “It's not the center of anything. The whole history of cosmology is Earth’s relentless retreat from center stage.”

They then traced out how Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, had stated the universe was somewhat like an onion, with the Earth at the center, and then concentric spheres around it. Ptolemy based his calculations on Aristotle and predicted, amazingly, accurately, the movement of the planets, even though the whole conception was wrong from top to bottom.

It wasn't until 1543, when a Polish deacon in a cathedral, with a nighttime hobby of astronomy, published on his deathbed, his Earth-shaking work concerning the revolution of the celestial orbs. Of course, that man was Nicolaus Copernicus, and his theory focused on two major changes. One, that the sun and not the Earth is the center of the solar system. And number two, that the Earth itself is revolving on its own axis, hence, we get day and night. The History Channel said Copernicus published on his deathbed for fear of reprisals from the dogmatic church, that was opposing this inevitable march of science.

How much more, then, was the same theme sounded when they turned to the case of Galileo. In the 17th century, a 1609 invention of the telescope, a wooden tube with two finely ground lenses at each end, magnified the sky a paltry 30 times, but still, that changed everything. Galileo was able to see some details and some things up in the night sky that nobody had ever noticed before. And one of those details was that the planet Venus actually goes through phases like the moon, waxing and waning, and this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Copernicus was right, Venus was actually going around the sun.

He published his results in a 1610 book entitled “The Starry Messenger.” Amazingly, at first, the Roman Catholic church was somewhat open to his findings. As a matter of fact, one cardinal, Baronius, said famously this, “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Later, however, the Catholic Church opposed Galileo because he sought to find a way to harmonize scripture with what he had been finding through his telescope, and that's where the Pope stepped in and forced him to recant.

What does any of this have to do with today's sermon? Well, you may think, “Not much, just our pastor likes lots of science and history stuff,” but it's not so much that. The fact is, we're in the middle of Matthew 24, discussing the events around the second coming of Christ. Did you notice what it said? The scriptures reveal that one of the aspects of the second coming will be the affecting, and that's an understatement, the affecting of the cosmos. Basically, dear friends, the end of the physical universe as we know it.

Amazingly then, astronomy is the study of the motion of the stars, as I've said. Astrology, that mythological superstitious religion, astrology, the prediction of how those stars affect events on Earth. But according to Matthew 24 and Revelation, the real question is, how will events on Earth affect the stars? Isn't that mind-blowing? And not so much, how do the stars move, but rather, how will the stars come to an end? So amazingly, the second coming of Christ will be a phenomenon we will see in the sky that will revert everything back again.

The Earth will indeed be the center of the universe. I don't mean the physical center, that's not necessary, or the sun revolving around the Earth, but rather the drama of redemptive history playing out is the center of what God is doing in the universe. And when that drama is done playing out, then the stars will be finished, as we know them. Look at verse 29, “Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.”

Just as it had said earlier in Isaiah 34 in verse 4, “All the stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll. All the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree.” Revelation 6:12-14, “I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to the Earth as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The sky receded like a scroll rolling up.” Hebrews 1:10-12, “In the beginning, oh Lord, you laid the foundations of the Earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment. You will roll them up like a robe. Like a garment, they will be changed, but you remain the same and your years will never end.”

That's four different predictions of the same thing, the end of the starry host, as we know it. Now, Cardinal Baronius's statement, “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go,” is only half true. The Bible does, in fact, tell us how to go to heaven, but it also does tell us how the heavens will go, or specifically, how the heavens will go away. And we have that in our text today.

So, this morning, we are going to learn to gaze at the stars again, to look up at the sky, to find the truth coming from the sky, not in the stars and the planets and their complex movements, but in the return of Jesus with the clouds. That's what we're gonna be studying from the sky, the second coming of Christ.

And why not? Because again and again, in redemptive history, God's people have been encouraged to look upward to study the sky. Think, for example, in Genesis 15, when God invited Abraham out of his tent and had him look up at the starry host. You remember that? Abraham wasn't sure how God was gonna give him anything, since Eliezer of Damascus was his heir. He had no son, he and Sarah were barren. They didn't have any children. “What can you give me since Eliezer is my heir?” He said, “Come out. I wanna show you something.” So he brought him out under the starry sky, and he said, “Look up at the stars and count them if you can.” Then he made him that promise, “So shall your offspring be.” Abraham believed the Lord and it was credited to him as righteousness. He, our father, in faith, believed as he was looking up at the stars, “I'm gonna have this number of descendants.”

Or how about at the birth of Christ, when the Magi were led by a celestial being? Some kind of mysterious wandering star that moved across the heavens and led them on a journey, and then eventually stopped in Bethlehem over the place where the child lay with his mother.

Or how about at the death of Christ, when there was a miraculous eclipse of the sun? From the sixth hour until the ninth hour, the sun turned dark. This eclipse was noted by pagan historians. Tertullian said, “Your own records,” he said to a Roman audience, “Your own records noted the eclipse at that time.” It was recorded in the scriptures. And they looked up at the heavens and they did not understand what was happening. Well, the Son of God was dying for the sins of the world. And so, there was a celestial portent, an eerie, a supernatural darkness coming because of the eclipse.

Or simply just the church, as it was at the time, there with Jesus after his resurrection, on the Mount of Olives, and Jesus, after giving them the great commission, ascended before their eyes. And he went higher and higher and higher, until finally, a cloud hid him from their sight, and they're just standing there gazing up into the sky. I don't think we ought to spend our lives doing that. Okay. You're gonna get fired from your job, you're not gonna get a good grade on your final exam. Okay. We are called on to live our lives. I Thessalonians talks about that, II Thessalonians as well. We have to be hard workers, not lounging on other people. The fact of the matter is, in our hearts, at least, we're to be looking upward because our redemption is drawing nigh. And so, the purpose of this whole exegesis and all these sermons in Matthew 24 is to cause you to live your lives looking upward, waiting for the second coming of Christ.

Now, as I said, this is already the second message directly on the second coming of Christ, the word coming in the Greek is parousia. It's in Matthew 24, four times. In verse 3, it says, “As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘When will this happen, destruction of Jerusalem, and what will be the sign of your coming?’” Parousia. The end of the age. Again, in verse 27, “As lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Parousia. Again, verse 37, “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.” And again, in verse 39, “They knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all the way. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

Four verses used this word “coming” and then the verse that we're studying today, verse 30, “At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the nations of the Earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. That is the second coming of Christ.”

Now, last time, when we looked at it a number of weeks ago, I said, first and foremost, the second coming is going to be obvious to everyone. Look at verse 26. “If anyone tells you, ‘There he is out in the desert,’ do not go out. Or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.” There's not gonna be any secret second coming. It's gonna be like lightning, visible from one end of the heavens to the other, verse 27.

There'll be no need for faith. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for. If you are believers today, you have a solid hope in the second coming of Christ. You have assertitude that Jesus is most certainly coming back. Amen? And you're hoping for it. You're longing for it. Just like Paul talked about in 2 Timothy 4, You're looking forward to the day of God. You're longing for that day. It's the assurance of things hoped for, conviction of things not seen.

That's what faith has to do. And so, there will be no need for faith, Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, the scripture says. And so, everyone will be able to see the second coming of Christ. No need for faith.

And therefore, I believe no opportunity for salvation, because throughout all of redemptive history, from that time of Abraham, in which it was clearly exemplified, but even before that, because Abel offered his offering by faith, right on through all the way through redemptive history, sinners have been made righteous in the sight of God, only one way, and that's by faith. Faith in the promises of God. Now for us, in this era of redemptive history, openly and clearly, faith in Jesus Christ.

Faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ saves your soul. And Jesus is invisible. He's proclaimed, he's preached all over the world, in almost every tribe and language and people and nation. Even right now, the name of Jesus is being proclaimed. The gospel is being proclaimed. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. And so, now is the time of salvation. Today is the day of faith. But when Jesus comes back, there'll be no faith required. Jesus will just appear, and everyone will see him. And therefore, there'll be on that day no opportunity for salvation. We talked about that last time. 

Secondly, we said that the second coming will purify the world of its filth, of its evil. I talked about this strange verse, verse 28, “Wherever there's a carcass, there the vultures will gather.” I said that there's a physical and a spiritual interpretation of this. First, I gave you the spiritual one, that at the end of the world, there'll be a great escalation of wickedness and sin and lawlessness. 2 Timothy 3 in verse 2 and following. “But mark this, there will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers to themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God.” That's what it's gonna be like in an increasing way, the increase of wickedness Jesus talks about in Matthew 24.

It's going to be a filthy time, consummated in the reign of the antichrist, the mark of the beast, and the open repudiation of all worship of the true God in favor of worship of this man, the antichrist. It's gonna be a filthy time. The world will be consummating its love and wickedness and sin. And so, the Lord is going to send out his angels, it says, and he's gonna weed out of his kingdom, everything that causes sin, and all those who do evil. The word vulture could be translated eagles, but either way, the vultures do us a good service, as I mentioned. They clean up the Earth from carrion. And so, the spiritual interpretation is that the second coming of Christ is going to purge the world of its evil.

The physical interpretation is, there's gonna be a tremendous carnage at the final battle. There's gonna be a lot of dead people. There's gonna be a lot of dead bodies, and the birds in the air will then come and feed on the flesh. You have both a physical and a spiritual interpretation.

Alright, but now we get to the new stuff today, and that is that the second coming of Christ is going to affect the cosmos. Look at verse 29, “Immediately after the distress,” or tribulation, “of those days, the sun will be dark and then the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.” Now, as I said, Copernicus taught us rightly that, physically, the Earth is not the center of the universe, or even the center of the solar system. And so, we accept that. We don't have any problem with that.

However, I believe that the second coming of Christ will establish the Earth as the spiritual center of the universe, where everything that God is doing in the universe is happening. It's all focused here. It must be that way because, if we're gonna go with the straight kind of blind mindless, evolutionary, atheistic way of looking at the universe, that there are perhaps, they estimate 6 billion stars in our own galaxy, supporting, with planets, some of them must be supporting life on it. Have you ever heard this kind of talk? It's all so random and godless. Each one of those has its own god, or is there only one God that creates the whole universe? The fact that all the stars fall from the sky at the end of events here on Earth say that the Earth is the focus of what God's doing in the world. This is the place dear friends. This is where it's happening.

We should have learned that right from the beginning of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, why were the sun and the moon and the stars made to begin with? And what does it say? It says in Genesis 1:16-17, “God made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” By the way, “he also made the stars,” one of the great understatements in all history. Genesis 1:16, “He also made the stars,” verse 17, “God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light to the Earth.” Now, what is that? The purpose of the stars is given there and the sun, the moon is so that they can give light to the Earth, that's why God made them. It's an earthly focus an Earth purpose for the sun, the moon and the stars. God said earlier in Genesis 1:14, “Let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years.” Again, an earthbound purpose.

So that's at the beginning of creation, so also the end of time. We learn that the heavenly bodies have an earthly purpose. When history on Earth, redemptive history on Earth reaches its end, then their time up in the cosmos, as we know it, the stars as we know it, will come to an end. I keep saying, “stars as we know it,” I don't know God's plan for the sky in the new heaven and the new Earth. It's going to be spectacular. I know that the glory of Jesus is gonna be radiating the whole universe, but let's just let God do that. We know that star differs from star and splendor, and so there's gonna be bright, glorious, shining things in the new heaven, new Earth, and the new Jerusalem, but the stars as we know it, the cosmos, as we know it, will end with the second coming of Christ. So that means that the Earth really is the center of the universe, spiritually, not physically.

The sun and the moon, it says, will be darkened, think about that, I gave you that statistic earlier that the sun converts 700 million tons of hydrogen to 695 million tons of helium every second. That's immense, just almost immeasurable power, nuclear fusion going on all the time, a power that just infinitely dwarfs anything the human race can do. And God turns it off like a night light. He just shuts it down.

Because that's the power of God. It is shining now at the command of God, by God's word, the heavens are upheld, and all of the sun, and then the reflected light of the moon and the stars are coming because God wills it every moment. So what does it say? Well, Revelation likens the falling of the stars in the Earth, like the tumbling of ripe figs from a tree. What does that look like? How does that work? How does the Hubble Space Telescope and all that fit? I have no idea friends, I'm just telling what's in the Bible like four or five different times.

God has the power to do that. Just because we don't know how he can do it, or how it's going to work, it shouldn't trouble us. Think what it says in Isaiah 40, it says of the Lord, “look up to heaven, look up to the heavens and consider the starry host, who created all these? He brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and his mighty strength,” Listen to this, “Because of his great power and his mighty strength not one of them is missing.”

Now, you say that's just poetical language. Dear friends, God upholds the universe. The stars come out at night, they come out and shine on the Earth because God wills that they do so. When God stops willing that, they'll stop shining on the Earth. And if he wants to do one last thing where they're kind of falling to the Earth, like the big end of a fireworks display, God can do that. I'm just saying it's the end of the cosmos as we know it, this is immense power at the second coming of Christ.

Zechariah 14:6-7 also testifies to the oddity of that day. It's gonna be a day unlike any other, he said. Zechariah 14, it says, “On that day, there will be no light, no cold, no frost. It will be a unique day without daytime or night time, a day known to the Lord, when evening comes, there will be light.” It's an unusual day, a day unlike any there has ever been in history, the Second Coming of Christ.

The sun's light will fail, but Christ's splendor and his glory will shine in the sky, and everyone's going to see it. It says when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, it's gonna be an awesome display of power and glory.

And it says the powers of the heavens will be shaken. NIV gives us the heavenly bodies, but the Greek Word is “dunamis,” the word for “power,” from which we get the word “dynamite.” The powers of the heavens will be shaken. I think it goes beyond just the planets and the stars and all that. I think this is referring at this point to Satan's power, talks about in many verses, the powers and the principalities, and the rulers and the authorities and all that.

Remember that the last seven years of history, Satan is openly reigning on Earth, all of his demons reigning and openly reigning through the antichrist, it's Satan's time on Earth. And so therefore, I think this could very well refer to Satan's kingdom, the spiritual forces or powers of demons and archdemons, rulers and authorities and powers in the heavenly realms will come to an end when Christ returns. Satan and his forces have been dominating the Earth in one sense, from the fall, and all the more under the reign of Antichrist, but they'll come to an end. They will be shaken.

Now, I love that word “shaken.” It's a powerful word. More powerful than any earthquake will be the shaking that comes when Jesus returns. And so the author to Hebrews, talking about what it was like to stand on Mount Sinai, or at the base of Mount Sinai. When the Lord came down in a dark cloud with thunder and lightning, and this powerful voice of God speaking the Ten Commandments, and the very ground under their feet was shaking, and everyone was terrified, Moses was... He said, “I am shaking with fear.” He was afraid of death at that moment, everyone terrified, even Moses.

The author to Hebrew says that was in the past, when the law came on Mount Sinai. What about the future? Well, Hebrews 12:26 and 27, “At that time, his voice shook the Earth, but now he has promised, ‘Once more, I will shake not only the Earth but also the heavens.’ The words ‘once more’ indicate the removing of what can be shaken - that is, created things - so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” I love the next verses in Hebrews 12, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire.”

That should bring you so much joy, the kingdom that you entered when you believed in Jesus cannot be shaken, and why? Because God himself upholds it by his own promises, you have entered a permanent abode, a permanent house, and it will never be shaken. You've built your house on the rock and it will not come crashing down, but it will stand forever, but everything else is gonna come down around us, difference, everything else. Everything that can be shaken will be shaken and brought down, and those are created things. And so the cosmos, the power of the cosmos, will be shaken.

The stage is now set for the glorious second coming of Christ, heavenly bodies will bow and get out of the way, their light will be extinguished like tiny candles blown out in a hurricane, the vast immense powers of heaven and Earth will be shaken. Everything's ready for Jesus to make his glorious entrance.

And so he comes. Look at verse 30, “At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the Earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.”

That is the second coming of Christ, here in Matthew 24, verse 30, it says, “The sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky.” Chrysostom thought this would be the sign of the cross, that there's gonna be just this appearance of a cross up in the sky. The word “sign” usually meant something pointing to the coming kingdom, something like that, usually referred to miracles, signs and wonders, healings, that kind of thing.

Remember that the Antichrist has been doing great signs and wonders to deceive even the elect, if that were possible. And he is deceiving the world who are not elect, and they're drawn in by the sign. Well, this is the one sign that reigns over all others, but I don't think it's really a sign. Well, what is the sign? It's Jesus himself. He'll be here, and we'll see him with our own eyes, and he will appear in the sky with power and great glory.

Remember with the false wonder workers in the time of the Exodus, remember how Pharaoh's magicians were able to imitate a few of those things with the blood and a couple of other things like that? But there came a point, I think it was the gnats, where they said, “We cannot do this. This is the finger of God.” This is the finger of God. They said that when a bunch of gnats showed up, but they recognized the finger of God. Well, how about better? This is the Son of God. Not merely the finger of God, antichrist can't imitate that. Satan can't imitate that. They'll all be bowing down because Jesus is returning. This is the sign of the son of man appearing in the sky. It's Jesus himself reigning.

“They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.” Why Son of Man? Well, you know this was Jesus' favorite title to refer to himself, I think he's harkening back to Daniel chapter 7, Daniel 7 talks about the beast coming up out of the sea. One empire after another, they're like beasts, mindless, ripping, flesh-eating, dominating. And in the middle of all of that, Daniel 7, you have this vision of the heavenly court. The Ancient of Days, Almighty God seated in his throne and the river of fire flowing from his throne, and thousands upon thousands of angels attended him. 10,000 times 10,000 stood before him ready to serve.

And the beasts are stripped of their power and authority, and suddenly this figure, this one, like a Son of Man, comes into the presence of the Ancient of Days. He comes to the throne of Almighty God, he approached the Ancient of Days. He comes one like a Son of Man with, it says, the clouds of heaven. And “he approached the Ancient of Days, and he was led into his presence. And he was given authority.” Do you not see the perfect unity of the Bible? All authority in heaven and Earth has been given to me. The Ancient of Days in Daniel 7's vision, gave the Son of Man authority and power and glory over all peoples and nations and many of every language, he gets it from God, and he brings it back down to the Earth with the clouds of the heavens.

He's got authority and power over every nation on Earth, and he brings it back down. It’s the very thing that Jesus said at his arrest and his trial before the Jewish authorities. He made them a prediction. He said, “In the future, you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” It's amazing to me how the clouds are never far from second coming passages. There's always clouds, awesome clouds, it's gonna appear in the sky, and everyone's gonna stop what they're doing and they're gonna look up. People will be marrying and giving a marriage, we'll talk more about that in another sermon, shopping, working, laughing, playing. Suddenly the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and everything stops. Clouds and glory are mentioned in so many different passages to give you a sense of the immense majesty of the presence of Jesus.

Imagine the most awesome display of clouds you've ever seen. I referred to one I saw from an airplane a few weeks ago when I was preaching, but Carolyn and I saw some pretty awesome ones, remember as we were flying into Pune. It's monsoon season coming and boy, those were impressive clouds. She asked, “Dad, are these as good as the ones you saw from flying from New York?" I said, “They're better.” There was some awesome turbulence too, really exciting, kind of like a carnival ride, the plane bucking and moving and all that, people starting to make sounds. I was wondering if I was gonna get a chance to preach the gospel one last time to the people on the plane, and what I was going to say. It was very dramatic, the buffeting we got and then the awesome clouds flying through that, as I said, like a valley of giants.

So I picture something like that. I picture them ignited with the glory of Jesus, radiantly shining brightly. Perhaps even lightning will be there as Jesus enters the Earth. Power and great glory, and an army of the heavenly host with him. Sights and sounds. What will we see? What will we hear? The voice of the archangel giving out commands?

I think that's where he sends out the angels to get us. We'll talk about that next week with the rapture. That's next week, friends, the rapture thing, you've got one week to think of me as an orthodox pastor, and then next week I get to preach on the rapture. But I do believe in a rapture, and we'll talk about that in detail next week.

The trumpet call of God and the appearance of glory and the majesty of the clouds, and the armies of heaven, and all the nations will see it all over the world.

And the second coming will result in judgment on sinners. It says in verse 30, “All the nations of the Earth will mourn.” Why will they mourn? Revelation 17 says, “Look he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. And all the peoples of the Earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.” They are mourning because it's Judgment Day, the time has come for their sins to be judged.

It says in John chapter 3, “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” People are running and hiding, they wanna find a place to hide, but they can’t. The glory of the pure light of Christ means instant judgment for the sinners on the Earth, they'll mourn because judgment is coming on them forever and ever. Their fleshly pleasures are ended, they'll mourn because the Bible thumpers were right after all, they'll mourn because they're going to spend an eternity in torment, they'll mourn because they will spend eternity in regret that they did not redeem the time when they heard the gospel.

And so the second coming of Christ will result in final judgment on sinners, and as we'll discuss next week, the second coming will result in the gathering of the elect. Verse 31, “He will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.” More on that next week.

Now, what applications can we take from this second coming of Christ? Well, first is very open and obvious. Dear friends, today is the day of salvation, now is the time of faith. We are called on to believe in the gospel, no matter who God sends to proclaim it. So today, you get to listen to my gravely nasty voice telling you the good news of Jesus.

But here's the good news, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, born of the virgin Mary, lived a sinless, miraculous life, and he came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom, as a substitute ransom for you and me. And if you are a sinner and you know that you cannot stand before this holy God, blameless and unafraid, unless Jesus Christ is your savior, flee to Christ today while there's time. You don't know when you'll die, and you don't know when the second coming of Christ will be, you don't know either one of those, none of us does. Prepare today. Listen, believe now. Look to Jesus, dead on the cross, his blood shed for sinners like you and me. Trust in him and believe that God raised him from the dead on the third day, and you will be saved.

Secondly, don't be dismayed at the rhetoric of the godless and the atheist who say, “Look, everything goes on as it always has, it's never gonna come,” and they talk like this, you know, “The whole history of science is the retreat of Earth from center stage.” Well, Earth is gonna make a big comeback, it's definitely gonna be the center when Jesus Christ returns. Don't be dismayed at it.

One of the experts, a physics professor that I actually knew at MIT, is still there at MIT, he said, “Anyone that doesn't believe in such and such is considered a crackpot.” Well behold a crackpot. I believe in the second coming of Christ. And you know the scripture already tells us, we're crackpots anyway. Alright, we have this treasure in what? Earthen vessels, jars of clay, we're cracked all over, dear friends. I think if Professor Guth would acknowledge that he also was a cracked pot, then Jesus can save him, but the fact of the matter is Jesus is coming back, don't be dismayed by what they say.

Thirdly, if you can live every moment in the light of the second coming of Christ, you will live a godly life. We're gonna talk more about this at the end of the chapter. I don't wanna steal my thunder from that, but you need to be ready. Jesus basically tells multiple stories saying, you need to get ready, you need to be ready. Five wise and five foolish virgins. It's all about being ready, the five and the two, and the one talent is about making the most of what God's entrusted you while you have time here on Earth. Let's live our lives always in light of the second coming of Christ.

When you see a beautiful sunset, when you look up at the clouds and you see them, just think Jesus is coming back some day, just make it more real and more vivid in your heart and your mind than it's been up to this point. Never look at the clouds again the same way. Always think about Jesus coming back.

And as you struggle with sin, and we all do, struggle in light of the second coming of Christ. I John 3:2-3 says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are.” We know, he says, “We are children of God, and when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

That's glorification, in an instant, when you see Jesus, you'll be instantly made perfect. Awesome. A transformation, instant perfection. But listen to what John says, I John 3:3, “Everyone who has this hope in him, purifies himself just as he is pure.” That means now, today, by putting sin to death, by leading a godly life, by laying before Jesus and saying, “Lord, search me and know me and show me my defilements now, so that I'm not ashamed that you're coming, I don't wanna have anything to hide, I wanna live an open and godly life, purify me and make me ready for your coming.”

And long for that day. Yearn for it and long for that day. And look forward to the day of God and speed its coming by your witness, by outreach, and evangelism. It's what God's called on us to do. Would you close with me in prayer?

Turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 24. We're looking today at the topic of the second coming of Christ as we go verse by verse through Matthew, focusing on 26-31. There is no way I'm going to finish this topic in one message either, so it's gonna be this time and the next time. We also have the joy of celebrating the Lord's Supper, so just relax and let's see if we can learn what the Lord has to say about the events and the circumstances surrounding his second coming.

At the end of his life of suffering and fruitful ministry, the Apostle Paul sat isolated, forsaken by many of his closest friends in a jail cell, awaiting his own execution. You can read about the circumstances of his feelings and what was going on in his life in 2 Timothy, his last epistle. In 2 Timothy chapter 4, he said these words that are very familiar to you, you hear them perhaps frequently at funerals. But he wrote this to Timothy, he said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” That part is very familiar. What follows is not so familiar, listen to what he says. “Now there is in store for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

Is that you? Do you long for the appearing of Jesus Christ in the clouds, for the trumpet call of God? Do you long for that? And if you'd longed for it a little, my goal is you long for it more as a result of this sermon today. And that if you don't long for it at all, that you'll be converted, and by the end of this message, you'll long for it. Surprised by grace today, surprised by the sovereign act of God in saving you, you will long for the second coming of Christ at the end of this message. That's my prayer, I prayed for that today. For you Christians that you'll be heated up inside you and yearn for the day when Jesus will appear in the clouds. Yearn for that day. Be hungry for it, and yearn for it. And if you're not a believer, that you'll come to faith in Christ, and you'll realize that one who's coming in the clouds, he's your savior, he's your king, and he's coming back in glory to get you. That's my desire and my prayer.

Feelings, strong feelings of a yearning for the second coming of Christ have come on me at different times in my life. It's not all equally, and I'm not feeling it all the time, but I can remember three in particular. I remember the summer after I graduated from college, I went on a trip with a friend of mine, crosscountry, just the two of us, probably the greatest time of freedom in my life. No, dear family, that's not my favorite time in my life, but it was a time of great freedom, you know what it's like. And I had a job waiting for me when I came back, and we just did whatever we wanted to do for two weeks. It was fantastic. And as we went across, we came to Montana, big sky country. Well, you have to see it to believe it, it's just amazing

And we came to the edge of this valley and were starting to go across, and our destination was Butte, Montana. Now, that's a different matter. At any rate, anybody been to Butte? It's a strip mining place. It's not necessarily that beautiful, but this valley was beautiful. And as we came, the clouds started to darken the sky, very, very dramatic out there. And this big sky was filled with these very dramatic clouds, and suddenly an electrical storm started. And I saw lightning appear in the east and go all the way across to the west. It was awesome, absolutely awesome.

And we got out of the car to watch until we felt personally threatened by the electrical storm, got back in the car. And having been to MIT, we'd learned, inside the car, Coulomb's law, you're safe. So, stay in there. Ask me later about Coulomb's law, it has nothing to do with theology, but you're safe inside the car. And so I was looking at that, and I thought about the second coming of Christ as lightning that flashes in the east is visible even in the west. And I'd never seen such a big and dramatic sky in my life, that was 1984.

Ten years later, I was serving as a missionary in Japan, and I went every Saturday to a city in Japan called Takamatsu. I traveled there alone on a train, and I was teaching English to some of the Japanese folks there. Sweet people, tremendous time, most of them non-Christians, and we had interesting times discussing. This was the English text here, the Bible. And so we had some wonderful discussions while they learned English. How sly we are in the church, drawing them in with the scriptures. They wanted to know English, I wanted them to know Jesus. Hopefully, we could get both. At any rate, it was 1994 and I was walking through the streets there. It was the summer, again, as it'd been 10 years earlier, and again very, very dramatic cloud cover. And I was personally weary, struggling with some things, homesick, being away from my home and family in America, and just yearning, yearning for the Lord.

And I was singing that hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul.” And you remember that final verse, “And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight, the clouds be rolled back as a scroll, the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend even so it is well with my soul.” And I didn't even know this, but I was singing it out loud, and the Japanese people I was walking by were looking at me. Interesting moment in church history there. They had no idea, probably most of them, what I was saying, but I didn't really care at that moment. The Lord was ministering to me as I looked at those clouds and as I was singing that song. I said, “Haste the day, Lord, come back. Even so come, Lord Jesus.” That was 1994.

Ten years later, I was flying back from a ministry in Czech Republic with a good friend of mine, and we were on a flight back, connecting flight back, from New York to RDU. And we were up in the midst of those clouds at that point, those dramatic - I don't know the names - cumulus, nimbus or something like that. Anyway, the kinds that just tower up to the sky. But we were in them. It was like we were flying in the land of the giants. And the sun was setting, and there was just electrical interplay, and I was just watching the show. It was awesome. And I thought about the circumstances of the second coming of Christ. And again, the yearning, the yearning for the coming of Christ with glory just captured my heart.

And I'd like to have a lot more moments like that, wouldn't you? I actually would like to live my life, every day, yearning for the second coming of Christ. I think it just changes the way you look at everything. And I think the Lord intends for us to set our hearts on things above, not on earthly things. That we would set our hearts on things to come, not things at present.

I don't think we're to avoid the things we're facing now, but I think we're supposed to go out into the future and get what we need, and then come back and say, it's... What we're going through now isn't even worth comparing with what's coming. And then with great strength and joy and confidence, we face the trials of our lives. So, won't you take that trip with me this morning, won't you go out through the words of Matthew 24, out in the future, and look at the glory that's coming to this earth. And let's contemplate together the second coming of Christ. And, friends, if we're gonna give two weeks to the abomination of desolation, we can definitely give two weeks to the second coming. Amen? So, let's do that.

And then what a perfect way to cap it off with the celebration of the Lord's supper. We'll talk about that later in this message, but just a beautiful way for us to contemplate God's great power, and when he comes. Four times in this chapter, the Greek word “parousia,” or “coming,” appears. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen?” The destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, “When will this happen? And what will be the sign of your coming, and of the end of the age?”

Again, in Verse 27, I already alluded to it. “For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Ten verses after that, Verse 37, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” And then Verse 39, “And they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away, that is how it'll be at the coming of the Son of Man.” Four times in this chapter the word “parousia,” or “coming,” appears.

The doctrine itself plainly taught in verse 30, which was up on the screens and on the cover of your bulletin. “At that time,” it says, “the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.” That is the second coming of Christ. This doctrine is taught many places in the New Testament. It's not just here in Matthew 24, this is a major doctrine. Jesus Christ is coming back, he is going to return, He's gonna come back in glory. And he will set up a kingdom that will never end, an eternal kingdom.

Perhaps one of the plainest places that it's taught is in Acts chapter 1. After Jesus's resurrection, he spent some time with his disciples. He instructed them and taught them many things, showed them all that was written about himself in what we call the Old Testament. And when those days were over, the time came for him to depart, and he brought them out to the Mount of Olives. He had said to them, “‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ And after he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.” And they were standing there looking up into the sky as he was going. And I think they were there a long time, for the Lord sent an angel to say, “Okay, no more of this. He's not coming back right now.”

Frankly, I wanna talk in a later message about the tension between immediate return and things to do, and we'll get to that, but at that point, it was obvious Jesus isn't coming back now. So, they needed to go back into the city. And so God sent two men dressed in white with the message again concerning the second coming of Christ. “‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking up into the sky? This same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you've seen him go into heaven.’” Isn't that spectacular? I think he's gonna actually touch down in the same place where he left. More later, there is always more to learn, friends. But he is coming back, and there it is, he is coming back in the same way that those apostles saw him go into heaven.

And so also the Lord's Supper. 1 Corinthians 11:26 says, “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” And then there'll be no longer any need to do that kind of proclaiming of the Lord's death. We'll celebrate the Lord's death, but the time for the proclamation of the Gospel will end. But we, by partaking in the Lord's Supper, we're gonna be proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes. Wouldn't it be spectacular if we didn't get to do this today, and he came in between now and when we're planning on doing the Lord's Supper? Wouldn't that be awesome? That would be absolutely fantastic. But in case he doesn't, get your hearts ready for the Lord's Supper, okay? “But we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

And so the second coming of Christ, I believe, should dominate our daily outlook. We should be thinking about it, we should be living for it, we should be yearning for it, we should be praying for it, we should be excited about it, we should be talking about it, we should learn about it as much as we can. The second coming of Christ then should be one of the major organizing principles to the way we do everything in our lives. Now, why will he do it? Why will he come back in glory with the clouds, with the armies of heaven? Why? And there are just so many different answers to this question, but I wanna draw your mind to think about five before we look carefully at the verses.

I think there are five major reasons why the Lord will come back in glory. The first is victory, triumph, victory, to just display and proclaim to the world his victory over all of his enemies, and make it just obvious how awesome and powerful he is over every enemy. Second coming of Christ will come to do that, to establish and complete his victory over all his enemies. He will be vindicated completely from the impostor that's receiving worship from all the world, the antichrist, filled with Satan, he'll be completely vindicated over him.

And by extension, his second coming will end forever all false and insufficient forms of human government. Gone forever will be totalitarianism and dictatorships, even kingships. In their best, a picture of Christ. At their worst, far less than that. Communism, socialism, even representative democracy, friends, give it up, because we're not going to a representative democracy. Jesus will not stand for cyclical elections, there's not gonna be a rotating basis or any of this kind of thing. He will be King forever, and we'll be so delighted with that. He's come to be completely victorious over all that. He's come to crush forever all manifestations of the sinful corruption of this earth, pollution, spills of oil in the Gulf, and disgusting displays of sinful greed. And disease, and all of the groaning and the decay of this earth, he's come to triumph over that.

And the second coming will establish so sweetly for us what a vindication for Christians against pluralism. He's come to vindicate himself against all the gods, the false gods, all the religions of the world, the man-made cults that Satan kept propped up and kept popping up throughout history. He's come to crush them all. Buddhism and Hinduism will be gone forever. So also all cults that did not teach rightly about Jesus Christ, like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and all of them. Islam will be gone forever.

At a conference I was at recently, Erwin Lutzer was there, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, and he was speaking of a recent trip he made to Asia Minor, Turkey, where those seven churches are of the book of Revelation chapter 2 and 3. And he had an Islamic guide and they had, I'm sure, a fascinating conversation. But in the 11th Century AD, Islam swept through that area and just obliterated Christianity. Obliterated it. And Lutzer was saying that his Turkish guide said this proved the superiority of Islam to Christianity. And in my opinion, the church has consistently advanced because its members were willing to be slaughtered and not to slaughter. We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered, but it doesn't play well, generally in human history.

The second coming of Christ will end Islam forever. If they respect the sword, let them respect the sword coming out of the mouth of Jesus now while there's still time, so that they can find Him as savior, and the warmth and the welcome of grace now. But he will crush Islam, and he will crush every false religion by his second coming. Amen and amen. And how glorious will that be, what vindication. No more pluralism, friends. It will be gone. The second coming will end all human philosophies contrary to Scripture, such as secularism and atheism. Secularism teaches that God doesn't matter, and atheism teaches that God doesn't exist.

Can I tell you, at the second coming of Christ, God will matter? He'll matter that day. Whatever your plans were, it will be over, Jesus will matter that day. He will force himself onto the consciousness of the world, and secularism will be gone forever. There will be no secularism where we're heading. The eternal kingdom of Jesus Christ, Jesus is at the center of everything, every radiant beam of light will be Jesus's. Secularism gone forever. So also atheism. They will not be able to say that God and his Son Jesus Christ don't exist when he comes in glory. He will not be ignored, he will not be denied, he will come in glory.

And the second coming of Christ will establish plainly his victory over death, because the dead in Christ will rise and meet the Lord in the air. And we also will be transformed, and we will never die again. Death will have no mastery over us, and Jesus will crush death forever. And it proves his own triumph over death, because there he is, he's not just a dead man in a tomb. No, he's the one up on the horse coming before the armies of heaven. Victory.

Secondly, justice, he comes to established justice. He comes to right the greatest injustices there have ever been. The greatest injustice there has ever been is not what you may think. The greatest injustice there has ever been is that God is not honored and glorified first and foremost above everything else, that he is not adored or worshipped or glorified as God, neither is he thanked, that's the greatest injustice. And another injustice is exactly like it, and it's the same injustice that Jesus Christ is not honored for what he did at the cross. He's not honored and loved and embraced and worshiped with tears by every human being on the face of the earth, that's an injustice.

And there are many other injustices lesser than those, just the way we treat each other, the way oppressors treat the oppressed. And Jesus will come to end all injustice. With eyes like blazing fire, he will judge the nations. They will be gathered before him, all of them, and he will winnow them out with his eyes. He will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. For justice, he comes.

Thirdly, for rescue. He comes to rescue us, to rescue his bride, the church. There has never been such a rescue of a damsel in distress as will happen at the second coming. Jesus Christ will come to get his bride. He is the husband, he comes with his army, and he comes to rescue the elect. And they are in trouble. We're in trouble. We're in trouble. And we must be rescued. We are going to a place where there will be no danger. But we're in danger now, and he will come finally in the end, the second coming is his final rescue of his elect. And he will send out his angels, and they will gather his elect from the four winds. From one end of the heavens to the other, he's going to rescue them. The greatest rescue ever. He's going to rescue us from the antichrist, from Satan. He's going to rescue us from the great tribulation. He is going to rescue us and bring us safely into his heavenly kingdom.

And fourthly, for restoration. I already mentioned that this world groans. It labors under decay and corruption. This is not the world we're gonna live in forever. This morning, we were listening as we drove in to the account in Genesis, we have these beautiful little discs of the Bible on CD, and we were listening as we drove in. And to that account in Genesis 13, where God promised to Abram, “I will give to you and to your descendants this land forever.” Figure that one out, friends. Especially in the book of Hebrews, he comes and tells us with authority that he died without receiving that promise. Is God a bait-and-switch God? Is he a promise-keeper or a promise-breaker? “Oh, don't worry about the Promised Land, Abram. I've got something better for you.”

Now, God's gonna keep that promise. How? By resurrecting the earth. And if you don't understand a resurrected earth, neither do I. And how it relates to the elements melting in the heat, neither do I. But I know that God will keep that promise. And so he is coming to, as it says in many verses, restore all things, and to make them perfect, and make them beautiful. There will be a continuity and a difference between the earth, present, and the new heaven and the new earth just as there will be - Well, let's talk about Abraham. “I will give to you,” Abraham had some changes. He died, and he's going to be resurrected. And in a resurrected body, he's going to enjoy that promise forever. And Jesus comes to restore all things at his second coming.

And finally, fifth, he comes to be worshipped. He comes to stimulate from us worship. It says in 2 Thessalonians, he's coming to destroy the antichrist, the lawless one, with the breath of his mouth and with the splendor or the glory of his coming. It's going to be quite a show. I say that with all reverence. It's going to be brilliant and glorious and bright and shining. And he's going to destroy the antichrist and Satan with that glory. And it says in 2 Thessalonians 1:9 and 10, it speaks of the “majesty of his power on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people,” Listen, “and to be marveled at among those who have believed.” For me, another word for “marveled at” is “worshipped.” Amen? We're gonna just worship him for what he's done and who he is, and we're just going to be - Our hearts are gonna change within us, and we will be transformed forever. That's the moment of glorification. How sweet will that be? I could go on and on, but I think I'm supposed to be an expository preacher, and this is an exposition. Let's go ahead and look at some verses. That's just biblical theology, is all it is, but now let's look at some actual verses and learn what Jesus says about the details of the Second Coming.

Look at Verse 26, the first thing I wanna say is that the second coming will be obvious to everyone, obvious to everyone. Verse 26, “So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is out in the desert,’ do not go out, or here he is in the inner rooms, ‘do not believe it.’”

There will be no secret second coming. The Jehovah's Witnesses have taught that twice Jesus has come back. In 1874, he came back. It was predicted openly and lots of interest around the Watchtower Society and all that. Lots and lots of interest. Charles Taze Russell taught it. It didn't happen. So, he said, “But it did happen. It happened spiritually. And Jesus is reigning in a new way and in a new stance toward the earth since 1874.” Don't you believe that. That's not what this is talking about. He said the same thing in 1914, that's when the 144,000 went up. Heaven is full. We just get the new earth in the Jehovah's Witness theology. But that's 'cause in 1914, he said that's when it happened. Friends, this is just a lie by a cult leader.

The second coming of Christ will be obvious to everyone. Everyone will see it. Even at the very end, as they're running for their lives, it will be a time of great deception by the antichrist Satan, and perhaps that generation of believers will be tempted that, “Here's Christ, or there he is, or here out here.” No, you don't need to do that. Go to the hills, go to the mountains and hide yourselves, because the second coming of Christ will stop it all. Don't worry about that, don't be deluded, don't be led astray. It's not going to be a secret or a local kind of second coming. It will be obvious to everyone.

Look at Verse 27, “As lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” I don't know what you need to picture. We had some electrical storm last night out in Bahama. I don't know if you saw some of that. But maybe you've seen some very, very dramatic electrical storms. It's not a private show. It's something everyone in that region can see. And so this is a very obvious thing. It'll be an event of cosmic proportions. More on that next time.

But it's just gonna be obvious to everyone. That lightning flashes across the sky, visible to everyone on the surface of the earth. Now, what does that mean? I tell you, it means that there will be absolutely no need for faith at that point. In my opinion, the era of faith will end with the second coming of Christ. So also for us Christians, the era of hope will end. Who hopes for what he already has? We will have it then.

We won't need any faith either, and so no need for faith. You don't need to believe in the Second Coming of Christ on that day. It says in Hebrews 11:1, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” This is something that will be seen, friends. It will be visible. Jesus said to Thomas, “Because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” He built his church with those people. We are those who did not see and yet we believed. By faith, it's the era of faith.

So, there'll be no faith required to see the second coming of Christ. Do you know the significance of that though? No opportunity for salvation on that day. None. Please listen carefully now. If you have never trusted in Christ, now is the day of faith. Now is the day of salvation. This is the time to believe in Jesus, now.

This is the time of faith, when all you get is a guy like me speaking into a microphone, and you have to somehow listen and hear the word of God through the word of a man. You have to hear that, and you'll have to believe. And if you do, the Bible says, you will be forgiven of all your sins. If you can look to Jesus, the Son of God, whose blood was shed on the cross, if you can look to him and say, “I understand. He died in my place. He died for me. I'm a sinner. I have transgressed the laws of God. My conscience is defiled. I am filled with lust. I'm filled with selfishness. I'm leading an empty life. I need Jesus.” If you can hear in that the law of God standing in condemnation over you and say, “I cannot survive Judgment Day without a savior. Jesus is my savior. Jesus shed his blood for me. He died on the cross as my substitute.”

The Bible says if you can look to Christ, and if you can call on the name of the Lord, you will be saved. But now is the time, now. It says in Romans 3:28, “We maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.”

So, when Christ returns, like the shutting of the door in Noah's Ark, it will be over. It will be over. No time for faith. I tell you, now is the time of God's favor and now is the day of salvation. So, please believe. Please, I plead with you. I plead with you to not leave this room in an unregenerate state. I plead with you that by faith you will project your mind ahead to Judgment Day, when there is heaven and there is hell, the lake of fire, and you'll be in one of those two places. And if Jesus isn't your savior, you're going to hell. Please don't go to hell. Trust in him now. Believe in him now.

Also, I believe that there will be no secret rapture. Now, hang on, folks. Don't push the eject - I don't think there's a trap door here or an eject thing. I'm going to devote a whole sermon to the rapture - against the better judgment of some close to me - but I'm going to devote a whole sermon to the rapture. But if I can just kind of begin to lay my cards on the table, I think the rapture and the Second Coming happen at the same time. I think the Bible so plainly teaches it. I don't understand why there's confusion about this. Could some of you please come and confuse me? No, never mind, don't come and confuse me.

I don't believe in a secret rapture. What do I mean by secret? I mean, the kind where Jesus comes and gets the church, but only the church, and then goes back in a big U-turn back up to heaven. We'll get to the whole U-turn thing in that sermon, not this one. But he goes back and gets us, and then the world goes on. I don't believe in that. I respect it as a view, and I'll talk about it in due time, but I think that really teaches two second comings. And because it teaches two second comings, I don't think that it's biblically accurate.

And I understand the reason is to get the church out of the tribulation, but I think God's intention generally is to protect the church in tribulation. That's what I believe. And so we can respect and love each other, just like we do with people who believe in infant baptism, we can embrace them. But I'm just telling you, and I'll make my case in due time. But I'm just telling you the implications of the worldwide visibility of the second coming of Christ is that the whole “Left Behind” thing, where Rayford Steele is on the plane and Hattie Durham is there and all that, and then they're all gone and the clothes are rumpled. We'll get to all that in due time.

Or a Casting Crowns song. “The United States of America looks like another Silent Night,” says Casting Crowns, “As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children. And while we're lying in the dark, there's a shout heard across the eastern sky, for the bridegroom has returned and carried his bride away in the night.” So, like a thief in the night... I know that passage in the Bible. Actually, it's even in this section that we're preaching on, so I will do the thief in the night thing in due time. But I don't believe in that.

I do believe, with all my heart, in a rapture, and I am looking forward to it. It's going to be the ride of my life up to that point. What happens after that, I'm not really sure. But up to that point, that will be the highlight of my life, to be caught up in the clouds and meet the Lord in the air.

The second coming, the Scripture says, also will purify the world of evil. Look at Verse 28, “Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather.” Aren't these eschatology verses fun? Aren't they? You read these and then say, “What does that mean?” And can I tell you, there are some things I'm more sure of than others in the Bible? I'm not 100% sure what this is, so I'll give you two possible interpretations and I actually believe them both. Okay?

First, let's take it spiritually. It could be that Jesus is using a spiritual metaphor, teaching us a spiritual principle by using an earthy kind of metaphor. The spiritual interpretation, a carcass then is a focus of infection, of deadness, of disease. The great increase of wickedness will characterize the end of the world. Jesus already described that increase plainly in verse 12. “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.”

So also the Apostle Paul describes it in 2 Timothy 3, “But mark this,” he says, “there'll be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, treacherous, brutal, rash, not lovers of the good, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” By this time in history, as I believe, the reign of the antichrist will be in full swing. All unbelievers will have received the mark of the beast. They'll be openly worshipping the antichrist and forsaking every other religion. They have rejected the truth and follow evil, it says. And it will show openly in their lives.

The human race will be a carcass at that point, spiritually dead, living only with writhing worms and maggots, the spiritually filthy end of the human race. The vultures - which also the word can be translated “eagles,” by the way - But vultures, in general, though they are disgustingly ugly, they certainly do the world of good service. Aren't you thankful for - you've probably never been thankful for vultures before - but the vultures clean the place up. And so I believe that the Lord is going to send out his angels and they're gonna clean up this world. They're gonna collect the garbage, as it were.

Matthew 13, Jesus had an explanation of the wheat and the tares. He says, “As the weeds are pulled up and thrown into the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all those who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” That's the spiritual interpretation of this verse.

The physical interpretation is about as physical as it gets. There's gonna be lots of dead bodies and there's gonna be lots of birds eating their flesh. That's as literal as it gets. Sometimes people accuse others in eschatology of spiritualizing things away. I'm doing both spiritual and physical here. I believe there will be literally carnage at the second coming of Christ, and there's going to be literal birds feeding on the carnage.

It’s described in Revelation 19, Jesus comes back dressed in a robe dipped in blood, his name is the word of God, and the armies of heaven are gonna follow him riding on white horses, and out of his mouth will come a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He's going to destroy the antichrist with the breath of his mouth and destroy it by the splendor of his coming. Revelation 19:7 and following, it says, “And I saw an angel standing in the sun who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in mid-air, ‘Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals and mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people free and slave, small and great.’” It says in verse 21 in Revelation 19, “The rest of them were killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.” That's what I call the literal interpretation of this verse. Wherever there is a carcass, there the birds, the vultures are going to gather. In any case, the second coming of Christ will clean up the world, purified at last from the filth of human sin.

Now, next time we will look at some other aspects from Matthew 24. I'm going to tell you that the Second Coming will affect the cosmos. Verse 29, “Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be dark, and the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.” We'll talk about that in due time.

And also the second coming will be, I will say, powerful and glorious. Look at verse 30, “At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.” So, we're going to talk about that.

And then the second coming will result in judgment on sinners. Again, verse 30, it says, “All the nations of the earth will mourn.” I'll describe why they're going to mourn and how the judgment will be.

And then finally the second coming will result in the gathering of the elect. Verse 31, “He will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” In my opinion, that's your rapture verse here in Matthew 24. And so that's where we will be gathered by the angels to meet the Lord in the clouds.

Now, as we prepare for the Lord's supper, I wanna briefly give you some applications. First of all, I wanna just go over those five things and just give you some applications. First of all, victory. Yearn for the day when Jesus will be triumphant over all human governments. Yearn for it. If you see the American government doing something you don't like or there's something that's despicable or something you find isn't biblical, look ahead to the second coming. That's God's remedy in the end. I am not saying we should not be active in civic things. We should be. We should be salt and light. I'm just saying the final end will be the second coming of Christ. Yearn for that victory.

Look ahead to the victory of Christ over false gods and false prophets and all false religious forms, and Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam. Look ahead to that. Victory is coming. Yearn for the day when secularism and atheism will be gone. Celebrate that day. Though you may grieve in your heart, and you should, at those that are swept away by it, just know that its days are numbered.

And yearn for justice. Yearn for God to be esteemed as he ought to be. That's just such a healthy thing to do. Just say, “God, it is unjust, not how I'm being treated, it's unjust that you are not worshipped and glorified.” Just change your thinking on that and just say, “Come, Lord Jesus, so that you can be honored and glorified as you ought to be. And, Lord, I see all this injustice around me. Jesus, come and solve our problem of injustice.” 

And rescue. “Come Lord Jesus” is a cry for rescue. This world is too hard for us. If left to ourselves, we will be swept away. Just say, “Jesus, rescue me from this world.” I talked last time about run for your lives, but just the ultimate rescue is going to be the second coming of Christ.

And yearn for his restoration, the new heavens and the new earth. Meditate with me on that promise given to Abram in Genesis 13, “I will give to you and to your seed, your descendants, this land forever.” Oh, how sweet is that. Yearn for the day when the new heavens and new earth will be the home of righteousness and glory.

And finally, if I can just say worship the Lord, look ahead with anticipation and with faith and hope to the second coming of Christ, as we participate in the Lord's Supper now. As the time comes for us to focus on the elements, we are proclaiming the Lord's death that's back in time. Until he comes, that's ahead, future in time. As you sit there and partake in these elements, the cup and the bread, as you partake in these things, think about what Jesus did for you to rescue you from the coming wrath and celebrate, celebrate the triumph of Christ at the cross.

And if I can just urge you, if you have not come to faith in Christ, if you're not a believer in Christ, please don't partake in the Lord's Supper. In order to partake here, you have to be a believer in Christ who's testified to your faith in Christ by water baptism. And if you've done that, then you are welcome to come. Please pray with me, if you would.

Jesus warns his followers to be ready to flee from the antichrist because they will not be able to fight him. After they flee Christ will return in glory to defeat the antichrist and Satan.

I can hardly imagine in life a more terrifying scenario than running for your life with some powerful and violent men chasing you, seeking to capture you, to bring you in, to interrogate you, to imprison you, to torture you, perhaps ultimately to kill you. That is a scene that has been played out again and again in history, but we saw it especially in the dark days of World War II. Nazi troops would win battles and conquer territory in Europe. On their heels would come the SS and the Gestapo, who would seek to weed out every Jew and every perceived threat to the Nazi state, including Christian leaders.

Refugees would flee in the middle of the night, breathlessly waiting perhaps under a bridge while their Nazi pursuers would travel over them so close they could hear their conversations maybe as they lingered on the bridge. Others fled by train using falsified travel permits. They had to endure the suspense of Gestapo agents moving from railcar to railcar asking to see the papers. Others fled through the mountain passes into Switzerland, avoiding Nazi roadblocks only by going through forbidding mountain passes at night and in the winter. Some hid among the baggage and crates on freight ships who were sailing to neutral countries like Sweden. Their hearts are beating wildly, beads of sweat forming on their brows as Nazi guards with German shepherds inspected the cargo holds and got closer and closer to where they were hiding.

Now, all of these refugees were fleeing because of terror. They were fleeing the might of the most powerful and most sinister force for evil the world had ever seen up to that point. But just take those pictures that are in your mind, perhaps from movies, perhaps from books, from history books, and multiply it in intensity and in number a hundredfold and then multiply it again, and picture what the days will be like when antichrist rules on the earth.

What will it be like when he is ruling by the power of the indwelling prince of darkness, Satan himself? When he is able to do signs and wonders to deceive even the elect, if that were possible, Jesus says? Seeking to draw from every human being on the face of the earth open worship as God, and seeking to exterminate anyone who will not do so.

Brothers and sisters, I don't know if that day will come in our lifetime, but the press of this text is to get ready for it, to get ready for that test, to get ready for that trial, to not love your life so much in this world that you shrink from death for our Savior Jesus Christ. And I think even if it doesn't come in our lifetime, you will live a different kind of life if you do that, you'll just live a different kind of life. And so by the scripture here, by this passage, we are commanded to get ready for what is coming. That's precisely why Jesus gave us Matthew 24 and 25, to get us ready for the second coming of Christ and the events that will follow.

Now, you know the context here. Jesus has predicted at the beginning of this chapter the total destruction of the temple, not one stone would be left on another. The disciples, all of them Jews, very troubled by this, did not expect it. Jesus frequently unsettled them by his teachings. I've often said before the “what would Jesus do?” thing only goes so far 'cause sometimes you're never sure what he was gonna do next. And so they would be shocked, even stunned, that the temple was going to be destroyed, and they came to him privately on the Mount of Olives and said, “Tell us, when will this happen, the destruction of the temple? And what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

And so Matthew 24 is Jesus's answer to that intricate question. We've already seen in Matthew 24:4-14, I believe, Jesus tracing out in general terms what life will be like between the first and second coming of Christ. Wars, rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes in various places. The agonies of a sin-cursed world. And an unfolding of redemptive history. The gospel of the kingdom being preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come. So that just covers that whole long stretch that's been almost 2,000 years now.

And then we spent two weeks looking at 24:15. This phrase, “the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel,” trying to understand it. In a nutshell, I think there are two things going on here. One is a clear description of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70, AD 70, by the Romans and Jesus therefore simply answering their question, “When will it be that not one stone will be left on another, everyone thrown down?” He was describing the circumstances then of the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century. More on that in this sermon.

But I also believe that as it was, so it will be, all of those things just dress rehearsals for the final desolation of the temple by the antichrist and events that are going to bring in the second coming of Christ. Last week, we saw how four times God gave his holy place over to Gentiles to trample on. In the time of Eli under the Philistines, when the Ark of the Covenant was captured. In the time of Jeremiah and other prophets when the Babylonians destroyed the temple of Solomon. In the time of Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes, the manifest one, that Greek king that lived in the second century BC, as he desecrated the temple of Haggai. And then in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 AD. All of these things have happened.

But I think that there's a final act of that drama yet to come. And so “When you see,” Jesus says, “standing in the Holy Place the abomination that causes desolation” - the antichrist setting himself up as God in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God, demanding worship, and abominating the place with this idolatry. When you see that - “spoken of through the prophet Daniel - let the reader understand.”

Then what should you do? Well, the answer is, run for your lives, and that's the title of this morning's sermon, “Run For Your Lives.” And so we're going to look at this passage and try to understand the flight, we're going to try to understand the circumstances surrounding it, the theology of it, and we're gonna try to see how it applies to our lives today, and I think we'll find a very powerful application to us as well.

First, let's talk about the desolation leading to the flight, this is just by way of review. The desolation of Israel consisted primarily and first and foremost in their spiritual desolation. They were empty in their relationship with God. They were spiritually a desert, had been for centuries. Time and again they struggled. Not to say there wasn't in every generation a remnant of true Jews who really loved God and followed him. But again and again, they were declared to be a stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears who would not listen to the prophets of God.

And the culmination of that spirit of hardness came in their rejection of Christ, and so Jesus rejects them in Matthew 23. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Seven times he says it. And then reaches out to Jerusalem and says, “O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Behold, your house is left to you desolate. For you will not see me again until you say ‘Blessed is he who comes in name of the Lord.’” And then Jesus leaves.

There's the desolation. It's a spiritual desolation. It then leads to a physical desolation of destruction by Gentile forces. Gentile forces come in and they destroy. I believe there's a demonic side to it. Jesus in Matthew 12 says, “When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest but does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ So it goes and finds a house unoccupied.” What would be another word for unoccupied? Perhaps desolate. “Swept clean and put in order” - Yes, a little more orderly through the ministry of Jesus, but desolate. “And it goes and takes seven other spirits and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it'll be,” said Jesus, “with this generation.” He's not just talking about a single individual, he's talking about Israel. In effect, Jesus just banished the demons from Israel for a short, short period of time by his sovereign power, put them to flight.

But they're coming back, Jesus said they're coming back. And they're gonna come back not just spiritually, but they're gonna come back in the form of a Gentile army that cares nothing for God, a pagan army incited by demonic power, the Romans.

And so they're coming back. And so as it was, so it will be. “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” In Luke 17:28 it says, “As it was in the days of Lot, so it will be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.” History will repeat itself, dress rehearsals.

And so the antichrist is going to come. 70 AD, a dress rehearsal for the final desolation. “When you see,” in Luke 21:20-22, “Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, and you will know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out and let those in the country not enter the city, for this is the time of punishment and fulfillment of all that has been written.” This is clearly in Luke 21 speaking specifically of the destruction of Jerusalem, no doubt about it. When you see armies surrounding the city of Jerusalem, then get out.

Now, Josephus gives us all kinds of historical details about the war between the Jews and the Romans, and I've got the details here but we don't have time. Bottom line is, the Romans were tired of the rebellion by the zealots, led by the zealots. The zealots had managed to gain control of the sacrificial system and to stop the priests, Jewish priests from offering sacrifices for the Roman emperor. This was an act of sedition and rebellion by the Jews against the Romans. They didn't like it, and so they invaded in 66 AD, but for some reason they turned back and left the city and left behind a lot of equipment. And the Jews took that stuff over and thought, “These are the days of Hezekiah all over again.” Same thing happened again in 67. They're getting a false sense of security. “We can defeat the Romans,” they thought. No, they can't. Especially since God was giving them over to the Romans. 

And so in 70 AD, the Romans came. Titus, the son of Vespasian, the emperor, came and arrived at Jerusalem with his legions in the northern outskirts and he starts to destroy the city. They breached the outer wall little by little, then they built an embankment as Jesus said they literally would do in Luke 19, an embankment around the wall. They get over it. The Romans knew how to conquer a walled fortress. They know how to do it very well, better than anyone there had ever been.

Little by little then, they get closer and closer to the inner area where the temple is, and contrary to the command of Titus, some guy throws, some Roman soldier throws a firebrand into the window of the temple and it ignites. Some others follow and then the whole thing burns to the ground. It was accidental as far as the Romans were concerned, but it was intentional as far as God was concerned.

It is theologically significant that the temple was destroyed, just like it was theologically significant that the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. God intended the temple to be destroyed. And by the way, there is no command from God for it to be rebuilt. That's very important. When it's rebuilt, it will not be in obedience to God, keep that in mind. It will just be in prophecy by God, but not in obedience. He's not commanding the dishonor done to his son and to his finished work on the cross, going backwards to animal sacrifice, you'll read about it in the book of Hebrews. We don't go backwards, dear friends. That's finished, never to be re-enacted again or re-established again to please the Lord.

And so when you see these things, these horrors, Jesus is giving practical advice to his own church that would be living in Jerusalem in the days when the Romans were coming. Get out of the city. When you see these things starting to assemble around Jerusalem, get out of the city. It's counterintuitive, because the walled cities were built because that was the safe place. Before gunpowder, it was the safest place to be. Romans are all over the land. But Jesus says, “No, get out of the city. Run for your lives.” That's what he's telling them to do.

And we have no record of whether the Church heeded these instructions, but it's the implication Jesus gave them for his people who could read this or understand it and take it to heart and run. And so these would be Jewish Christians who lived in Jerusalem, who believed in Jesus, who understood the Olivet discourse and they got out of town, saved their lives. And that's already happened, been fulfilled, it's already been done.

But I believe that as it was in those days, so it's going to be again. And there's going to be a need to get out of the city again. The end of the world, the rebuilding of the temple, as I discussed last time. Evidence of the desolation of the Jews, they wanna go back to the law of Moses, back to animal sacrifice. They do not believe that Jesus is the final sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. They don't believe that and so they wanna build the temple, and I believe that the antichrist will make an arrangement with them so that it will be rebuilt.

It says in Daniel 9:27, “He,” the leader, I believe the Antichrist, “will confirm a covenant with many for one seven.” The interpretation of that is seven years. “And in the middle of that, he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple, he will set up an abomination that causes desolation until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.” So that's the desolation that causes the flight.

What is the danger? Well, we have to run. The Church will have to run for a simple reason, we cannot handle the temptation of a face-to-face encounter with the antichrist. That's the simple truth. Run because you can't handle it. You're not strong enough. You've got to run for your lives.

And this is the consistent biblical instruction when it comes to temptation. 1 Corinthians 6:18, “Flee from sexual immorality.” Flee. 1 Corinthians 10:14, “Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry.” More on that verse later. 1 Timothy 6:11, “But you, man of God, flee from the love of money.” 2 Timothy 2:22, “Flee the evil desires of youth.” And then in the Lord's Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” And notice, the Greek really is, “Deliver us from Satan,” not merely from evil generally, but deliver us from Satan's evil plans and schemes, deliver us from temptation. And so again and again, we are counseled by scripture, “Get out of there. You can't handle it.”

And that's going to come to a peak in the days of the antichrist. Do not think so highly of yourself that you can handle an interview with the antichrist. You are such a strong believer in Jesus, you have memorized so much scripture, you've lived such a godly life, you'd like to sit down at table with the antichrist and go head-to-head in a debate with him. You can't handle him. Get out of there. Run. That's the advice, I think, being given here.

And there's a parallel the night that Jesus was arrested, a very significant parallel. You don't have to turn there, but it's in John 18, and do you remember the occasion there? Jesus is being arrested, Judas is coming, leading a detachment of soldiers, maybe as many 600 Roman soldiers. They're coming to arrest Jesus. They've got torches, lanterns and weapons, they're there to get Jesus. They think they're gonna have to search for him. They've got Judas there ready to give the kiss and all that, and they're there and they're coming near to Gethsemane and boom, there's Jesus right there.

Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and met them. That's our Savior. Isn't that awesome? The power of Christ, going out there to meet those that are coming to arrest him. What courage. Goes out there and he says, “Who are you looking for?” Who are you looking for? “Jesus of Nazareth.” They've got their orders. And Jesus says in the Greek, “Ego eimi. I am.” And they all fall down on the ground in front of him. And it says Judas the traitor was standing there with them. He was filled with Satan at that moment. When he had taken that bread from Jesus, Satan entered into him. He's on the ground before Jesus. Praise God for the power of Christ.

But then it goes on. Jesus asks them a second time, “Who is it you're looking for?” They pick themselves up off the ground. Oh, the density of human beings. They just fell in front of the sovereignty of Christ, but they don't really know what happened. And so they get up off the ground and Jesus asks them again, “Who are you looking for?” “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus said, “I have told you that I am. If you're looking for me, then let these men go.”

Now, what is Jesus doing there? He is orchestrating a way of escape for his disciples. Why is he doing it? Because they can't handle being arrested that night. And because in God's sovereign plan, it's not time for them to be arrested that night. What is their job then? The 11 apostles left, what is their job? Run for your lives, dear friends, run for your lives. And so they did. Every one of them deserted Jesus and fled. Now, John tells us why Jesus did it. He gives us this editorial theological comment on why he did this. “These things happened that the words Jesus had spoken would be fulfilled: ‘I have not lost any of all of those you have given me.’” Oh, is that powerful? Brings goosebumps to me.

In effect, what Jesus is saying is, there is a physical threat, arrest, torture, inquisition and death, a physical threat that can come to you that can cause you to lose your faith. And then I will lose you spiritually. Jesus had prayed there in the high priestly prayer, one chapter before, “Father, I have not lost any of those you have given me.” You know how he doesn't lose you? By orchestrating the circumstances of your life so that you're not tempted beyond what you can bear. That's how he doesn't lose you. And by, we'll get into this more, but making a way of escape so that you can run.

And so they all ran. All of them, but one of them made a U-turn. Do you remember who it was that after running said, “Wait a minute, wait. What am I doing?” It was Peter, remember? He said, “No, I already made some promises. I said I could handle it. Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will. I am ready not only to be arrested, but I'm ready to die for you.”

Really? Jesus said, “I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” Jesus told him the truth, but Peter wouldn't believe it. Peter didn't believe it. And what did he do? He does a U-turn and he follows Jesus at a distance, right? You remember what happened? You know what happened. Within a short time, I don't know how long, but a couple of hours at most, he had gone from that kind of bravado and courage to then a little servant girl at the door saying, “You're not one of his disciples, are you?” “Oh, no, no, no, I'm not.” Then he goes, then he's warming his hands with Jesus's enemies. And they're like, “Wait a minute. You look familiar. Weren't you with him in the garden?” “No, no, I don't know him.” And then by the end of the evening, in Matthew 27, it says, Peter was calling down curses on himself, if he even knew Jesus at all. “May I be eternally condemned if I even heard of this person.” And you think you'd be able to handle an interview with the antichrist?

“Simon, Simon, Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail, and after you have turned back, then strengthen your brothers.” It was the worst night of Peter's life, and all because of arrogance, because he didn't run when it was time to run, he thought he could handle the temptation and he couldn't, he wasn't ready for it.

And how much more, then, in the final days when the beast of Revelation 13 is on the earth, the dragon, Satan, indwelling the beast by his power, giving him power and a throne in great authority, Revelation 13:2, to “perform great signs and miracles, to deceive even the elect - if that were possible,” Jesus says. 2 Thessalonians 2:11, “God sends them a powerful delusion, so that they will believe a lie.”

And he will, in Revelation 13, rule the earth and conquer the saints. It says, “the beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for 42 months. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven,” listen to this, “He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them.” There's not gonna be any miraculous deliverance, you'll die, you'll die.

So run, run. Not just for your lives, run for your souls, because you can't handle him and his specific enemies, Jews and Christians, he's gonna be going after them in particular, because he wants worship.

And I don't have time to get into the mark of the beast, but it's very plain. It says, “If anyone receives the mark of the beast on his forehead or on his hand,” Revelation 14, “he too will drink the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever, there is no rest, day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name.”

Listen to the next verse, “This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God's commandments and remain faithful to Jesus.” Just remain faithful to Jesus in those days. And take as little temptation as you can get. Isn't that just good advice, good, sound advice? Take as little temptation as you can get. Run. Get out. 

So they're running, and it's going to be a desperate flight. Look at verses 17-21, “Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in the winter on the Sabbath. For then there will be a great distress or tribulation unequaled from the beginning of the world until now, never to be equaled again.” There's an immense urgency in these verses, you see a breathless pace.

No earthly possession is worth your soul. So you're up on the roof of a house there in the Near East, you know they've got these flat roofs, you go up there in the cool of the day, maybe for prayer or just to rest. I've been in houses like that in Pakistan, flat roofs and you're just up there. But there comes a moment here, in redemptive history, when the danger is encroaching. You see the moment, you don't have time to go back downstairs to get anything out of the house. Run. Do you see the urgency there? You're out in the field, you don't have time to go back and get your cloak. It's all about speed now, it's all about staying ahead of your captors now, you don't even have time to go back and get a cloak.

And it's gonna be very, very tough for people who can't run fast, pregnant women, nursing mothers, what a little vignette that is, Jesus having compassion on them, but it's just hard for them because they can't keep the pace.

Run for your lives and pray that there might be an easement of the circumstances, that your flight won't take place in the winter, on the Sabbath, anything that would slow you down and make it harder for you. The word Sabbath I think implies it'll be a general kind of re-establishment of the laws of Moses in the land. At that point it makes sense with the rebuilding of the temple. And so it'd just be harder, harder to get going, harder to move.

Unequal distress. Tribulation, the great tribulation. This is the, verse 21, is the great tribulation verse. The King James Version, ESV, NRSV, NASB, all of them use the same expression, “the Great Tribulation.

Well, what is the destination of that? Well look at verse 16, “Let those in Judea flee to the mountains.” The mountains, just a place for hiding, a place where there are caves, a place to go hide. Some people picking up out of Revelation 12 talk about a place out in the desert and they look at Petra as well.

But this verse, we'll just stick with Matthew, it's go to the mountains, go to the mountains and go up into the caves and look for a place of refuge, a place to hide out and count the days.

I've always envisioned, since memorizing the book of Daniel and going through it, a group of haggard people in a cave somewhere, just counting with those hash marks, 5, 10, 15, 20. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive. They're counting the days until it's all over.

And so what is the duration of the flight? Well, look at verse 22. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened. And so there they are in the caves and the mountains, counting the days.

And here comes, I believe, a fuller understanding of the book of Daniel, Daniel 12. I've mentioned this, let the reader understand, they will more than just understand in those days, they'll be in the caves, and some learned, some wise person will be there with them and say, “Let's look again at Daniel 12.”

In verse 11 and 12, “From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination of desolation is set up there'll be 1,290 days.” Daniel 12:12, “Blessed is the one who waits for and reaches the end of the 1,335 days.” Now listen, if you have a study Bible with a little footnote, you can go down and find out what that means, and the commentator will tell you exactly what that means. He doesn't know, dear friends, and neither do I for sure. You know why? Because it's not the last days like that. The antichrist isn't ruling in the temple demanding worship yet.

So what do I think is gonna happen? Well, we all get to have our theories, this is my theory. I believe that the book of Daniel is very clear on the second coming of Christ, read about it in Daniel 7, “He's coming with the clouds of heaven to be worshiped by people all over the earth.” Daniel 7 is the second coming of Christ. So it's not like Daniel didn't know about the second coming.

And not only that, but Daniel 12, the very same chapter, talks about the general resurrection. Daniel 12:2-3, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens and those who lead many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever.” That's the general resurrection and the eternal state.

So what then are the 1,290 days and the 1,335 days? I don't know, period. Next paragraph. I have a theory, alright. My theory is that they will be able to track the events better than we can, and they will know how many days it's been from one to the other, and they will be able to say, “We have 45 more days to go until such and such, we have 41 more days to go. We have 37 more days to go. We have 32 more days to go.” Now, why will there be a need for that kind of counting of days? Oh, what a time. Unequaled from the beginning of the world until then, if those kind of days hadn't been cut short, no one would make it. We need as few of those days as possible.

And so they're counting the days, and so those days would be cut short, and Jesus says specifically for the sake of the elect. Now, who are the elect? Well, this is fascinating. The elect are those that God foreknew before the foundation of the world would be saved.

But I think there's a specific category of elect here that are fascinating to me, it has to do with Jewish elect, the Jewish elect. Up to this point, the Jews as a nation had been hoping in the Old Covenant and the re-establishment of the temple. That has been dashed, that hope has been destroyed. You understand the spiritual significance of all that from Romans 9-11.

The idea is Israel has experienced a hardening from God on their hearts, so that they cannot turn and believe in Jesus, it's clearly taught there, there's this hardening and they're responsible for it too. There's this hardening, but at the right time, when the whole, the full number of the Gentiles has been saved, he will remove the hardening from Israel, and he will transform their hearts. He will take out at last the heart of stone from the Jewish nation, and he will give them a heart of flesh, and they will at last see Jesus for who he really is. 

Romans 11:25-28, “I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced the hardening in part until the full number of Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved. As it is written, ‘The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob.’ And ‘This is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.’”

Oh, how sweet that is. “As far as the gospel is concerned,” says Paul, Romans 11:28, “they are enemies on your account. But as far as election is concerned, they're loved on account of the patriarchs.” Now, I believe in a national election for Israel generally and an individual election for Jews so that they don't go to hell, but rather to heaven. And so the national election doesn't save any Jew, and so Jews have to repent and believe in Jesus now, or if they don't, when they die, they go to hell. That's why Paul has unceasing sorrow and anguish in his heart for Jews that are going to hell.

But the national election and the individual election really come together right before Jesus returns, I believe, and he takes that hardness away and it's going to be, as he says in Romans 11, life from the dead, the end of the world. The final act of human history, how exciting is that? So for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened. Zechariah 12:10, listen to this, what a great verse, “I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. And they will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only son, and they will grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.” That's the salvation of the Jews, when God pours out grace on them, and they finally look to Jesus for salvation.

Well, what is their destiny beyond the flight? They're counting down the days. And Jesus said, those days are gonna be what? Cut short. Well, what do you think is gonna cut them short? How about the greatest divine interference there has ever been in human history? I mean, it makes the Red Sea crossing look like nothing. It is the end of all things. The end of this age, the second coming of Christ.

Look at it in verses 27-31, “For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass there, the vultures will gather. Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from the sky and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn.”

Here it is, “They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.”

That's how the days get cut short, Jesus comes back. “And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.” That's the rapture. We'll talk about that in due time. Exciting moments coming. Now, I've already tipped my hand so you can come and argue with me for the next two weeks if you want, but at any rate, that's where we're heading. That's where we're heading. The Lord returns in glory. The second coming of Christ will occur. And we'll talk more about that next week.

What application can we come from this? Can I just begin by telling you there is a far greater danger than having antichrist's forces chasing you, and that is that on Judgment Day, the Lord will say to you, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” There will be no rescue from that. There is only one rescue from that, and that's now by faith. Look to Jesus. We may not be the last generation, we may be, but we may not be. I know this, though. If we are not the final generation, you will die someday. You will die. And you will stand before God and give him an account for your life. There is a savior for you, there is a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shed his blood on the cross for you. Look to Christ now to escape the greatest danger there could ever be. What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? So flee to Christ crucified. 

Secondly, though, I just want to urge you to flee temptations. Take a minute, please, if you would, and look to 1:10. 1 Corinthians 10:13-14. I have two or three other applications but I'm going to pitch them right now, I just want to focus on this one. We'll close with this. Look at 1 Corinthians 10:13-14.

“No temptation has seized you, except what is common to man, and God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will provide a way of escape so that you can stand up under it.” Please keep reading. Look at verse 14. “Therefore, dear friends, flee from idolatry.” You gotta put those two together.

Idolatry is the love of any created thing more than the Creator, more than God, it is the struggle we all have in our daily Christian lives, it's the thing that kills non-Christians, it's the issue of worshipping anything more than you worship God. And so basically, when idolatry is coming to pull on you, look for the way of escape that Jesus has made for you.

Well, what kind of idolatries? Well, there's only a handful of those that always afflict us. Lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life. You know, materialism? Love of food too much, love of money. Love of pleasure. Love of sex. These things are idols. They are lusts. And we need help, friends.

Here's the beauty of it. Jesus, our Good Shepherd, is helping you today. He has already filtered your temptations and he will go on doing so, and he won't let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. He's going to open up a door. Can I urge you to run for your lives? Run for your lives. Look, temptation is sure to find you. Jesus said temptations are sure to come. And in that day, Ephesians 6 tells you to put on the full armor of God and stand your ground.

But there's a dynamic between running and standing, and you kinda have to do both in the Christian life. So flee temptation, ask the Lord to minimize your temptations in the Lord's Prayer, and when you are tempted, look for the way of escape, say, “God, I don't wanna sin. I hate sin, it's damaging my life, I've got to get out. Please deliver me, Lord.” And he will make that way of escape obvious to you and you'll take it.

Brothers and sisters, can I urge you, get ready for the days to come. Get your children ready. Tell them about the antichrist. No, it's not the most important doctrinal point in the Bible. I hope you've already saturated their minds with what is, the gospel of Jesus Christ, but you need to teach them, they may well be the final generation. Get them ready to be courageous and saturate your minds with the word of God, so that when the day comes, you may be able to stand your ground. Close with me in prayer.

One of the most glorious statements in the Bible, one I think about often, came from the mouth of Jesus in the form of a prayer in that greatest prayer in the Bible, John 17, the so-called priestly prayer. An incredibly powerful statement, Jesus makes. John 17:24, he says there, “Father, I want those whom you have given me, to be with me where I am and to see my glory, the glory you gave me because you loved me from before the foundation of the world." 

That's what God wants. He wants to live with us, and he wants us to feed on his glory and have our whole beings radiated with his glory, and he wants us to live in a beautiful world, shining with the glory of God and for us to be deeply, and fully, and completely, and perfectly satisfied of that glory. He wants to give us that gift, that's why he made the world. And his desire has never changed, it's what he has always wanted, and Jesus just vocalizes that deep desire. "I want them to be with me, and I want them to see my glory."

Now, twice in redemptive history, in the Old Testament, God testified to that desire in a physical location, a physical reality, a place that you could go, and it was built according to the law given by God, according to a vision and revelation given to a man of God, how it should be constructed, I'm thinking of the tabernacle and of the temple, both of them a location, a place where you could go, and at a certain moment in redemptive history, you could see the glory of God.

At the end of the Book of Exodus, after all of those miracles have happened, and God has brought out the people and they're there at Mount Sinai, and God has described how this tabernacle, this tent was to be made. And really, if you look at it was just a bunch of barriers, a bunch of walls, cloth walls, portable walls, but walls nonetheless, giving a message to the sinful people of Israel that they were not holy enough to come into his presence, they needed to stay at a distance from God. As I've said before, the central message of that animal sacrificial system in the Old Testament, all of those barriers and all that, the message was, “Thus far you may come and no farther,” in the old covenant. “You may not come into my presence.”

The tabernacle testified to that, and when it was built according to the instructions, according to the laws that God had given to Moses, and according to the vision that Moses had had on the mountain of the heavenly reality which was captured in that little tabernacle, that tent. When all of that was done and the ark of the covenant, that golden box wherein was the testimony, the tablets on which the law of Moses was written, The Ten Commandments, all of that was set up, everything ready at the very end, the last paragraph of the Book of Exodus, it says that the glory of God descended in a cloud and filled the tabernacle, and no one could enter because of the glory of God there, and all the people fell down on their faces and worshipped God, and that was just a picture of God's desire to live, to dwell with his people, to be together with them, and to dwell with them, and they with him.

And the word though, as far as I could tell, not found in the Bible, you hear often of the Shekinah glory of God just means that dwelling glory, that place where God would dwell with the people. That's just the word for dwelling, and so God wanted to tabernacle or dwell with his people, and he did that with a glory cloud, the time of the tabernacle.

Then sometime later in redemptive history, King David established over all of Israel, finally ruling over all his heart desired, he was settled and at peace in Jerusalem, he said, “I’d like to build a more permanent structure. Here God is dwelling in a tent and I'm in this palace of cedar, I wanna do something better for God,” and it was a good desire, but God in effect said, “You're not the one to do it at two different levels, but you're not even the one to build the physical one.” And I could just go in and we could just go on and on, the themes on this are just so deep.

But his son Solomon built that temple, it was more permanent - more permanent, but not permanent. You know the difference. Okay, because there is nothing permanent in this world, nothing you can see with your eyes or touch or smell or taste, and anyway, nothing here is permanent, not even that temple was permanent, but still when it was built and Solomon dedicated, then again the glory cloud filled the holy of holies, where the ark of the covenant was. And just again, God's desire to dwell with his people that they would see his glory.

Why then four times in redemptive history in the Bible has God allowed that place to be trampled on by his enemies? Why? And I say it's gonna happen one more time, although it'll be very different that last time because it won't truly be the temple of God, but they will identify it as such, and it's going to happen one more time. But those four times trampled by the enemies of God, why would a sovereign God who rules over heaven and earth allow that to happen?

And that's the focus of our sermon, this is the second part of a sermon that I found impossible to finish last week. A number of people commented on that, they really loved that moment when I said, “I don't know what to do.” So there I was at 12:10, didn't know what to do, lest we have that same problem this morning, we're gonna keep moving.

But the fact of the matter is, last week, I made it clear what was going on in Matthew 24:15. You remember how the Lord had left the temple? Jesus had left the temple after the seven-fold woes, finished with those words, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets, and you stone those who sent to you. How often I have longed to gather your children together.” Same desire, I wanna be with you, I wanna live with you, I wanted that, but you didn't want it. “Behold, your house is left to you desolate.” Very significant words.

Notice earlier in Matthew, he had said, concerning the temple, “My house will be a house of prayer for all peoples.” But now, at this point he didn't call it my house anymore, he says it's your house. “Your house is left to you desolate. For you will not see me again until you say ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” Then he leaves the temple. The glory of God just going right out of the temple - Jesus is the glory of God - goes right out of the temple.

And at that moment, the disciples come up to call his attention to the glorious size and majesty of the temple complex, and its big buildings and stones. “Do you see all these things?” Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, not one stone will be left on another, everyone will be thrown down.” Jarring words, because the Jews consistently didn't understand that God would do this to his holy place, why he would do it. It made no sense to them, they were always shocked when it happened, and so the disciples here as well. It didn't make any sense.

So they found Jesus alone on the Mount of Olives, came to him in private. “‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘when will this happen? And what would be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’” So Jesus unfolds in those verses four through 14, what I think covers the history of the world from the first to the second coming of Christ, generally, in general terms, and then he starts to get specific about some things.

Now, this is really, really fascinating. Jesus, I think in 24:15, is answering simply the first question at least. When will this happen? When will Jerusalem be destroyed? And so he's answering that question. “When you see standing in the holy place, the abomination of desolation spoken of by the Prophet Daniel - let the reader understand.” So he's beginning to answer, and I think he is answering that question concerning the destruction of Jerusalem.

Parallel passage in Luke 21 that I read last time, “When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, then you will know that its desolation is near, then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, let those in the country not go into the city, for this is the time of punishment, in fulfillment of all that has been written, how dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! And there will be great distress in the land and wrath against these people, and they will fall by the sword, and they will be taken as prisoners to all the nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.”

So he's talking at least about the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem, that in fulfillment happened in the year 70 AD, the Romans came and he's describing that. And I think he's giving a specific warning to his followers, the unbelieving Jews aren't gonna listen to his instructions anyway, but he's talking to them, “Spread the word in the church, the church in Jerusalem, get out.” And we'll talk about that more next week. But when you see this, this is how you should behave.

He's at least answering that question, but I tell you based on the Book of Daniel, he's saying more than that. One of the key principles in end time teaching that I've taken to Matthew 24 is from verse 37, “As it was in the days of Noah, so will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” And I've taught that principle to you now for three weeks, “As it was so will be.” History repeats itself, and so therefore the trampling of the holy place by Gentile armies in their blasphemy has happened again, and again, and again. We'll see that this morning, and it's gonna happen one more time.

And so the circumstances that surrounded the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, we're gonna see it again one more time. That's really the point of what I got to last time. Last time we went through the Book of Daniel, and I think another key principle is in verse 25, “Behold, I have told you ahead of time,” and that'll come alive more next week when I preach the sermon, “Run For Your Lives.” But basically, because we are told ahead of time, we will know what to do at that time, we will not be confused, we're not gonna get caught in the Satanic net, we will know what to do. And Jesus has told us ahead of time what's going to happen.

And so he wants the reader to understand so that we can be ready. Now, the reader is the reader of Daniel. Last week's sermon, we were tracing through the phrase “abomination of desolation” in the Book of Daniel, I'm not gonna go through all that again. What I'm gonna do is just summarize what we found last week. If you wanna know more, if you weren't here last week, you wanna hear more, you can get the sermon or listen to it on the internet, but we talked about the abomination of desolation.

The word abomination refers to some form of idolatry, some wicked symbol of human rebellion focused on religion, specifically idolatry and worship. The desolation begins as a spiritual desolation of Israel, they have forsaken God, God has forsaken them, the glory cloud is gone, that place has become just any other place. It's spiritually desolate, and then it becomes physically desolate when the armies flood in and kill everybody and then they leave. And so this happens again and again, and so that's the abomination of desolation.

The basic concept then is that because of their sins, God abandons his people to the power of marauding Gentile armies resulting in a shocking trampling of his holy place. He does this to show that he is holy, that he dwells in a high and holy place, and not in any man-made shrine, he's not held captive to it, and then what God really wants is to dwell in the midst of a holy people who are pure from sin and to dwell that way with them forever.

I was talking to Calvin this week, and we were driving in on - it was Thursday morning - and he's going over Ephesians and we're going, and we're just talking about salvation, and we got to, “What is the finish line?” And I said, “Calvin, for you, the finish line is going to be that your soul will be perfect, living in a perfect body, living in a perfect world in perfect fellowship with God.” That's the finish line. That's where we're heading friends. Perfect souls, in perfect bodies, living in a perfect world in perfect fellowship with God, that is where we're going.

And you know what? By the sovereign power of God, we are gonna get there. But we have some wretched times to go through first. Like labor pains on a pregnant woman, it's going to be tough to get there, it's going to be difficult, and we need these warnings, and so therefore, it's gonna happen one more time.

The man of sin is coming, the antichrist is coming. That's spoken of in the book of Daniel, in Daniel chapter 8 and chapter 11, that little horn pictures, prefigurement of the antichrist. And it's going to happen again. And that's a summary of what we discussed last time. 

Now, what I wanna do, is I wanna show you how four times God has allowed his holy place to be trampled, and then I'm gonna talk about the rebuilding of the temple and why I think it's going to happen and what I think God thinks about it, and how that will bring down the curtain in human history. So let's talk about that first, quickly, let's go through four acts of this drama.

Phase one. And again, I'm talking about a holy place that God sets up and then he allows the Gentiles to trample it. The first phase happens in the book of 1 Samuel, early chapters of 1 Samuel. Eli was the judge, he was a priest, he was a nice guy. He was, he was a nice guy, but nice guy isn't enough when you're the high priest and you're the judge, and he let his sons run amuck and they showed utter disregard and disrespect for the sacrifice of the Lord, and though he did somewhat mildly upbraid them, he could not restrain them, and God judged him through two different prophets, the second being little boy, Samuel, that it was finished, he was losing his position, and he said, “You will know that I'm judging your family when your two wicked sons, Hophni and Phinehas die on the same day.”

Well, what happened was God - because the people were wicked, not just Eli's ministry there, but the people in general were wicked and idolatrous - God brought Gentile hoard, the Philistines in to fight against them. And on the first day of battle, the Philistines just destroyed the Israelites, they just beat them badly.

Well, the Israelites were very discouraged and dejected, and so they said, “Well, tell you what, let's go to Shiloh where the tabernacle of the Lord is, and let's get the ark of the covenant, and if we bring the ark, the ark is gonna whoop up on the Philistines. So we just go get the ark and bring it, then the ark is going to destroy the Philistines just like it did…” Or something like that, anyway, “back with the Egyptians.” So the ark was nothing more than a good luck charm. 1 Samuel 4:3, “Let us bring the ark of the Lord's covenant from Shiloh so that it may go with us and save us from the hand of our enemies.” Not he; it. That is a good luck charm. Well, let me tell you something, the ark of the covenant is no good luck charm. I think it's probably the most dangerous golden box there has ever been in history, that ark. 

And so they brought the ark in there, and immediately the Philistines were dismayed and discouraged, 'cause the Israelites were cheering like crazy for the ark, and they thought, “Oh no, we're in trouble, but what else can we do? We gotta fight the battle, so let's just go die like men, 'cause these are the great gods that destroyed Pharaoh and all that, and we're in trouble, but we don't wanna run, so might as well fight.” Well, that was at least for them at that moment, a good idea, because they fought and they won and they captured the ark. They captured the ark of the Lord. Eli was terrified of this very thing. I think he knew in his heart probably it was gonna happen, what happened with the ark. And when he found out that the ark had been captured by Gentiles, he fell over backwards, his neck was broken and he died. So he died the same day as his sons. The ark was captured.

Now, I'm not gonna go into the rest of the story, you know what happened, the ark didn't stay in Philistia. Everywhere it went, there were cancerous tumors and plagues and idols falling down and breaking, and then finally, the Philistines said, “We have got to get rid of this thing,” and so they sent it back. Well, that's what happened. Let me tell you something, God can take care of himself. You don't need to protect the ark, you don't need to worry,  God can take care of himself. He knows what he's doing, that's the lesson in that. I could preach 30 different sermons today, but keep on the track, keep on track.

Psalm 78 describes this tragedy, “They angered him with their high places, they aroused his jealousy with their idols. When God heard them, he was angry.” When he heard, “Hey, let's bring the ark, it will save us.” When he heard that, he was angry. “He rejected Israel completely. He abandoned the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent he had set up among men. He sent the ark of his might into captivity, his glory into the hands of the enemy.” It was no accident, that's the first phase of this drama, first time he did it.

Phase two, many centuries later, past the Assyrians and the deportation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, past the time of Hezekiah when the angel of the Lord had killed all those Assyrian troops, past all of that into the days of Jeremiah. Now, the threat is not the Assyrians, it's the Babylonians. Jeremiah gets this ministry: “Go tell the Israelites, you're finished in the promised land. ‘Where shall we go?’ You'll say to me. I'll tell you, to the sword, famine or plague, that's where you'll go.” Imagine that ministry. That was Jeremiah's job, day after day.

And so the Lord came to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 7. Says this, “This is the word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. ‘Stand at the gate of the Lord's house,’” the temple, “‘and there proclaim this message: “Hear the word of the Lord all you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words, saying, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’”’”

It's an amazing passage. Why would it say it three times? 'Cause that's what they're murmuring and saying, “Look, God's not gonna ever let the temple get destroyed. Look what he did with Hezekiah, he's gonna protect the temple for his own glory. So we don't need to worry about anything. We can do whatever we want.” Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 7:8-12, “But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. ‘Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house which bears my name and say, “We are safe” - Safe to do all these wicked things? Has this house which bears my name become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching!’ Declares the Lord, ‘Go now to Shiloh, where I first made a dwelling for my name, and see what I did to that place because of the wickedness of the people then.’”

That's phase two friends. You see, Shiloh was the first. Jeremiah said, “Go back and see what I did. Didn't I let the ark get captured? Didn't I do that? How can you possibly say that I would not let that happen to the temple?” Jeremiah warned them plainly not to trust in simply having the temple, but they didn't listen.

And in that same chapter, Jeremiah 7, the prophet revealed that the people were stubborn in refusing to listen to the prophets, and the end result would be - Here it is - the desolation of the land. Jeremiah 7:34, “I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and gladness, and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, for the land will become desolate.” It's the same word, friends.

And so the Babylonians came and God gave the temple. Read it in Daniel chapter 1, God gave the temple of the Lord into the hands of the Babylonians and they destroyed it. That's act two of this drama.

Phase Three happened over four centuries later. After 70 years, the Lord in his grace allowed the Jews to return to the promised land. But now, under Gentile domination. The Babylonian era had passed. Now is the time for the Medo-Persians, the Medes and the Persians were ruling. And Cyrus the Great, in a decree allowed them to go back after those seven years and rebuild Jerusalem, and they went back and they rebuilt the walls, and they rebuilt the temple, and they re-established a life, under Gentile domination, but a life there.

The Medes and the Persians were in turn defeated by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. Alexander, at the height of his power was cut off, he died, his kingdom was divided under his four top generals, because he had no ancestor who could take over and rule and so the Greek Empire was divided into fours. Quadrants. And then as history unfolded, these Greek generals who were immediately kings of their little realms had descendants and then a history.

And just typical of Greeks before Alexander and Philip of Macedon, they're just fighting each other all the time. These fighting Greek states and the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The kings of the North, kings of the South fought over that crossroads known as Palestine and Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s caught in the midst of all that. Okay, just a quick summary of what's going on.

Phase three happens, and Daniel 8 predicts it. The little horn that comes along, this individual, a Greek king, who in a special way dominates Jerusalem and in a very spiritual kind of way, vaunts himself against the God of heaven and desecrates the temple that had been rebuilt under Haggai. This man, his name was Antiochus IV, as I mentioned last week, he called himself Epiphanes, or the manifest one. He believed he was god in the flesh, or a god in the flesh.

And I mentioned last time that the Greeks had a propensity for this. Alexander the Great thought he was Zeus-Ammon, and so there are horns coming out of his head on these coins they found in Egypt that he had minted for himself, that's Alexander. Philip of Macedon was his father, he said, “The man purported to be my father.” That was Alexander. Okay, so from time to time, these Greeks had these delusions of grandeur and they felt that they were actually gods in human body, Antiochus IV was like this.

And what does it say about him? Daniel 11-31, “His armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and will abolish the daily sacrifice, then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation.” The book of First Maccabees, the apocryphal book that's in Roman Catholic Bibles, but it's not in our Bible, because we don't believe it's inspired scripture. However, I do believe it's faithful history of the time. And so during the Maccabees, this Antiochus sets himself up and he sacrificed pigs. He sacrificed pigs in the Holy of Holies. Now, why would he do that? He didn't care about the Jewish dietary regulations, any of that, he's trying to find the way to be most offensive to the God of the Jews.

And so he does this, he sacrifices specifically pigs so that he can be most offensive to the God of the Jews, he did it to enrage the Jews. So he had allowed them to carry on their animal sacrifice, but then he stops the sacrifice, and then he goes and establishes himself up as god in the temple and worships in his own way, accepts worship and sacrifices in a desecrating way in the Holy of Holies. That's phase three.

Alright, phase four. When Jesus spoke these words, was yet to come. And that was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. In the year 70, the Jewish zealots had wanted the Romans out. They were sick to death of Gentile rule. But they can't do anything about it. Couldn't do anything. It was from the Lord, it was what Jesus called the times of the Gentiles. There was nothing they could do, but they wanted to be free, and so the Zealots were pushing, pushing, pushing all the time. Rome had to keep sending more troops to keep the peace, and finally they just got sick of it, and the war started, the wars with the Jews started, and the Jews had no chance at all.

The Roman empire, the most powerful military empire the world had ever seen up to that point. Titus, who was in command of the legions, did not want the temple destroyed, but they did it anyway, they wanted the gold and the other stuff off of the temple, and I think it was an accident, Josephus tells us it wasn't intentional. I don't know if that's true or not, but what can we do? I wasn't there. Josephus was, I guess. So he tells us what happened. In any case, the temple was destroyed.

How is it the abomination of desolation? We don't know for sure. Although some people think that the standards that the Romans used to carry, which had insignia of Caesar, whom they worshipped as a god would be enough to make it an abomination of desolation, and that's good enough for me. And so in some way, they desecrated through idolatry, the Temple Mount, and they destroyed the temple completely. The Jews were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, and when I talk about that more next week, you'll see, but just a horrible bloodbath, and that was the fourth phase.

Now we come to it. Will there be a fifth phase? Will there be a fifth act in this drama, the abomination of desolation, has it been fulfilled? Is it done now? Or is there one more act in this drama? I think there is one more act in this drama of it, the only way it could happen is if the temple would be rebuilt, and here we come to a sticking point: how can the temple be rebuilt? How can we understand the rebuilding of the temple? Jesus says, “So when you see standing in the holy place, the abomination that causes desolation,” so the most common understanding of that is the temple.

And a key principle for me as a Christian dear friends, is that Jesus Christ has fulfilled the law, he has fulfilled the animal sacrificial system, it's fulfilled. “Do not suppose,” Jesus said, “That I came to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” Jesus's death on the cross is the fulfillment of all of the animal sacrifices that were offered legally under the laws of Moses. When John the Baptist saw him, he said, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

When Jesus died, in John 19:30, “Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ And with that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” And it says in Matthew 27:51, “At that moment, the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” Oh, how significant is that moment. What a miracle. If you had been there, the curtain, torn in two from top to bottom. All the animal sacrifices done in the temple were merely pictures of the final sacrifice of Christ, and once he said “it is finished,” it was done, there was no need again for those animals. They had no efficacy anyway, to remove sin. Hebrews 10:4 says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin.” It never took away sin ever, it was just a symbol.

And so when Jesus died, the time for animal sacrifice ended forever. According to the book of Hebrews, this meant that the Old Covenant sacrificial system was obsolete and aging and would soon disappear. The author of Hebrews tells us, that's Hebrews 8:13, “By calling this covenant new, he has made the old one obsolete, and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.” That tells me that the book of Hebrews was written before the destruction of the temple, and that the destruction of the temple caused the animal sacrificial system and the Old Covenant to disappear from the earth. 

Now, the tearing of the curtain, and two from top to bottom was a symbol of God's completion of the animal sacrificial system. It's his way of saying that time is finished, the animal sacrifices are done, and he's actually beautifully saying more than that isn't he? Do you remember I told you the old covenant message was, “Thus far, you may come and no further?” You know what the New Covenant message is? “Let us draw near to the throne of grace.” Let's go by a new and living way, right into the very presence of God, sinners like you and me.

How is that possible? Because Jesus, the Lamb of God, has taken away sins for people like you and me. And all we have to do is just believe in Jesus, if you just trust in him, if you look to Christ, to the shedding of his blood. Your sins, all of them will be forgiven, and there will be no hindrance to you whatsoever to come right into the Holy of Holies, right into the presence of God as adopted children of the living God. Oh, dear friends, who just dedicated your babies, teach your children that, teach them that the blood of Jesus can cleanse them from their sins, bring them to the cross again and again, bring them through the new and living way into the presence of God, through the New Covenant bring them there.

That curtain was torn in two from top to bottom, but now I'm gonna use a bit of sanctified imagination. I think that there were some unbelieving priests in the temple that day who watched that happen. Did you see that? Top to bottom, meaning God did it, and it was torn. And they could even probably see in there, and it was just shocking to them, so they probably went and reported to their boss, Caiaphas. What do you think Caiaphas would make of that? Nothing. What did he make of the resurrection of Lazarus? “We gotta kill him too,” that's what they made of that.

So I think that Caiaphas ordered that the torn curtain be taken down and repaired. Why? So that they could continue the animal sacrifices that wicked priests operating through wicked unbelief ordered that that curtain be sewn back together. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You don't enter and nor will you let others enter who are trying to.” As I've said before, quoting the one on divorce and marriage, there he said, “What God has joined together, let man not separate.” In like manner I say, “What God has pulled apart, let man not sow back up together.”Amen.

But the curtain wasn't symbol enough, I guess, so why not just destroy the whole thing? Destroy the temple so that not one stone is left on another, it cannot be then that animal sacrifice will continue. God the Father said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Watch what I'll do to that sinful building, which Jesus at the end of Matthew 23, called your house. It's not my house anymore. My name is gone. Watch what I'll do to your house. I will destroy it.”

But I believe that the same spirit of unbelief that led the priests to sew up that curtain lives today in the hearts of Jews who want the temple to be rebuilt, they want the temple to be rebuilt so that they can offer animal sacrifices in fulfillment of the law of Moses.

Now, for the longest time as a Christian, I heard that the temple is going to be rebuilt. I think I started studying eschatology the second day after I was a Christian. I don't know what it is, like exciting stuff, and people were telling me this stuff right away, and I learned right away all this stuff about the temple, and I heard it was going to be built again. And I said, “Alright, well, that's interesting,” and read all kinds of stuff. Read Chick tracts, those are really exciting for that kind of theology and read all about what's gonna happen, I read that stuff and I was whatever until I really carefully started the book of Hebrews, and then I kinda went, “Oh my goodness.”

Can I say to you plainly, the message of the book of Hebrews is that God will never again accept the blood of an animal as a religious offering to him, never. It's finished on into the millennium and on into eternity. Never again will he accept it. So if that messes with the whole Ezekiel temple for you, then let it mess with it, but the message of Hebrews is it is finished, he will never again offer or accept animal sacrifice. But that doesn't mean the temple won't be rebuilt, and it doesn't mean that God didn't predict that it would be rebuilt. I'm just telling you, he doesn't accept the sacrifices and offering there.

So a key verse for me, if you would turn there in your Bibles to 2 Thessalonians 2, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, I think was really the tipping point for me. I was like, “I just don't think the temple is gonna be rebuilt. I think they're interpreting scripture wrong.” Which is actually not a hard thing to do when you come to these end time things in the book of Daniel, it's not an easy book to interpret.

In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul is dealing with the Thessalonians who had a specific kind of false teaching that had come to them. Some false teachers had come and had spread a report saying that the day of the Lord had already come. You've heard of the Left Behind series, that's the early version of the Left Behind, you all missed the day of the Lord, you've been left behind. How depressing is that? Not just that, you might be left behind, you were left behind.

And so Paul writes to address that, he says in verse three and four, “Don't let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction, he will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or his worship, so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”

That brings us to the final phase, the abomination of desolation in the days of the antichrist, the words of 2 Thessalonians 2, 3 and 4, almost exactly parallel Daniel 11:36. Really just look down at verse 3 and 4 of 2 Thessalonians, and just hear me read Daniel 11:36, and you'll see the similarity.

Now I'm reading Daniel now, Daniel 11:36 about Antiochus and about the antichrist. Listen, “The king will do as he pleases, he will exalt and magnify himself above every god, and will say unheard of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath has been completed, for what is determined must take place.” He's just about exactly paraphrasing Daniel 11:36. So what that tells me is that Daniel has yet more to tell us about the future, because when Paul wrote this, all of that stuff was yet to come, and he said the end won't come until that happens, the end didn't come when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. It still hasn't come, because the man of sin hasn't come yet and set himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God and accepting worship. Friends, that hasn't happened yet. But it's coming.

This is the very one, Daniel 11:36 mentioned just a few verses before in Daniel, his armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and abolish daily sacrifice, then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation. And so this evil figure of 2 Thessalonians, number one, opposes every god or everything called God, so all religions shut down; number two, he exalts himself over every god and over the true God, “I am greater than all of them,” he exalts himself. He didn't just shut down all religion, he shuts it down in favor of himself. “Worship me,” he's saying. He sets himself up, it says in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God. And notice that he's in God's temple. That phrase is a difficult phrase for me.

In what sense is it God's temple? God has abandoned it. It's a God-forsaken temple. But if you look at the verse, every use of the word “God” in the verse is kind of, you could put in quotations. It says there, look at verse 4, “He will oppose and will exalt himself over every so-called God,” or everything that is called God or his worship. “So that he sets himself up in so-called God's temple, proclaiming himself to be so-called God.” So you really shouldn't stumble over the fact that it's called God's temple.

This is what I think is happening. The Jews of the time will think that it's God's temple, they will think they're honoring the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though it cannot be done apart from Jesus. “Whoever honors me,” said Jesus, “Honors the father. Whoever does not honor the Son, does not honor the Father.” So they think they're offering sacrifices to God, but he's not accepting, but that's what they think, so they will call it God's temple, the Jews will having been permitted, I believe, by the antichrist to reestablish that temple, they will call it God's temple.

Antichrist knows what they think, and he wants to go to that so-called Holy Place and violate it, just like Antiochus did with the pigs. Why did he choose pigs? Because it violated the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he's trying to be offensive to that God. So he goes to God's temple and he sets himself up there, he ends animal sacrifice, and I think at that moment, sets the Jews to running. Their time is finished. They're in mortal danger. And I think at that point, God is going to finally take the hardness out of their hearts, and they will call on Jesus, they will look to Jesus by faith and they will trust in him. Romans 11 will come true. And so all Israel, at that time, all Israel will be saved. I think that's what's going to happen.

Now, the Puritans and reformed people, they're always telling us that the antichrist is the Pope, and so they say God's temple isn't a physical structure, but it's just the church. The problem is that has not been fulfilled in redemptive history, and it just doesn't do justice to the depth of this Daniel connection. The fact is there's going to be a rebuilt temple, a man is gonna take it over and set himself up as God. I think it's the perfect wicked end to human rebellion, in which we took God's place and sought worship ourselves rather than to worship and serve the true God.

Alright, Jesus said at the end of that little section, “Let the reader understand,” you've had two weeks to hear this. How's your understanding? It's like, “I always thought I knew the Bible, but whenever I come to First Baptist, I just get confused.” I just, look, I prayed for clarity. If this isn't clear to you, I'm sorry, I've done my best, alright? But Jesus is challenging you to try to understand, work at it. Go and read Daniel for yourself. Study it carefully.

But let me tell you one more thing that hit me, okay? For us, if we're not the final generation, “let the reader understand” is an exhortation to study, so study, listen to sermons like this one, try to understand these themes. But I believe there will be a generation that will come, that will need more than just study, they will need to know what this says. And we're gonna talk about that more next week in the “Run For Your Life” sermon. They will need to know how many days they need to survive before Jesus comes back, and at that point, “let the reader understand” will be similar to God's statement in Genesis 1:3, “Let there be light.” And there was what? There was light. And so over that generation, he will say, “Let the reader understand,” and they will understand, they will know when Jesus is coming, they will know precisely what to do, even the mysteries of the end of Daniel chapter 12, that Daniel didn't even understand. They will know. 

So “When you see standing in the Holy place, the abomination that causes desolation spoken of through the prophet Daniel...” Come next week to find out what to do, I've already told you four times, “Run for your lives,” that's what he's saying. I'm gonna explain next week why you need to run, let me take a few moments to apply the scripture and we'll be done. 

First, I've already said once, come to Christ now while there's still time. Could be there are some relatives here that came to see a baby dedicated. If you haven't trusted in Christ through the forgiveness of your sins, the blood of Jesus, all of that, you are on the outside looking in, and if you were to die tonight, you would go to hell, you would spend eternity apart from God. Come to Christ. I'm just inviting you, come to Christ, trust in him for the forgiveness of your sins. That's the most important lesson. That's what the animal sacrifice was pointing to all the time.

Secondly, dear friends, there is no permanent dwelling place here on earth. God four times has trashed his dwelling place, he is saying we are moving. There is no permanent place here. God says in Isaiah 57:15, “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him whose heart is humble and lowly and can try to revive the spirit of the contrite and to revive the heart of the lowly.” God lives in heaven and we're on earth. There is no permanent dwelling place here on earth, while this present age continues, Christ had no permanent resting place, “Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” He had no permanent tomb. You can't go anywhere to find the tomb of Jesus, I don't care what shrines they have in Jerusalem. I have no idea which of those places - Actually it wouldn't surprise me if Jesus tomb actually has dead bodies in it, but it wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't bother me, I just know it's not his dead body. Amen. He has risen.

Alright, what happened to the space and place? Doesn't matter to me. God isn't doing that now, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. God is spirit. We're not looking for the holy place, this place can be every bit as holy as any place in Jerusalem, dear friends, there is no permanent dwelling place here on earth.

I mentioned this last week, concerning desolation, let not your heart be desolate toward God, be rich and full in your relationship with God. Do not be empty.

The pull is always towards richness with God or idolatry, that's the pull all the time, you will fill that empty space inside you with something, it's either going to be an idol or the living God, don't let your own heart be an abomination of desolation. Don't turn to money and possessions and vacations and careers, and even children or any of the good blessings of God. None of the good blessings of God are meant to be enjoyed apart from fellowship with him, all of them are meant to be enjoyed in him, any of those things can be idols.

And marvel what God will do and has done to have a pure people, he'll destroy the Holy of Holies, he'll let the ark get captured. He'll do all of this stuff so that he can have a pure and holy people. That's what he wants, then strive for holiness in your life.

Hate the sin that defiles your heart, live free from idols, and marvel at the intricacies of redemptive history. Yes, there's a milk in here, but I hope at this point, you don't just want the milk, that you wanna know these things, you want to wrestle with these things you wanna take “Let the reader understand” and go work on it. Marvel the intricacies of redemptive history, this is a complex story to tell. I have never and probably will never again preach two sermons on one sentence fragment, I'll probably never do that again, but this is a complicated story, fall down in wonder.

And don't trust in any man made sanctuary. This is a beautiful place that we meet in every week, isn't it? It's beautiful, it's comfortable. The carpet's, nice. The outside looks beautiful. Some people have worked very hard to make it look beautiful outside, they've done a great job, they should be encouraged for it. People work very hard to make this place clean and attractive and pretty every week. That's a good thing. That's a good ministry.

Friends, it's not permanent. He's going to shake everything, heaven and earth, including this place. Don't trust in this man-made place, God himself will forsake this place if we forsake Him, and if we turn away, this place will be an empty nothing on Sunday mornings, 20, 30 years from now, if we don't continue to follow him.

And finally watch out for pride. More on this next week, but what caused the antichrist to set himself up to be worshipped? A desire, a pride. That's at the root of our sin problem. We make too much of ourselves. Humble yourself under God's mighty hand. Let him lift you up. Close with me in prayer.

Well, I mentioned a few weeks ago, this would be a most unusual Sunday, and so it is. I'm preaching this morning on a sentence fragment. We don't even get the full thought today, we just get dot, dot, dot at the end of the verse. And it occurred to me that next week's sermon, which is the completion of the thought, the sermon's entitled “Run For Your Lives” will be our Mother's Day sermon here at First Baptist Church. That just occurred to me, only here at this church would that happen. Mothers, can I say a word in advance? It wasn't personal, it's just the next passage. We will seek to honor you and we love you, we will pray for you and bless you in many ways. But I thought about that this morning and I just had to laugh and said, “Well, I'm gonna stay the course, and we're gonna keep learning from the Word of God.” But this morning, we're gonna focus on verse 15.

Every single day, Jews from around the world gather at a place called The Wailing Wall, and they stand there and pray and weep concerning the destruction of the temple that happened almost two millennia ago. They weep over the fact that the temple is destroyed, that they are because of that, unable to fulfill the laws of Moses, they're unable to render animal sacrifice. They don't believe that Jesus finished the animal sacrificial system, they don't believe that at all, and they yearn for the temple to be rebuilt so that they can continue their religious lives in accordance with the law that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob gave them.

And so they stand there and pray, and many of them pray the words of Psalm 79:1, “O God, the nations have invaded your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple, they have reduced Jerusalem to rubble.” They pray that lament Psalm. “The Gentiles have come and done this.”

And many of them I'm sure, I don't know their minds and hearts, but pray that that temple will someday be rebuilt. They pray this way, despite the fact that one of Islam's holiest shrines, the Dome of the Rock, is built supposedly right where the Holy of Holies was for Solomon's temple, and that the Muslims are not going to give that holy site up easily. But still, the Jews continue to pray that the temple would be rebuilt.

Now, our passage today looks back to the prediction that Jesus made during his lifetime, about 40 years before the destruction of the temple, that the temple would be destroyed. It looks back to that prediction that was fulfilled in AD 70, when the Romans destroyed the temple. It looks back, but I believe it also looks ahead to a stunning climax to human history, the rebuilding of a temple of desolation, the re-establishment of animal sacrifice, in defiance to the completed work of Christ on the cross, defiance of the stipulations of the new covenant, the ending of the animal sacrifices by antichrist and the second coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I believe this passage looks ahead to all of that.

I've been praying this morning, according to Colossians 4:4, that I would be clear, this is a difficult passage to preach on. It's not controversial or disagreements, but it's not one of those ones that people feel, well most people, feel emotional about and get all upset or heated about. It's just hard to understand. And I'm going to be taking you through the Book of Daniel, through some of the visions in Daniel, I'm gonna try to fulfill what Jesus said, what he exhorted, I think, at this phase in redemptive history, “Let the reader understand.” It's my desire to be an instrument in God's hands toward that end, that you would understand the book of Daniel and understand what this abomination of desolation is.

I think there are actually two key principles that I have in my mind, there's just one in your outline. But there are two in my mind from Matthew 24 and one of them is in verse 37, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” Stripped down, the concept is this: As it was, so it will be. History repeats itself. We've seen some things before in redemptive history, we're gonna see it one more time.

That's a key principle for me. A second key principle is in verse 25, “Behold, or see, I have told you ahead of time.” There's something here in these two sermons, this week and next week, that the Lord wants us to know ahead of time before it comes and that your right understanding of these things will help you survive those trials. Now, I don't know if we're the final generation. I believe from Scripture, we are to live as though we were. And to prepare our hearts as though these things were going to be fulfilled in our lifetime; we need to get ready for the coming of the antichrist. I believe that. But if we're not the final generation, maybe our children will be the final generation. We need to get them ready. So we have to attend to these things carefully, we have to take this seriously.

I do not believe that these things are the most important issues of theology. If you wanna know what the most important issues of theology are, you can just read 1 Corinthians 15:3, “For I passed on to you as of first importance: That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised from the dead on the third day according to the scriptures.” Well, there's the center of it all. That's the most important thing, “I passed that on as of first importance.” But it is a fallacy to say that we should only teach those things that are of first importance from the pulpit. That's what expositional preaching does, it brings you through things that are of lesser importance, but they're still important. And so this is important and we need to learn it. So I'm praying for God's grace, I'm praying for the Holy Spirit to just be moving through this sanctuary, and that you'll just say in effect, “Aha, there's something I hadn't seen before,” that insight will come to you and that it'll get you ready for the end of the world. That's my desire.

So as we look at this, “As it was, so it will be,” this is the principle that's governing me today. History repeats itself; redemptive history repeats itself. God in his sovereignty has orchestrated history to be a teaching tool, to teach us important things that we need to know. Past is prologue in redemptive history, definitely, that God has stuck some certain things in history and then recorded them in the Bible that help us get ready for the future.

That definitely was the case concerning the salvation that we have in Christ. Every animal sacrifice ever offered was a picture of the final sacrifice of Christ. Those things are called types, things acted out in history that then instruct us concerning future events. The near sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, was such a type. As God told Abraham to take his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loved and offer him up as a sacrifice, it was a clear picture of what God the Father would do in sending his own son, the only begotten Son of God, Jesus and pouring him out to death for our sins.

It was acted out in history again and again. The Passover lamb, a clear picture of Christ. And I preached that on Maundy Thursday, how the blood was painted on the doorposts, and all that and there was a picture of the death of Christ for us. So also the Exodus itself, all of the Jews, this mighty nation coming out of bondage, out of slavery, and coming into the Promised Land. Definitely a picture of our personal salvation. So history repeats itself, “As it was, so it will be.”

Now, what I believe is happening here is Jesus is predicting the destruction of the temple, its desolation, he's talking about the destruction of what we would call Herod's Temple. Alright? I believe it was a continuation of Haggai's Temple, but it was just enlarged and beautified by lots of money that King Herod poured in around the time of Jesus 's birth. And so it's generally called Herod's Temple. He's talking about the destruction of Herod's Temple. And he's saying, in effect, I believe, what Daniel foretold and has already been acted out will be again, will be again. Verse 15, “So when you see standing in the holy place, ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel - let the reader understand.” Jesus is saying, “As it was, so it will be.”

Daniel's prophecy was in part fulfilled in the second century BC. But it's not done being fulfilled yet, there's more yet to come from Daniel. And I'm saying today, there's more still yet to come from Daniel even now, even now that the temple has been destroyed back in that first century AD. There's still more coming from the Book of Daniel, that's what I'm saying. As it was, so it will be.

And in verse 25, Jesus says, “I have told you ahead of time. I'm telling you this ahead of time because you'll need to know this,” and every generation has needed to know this to prepare themselves to get ready. It affects the way you live, it affects your outlook on life, it affects your godliness in this present age.

Alright, well let's zero in on this phrase: Abomination of desolation. What is this phrase? Friends, there's nobody on earth that's born into the world knowing what abomination of desolation means. Everybody's gotta sit at Jesus ' feet and learn this. And I praise God to be in this church, people that are eager for the meat of the Word of God and not just sipping at the milk. This isn't milk. We all have to learn. What does this mean? I don't know what that means. I don't use the word abomination very often in everyday life, and I - Other than these kinds of things - I would never put it together with desolation. Abomination of desolation? I don't know what it means. Teach me what it means. We're all on the boat, same boat of learners. What does it mean?

Well, let's begin with the concept of desolation. Let's keep close to Matthew and then I'll branch out. We've already seen the desolation haven't we? Go back to the end of Matthew 23. At the end of Matthew 23, Jesus is there having argued and disputed with the scribes and Pharisees, you have the seven-fold woe on the scribes and Pharisees. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Seven times, he speaks this, and then he just weeps. In Luke, he literally weeps over the city. But here, you just hear the weeping and the words, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling. Behold, your house is left to you desolate.” There's that interesting word, desolation. And then as I highlighted when I preached on that passage, “For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” The desolation is the absence of Jesus. When Jesus walks away, Israel's house is left desolate.

Now, what does the word desolate mean? Empty like a desert, nothing there. It's a howling wasteland spiritually because Jesus has left, he's walking away. The word “for” shows the nature of the desolation, this is the desolation. Because they rejected Christ, because they did not recognize the time of him coming, because they did not love him, Jesus is going away. Israel has forsaken her God, and now God will forsake Israel. That's the nature of the desolation, a desolate relationship.

And so as he's walking out, you remember, he's walking right on out of the temple, and you just continue right on into Matthew 24 from 23. As he's walking out, the disciples come up and they call attention to the vast stones of the temple complex, and “Master, what magnificent stones? What incredible buildings?” “Do you see all these things?” Jesus said. “I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another. Every one will be thrown down.”

Jesus, as a prophet, predicting a future event, the total destruction of Jerusalem and specifically of the temple. Shocking to the disciples, they come to him privately, they don't know what to make of Jesus ' statements. And so they asked him privately, “‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘when will this happen? And what would be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’”

All conservative commentators believe that Matthew 24:15 and following is at least this, the answer to their first question: “When will this happen?” “When will what happen?” “The destruction of the temple. When will the temple be destroyed?” And Jesus here is at least answering that question. So conservative commentators who believe in inerrancy, who believe in the Word of God, they say at least this: Jesus in Matthew 24:15 is predicting the circumstances concerning the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which was fulfilled in the year AD 70. At least that, I think more than that, but at least that is true. He's in part answering their first question, “What will it be like When Jerusalem is destroyed?”

Luke 21:20-24 gives us a parallel account that helps give us more information. “When you see,” Jesus said there, “When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, let those in the country not enter the city for this is the time of punishment and fulfillment of all that has been written. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people, they will fall by the sword and they will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles is fulfilled.”

So Jesus, there, you put the two passages together, Jesus is talking about the circumstances of the besieging and then the destroying of Jerusalem. He calls it interestingly, the times of the Gentiles. Very interesting phrase that we don't have time to get into, but we're in it now. These are the times of the Gentiles in which the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has turned his attention to the nations, as we saw in 24:14, and is bringing them into Christ. They're bringing people in from Asia and Africa and Latin America, bringing them in through faith in Christ into the household of God, drawing them in. This is the times of the Gentiles. And also the time when the Gentiles, at least in part, have some control over Jerusalem, some authority over Jerusalem, and able to dominate there. It comes as a result of military conquest.

So this is how I understand the desolation, the spiritual desolation comes first. Then comes military conquest producing a physical desolation; lots of dead people, nobody living there. That's how it works. And so there's the spiritual desolation first resulting physical desolation, and it comes as a result of military conquest.

Now, Jesus in the middle of this teaching, just pauses as I've already noted and says, “Let the reader understand.” I believe these were Jesus ' original words to his disciples as they were sitting there at his feet, learning about the end of the world. I think he interrupted himself and said, “Let the reader understand.” The other alternative is that it's Matthew interrupting his writing of the gospel, and just inserts that. Either way is a reputable interpretation. But I really think it was Jesus, it doesn't make a difference who because Jesus would be speaking through Matthew by the spirit anyway. But in the middle of this, after he says, “So when you see ‘the abomination of desolation,’ standing in the holy place, spoken of by the prophet Daniel - let the reader understand.”

Well, that is your springboard from Matthew into Daniel. Basically, Jesus is saying, “We need to study Daniel better and understand it better. It's a difficult book, and so we're going to go over to Daniel and try to understand it.” He's basically saying to his disciples, “You need to read Daniel more carefully, Daniel is complex.” Daniel, himself, the prophet, didn't fully understand what was told him. Five different times in the book of Daniel, he stops an angel and says, “I don't get it. I don't understand what you're telling me.”

The book of Daniel has 12 chapters. The first six chapters talk about Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, their court life in the lives of Gentile courts, the king of Babylon and the king of the Medo-Persian Empire. So it has to do with the circumstances of those Jewish people in a Gentile court, kingly court, 1 through 6.

Daniel 7-12 is a bunch of visions that God gave to Daniel concerning the future. And so those visions are the source of information about the future and the source of complexity. And Daniel himself would stop when an angel would come and give him a vision in the night, and he'd say, “I don't understand.” And generally, four of those five times, the angel would stop and give more plain explanation.

The last time, he didn't, interestingly. Daniel was told the last time, “But as for you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end.” In effect, it was told, and what 1 Peter says, it was revealed to him that it wasn't for him to know. He didn't need to know his own vision. “Just write it down, seal it up and send it on to the future. You don't need to know.”

But there is a clear implication in Daniel 12, that some people will need to know. Some people will need to understand these complex visions, their very lives will depend on it, and so understanding is actually pretty important. I believe that every generation of Christian is challenged by Jesus's words, “Let the reader understand,” to study Daniel more carefully. I think the final generation of Christians will need to do it so that they may survive what's going on at the time, just a higher level, so we need to hold the torch of learning and understanding, and if we're not the final generation, pass it on to those who may be the final generation, get them ready.

And so, Daniel repeatedly makes statements about the desolation of Israel. For example, if you wanna turn there, it probably would help you. If not, you can just listen. But in Daniel chapter 8, Daniel is shown the vision of the first king of Greece, who comes from the west across into the east and destroys the King of Persia, just destroys him, and conquers his empire completely, the king of Greece does. And then at the height of his power, he dies. And his kingdom is divided up into quadrants, into four, four of his generals get it.

There is no doubt. Nobody even wonders who this is, even liberals who read this, who don't believe in the inspiration and authority of the Bible, know that this is talking about Alexander the Great. What they say is, it was written afterwards, prophecy after the fact. “I predict that World War II will strike in 1939,” that's not a prophetic statement. But they said “It comes after, it was just too specific. It was too specific.”

Alexander the Great, height of his power, cut off, kingdom divided into four. And in one of those quadrants, this little horn comes along and creates some problems, and that's an interesting feature, but in the middle of it, Daniel doesn't understand. He is told that one of Alexander's successors will viciously persecute the Jewish nation, becoming extremely arrogant, making claims that reach even up to the heavens as though he could bring the stars down from the heavens, an arrogant boaster. Daniel's told that a huge number of his own people will be given over to this man because of their transgressions. And at one point the angel speaks up, saying in verse 13, Daniel 8:13, “For how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate and the giving over the sanctuary and the host to be trampled under foot?”

So here you have the first time that the word “desolation” or “desolate” is mentioned in Daniel, and the word desolation has to do with powerful Gentile rulers or a ruler with their armies trampling the sanctuary of the Jews, trampling it. In Daniel 9, in the next chapter, the phrase is mentioned many times again.

Daniel there at that point is praying to God, concerning the desolation, the present desolation of Israel, in his own day. What do we mean by that? Well, Israel had been destroyed by the Babylonians already, that's why Daniel was in Babylon. He learned from the prophet Jeremiah that the desolation would last 70 years. So look at Daniel chapter 9:2, “I, Daniel perceived in the books the number of the years that according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, 70 years.

So the desolation has to do with Jerusalem being a pile of rubble, the temple a pile of rubble, and nobody's living there really. And it's been going on now for 70 years. And he gets down on his knees three times a day, and prays that Jerusalem will be rebuilt. And that's what Daniel 9, the first part is all about, the rebuilding of the temple and the rebuilding of Jerusalem to the glory of God, because God had said it would last only 70 years.

And so in Daniel 9:17-18, it says, “Now therefore, O our God... “ this is Daniel praying, “listen to the prayer of your servant, and listen to his pleas for mercy and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate.” A desolated sanctuary. “Oh my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations and the city that is called by your name.” Jerusalem is desolate. It's empty. The temple is desolate. It's destroyed. Oh, Lord, please. For Your name's sake, rebuild it, that's what he's saying. 

Well, then the Lord dispatches another angel to come and tell Daniel some stuff. I bet you don't have quiet times like this, I know I don't. But wouldn't it be exciting? You're having a prayer time, and suddenly the angel comes with some insights about the future. And so the Lord dispatches this angel to tell him with amazing clarity about a timetable concerning, I believe, both the first and the second comings of the Messiah.

And it's a fascinating passage that I already preached on once, so I won't do it again. But at any rate, the 70 weeks of Daniel, we get seven weeks, 62 weeks, and one week adds up to 70, seven plus 62 is 69 weeks. And at the end of that period, after 69 weeks, seven plus 62, in Daniel 9:26, look what it says there, “an anointed one,” or the Anointed One, the word for anointed one is Messiah or Christ, but there are other anointed ones. But, “An anointed one shall be cut off and have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.” So after the death of the Messiah, the city and the sanctuary will be destroyed. “It's end shall come with a flood and there shall be war. Desolations are decreed.” It's the same thing, only this time it's in the future.

Alright, stop, what's going on? Daniel is praying, “Oh God, please give us strength to rebuild the city.” And you know what the angel comes and says, “Daniel, the city will be rebuilt, and guess what? It's gonna be destroyed again.” That's what's happening here, he's saying, “Just so you know, it will be rebuilt and then it's going to be destroyed again.” For the same reason actually, sins of the people. But at any rate, it's going to happen.

Then in Daniel 9:27, it speaks of the famous final week, what many interpreters believe depicts the final seven years of human history, what some people call the great tribulation, the last stretch of seven years that many commentators believe refers to the final seven years of human history. Again, you see the concept of desolation. Look at verse 27, Daniel 9:27, “And he,” the prince who is to come, “He shall make a strong covenant with many for one week.” Some people say seven years, “and for half of the week,” after three and a half years, “he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.” If you think it's hard to read that in English, it's even harder in the original language. There are like 17 different translations of that one verse.

But basically what's going on is you've got these seven years, I think, and in the middle of it, this leader is going to stop sacrifice, put an end to it, and then set up an abomination of desolation. He's going to set up or build something, or establish something that will be the abomination of desolation. So the concept is a powerful and evil ruler will make a seven-year covenant concerning the sacrifices of the temple, and that in the middle of that period of seven years he'll put an end to sacrifice and offering. Note this is after the events of verse 26, in which the city is destroyed. And he shall in some striking way abominate the temple, but the end decreed by God shall be poured out on this evil person, God's in control of all of this.

Now, Daniel 11, one of the most extraordinary chapters in the Bible. I think 106 times the English word “will” appears in this one chapter. “Will” is our future word, this will happen, that will happen, the other will happen. It's a future chapter. I believe it's God, the sovereign God, showing off. Showing what he can do, he says, “You wanna know how detailed I can get with prophecy, read Daniel 11.” There's so many details here that it's really tough to preach, I've already tried to do it once, I am not doing it again.

Because the details all have to do with these Greek kings who fight each other, they hate each other all the time. Alexander the great unified a fractured Greek-speaking nation. Once he was gone, they just fell apart again and they're fighting each other all the time, Daniel 11 is all about that. And in the middle of all that, this one Greek king pops up, second century BC, a man named Antiochus, he was the fourth of that name Antiochus IV, he takes on himself a special name Epiphanes, it means in Greek, “the manifest one,” “the revealed one.” He thinks he's a god incarnate. So did Alexander, for that matter, Alexander thought he was Zeus incarnate. I think it ran in the family of these Greek leaders, they had delusions of grandeur. They thought high, lofty thoughts of themselves.

So this Antiochus comes along and he's particularly wicked and he's going to do special desecrations of the temple. Again, the language of “abomination of desolation.” Look at Daniel 11:31, “his armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortresses and will abolish the daily sacrifice, then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation.” So there's that phrase again, “the abomination of desolation.”

Finally, in Daniel 12, the concept is mentioned again. This time it seems to be in connection with the end of the world and the eternal state of glory that the saints will enjoy. This is what makes it so amazing. The beginning of chapter 12 mentions a great tribulation greater than any that Israel had ever endured up to that time, I believe Jesus was pretty much paraphrasing that in Matthew 24. It also predicts a rising up of Michael, the great prince angel who protects Israel.

The chapter then goes on to unfold the deliverance of Israel miraculously, the resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked, some to everlasting glory, and others to everlasting shame and contempt. Jesus covered this in John chapter 5, that's the end of the world friends, that's the resurrection of the righteous and the wicked to their final places of heaven and hell. And at the end of that chapter, the angel says this - Look at verse 8-12, by the way, verse 8, Daniel says, “I heard but I did not understand.” I have no idea what you're telling me. “Then I said, ‘Oh, my Lord, what shall be the outcome of all these things?’” I don't get it. Please explain it to me. “He said, ‘Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.’” That is unbelievably significant. Basically what it is is no one's really gonna get it until the time of the end. Now, Matthew 24-15 says you need to try, you need to chew on it, you need to meditate on it, you need to think about it, but you're not gonna really get it until you need to.

Okay, the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end. Verse 10, “Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined but the wicked shall act wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand” - here's this word understanding again - “but those who are wise shall understand.” There's the word understand again. Understanding seems to be huge here, the Wise need to understand. We'll get to that next week. Why? But they need to understand. “And from the time that the regular burnt offering is taken away and the abomination that makes desolate” - there's the phrase again - “is set up, there shall be 1,290 days. Blessed is he who waits for and arrives at the 1,335 days.” I have no idea.

All I think is what's happening is there's gonna be some generation of people that will know exactly what those words are about. And they'll be sitting there counting down the days in some cave somewhere, waiting until those shortened days finally come to an end and Jesus returns.

So what is the abomination of desolation? The word abomination refers to some kind of idolatry, some offense to the Almighty God, generally some idolatrous worship focused thing. What is the desolation? It is the spiritual emptiness of the people that are doing it, and the physical emptiness of the city after it is destroyed, that's what the abomination of desolation is.

Alright, summing it all up, because of their sins, God abandons his people to the power of marauding Gentile armies, resulting in a shocking trampling of his holy place. He does this to show that he is holy, that he dwells in a high and holy place, and not in any man made shrine. God just continually tramples his own shrine to show that what he really wants is to dwell in the midst of a holy people, and until they're really holy, you cannot live with them. And so he goes away and then they come in and trample the place. Because of the desolation, demonic forces flood in in the form of Gentile armies and create a horror show of pagan worship and destruction. Alright, now, I believe that the bible has shown that this has happened again and again.

I don't know what to do. It's 12:10. Hang on, dear friends, I don't wanna hurry through this... Okay, I'm not going to. We're gonna resume this next week, thank God, we're not doing that on Mother's Day, we're not saying “Run for your Lives” on Mother's Day. The Lord is so good. We'll do that the week after Mother's Day.

I wanna go through the dress rehearsals for this, there have been four of them already. One, two, three, four. I wanna talk about each one of them, and I want to talk about why the temple would be rebuilt. We haven't even gotten there yet. There's no way I can finish this sermon today. So we'll talk about why I think the temple would be rebuilt and what's gonna happen at the end of the world, we'll do that next week.

Let me just pause, if I might, and just take a moment to apply this. You may say to yourself, “What in the world does this have to do with my life?” I thought about that for a full week. I did nothing but think about applications on abomination of desolation for one full week, I have nine of them… There are probably more than that. And I'll give them more to you next week.

But let me just tell you one thing, clearly God wants you to know this. Clearly he wants you to know this. You know why? Because in II Thessalonians 2, one of the clearest teachings on the antichrist in the Bible, Paul says, having given them some instruction about the antichrist he says, “Don't you remember that when I was with you, I kept telling you about this?” They lived in the first century AD. Paul thought it was incredibly important that those Thessalonians know about the antichrist. We're far closer to the end of the world than he.

As a good pastor, I have to teach you about the antichrist. You may say, “What does this have to do with me? I'm unemployed and my marriage is struggling, my loved one is sick, etcetera.” Look, all of those things are important, God cares about them, but he clearly cares about this too, this isn't just some made up fable, these are deep, rich things that the Lord has gotten across to us in the Word of God. We need to give attention to it. So let me give you some of the applications that I've already thought of.

First of all, consider the phrase abomination of desolation. The abomination is idolatry. Are there any idols in your life? The desolation is a sense of emptiness with God, of his remoteness from you. What about you? Are you close to Jesus right now? Or is there a miniature abomination of desolation set up in your heart? You know what causes God to flee from you? Idolatry. You know what, when you do idols, it's when you're not satisfied with God anymore. You're not satisfied with him, and so you run after some material thing to fill the emptiness of your heart, and you set up within your own heart some form of an abomination of desolation. The beauty is that God will not allow that to happen to his children. He's going to come with a whip, Jesus says and clean your temple. He invites you to clean it first, tear down your idols, get rid of them. 

The central idol of our lives is ourselves. Don't worship yourself, don't feed yourself, don't live for yourself. The Bible says we should no longer live for ourselves but for God, and for Christ who died for us and was raised again. Live for him, don't leave an abomination of desolation in your own heart, draw close to Jesus, get close to him in your prayer closet. Say, “Lord, I've been distant from you, I don't feel your presence in my life, I don't feel close to you... Yes, I'm unemployed, but that's not the issue. The issue is, I'm distant from you in my unemployment. Yes, I'm struggling with my teens or I'm struggling with my marriage. That's not the issue, the issue is, I'm not close to you through that, I wanna get close to you, Lord.” Draw near to God and he's gonna draw near to you, don't be desolate or empty in your relationship with Christ.

And finally just let me say, if there's any that are here that have never trusted in Christ, the time is now for you to repent and believe the gospel. Jesus shed his blood, ending forever the animal sacrificial system, we'll talk about that next week, but he shed his blood, ending it forever. You don't need the blood of bulls and goats, it won't help you anyway, the blood sufficient for your forgiveness has already been poured forth. All you need to do is believe in him, trust in him for the forgiveness of your sins. Repent, give up your idolatry, give up all of the things you've been living for and come to Jesus and allow him to take his place on the throne of your life.

The antichrist sets himself up as God and says, worship me. Jesus is worthy of your worship, allow him to set up his throne in the center of your life, fall down and worship him, and then get up and serve him with every breath you have more next week. Let's close in prayer.

It still amazes me as I think about it, just the significance of the moment in redemptive history as this young rabbi sits on the rocky hillside overlooking Jerusalem surrounded by just a small handful of ordinary men, and makes an extraordinary prediction concerning human history. This one verse that we're looking at today, Matthew 24:14, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

That prediction that Christ made on that hillside would be one of the costliest predictions that Jesus ever made. It would cost the lives of thousands and thousands of his choice followers over two millennia in the years to come. It would bring pain and disease and injuries, and tears and torture and blood and tragic funerals, and incalculable sorrow to those who would see that it happened.

The preaching of the gospel in every nation has been incalculably expensive. And examples are bound from church history, and we ought to immerse ourselves in them for our own edification, lest we think too highly of ourselves and our own achievements. Immerse yourself in church history. These are your brothers and sisters, you're part of a royal family.

October 8, 1732, a sailing vessel pulled away from the wharf in Copenhagen, Denmark. On board were John Leonard Dobber, a potter, and David Nitschmann, a carpenter, who were leaving the security of their jobs and their families in Copenhagen to become the first Moravian missionaries. In a prayer meeting, they had both felt the strong call of the spirit to come and minister the gospel to the slaves of sugar plantations at St. Thomas, in the West Indies. They knew the only way to reach them would be to enslave themselves, to become slaves themselves, to reach these lost people. One of the men left a wife and children begging him on the wharf not to go - reconsider and stay. But the call and the heart of God for these slaves in the West Indies was even greater than that pull, the pull of home. And as the ship pulled away from the docks, these men lifted the cry and those waiting on the wharf heard it: “May the lamb that was slain receive the reward of his suffering.” Amen to that. May Jesus get what he deserves for dying on the cross. And that became the resonating heartbeat of the Moravian missions movement, and the cost they paid was very high. 

So also the cost of Adoniram Judson who buried two different wives and six children in five different locations for the cause of the gospel, whose sorrow over the shocking loss, sudden loss of his wife Ann was so profound that he dug his own grave and stared into it for weeks in deep despondency waiting for God to kill him, but pulled out of it and led hundreds, even thousands of Burmese to faith in Christ. He laid his life on the line to fulfill that aspect of Jesus' prediction that we're looking at today; this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in Burma as a testimony of that nation, then the end will come.

That spirit, that drive to fulfill the Great Commission was in the volunteers of the student volunteer movement, the early part of the 19th century. You've heard of them, they're the ones that pack their belongings in their own coffins because tropical illness made the life expectancy somewhere between 18 months and two years. So why waste extra baggage with boxes? They just packed their stuff in their own coffins and they died for the gospel from fevers.

That same spirit motivated William Borden, who was a 1909 graduate of Yale University, heir to the Borden family fortune, was converted to Christianity, gave his life to become a missionary to the Muslims in China. He never made it. He died of spinal meningitis during his training in Egypt. His grieving parents were given his Bible, in it they found in one place the words, “No reserve.” Nothing held back. And next to those words “No reserve” was a date placed shortly after he had renounced his family fortune in favor of missions. And at a later point, he had written the words “No retreat.” That was dated shortly after he was diagnosed with meningitis, and just before he died, “No regrets.” What a spirit! I want that spirit in me, I want that spirit in this church. No reserve, no retreats, no regrets, everything for the gospel. That's the kind of commitment it takes to fulfill Jesus' prediction.

Now, how is it that Jesus sitting on that rocky mountainside overlooking Jerusalem could predict that 20 centuries of his followers would be willing to make these kinds of sacrifices to get it done? That's the focus of the sermon today. Basically, in a nutshell, what I'm gonna say is only the sovereign power of the Holy Spirit over the hearts of the followers of Jesus to lay down their lives for people that have never met would make these words come true. And that kind of sovereign power is at work still today. I'd like to see it at work in this church, as it has been, and I wanna see it continue to work here, that we might help fulfill Jesus' prediction. That's what this sermon is about.

The context of Matthew 24:14: Jesus had made a prediction, a shocking prediction of the destruction of the temple. Not one stone left on another, every one would be thrown down. The disciples come to Jesus privately on the Mount of Olives, they ask him about it. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen? And what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” And so Jesus begins teaching them about the end of the world, about the destruction of Jerusalem and other things, Matthew 24, the rest of the chapter, and then on into 25, really, it's all of a unit. Speaking about the end of the world and the second coming of Christ and the way that we are to prepare for it.

Last week, we looked at the first section. In my opinion, Matthew 24:4-14 describes the events on earth between the first and second comings of Christ. What will life be like between those two events, the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ? He begins in verse 4 and 5 with a warning against false Christs, false prophets, false teaching. Verses 6-8, he talks about what he calls the beginning of birth pangs: wars, rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes in various places. These kinds of things. General convulsions of a sin-sick planet, that it would be a difficult place to live.

And then in verses 9-13, I think he's talking about the specific sufferings of the people of God, what kinds of trials and temptations and sufferings are gonna come on his followers themselves. They'll be hated by all people on account of him. They're gonna be arrested, they're gonna be persecuted, they're gonna be put to death. Some are gonna betray and turn away from the faith and betray their own brothers and sisters in Christ. And there is a need in verse 13 to stand firm to the end. Only those people who stand firm to the end will be saved.

And then he gives this one verse, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” And this is, in its context, a sign of the coming of Jesus Christ, the steady irresistible advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ is evidence and proof of the same day coming back of Christ. The fact that we can see the progress that's happening right in front of us. And friends, it's accelerating. In our own lifetimes it's going faster and faster, it's exciting, what a thrilling time to be alive, but it's evidence of signs of Jesus' return. The advance of the gospel.

Now, as we come to verse 14, one of the central points I wanna make is that this is not a command but a prophecy. There's no word of command here. Now, Jesus came into the world, we were told, to seek and to save the lost. Very plain. He came into the world as a rescue mission, that we were lost, we had no hope. Luke 19:10, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” Came to save us from our sins. That's why he came the first time. It's why he shed his blood on the cross, that's why he died.

It's also why he's waiting to return, he's waiting for the second coming so that individuals may be saved, so that people can repent and come to faith in Christ. That's why he's waiting. 2 Peter 3 teaches us this in verse 9, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

And then in that same chapter, in verse 15, “Bear in mind,” said Peter, “that our Lord's patience means salvation.” There are specific elect people, they were chosen before the foundation of the world, the Bible teaches us, and the gospel has to reach them. Paul says he'll endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may hear the gospel and be saved. That's why the Lord's waiting. It's not for no purpose. It's to get this work done. The gospel work.

Now, I said this, this is not a command in verse 14, I'll say more about that in a moment, but there are many commands concerning the Great Commission. All you have to do is go to the end of this gospel, the most famous of all of the commissioning statements. “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” Verse 18 and following, “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you, and surely I'm with you always to the very end of the age.”

There's the command. Commands are not lacking, we're commanded to go, commanded to make disciples, we're commanded to baptize them, we're commanded to teach them to obey everything. And this command was going to be across all the eras of church history. “Surely, I am with you always to the very end of the age.” It's a lasting, abiding command on the church and on you individually, and me too.

So there's the command also in Mark 16:15-16, “He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved but whoever does not believe will be condemned.’” So there's the command. We have it in Matthew 28, we have it in Mark 16.

At the end of the book of Romans, Paul speaks specifically of the command to take the gospel. He speaks of “the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him.” There's the word command even. There's no doubt about it, we are commanded to do this. And if we love Jesus we'll obey him.

And the lesson of the command then is that we have an obligation to the lost. Paul speaks of this obligation, the sense of being a debtor, we owe something. In Romans 1:14-16 he says, “I'm obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish.” I owe them a debt. “That is why I'm so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome. I'm not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” So Paul says, “I owe Greeks and I owe non-Greeks, I owe everybody the gospel.”

And so this is not in any way paying Jesus back for what he did in saving him. We're not saved on a mortgage payment plan, friends. And you pay it off in installments with good works, that is faulty thinking, that's not the debt. Paul owes other human beings the gospel, and he's going to discharge it by preaching, that's the lesson of the commands. We should not feel any less an obligation.

In 1792, William Carey, the father, so-called, of the modern Protestant missions movement wrote a tract entitled this, “An Inquiry into The Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens.” Carey was there arguing against the passive view of the sovereignty of God, that because God is sovereign and he can do everything without human agency, that we don't need to do anything. And if God wants to convert the heathen, he can do it on his own time and in his own way. He's writing against that view, though he himself believed in the absolute sovereignty of God, he still said, “We need to use means.” We ought to do stuff, that’s the 21st century version of “Use means."

We have to do stuff to get the heathen, the lost people converted, we have to get - in Carey's day - we have to get on ships and sail to India and set up a mission station and study the Hindu languages, and we have to preach the gospel plainly to them in those Hindu languages, and we need to translate the Bible into their native languages, and we need to set up a press to print those Bibles, and we need to teach them how to read their own language so that they can understand the Bible, we need to do all of... Those are the means. We need to use means to the conversion of the heathen, but we have an obligation to do it.

Okay, that's the lesson of the commands. But I already said that this verse isn't a command. This is not a command here, this is a statement of future fact, it's a sovereign statement of future fact. “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” 

And I'm celebrating that sovereign declaration with you today. It's going to happen. Absolutely, certainly going to happen. He is not telling his apostles something they should do, he's telling them something that will most certainly happen. That's what he's telling them. Something that will most certainly come to pass. It is absolutely certain. In effect, Jesus was saying that witnesses filled with the burning heart of love for Christ and the lost, filled with the Holy Spirit, will travel over the burning sands of the desert and through forbidding rocky and snowy mountain passes, and they’ll go across the seemingly endless, boundless waves of the South Pacific to cannibal filled islands there, and they will be willing to pay this price to get the gospel preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations. This will absolutely happen.

Now, what I wanna do is I wanna go very carefully word by word, phrase by phrase, through this one, this one verse, and explain it to you. First, the message. “This gospel of the kingdom.” This gospel. The word “gospel” comes straight over from the Greek language meaning “good news.” I'm not gonna break the Greek word apart, but literally, it's got a prefix and a central root that means “good news.”

And this good news of the kingdom, this good news of the kingdom, the idea is of a king, sovereign, who sits on a throne and rules, the King of the kingdom of heaven is really the unifying theme of the gospel of Matthew. Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. From the very beginning of Matthew's gospel, the genealogy and right on through, we get a sense of the right Jesus has to rule over us and rule in this world, the kingdom, Christ himself, the centerpiece of that kingdom. And that is the good news, the good news is the King. The good news is God Almighty seated on a throne. That's good news.

Jesus said earlier in Matthew's Gospel, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you.” And I explained when I preached on that passage, the yoke represents Jesus' right to rule over your life. His kingly authority to govern you and move you right or left, or have you go straight. The kingly rule of Jesus. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you'll find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus is inviting you to come into the kingdom with those words. There'd be no sense in me preaching on this one verse without inviting any who have never trusted in Christ to come and trust in Jesus.

Take that stubborn neck of yours, that stiff neck of yours that's been rebelling against God all these years. We all know about that. We still struggle with our own stiff necks; we're all the same. Put it under Jesus' yoke and you'll never regret it. Come to Jesus, follow him. Let his blood shed on the cross be sufficient for all of your acts of rebellion. Past, present and future. Come to Jesus. This is the kingdom, this is the good news, because what you're gonna find when you come into the kingdom is the perfection of the king, and how good and delightful he is, and how wonderful it will be to sit at his table and to talk with him and to obey his commands. It's good news, the kingdom.

And I love what it says, "this gospel of the kingdom.” This one that's going on right in front of you. He's speaking to men who are unique in redemptive history, they were the apostles, they were the eyewitnesses of his glory, Peter calls himself. They saw things you and I didn't see, they heard things with their own ears we don't get to hear. They were the eyewitnesses. They were the first link in the chain of church history, right to Jesus, the incarnation. And they saw what he did and what he said, they heard his words. When the woman anoints him with expensive perfume, he says, “Wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

So there was a sense of, there were little camcorders, little recorders, taking in the history of Jesus, taking in the events of his life, just being there. And don't worry about them forgetting, because it says in John 14, “The Spirit, the Comforter, the Counselor, will come and he will remind you of everything I said to you.” Ordinarily, they may have been very forgetful individuals. Not when it came to Jesus' words and actions; they remembered everything, wrote it down for us. This gospel, the one about Jesus, that's the message.

What is the method? Well, it's going to be preached, it's going to be proclaimed by word, messengers are gonna go and they're gonna stand up in front of people and speak words about Jesus, and without that, no one gets saved. It says in Romans 10, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then can they call on the one in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in one of whom they've never heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.’” The good news about Jesus, the good news. 

Somebody's gotta go and tell him a biography, they gotta go and tell them about Jesus, who he is. They don't know who he is, never heard of him. Some people have to go and they have to preach this message, because “faith comes by hearing,” it says there in Romans 10:17, it's got to be preached, it's got to be proclaimed.

Nowadays, there are some so-called “new evangelicals” who have a heart for social work, a heart for the urban scene, a heart for decaying cities and physical suffering they see brought about by sin, and they ought to because Jesus had a far greater heart for those things that they did. But they're saying foolish things, some of them, like this one: “Preach the gospel. Use words, if necessary.” Where in the world did that come from? We're told St. Francis of Assisi said it, he disavows all knowledge of it, according to the internet anyway. “He never said it,” he says, or at least some Catholic scholars are saying he never said it.

Well, it doesn't matter whether he said or not, some evangelical so called are saying it. You wanna know what they're saying? Just let the gospel ethic, just the good life that comes from being a Christian, just so shine around the people of your lives that they're just gonna get saved by watching you, how good you are. Well, to start, I would suggest, if you're married, just ask your spouse if that's gonna cut it. Alright? Am I just so good that people just by watching me are just gonna wanna come into the kingdom? And that will end your career right there on that one. “Preach the gospel. Use words, if necessary.” Let's try this one on for size: “Feed starving children. Use food if necessary.” Friends, the food is necessary to feed the starving children, and the words are necessary to get these people saved. We've got to proclaim this message, we've gotta tell them about Jesus, we've gotta speak to them. That's the method that God has chosen, the preaching of the gospel, and he's got reasons for doing it, but I don't have time to say it, it just humbles us to just hear a preached message and believe it, and we get saved.

Thirdly, look at the scope. It's going to be done in the whole world. In the whole world. Jesus' eyes are on the whole world. Sitting on that rocky Mount of Olives looking out over Jerusalem before his death, he's thinking about the whole world. Yes, he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, but his heart was always for the whole world. Now, the Greek word here means “the inhabited world,” the places where people live. I believe that sin, the curse of sin has made some uninhabitable places of the world. I don't think it was that way from the beginning, but it's that way now. And so therefore, this is not talking about uninhabited places, but actually the Greek here intensifies it, “the whole of the inhabited world.

The gospel is going to be preached in the whole of the inhabited world, not a single inhabited place will be missed. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So there's no strategy needed for the uninhabited portions of the world, you don't need to go to Antarctica, you don't need to go to Northern Greenland, you don't need to go to the seabed of the Pacific Ocean and preach to those nasty-looking creatures down there. We're going where people are living their lives, the inhabited world, that's where we're going, and we're going to preach to them.

And what is the purpose? Well, it's going to be preached as a testimony, it says, to all nations. The word testimony, in my mind at least, brings the sense of a court trial, some kind of a proof's given, this kind of thing. It's an effort to persuade. And so the proclamation is going to be an effort to persuade, to prove something, to perhaps reluctant audience. And the nature of the proof has to do with the identity of the King, King Jesus. Who is he? What did he do? And of their need to repent and come into the kingdom. They need to have a testimony about this, the evidence of the deity of Christ, the proof of his miracles, the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw him physically, bodily, raised from the dead on the third day. We're gonna give testimony about these things, we're going to give persuasions.

The evidence that the prophets brought forth that Jesus didn't suddenly appear on the stage of redemptive history, but his coming was long expected. Come thou long expected Jesus. He came in fulfillment of the prophets. We've got to bring all of this evidence out and reason with people, and explain and prove from the scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.

There's a testimony there, and it's going to be given, it says, to all nations. Again, we have this Greek word “ethne” from which we get “ethnic,” it has to do with the understanding that we in missions have come to really relatively recently, that it's not enough to go just to the political nations, like the political nation of India. William Carey brought the Gospel to the political nation of India, years, centuries ago. But Donald McGavran, a missionary there, a very careful observer of cultures and languages and customs and habits, said, “You know, there are just thousands of different people groups or identifiable ethnic groups, ethnes, so to speak, here in India. We've got to take the gospel to each one of them.” And so there is this understanding that we're going to cultural, linguistic, identifiable people groups.

And they need to hear the gospel. Jesus is saying they will. Jesus is saying they're going to hear. Every ethnic group on the face of the earth is going to have a clear proclamation of the testimony of the Gospel. 

And what is the result? Then the end will come. The end will come. For us who have believed in Jesus, it's a good end. For those who have not believed in Jesus, a dreadful end, more than you can possibly imagine, but the end is going to come. We're not going on like this forever. The end is coming.

Alright, well, that's word by word, through the verse. Let me talk now about the power behind this prophecy, there is a power behind these words. These are not idle words spoken by some man sitting on a rock. This is the Sovereign God telling us what he's going to do. The absolute sovereignty of God. Only God, in my opinion, can make any kind of certain statement about the future; none of us can. I mean, that's even down to the small details of weather, or who wins a sporting event or other things like that, only God knows really.

But how much more is it true that only a great God can make a great proclamation like this and make it come true? The sheer number of things that would have to happen to make this occur are boggling to the mind. No one missionary could do all this. No one generation of missionaries could do all this. It was too immense even for the faith-filled and faithful apostles to achieve, too big a job for them.

Christ is predicting the mobilization of generation after generation of men and women who will be willing to lay down their lives for the cause of the gospel. Christ knows full well that some of these servants will die in the effort, they will fall into the ground and die, in the language of John 12. He knows that, and what Christ is stating here is, no matter how high the cost, this is going to get done.

So how can that happen? How can he be so certain? How can we know that this most certainly will come to pass? The sovereign power of Almighty God guarantees this. And specifically, the link down to earth is the power of the Spirit of God over individual human hearts to turn them from sin and selfishness and get them to do his will. And I think that's powerful. That he can do that. Acts 1:8, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.” And you're not going to be able to live the way you used to be living. You're not gonna do the same things you used to be doing. When the Holy Spirit comes on you, you're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. You will go when the Spirit comes on you.

Take a minute, and I wasn't gonna do this, but look over in Ezekiel 2. I think this may be the simplest statement you'll find in the whole Bible about this power that I'm referring to here, the power of this sovereign Spirit of God over your heart and mine. Look at Ezekiel 2:1-2. “He said to me,” this is Ezekiel, “he said to me, ‘Son of man’” - that was God's name for Ezekiel - “‘son of man, stand up on your feet, and I will speak to you.’” Verse 2, “As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet.” That's about as simple, mathematical as you're ever gonna get. The command comes, “Stand up on your feet.” The Spirit enters, and he found himself standing on his feet. That's the first step of the missionary journey right there. I'm praying that the Holy Spirit will come on us and get us to stand on our feet, and to do the things that God has commanded us to do. And he has that power. And there is a mysterious combination between the command, “Son of man, stand on your feet,” and the Spirit coming and empowering obedience to that command. It’s a mystery, you can't have the one without the other. We have to have the sense of the command of our king, but then the power of the Holy Spirit to make it so. So go back to Matthew 24:14, but I think this is the display of it, the Holy Spirit has the power to transform our selfish hearts and turn them to God and to others. He has that power.

Jesus, in Matthew 9, “When he saw the crowds, that they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out laborers into his harvest field.’” Well, the words “send out” in the NIV are a bit tame. “Ekballo” is the Greek word. “Throw them out.” Alright, it's the same word used for casting out demons, the same kind of power that can cast out a demon can thrust out laborers into the harvest field. Amen and Amen.

He has the power to come on you and get you to change the whole way you live, so that from then on, you're doing something different. Change your career, you change your life, you change the direction and the flow of your life, and you do something different from then on. Now, here he's saying, “Ask the Lord of the harvest to do it.” So he's involving us in God sending out the Holy Spirit to do that. It's just amazing how deep and mysterious all this is, but we are to pray to the Lord of the harvest saying, “God send them out, drive out those laborers into the harvest field."

And so I think what we're talking about here is a holy compulsion that just comes over you, you're just compelled by the Spirit, as Paul refers to in Acts 20. “And now compelled by the Spirit, I'm going to Jerusalem.” There's a compulsion of the spirit. There are examples of this over and over in the Bible. Look, for example, at Jeremiah 20. Don't turn there now, but in Jeremiah 20, Jeremiah comes to God and says, “Oh Lord, you deceived me about my job description, you never told me how awful it would be to do this job.”

Aside, I'll say it again. I think Jeremiah had the hardest ministry in the Old Testament. I would rather be anybody in the Old Testament than Jeremiah. What a tough, tough job to be there, to be the one to turn out the lights on Jerusalem when the Babylonians were done with the place, to sit there over the hill and weep over it, as flames are just dying out and the smoke is rising and everyone's dead or gone. And you get to be the one to predict it and be there when it happens. And to be hated by the ones you are... Tough ministry.

But at any rate, Jeremiah goes back to his employer, back to God and says, “You deceived me, oh, Lord.” But then he goes on and says this, “If I say I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name, his word is like a fire in my heart. It's like a fire shut up in my bones. I'm weary of holding it in. Indeed, I cannot hold it in.” That's a compulsion that comes over you by the Spirit, you can't do anything but this work of God.

So also the Apostle Paul. His work was linked together with his salvation. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” “I am Jesus, the one that you're persecuting. Now, get up and go into the city and you'll be told what you must do.” Well, the word “must” became pretty obvious to Paul immediately what that meant. He had no choice. And so in 1 Corinthians 9:16, he says, “Yet when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe unto me if I do not preach!” That's a compulsion of the spirit that comes on

And how does it work? Well, I've thought about this and I think it works by love. I really think what happens is the Spirit comes and moves love in our hearts. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, it says, “For the love of Christ constrains us” - or compels us or controls us, different ways to translate that - “because we have concluded this, that one died for all, and therefore all have died, that he who died for all should no longer live for themselves, that we should no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died for us.”

Basically, there's a kind of lifestyle I'm proclaiming here today, lifestyle of full on flat out obedience to the Great Commission in whatever role God has for you. And the alternative is that you should live for yourself. Those are your two options. I really believe it. It really just comes down to that. And Paul is saying that we should no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died for us and was raised again.

Well, what moves him to do it? The love of Christ constrains us. Now, I meditated on that phrase, it's a little tricky, and I think it may even be meant to be. What is this love of Christ constrains us mean? Is it the love we have for Jesus or is it the love that Jesus displayed in his life for sinners? How about both? How about we don't choose? How about we love Christ so much we want to get on a ship and go and say, “May the lamb get what he deserves,” that we can live like that. I just love Jesus, am filled with the love that I have, that Jesus get what he deserves. The love of Christ, the love we have for Jesus. Or could it be the kind of love that Jesus displayed for sinners in dying on the cross for them? I wanna live like that. I think it's both.

But in any case, it constrains us. The same Greek word is used in Luke 12:50. Jesus speaking about his own crucifixion, “I have a baptism to be baptized with. And how constrained I am until it's finished. I can't turn to the right or the left, I've got to finish this work.” Well, again and again in church history, servants of Christ have spoken like constrained people. They've talked like this.

Hudson Taylor is a prime example. He was called to be a missionary to China. He went there, he had some very indifferent experiences with the mission agencies. The missionaries were all on the coastline of China, none of them venturing out much into Chinese society, they're living comfortable lives in the mission stations, and he was becoming disillusioned. He decided to go native, go inland to become kind of as Chinese as he possibly could be. He went with the Chinese hairstyle and garb and all that, so much that people that saw him and knew before thought, they didn't recognize him at all, thought he was just a Chinese man.

The mission group there rejected his methods entirely and his zeal, they didn't want any part of him, so he went back to England for many reasons, but to raise support. And then he says this, he was just thinking about the inland regions of China. On Sunday, June 25th, 1865, he said, “Unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security while millions were perishing for lack of knowledge. I wandered out on the sands alone,” listen, “in great spiritual agony. And there the Lord conquered my unbelief.” He had seen a map of China, and he called it the accusing map of China, had huge sections of the country, none of them had ever heard of Jesus, called it the accusing map. And this was the burden on him, the inland regions. “In great spiritual agony, and there the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service. I told him that all of the responsibility as to issues and consequences must rest with him; that as his servant it was mine to obey and follow him, his to direct, to care for, to guide those who might labor with me. Need I say that the peace of God at once flowed into my heart. It was indescribable.” So there's a man constrained. He lived the rest of his life for this one burden, and that was to bring the Gospel to the inland regions of China.

Now, this prediction of Jesus, is it fulfilled? Can I say the words with great joy? Almost, almost, but not yet. I know it's not yet 'cause we're here. Jesus hasn't come back yet. He said, “And then the end will come.” The end hasn't come, there's still work to be done

But there's less work to be done now, a lot less than there was 50 years ago. The progress has been astonishing. Friends, this isn't a losing battle. If you're a bandwagon person, this is the bandwagon to jump on, this is the one to pitch in on and get involved. This is the one to invest your life in. This one. This is going to win. It's amazing, there's not a geographical nation on earth that doesn't have a vibrant church. That could not have been said 25 years ago.

I mean, all of the United Nations type nations, all of them have witnesses. That was not true when I was in college. The Berlin Wall was still standing then, there were countries like Albania, others like Mongolia, Morocco, some of those Northern African nations, Muslim nations, there were no churches there, that's no longer the case. Praise God. And then once Donald McGavran gave the idea of the unreached people groups, they started counting them, and the count down's been going down.

24,000 in 1950, the estimate was. When I was in college, the number was 17,000. In 1992, it was down to 11,000. In '96 estimates put it around 9,000. It's about half of what it was when I was in college. Today, joshuaproject.net, who keeps track of these things, puts the number at 6,644. It just keeps coming down. And many, many local churches have adopted unreached people groups and have just made it their focus to be sure that there's a Gospel Church planted in that unreached people group. It's just incredible the kinds of things that are happening, I don't have time to go through the statistics. Bottom line is the church is exploding and growing all the time.

Listen to this, in A.D 100, there were 360 non-Christians, estimate, 360 non-Christians for every one believer. Today, the number is seven to one. Get this one, this is even better, I love this. In A.D 100, it was estimated that there were 12 unreached people groups per local church congregation. Today there are 500 local congregations for every unreached people group. See, all we need to do is get the other 499 congregations together and choose an unreached people group and go reach them. Boy, they're gonna be overwhelmed when all 500 churches show up to reach that one unreached people group. 

Friends, this is a doable task, but there's still work to be done, there's still just four billion people have never heard the name of Jesus. Most of them, the 10/40 window, the longitude lines there, the 10/40 latitude lines, the 10/40 window. Muslim nations, India, China, there's a lot of work to be done, and it's still true that Americans spend... American evangelicals spend more money on dog food than they do on missions. May it never be.

Bottom line, can I say this just application, let's rejoice in the sovereignty of Christ, let's see what he's achieved already, let's give him the praise and the glory of 20 centuries of astonishing achievement. Say, to God be the glory for what you have done. To God be the glory for raising up men and women who are willing to lay down their lives for the Gospel.

And be confident, very confident in the final outcome: he's going to win. 

Based on Matthew 9, pray confidently to the Lord of the harvest to send out, thrust out, laborers into the harvest field. Pray it a lot, pray it fervently. Pray it confidently. But you know what might happen if you start praying that prayer, you know what might happen? He might actually send you out into the harvest field. Pray for it. Draw near to God every single day.

If you don't have a heart for the nations, if you don't have a heart for missions, it's because you're distant spiritually from God, this is his heart, he's made it plain everywhere. Kevin quoted, I think it was Psalm 67, that's God's heart, that the nations might praise him. If that's not your heart, you're distant from God. Draw near to God, fix your relationship with God first, repent of known sin. Have your quiet times, draw close to him, and say, “Lord, give me a heart for the nations, and give me a heart for the lost coworker that's in the next cubicle.” It's all of a piece. It's all together. So draw close and ask God to give you an unreached people group to pray for. Go to joshuaproject.net and choose one. You get to pick the continent. I mean, whatever you want, go pick one and pray for it for the rest of the year, 2010.

And this is the one that convicted me the most, it is absolutely guaranteed, absolutely guaranteed that Jesus will finish this, that this promise will take place, but it's not guaranteed that I'll have anything to do with it. There's no Bible verse that tells me that, I, Andy Davis, will have anything to do with Matthew 24:14, or you. There's no guarantee that FBC Durham will be having anything to do with this at all 20 years from now. We have got to be faithful. We have got to say to the Lord, “Make me... Please don't pass me by, please don't leave me behind, please don't, as you move on ahead in success and triumph, leave me out. I wanna be part of it, Lord. Give me a burden, give me a heart after the nations, give me a heart after missions, so that I can be part of what you're doing in the world. And make sure that my local church is part of it, too. I don't wanna go to a church that's not not doing this, I'll leave that church. I wanna be a part of a church where this command is our command. This prediction is our command, we are moving out based on this, praying for unreached people groups, praying for the missionaries we have sent out.”

Pray that FBC would be a launching pad for missions. We've seen a lot of brothers and sisters go out from here. Heavenly, what a joy. But I would say the overwhelming majority, if not all of them, came in here with a preconceived or pre-sense of call to the missions, and what we did was, we tried to shepherd that and be good stewards of it and furthered it long. Praise God that that happened. But I'd like to see someone who comes in here even today, without even any thought of missions, and then through the ministry of the church, through the influence of other brothers and sisters in Christ, develop that call and we launch them out in five years. That would be awesome. Wouldn't that be great? Pray that that would happen in this church. Close with me in prayer.

Well apparently, according to some, the world is going to end on December 21st, 2012. You know, it just might. I mean, the Lord is sovereign. But it's not going to end on December 21st, 2012, because the Mayan calendar says it will. Despite all of the experts that have studied those hieroglyphs and those other things, and the History Channel programs on the 2012 phenomenon, and the recent popular movie about the year 2012 and solar flares sending radiation across 93 million miles of space and heating up the Earth's core like a microwave, until the mantle on which the continent sits, melts, and a major water flood covers the earth, I know that's not going to happen. Don't you, Bible believers, know that is not going to happen?

But you know, I tell you, the 2012 phenomenon is just more evidence in the long line of evidence that we are morbidly fascinated with the end of the world, doomsday scenarios, this is just natural to the human heart. We are fascinated by it. We are interested in it. There are many different scenarios that people discuss on how it will happen.

Since the nuclear age, there's been something called the doomsday clock, which some bureau of atomic scientists set after 1947, after the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, set at seven minutes till midnight. Seven minutes till the end of the world by nuclear blast. And it actually, they would change it based on certain current events, and so, when, in 1953, both the United States and the Soviet Union experimented with a new form of nuclear blast, a thermonuclear blast that was so much more powerful than the atomic bombs, that had been, they set the doomsday clock at two minutes to midnight. That's the closest it got. It relaxed a bit to six minutes shortly thereafter, where it stayed through the Cuban Missile Crisis, interestingly. I would have thought they would have moved it up a little bit during that time, but they kept it there. It's presently at six minutes till midnight now.

They added some environmental issues like, global warming to it, so that's factoring into the setting of the minute hand. They don't have a clue, friends. I'm not saying there's no Christians, I'm just saying, wherever they put that minute, it doesn't make a difference for when the Lord will return. All I'm saying is that this is a fascination that people have with it.

There are so many different movies about these end of the world scenarios. You've probably seen a few of them. The earliest one I ever saw was Planet of the Apes, in which a nuclear holocaust had just wiped human civilization from the surface, it's a reverse evolution thing, and then, whatever, you don't need to see it, but you know, that was the nuclear thing. There's the pandemic that wipes out this huge quantities of the earth's population, some kind of virus or something that's genetically developed and we can't control and that wipes it out. I Am Legend follows that approach. Global warming gives us oddly enough a new arctic age in The Day After Tomorrow, so that had... It has a backlash, there's reasons for it, I guess, and we end up.

I find it interesting in all of these movies, there's some people you're following, they are the movie version of the elect that you're following through, and they always make it through. Have you noticed? They always somehow survive through, which is another human aspect, we want to survive Doomsday. 

And the amazing thing is, first of all, there actually will be a Doomsday. And secondly, you can survive it in Christ, and that's what we're getting to in Matthew 24, isn't that marvelous? The end of the world is coming. It is, there is going to be an end. This isn't the Hindu kind of cyclical thing going round and round, birth and rebirth, that kinda thing; there will be an end. There was an Alpha Day, and there will be an Omega, a final day in this world history, this age, this eon that we know, it will come to an end.

And Matthew 24 and 25 is talking about that. And so, we're beginning really, I'm sure it's going to be a lengthy study in this chapter. I've already come to the conclusion that the next two sermons, if God lets me live, and if we're still here, and I don't say it facetiously, but if the Lord wills and we live, the next two Sundays are going to be on one verse each, amazingly. Matthew 24:14, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come,” deserves a full sermon by itself, and it will get one.

And then, in my opinion, the next verse also deserves a full sermon by itself and it will get one, 'cause I get to do that being up here. So, and that's going to be interesting, because Matthew 24:15 isn't even a completed sentence. I'm gonna preach on a sentence fragment, a whole sermon on a sentence fragment. “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the Prophet Daniel, let the reader understand ...” That's it. What should we do? Well, that's the next sermon, the answer is, run for your lives. We'll get to that, but I wanna just give a whole Sunday to the abomination of desolation, so that's where we're hearing. I'm already off my time, and this was a 50-minute sermon this morning, so we better get going. 

At any rate, at the end of Matthew 23, just, let's set it in context. Jesus gives the seven-fold woes to the Jews. It's a very, very significant moment in redemptive history. Because they have rejected God, God has in some way rejected them, and so, there is this complete perfect seven-fold woe spoken by the ultimate, the greatest, the perfect prophet of God, Jesus. Spoken to them seven times, woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

And the chapter comes to an end in Matthew 23 with these just heart-wrenching words, and you just have to read the Bible and all that God has done with his people, his love for Israel, and all of that and embodied in his Son Jesus. And he stands there and says, it doesn't say in the scripture, but you can just imagine with tears coming down his face, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Behold, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you that you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” Immediately go to the next chapter, verse 1, “Jesus left the temple and was walking away.”

So that's where we go, we're going right from that, those amazing words, “Behold, your house is left to you desolate, for you're not gonna see me again,” and then he walks away. It's just hugely significant. Big, big moment. I believe this is an embodiment of the glory of God leaving the temple, just leaving. I think that the Shekhinah, the dwelling glory, that's what “Shekhinah'” means. “Mishkan” was the Tabernacle, the dwelling place with God, the dwelling glory in the Tabernacle, and then in the temple, it represented God's desire to live with us, to be with us, to be with his people, to live with them. And the Tabernacle, the tent, the temple, the building with a foundation, they are both temporary, but symbols of God's desire to dwell with his people.

The glory cloud was a symbol of that, and in both cases, a miraculous appearance of this glory cloud showed God saying, I am willing to live with you. Amazing Grace. But in Ezekiel, the glory cloud departs the temple, goes to the threshold, goes in stages, but eventually just leaves, and why? Because of their wickedness, because of their sin, leaves. Jesus leaving the temple embodies that. The glory cloud was a symbol of Jesus, it's really what it was. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” and so, we have seen his glory, it says in John 1, he was the glory of God for Israel, and he leaves now, Matthew 24:1.

And at that moment, the disciples who are us, come up just, no idea what's going on. No idea of the significance of this moment in redemptive history, and just wide eyed-with wonder at the magnificence of the temple. Just amazing. Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came to him to call his attention to its buildings. Mark 13:1 gives us this. “They said, ‘Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!’” Aren't you glad for the disciples? I mean, aren’t you glad for the Apostles? They just, they're us. Like I said in my prayer, we don't always know what God is doing, and so they represent us and, they just, the timing is terrible on that statement. But actually beautiful too, because it gives Jesus a chance to speak into their ignorance and their misunderstandings of what he is going to do. They did not understand the significance.

Now, some commentators have taken the approach that these are just country people, they're country people from Galilee, from the outliers, the outlying region, they didn't get to the big city much, and they're just country hicks and they're like... With their mouths agape at the skyscrapers. But you have to realize, they had to come to the city three times a year, at least. They've been there regularly. Really what they're doing is, they're including the love of their lives, their savior into their wonder, which is actually a good thing to do, including Jesus in your amazement and wonder. So I don't fault them for it.

Some of those stones were amazingly large. Josephus tells us that one of the stones in Herod's temple was 45 feet long. One stone, 12 feet high and 18 feet in width. So I had to calculate the weight of a stone that size. I just, I can't let some aspects of engineering go. And so, I went and found out the density of granite, which I figured it would be, 1.6 million pounds on that one stone. Amazing. So, and the building itself was apparently amazingly ornate and beautiful and just visually appealing.

There was marble, there was gold, Herod spared nothing. He was a tyrant, a wicked man. Wicked man, read about it in Matthew 2, with the slaughter of the infants. But he had this adorned temple. And Rabbis commenting from the first century said, “He who has not seen the temple of Herod, has never seen a beautiful building.” It's the Jewish way of saying this was the most beautiful building on earth.

And it is natural for us as human beings to marvel in human achievement, to be amazed at what we can do, the technology, the architecture, to be amazed at that. From the tower of Babel through Nebuchadnezzar's evening walk on the roof of his palace, looking out over Babylon and saying, “Is this not the magnificent Babylon that I have built for the praise of my glory,” and that kind of thing. We have always been amazed at what we can achieve with our hands.

But God is not so impressed with us and with what we can achieve. Stephen quoted an Old Testament scripture in Acts 7, when God says this through the Old Testament prophet, and then again through Stephen to the Sanhedrin. God saying this to us, “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, or where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things?” God apparently is much more impressed with what his hands can do, and so should we be.

God yearns for us to have a broken-hearted humility toward human achievement, toward what we can do, what we have done with our hands. We have sinned. That's what we've done with our hands, and God wants us to tell the truth about that. And with broken-hearted humility with tears and with faith, come to Jesus and find forgiveness, not be amazed at human achievement, even religious achievement. Maybe, I would say, especially religious achievement.

And so, Jesus at this moment makes a shocking prediction to them. “Do you see all these things,” verse 2, “Do you see them all? Look at them. I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” Wow. Again, Jesus, the greatest teacher that has ever lived, in this case uses an object lesson. Look at them. Look at the stones. Take a look at them. They're big, aren't they? Huge, ornate. I tell you that not one of them will be on top of another.

Humanity tends to build, like the Tower of Babel, tends to build upward, we tend to go up. I think it's a grasp after deity is really what, we tend to go up. There are practical reasons for going up, but I'm just telling you, tends to go up, and these stones are coming down, that's what Jesus says. Everything lofty will be humbled. Everything that exalts itself against God will be thrown down to the ground.

Now, this prediction actually did happen, it's unclear whether Jesus is referring to the temple alone or the whole city of Jerusalem. Because I don't know what his hand gesture is when he said, “Do you see all these things?” We know the whole city was destroyed, so it could be that Jesus was predicting the destruction of the whole city of Jerusalem, as it is a little clearer in Luke in another place, he's talking about the whole city. But either way, temple, whole city, it's gonna be destroyed.

Josephus tells the story. Josephus was a Jewish historian, who acted as a mediator between the Jews and the Romans during the years leading up to the war, the Jewish War. But in 70, in AD 70, the temple was destroyed. The city was destroyed by the Romans, they went beyond the Roman edict. Titus, who was in charge of the army, he eventually would be Emperor, he was there. He commanded restraint. But they just couldn't stop themselves, their hatred for the zealots was so great, and a little structure burned near the temple, and pretty soon the whole thing was burning and then they wanted the gold and just pretty soon, Jesus' words were fulfilled. They were.

It was destroyed, the whole city was destroyed. And Josephus tells the story, the details, I have a quote from Josephus, we don't have the time for it. But it happened, it really happened, and you can go to Jerusalem and see the wailing wall and I’ll talk about that in another sermon, but the fact of the matter is, it happened, Jesus' words were fulfilled, Jesus was not a false prophet. Jesus told the truth and the city was destroyed in fulfillment of Jesus' words.

And the significance of this theologically cannot be measured. It's huge, it's a huge moment. The destruction of the temple in 70, in AD 70, was a huge moment in redemptive history, not a minor moment. And I'm gonna make this clear in the abomination of desolation sermon, but God has a habit regularly of trashing his own sanctuary, of having it trampled by Gentiles. He does it again and again, we'll get to that. It's just what he did. And he predicted in the song of Moses that he would do it. He said, “You're going to forsake me, you're gonna go after the idols of the Gentiles, so I'm gonna bring the Gentiles and they're gonna trample you.”

And therefore, it is what Jesus calls “the times of the Gentiles,” that's a designation in which God is primarily by his grace, a sovereign power working among Gentiles, not Jews. That's what this time is. And so, the verses we're looking at today from Matthew 24:4-14, those verses. I said in my overview sermon last week, that describes in general terms what life is like between the first and second advent of Christ, between the first and second coming of Christ. And those times are the times of the Gentiles, that's what it is. It's the time in which God is primarily directing his actions towards the nations of the world and bringing them in in a vast, glorious harvest. Bringing them in through faith in Christ, by the spread of the gospel, he's working in the nations. His gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

So this is the time of the Gentiles. He speaks specifically of that phrase in Luke 21:24, “Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” In the book of Acts, Paul always goes to a synagogue first, and in a key moment, he says, “I'm through with you, your blood beyond your own heads. From now on, I'm going to the Gentiles.” Very significant, and that's exactly what happens here.

Also, and I think just as significant is the official, clear, obvious to anyone who's looking, end of the old covenant. It's the end. Curtain in the temple torn in two from top to bottom wasn't enough. We'll get to that. The destruction of the temple should have been enough. It won't be, we'll get to that as well. But at any rate, God is saying, “I am finished with animal sacrifice, it's done.” God will never again accept the blood of an animal for a religious spiritual purpose. He will never be pleased with it again, I am not a dispensationalist, I don't think there are two different ways of getting at God. There is one new man out of the two, Ephesians 2, he accepts only the blood of Jesus shed once for all.

Read about it in the book of Hebrews, dear friends. It is finished. And so, in Hebrews 8:13, speaking of the new covenant that God predicted in the times of the old covenant, through Jeremiah the prophet, that God would make a new covenant with the house of Israel, with the house of Judah, the forgiveness of sins, at the center of that new covenant, as it could not have been with the animal sacrifice. In Hebrews 8:13, it says, “by calling this covenant ‘new,’ he's made the old one obsolete. And what is obsolete and aging will soon pass away.” Interesting there, the author of the Hebrews gives us the word “soon.” You know why? It was before 70 AD. Now it's gone. And they cannot obey the law of Moses, they can't. Oh, they can offer a bull or a goat, they can do that kinda stuff, but they can't do it in the one place God chose among the nation, among the tribes, Jerusalem, he can't do it there. The Muslims won't let them. So we'll get to all that in due time, but the fact of the matter is, the time for that is finished, so a big-time significant moment in redemptive history.

So, obviously this statement in verse 2 must have rocked their world. I think they still expected Jesus to set up shop in a paneled palace with a golden throne with them, with six thrones on each side. One of them, right and the left, James and John being right at the right and the left, 'cause mom asked, that's another passage, but that's what they figured. Jesus is gonna be there, and I think they assumed the animal sacrifice would be going on in the temple, praising God. All of this was, they just did not understand yet that Jesus had to shed his blood for them and for their sins or they would be disqualified from anything good from God. They would deserve only wrath from God, they didn't understand that. Not really.

And so they're stunned. And in verse 3, it says, “As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. ‘Tell us, they said, when will this happen? And what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’” Now, it was wise for them to ask this in private. Mount of Olives was a place of refuge for Jesus, he'd get out of the city, too hot in the city, and I don't mean thermally, I mean, just relationally, just so much anger and hatred. And so, Jesus would go in the evenings to Mount of Olives, Gethsemane was there. Gethsemane means olive press. That's where, it was a place of refuge, and he's sitting there.

And as it turns out from the Mount of Olives, I've never been to Jerusalem, but you can see the city just spread out, and so you can imagine Jesus sitting on a rock or something on the mount, and they're looking out over the city as they're having this discussion. Powerful. So they come to Jesus privately and privately was the best way for them to discuss the statement. If Jesus had gotten up on a podium in downtown Jerusalem and said, “The Temple is going to be destroyed,” I don't think they could have heard that. I don't think the populace could have handled that. All of the stuff that he's about to predict, I don't think they can handle this. I think the apostles themselves had a hard time handling it, and so, it's a private discussion.

And so, they come to him and they ask him these questions in a complex swirl. When will this happen, the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple? When will this happen? And what will be the sign of your coming? The word “coming” is “parousia,” it's an important word in eschatology, end time teaching. And Jesus, I believe had already taught them this word, this concept of “parousia” coming. It's in almost all the parables, the absentee master who returned. So, they're already starting to get it, but they don't quite get it. And of the end of the age, the age is going to end. We're coming into a new age of the kingdom, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as is in heaven. They already were starting to think about these things, but didn't get it, so they wanna know.

And I think that these threads that just are woven together in their minds and they come across the rest of the Chapter, it's what makes Matthew 24 so delightful and so complex to interpret. At any time, you're not sure if Jesus is talking about the destruction of the temple, or is he talking about the end of the world and his second coming and all that? How do you know? Three separate issues.

Now, in my opinion, I believe one of the key hermeneutical or interpretive principles for this chapter is found in verse 37. Go down to verse 37, Matthew 24:37. And there it says, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of Son of man.”

Now, actually Jesus says also in Luke that same statement, but another one besides, “As it was in the days of Lot, before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, so it will be at the coming of Son of Man.” He actually gives us two “as it was, so it will be” statements. What that means is that God has crafted history to give us dress rehearsals. And so stuff happens in history that is a lot like what it's gonna be like at the end of the world. 

And he actually does a lot of that, he gives us lots of dress rehearsals. A key example of this is in 1 John, which is the only verse that mentions the word antichrist, it's the only one. The concept's in other places, but the word is only mentioned in 1 John 2. “You have heard that antichrist is coming, but even now, many antichrists have come.” There is one final antichrist, he's coming, we'll talk about him. But there are many antichrists along the way, and John describes what he means by that.

So there are dress rehearsals and then the final act, the final thing. And so it is, I believe, with the destruction of Jerusalem and then the second coming of Christ. I actually think the reason that it's so hard to unravel is that as it was in the days of the destruction of Jerusalem, so it will be when Jesus comes back, it's gonna happen again. And it's actually pretty complicated to assert that in light of the book of Hebrews, but this is what I think is gonna happen. We're gonna talk about that in due time. That's why a sentence fragment gets a whole Sunday in two weeks. But we'll get to that in due time, but we're gonna see this again.

Now, the first thing Jesus says to get them ready is he warns them against spiritual deception. Look at verses 4 and 5, “Jesus answered: ‘Watch out that no one deceives you.’” Verse 5, “‘For many will come in my name claiming “I am the Christ,” and will deceive many.’” I've said before, just a great maybe the greatest danger in every church age is false doctrine, false teaching, it attacks the Gospel itself, which is the only power of God there is in this world for salvation. And so, it's like AIDS that goes after the immune system, vital to our lives, so false teaching goes after the gospel.

And so, it's part of the job of an elder to defend the gospel against attacks. We've got to do that defense work, and so, that's why your elders have to be sharp doctrinally, because they need to discern how Satan is attacking the gospel and defend it. But there's gonna be these false teachers, false christs, false prophets that are coming in Christ's name and they're going to say, “I am the Christ.”

And it's interesting, one of the hallmarks of cult leaders is their appeal to eschatological things, end time things. So many cult leaders come and say, “The end of the world is imminent.” It's happened again and again in church history. It's a regular pattern.

Like during the Reformation in the 16th Century, right during the time of Martin Luther, there was a group of people called the “Zwickau Prophets,” and they went around preaching Millenarianism, the thousand year reign is about to come. They were led by a man named Thomas Muntzer. They proclaimed that the return of Christ was imminent, the day of God's wrath and judgment was very near in hand, they believe they were the elect, the chosen ones, the Zwickau Prophets were, to announce the arrival, the impending arrival of the kingdom of God, and that the true saints would inherit the earth and get this, they themselves were to impose the kingdom using the power of the sword. Well, you can imagine what happened. They were defeated militarily, and were executed, those that survived the battle.

Around that same time, a little later though, in 1533, a man named Jan Matthys of Leiden came to the German town of Munster and set up a polygamous theocracy. Polygamous means in the pattern of the Old Testament kings, he had multiple wives. And many of them had multiple wives, and it was a theocracy, God ruled in this town through this man as the prophet, you see. And so, Matthys declared that Munster was in fact the New Jerusalem considerably smaller than the book of Revelation had said, but at any rate, there it was, that was the New Jerusalem and he was in charge. And the town became so bizarre that the only thing the Catholics and Protestants in the region could agree about was that it needed to be besieged and destroyed. And so, the Catholics and Protestants together took out that town. While they were being besieged, this guy Jan Matthys, who he thought, he believed he was spiritually the successor of King David, took 30 of his best men and rode out to meet this besieging army. Needless to say, they were captured immediately and executed. It happens again and again, it happens all over the world.

In China, there was a man named Hong Xiuquan, in 1837, after hearing some Christian missionaries, he had some visions of his elder brother Jesus. Jesus was his elder brother, and he called on this man to purify China of demon worship and bring in a heavenly kingdom of transcendent peace. On January 11th in 1851, he led the Taiping Rebellion, he was eventually defeated and committed suicide.

Well, is that going on now in our era? Yes. You've heard of ghe Moonies, Sun Myung Moon from Korea. He has designated himself to be the successor to Christ, get this, to finish Christ's unfinished work. And on, I didn't know this, on March 23rd, 2004, he crowned himself Messiah at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, with some senators and representatives there, photo-op, the new Messiah.

David Koresh, you've heard of him, Branch Davidians. Claimed to be the final prophet, end of the world imminent. FBI and ATF agents came to the compound there, you remember in Waco, Texas, and destroyed it.

And there's this man from Puerto Rico, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda who claims, get this, to be both the Christ and the antichrist at the same time. Now, there's a confused individual. How would you like to do counseling with him? But he has the number 666 tattooed on his forearm and he preaches to followers in 35 nations, mostly in Latin America, has 287 radio programs and a 24-hour Spanish language TV network. I'm gonna ask Herbert afterwards if he's ever heard this individual. You have, alright, well, we'll talk about him later. You don't believe him though, do you? Good. Alright. Encouraged.

Jesus warns us to watch out for these kinds of people. And here's the beauty of it. Can I just say, Go right to the heart of the matter. The beauty is Jesus' warning is effective for us. It's effective for the elect, the sheep will not follow these guys, they just won't.

We have an anointing from the Holy One, and we know the truth. You know it when you hear it, you just know good doctrine when you hear it, don't you? You're listening to some preacher, you don't even know his name, it's like, that's right or it's wrong. You just hear it. But we need the warning, because Jesus is giving it to us here.

And so, later in the same Chapter, in Matthew 24:23-25, look down and see it, says, “So at that time, if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear,” listen, “and perform great signs and miracles” - Wow, they're going to do it friends, great signs and wonders - “to deceive even the elect, if that were possible. Behold, I have told you ahead of time.” That collection of words is huge for me. He's warning them, this is what they're going to do to deceive the elect, if that were possible, implying it's not, and the reason it's not is I've told you ahead of time.

So part of my job is to tell you ahead of time, watch out for these folks. Watch out for false teachers, especially eschatological style false teachers. And the culmination of that will be the antichrist, the greatest deceiver that has ever lived as a human being. And I'm gonna tell you why in due time in the next sermon, after the 24:15 sermon, why you have to run for your lives if you're alive at that time. You can't take him on. He's just too strong. The power of evil will be so pervasive in this individual, his wonder-working ability, miracles, that he will be able to do, you can't handle him. And so, the advice, the command, Jesus gives you is you run for your life.

And we'll get to that in due time, but in 2 Thessalonians 2, it says, “The coming of the lawless one, the antichrist will be in accordance with the work of Satan, displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs, and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish, because they refuse to love the truth, and so be saved. And for this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.” God's sovereignty goes in places you and I can scarcely understand or imagine. But basically, if you won't believe the truth, I'll send you a lie. And so, we, the elect, the true sheep of God, we have loved the truth, we embrace the truth. We're not gonna get taken in by this, but we still need to run for our lives. We'll get to that later.

All right, so the first thing Jesus does is, he gives us that warning against false teachers, next he gives us an overview of what I call the spasms of a dying world. And it's been dying since Adam took that fruit. It's not anything new, and that's the whole thing. This stretch of Matthew 24, you really need to see it for its sad ordinariness, is what it is. Its tragic ordinariness. And if you don't think it's ordinary, you don't know much about history frankly. But I think that you do know enough about history to know how ordinary these things are.

Look at what it says. “You'll hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you're not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There'll be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. 

This is the wickedness of humanity, wars and rumors of wars. I lost track of the number. I did some research a couple of years ago, the number of wars there have been since the United Nations were set up, it's in the hundreds and hundreds. I don't know what, but wars and rumors of wars are nothing new, and they do not mark out or identify any era of human history. Frankly, since Cain killed his brother Abel, we have been en route to wars and rumors of wars right from that very start. It's in the nature of the human heart to assemble together, power, military power, and go after someone and take what they have. It's been going on all this time.

Empires rising and falling is the history of the world, and it's going to continue right to the end. Why did the Roman army destroy Jerusalem? Because they were fulfilling prophecy? They were all Christians doing God's work? Not at all. They destroyed Jerusalem because they thought it was in the best interest of the empire. They were just doing what they do. It's what the legions did, they wanted Pax Romana, they wanted organization and peace and quiet and tax money rolling in and harvest rolling in and everybody happy under their boot, that's what they wanted. But if people got uppity, if they got rebellious, they would bring in the legions and guess what? The legions would win. And that's what happened to Jerusalem, they're just doing what they do. Wars and rumors of wars. The zealots, I don't think they were doing it for the glory of God, they wanted their own kingdom, that's what they do. It's what the human heart, the unregenerate human heart does.

And those current events, friends, are gonna continue to swirl in every generation. There's not gonna be some lull with no current events for X amount of time before Jesus comes back. I mean, the New York Times, CNN, they're just, stuff will be happening, right up - Lots of stuff, actually - and then Jesus will interrupt it all. Actually, this is for this very reason that Jesus is coming back. The wickedness of the human heart, the wars, the rumors of wars, the hatred we have for one another, the native hatred, the covetousness we have of our neighbor's goods, this is why these empires rise and fall. And Jesus is coming back to end it.

But it's not just human to human, there are spasms of the earth itself described here, famines and earthquakes in various places. And that just shows you how general this is. Well, which places? Various places. Where? Well, just look on the computer, do some research on earthquakes in the last thousand years. There have been some. There have actually been a lot, and in fulfillment of the prophecy, they've been in various places. I mean, there were two major ones quite recently, one in Port-au-Prince, one in Haiti, and one in China. They just keep on coming.

The Bible doesn't specifically mention volcanoes blowing their top in Iceland and putting an ash cloud over the northern part of Europe, so that a week of flights in and out of Northern European cities are cancelled and backlogged. But I believe all of this is a picture of an earth convulsing and writhing under human sin.

Groaning as in the pains of childbirth, it says in Romans 8. This world is under a curse because of us. God put it that way. “It was subjected to futility,” Romans 8, “not by its own choice, but by the will of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” But meanwhile, we get famines and earthquakes and volcanoes and floods, and tidal waves and mudslides and pandemics and other natural stuff that just comes and it's just horrible.

And Jesus calls it the beginning of birth pains. And again, as a man, I can't understand that except by sympathy. I saw my wife go through it with our children, I've heard it's agonizing. Jesus chooses it as an example of great pain, not small pain, but great pain. But a different kind of pain, isn't it? Birth pains are different than cancerous tumor pains. And what's the difference? Well, Jesus says in John 16, “after the baby is born, she forgets the grief for joy that her child has brought into the world.” Oh, hang on that friends. We're heading to something glorious and beautiful. Yes, it's just the beginning of birth pains, and it's not going to be easy to get there.

Friends, no one here, no one sitting here, no human being sitting here will get out of this place unscathed. We are in a world of pain, and the only way to get through it is great pain and difficulty and trouble, some more than others, I acknowledge. Walter Martin, the Bible answer man, was taken while kneeling in prayer. O Lord, that sounds good. But most of us don't go that way. Most of us, like I preached for you on Easter Sunday about David Brainerd. Oh, was that... I wasn't sure I should even preach that, but it's tough to die, and it's tough to be with those that die. It's not going to be easy to get out of here into the next world. But when we do, oh, it's gonna be beautiful. The beginning of birth pains.

And then he gets to what I call the costly growth of a living kingdom. “You'll be handed over to be persecuted and put to death,” said Jesus, “and you'll be hated by all nations because of me. At that time, many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other. And many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold. But he who stands firm to the end will be saved.”

Now, this is a unique special kind of suffering. This is the suffering of the church, the suffering of believers that we will have. Hatred is going to increase at the end of the world, persecution will be both informal and formal. Informal will, you know, pseudo-brothers and sisters in Christ, the false ones, the nominal ones. They're not going out of the Church easily, they're going to betray us, they're gonna turn us in. Turn us into who? Well, to the formal persecutors, those are the government forces. And in some countries, they know exactly what we're talking about, the governmental laws against Christianity and you're betrayed and turned in for your faith. And they persecute you, they put you in jail, they torture you.

That's going to escalate and increase until it's consummated in the age of the antichrist, when it will most certainly be illegal to be a Christian. And nominal Christians cannot handle that, and they will sell out their brothers and sisters in Christ to improve their own position in the new world order. They're gonna betray and hate each other. And the love of most will grow cold. This is a great trial of faith. But you remember the parable of the seed and the soils, and there is that stony ground here that at once receives the word with joy, but when the sun comes up on trouble, persecution comes because of the word, they quickly... What? What do they do? Well, they fall away.

So Jesus says, you know, they're going to turn away from the faith. That's called apostasy. You think, well, if you're reformed in theology, we don't believe in falling away from the faith. Well, these are nominal Christians, this is what they are, they are stony ground hearers. And they can't handle the persecution, and they go out from the church, they go out from us, because they're not really with us or part of us.

But verse 13, just put it in your brain, put it up on your mirror. “How do I know, Lord, if I'm a Christian?” Well, “He who stands firm to the end will be saved.” The greatest mark of regeneration is perseverance in the faith through difficulty, that's it. Day after day, month after month, year after year, still loving Jesus, despite the temptations, the sins, the struggles, the attacks, the trouble that Christ has caused you, if we can even use that expression, the trouble the word has brought into your life, you're still loving him, still believing in him, that's the mark of a Christian. Now, next week, I'm going to talk about verse 14, so I literally will say nothing about it right now.

The gospel of the kingdom will spread, and that is my first application. What is this gospel? Well, how are we gonna get out of here and go into the next world, except by that gospel of the kingdom. Come to Christ, come to Christ. I don't know that the world is going to end later today, but I already said last week, we have to be ready for that. Jesus isn't asking your opinion on eschatology when he comes back, he'll come when he comes.

So it might end later today, but that's not the issue; you might end later today. You might end later today. You might die later today. And after death comes judgment. Are you ready for it? You are a sinner. And so am I. Apart from Christ, you are not ready for it. You will weep, you will wail in hell if you're not a Christian. You will grieve, and you'll wish you could have come back to April 18th, 2010, when it was quiet and peaceful and sitting on a comfortable pew, and this man stood up and told me about Jesus and how Jesus shed his blood for me, and that if I had believed in Jesus, all of my sins would have been forgiven, and God would have seen me as perfectly righteous in him, trust in Christ. That's the answer here.

This is the purpose of all of this is to redeem sinners like you and me. Come to Christ, come to him for salvation. I tell you, the cross of Christ is the only thing that makes any sense of human history. I don't understand it other than that. And it doesn't make any sense. One hymn writer put it this way, “In the cross of Christ I glory, towering o'er the wrecks of time.” It's the only thing that makes any sense over the wrecks of time.

But also come to Christ for wisdom, alright? You're a Christian, alright, you already came to Christ for forgiveness, well, then come to Christ for wisdom. Go to Mount of Olives, metaphorically in your minds, spiritually, sit at Jesus' feet and say, I don't get it. I don't understand. Teach me, teach me the end of the world, teach me what Revelation means, teach me Matthew 24. Teach me what it means that this generation will not end until all these things have taken place. I wanna know what this means, teach me the deep truths of the faith.

And he will do it through this word, not through private subjective impressions. He will teach you what these words mean, what these nouns and verbs and adjectives mean and how they relate to other ones, and it's gonna be a lifetime study. Ask him for wisdom and he will give it to you. Be confident that God wants to tell you more than you wanna know. He wants to give you wisdom, Matthew 13:11, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.” Come to Christ and ask.

And realize that history has a direction. And that's what Matthew 24 is about. We're heading somewhere friends, we're heading somewhere. We're heading toward the new heaven and new earth, we're heading toward the second coming of Christ. It's not gonna go on forever. It will not go on forever. And though people have oftentimes thought the end of the world was imminent and it wasn't, it doesn't mean the end of the world isn't coming, it is. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, said Jesus, the first and the last. It is coming. Believe in that and accept it.

And rejoice in the end of the sacrificial system, be glad you don't need to go to the temple in Jerusalem and offer an animal for your sins. It's done. Jesus said, “It is finished.” His blood is shed. You are, if you're a Christian, you are forgiven. You're forgiven. Isn't that beautiful? The righteousness of Jesus is yours. And that animal sacrifice is over, it's finished.

And do not trust in human achievements, don't rejoice in the temple and the size of its stones and all that. Don't rejoice in the beauty of this building. I'm glad that this building is beautiful and comfortable, it's a good thing. But everything you see around you will come down some day, all of it. All of it will. Focus instead on Jesus' achievement, on Christ's achievement for you, focus on that. I have many other applications to say, but if God wills, we'll have more chances to talk about Matthew Chapter 24:14, let's say a closing prayer.

Well, this morning it's gonna be a little bit different sermon than usual. I am generally a verse by verse expositor, and if I were to do that to these two chapters, we'd be here literally all day, I think. So I'm not going to do that, but rather what I want to do is just give you a vast overview of two of the greatest chapters in the Bible, Matthew 24 and 25. Jesus teaches on the end of the world.

I think it's natural for human beings to have a fascination with the future. All over the world people strain to guess at what cannot truly be known apart from the direct revelation of God, and that is what's going to happen in the future. False religions are replete with efforts and techniques that people have used to try to discern the future. Ancient Greek and Roman polytheism utilized priests that would seek to read the future by examining the entrails of sacrificial animals, the liver being of special importance for that purpose. They would also observe weather phenomena, the movement of the clouds, lightning, and other things. They would look for omens in everyday life, extraordinary circumstances, things like that.

The renowned Roman orator Cicero, who wrote on divination, belonged to the Roman College of Augurs. Now an Augur evaluates the presence or absence of divine blessing by omens. They were the official state-approved interpreters of omens. And no election could be held, no war could be initiated, no law could be passed without favorable omens. So also the Oracles in Greece, like the Oracle of Delphi, where there were prophets and prophetesses, supposedly in direct connection with the gods and goddesses, whose ability to foretell the future was coveted.

In ancient Babylon, the Chaldeans were a special class of people that studied the stars, in particular, to try to discern the future. They also were experts at interpreting dreams. In the British Isles, the Druids studied black arts like necromancy and divination and sorcery to seek knowledge about the future. Merlin the sorcerer was one of these, that kind of figure, making predictions about King Arthur and his eventual ascendancy to the throne.

The ability to predict the future has, throughout history, been connected with the ability to make money. I mean, if you were to talk to an average non-Christian and say, if you could know in detail the next year, what would you do with the knowledge? They'd immediately say, I'd make money. I'd find out what things to invest in, or what to gamble on, and I would be amazing, my bracket would be perfect. I'd have the first perfect bracket in ESPN history, and I would be able to make money. But that connection between fortune-telling and money is seen right in the scripture in Acts 16:16, Paul and Silas in Philippi, they said, “Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl, who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling.” And Paul and Silas then delivered the girl, cast out the demon. The owners were enraged and had Paul and Silas beaten publicly, because they had in some way slain the goose that laid the golden eggs. So the long-standing yearning to know the future continues, even to this day, people are hungry and thirsty to try to discern the future. I think this is why the Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies. People are interested in knowing what's going to come.

Now, I say to you this morning as I've said many times before, the ability accurately to predict the future is God's and God's alone. It's a glory that God reserves to himself. And the only ones that really know, the only human beings that really know the future are those who have received that information from God. Because God is sovereign over all of human history, and “Many are the plans of a man's heart, but it's the Lord's purpose that prevails.” And so, he alone can tell us what's really going to happen. And it's a glory he reserves to himself.

Many verses in Isaiah, especially in the 40s, testify to God's unique ability to predict the future. Isaiah 42:8-9, “I am the Lord, that is my name. I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols. Behold, the former things have taken place and new things I declare. Before they spring into being, I announce them to you.” That is his unique glory. He says in another place, “Bring in your idols and see if they can tell you anything at all.” Let's see if they can tell the future, let's see if they can declare anything at all. But they can't, because they are nothing and less than nothing and their works are worthless. Isaiah 45, He issues the same challenge. “Declare what is to be, present it - let them take counsel together. Who foretold this long ago? Who declared it from the distant past? Was it not I, the Lord? And there is no God apart from me. A righteous God and a Savior, there is none but me. Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other.” So God's claim to be the unique savior of the world, the only God there is, is a link there in those verses to his ability to predict the future, he is the only one that can do it.

Now, in the Bible, the Bible is filled with prophecies, all kinds of predictions of the future. Many of them have already come to pass. But the center of prophecy, biblically, is the person and work of Jesus Christ, that's the center of prophecy. And so, in Revelation 19:10, it says, “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” And so, in the Bible, first and foremost, prophets proclaimed the Christ, his sufferings and the glories that would follow.

Now, here in Matthew 24 and 25, we have the Christ himself predicting the future. We have Jesus sitting on a little mountain off to the side of Jerusalem, making statements sweeping out across the rest of human history, right to the end. It's sometimes called the Little Apocalypse or the Olivet Discourse, because it was on the Mount of Olives that he gave it. Some years ago, I heard from John MacArthur, one of my favorite sermons of all time, it was entitled, “A Jet Tour Through The Book of Revelation.” It was 70 minutes long as I remember, and he took on all 22 chapters of that book. Now, I don't agree with every little detail, but it was a fascinating sermon. I'm not gonna take a jet tour through the Book of Revelation, 22 chapters, what we're gonna do is look at two chapters alone. And we're just gonna try to fly across them and look at the grand structure, as though we're taking back in the 19th century a balloon ride, and for the first time you can just see all the farmland and see everything stretching to the horizon. And then, as God permits us time, we'll go back over these chapters and look section by section.

So we're gonna begin this morning by looking at this grand teaching of Jesus on the future. And the context here, as we've been seeing, this is the final week of Jesus' life, he's been in hot debate and argument with His adversaries. It culminates in Matthew 23, The Seven Woes. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites,” the repeated refrain as he deals with the hypocrisy of the spiritual leadership of Israel. And it culminates in these astonishing words at the end of Matthew 23, “O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Behold, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you that you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

And immediately after that, Jesus leaves, and the disciples come up to him and talk to him about the temple. It says in verse 1-3, “Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. ‘Do you see all these things?’ he asked, ‘I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another, everyone will be thrown down.’”

So Jesus is there clearly predicting or prophesying the destruction at least of the temple, and really by implication, of the whole city of Jerusalem. And this was absolutely shocking to the disciples. I think they were just amazed at it, and so they came to him privately, they never imagined that this was going to happen. They did not understand what God was doing in Jesus.

And so, they come to him privately and they ask this private question. And to them, I really believe it probably was just one question, but it really actually comes at us in three different parts. When will these things be, namely the destruction that you alluded to? Not one stone left on another, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of your coming? And what will be the sign of the end of the age?

Now, dear friends, the complexity of Matthew 24 and 25 is in unraveling those three strands. At any moment, as you're reading, is Jesus talking about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD? Is he talking about the second coming of Christ, the tribulation? Is he talking about the church age in between? What is he talking about? And that's the complexity, and there's so many different interpretations. This morning, you hear mine. But there are other people that will come and give you different ways of looking at this chapter.

What I'd like to do now is just pause and just give you quickly an overview of this whole section, just going across. Basically, there are four great truths in this chapter. The first great truth is in verse 14, Matthew 24:14, and that is this, “This gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” The proclamation of the gospel to the end of the world, to every nation, is the first great truth in these two chapters. Secondly, verse 21, Matthew 24:21, “then there will be a great tribulation or distress unlike any there has been in history and never will be again.” So the teaching of the great tribulation is there. The third great teaching of these two chapters is in Matthew 24:42, “You do not know when the end will come, you do not know the day or the hour.” So the Lord keeps us in the dark concerning the exact time. And the fourth great teaching of these two chapters is in Matthew 25:31-32. And there it says, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory, and all the nations will be gathered before him. And he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he'll put the sheep on his right and he'll put the goats on his left. And then he will consign each of them either to heaven or to hell, the sheep to heaven and the goats to hell.”

These are the four great teachings of these two chapters. I know there are many lesser teachings, but these are the four pinnacle teachings. The gospel is going to advance throughout the world, and then the end will come. Secondly, it's a time of tremendous tribulation and distress and trial. The world is gonna go out with a scream and a wail of agony. It's not going to be easy. Thirdly, we do not know the exact day or hour of the Lord's return. And fourthly, Jesus is going to assemble every human being that's ever lived, and they're all gonna stand in front of him, from every nation and tribe and language, and he will divide them into two categories, based on whether they believed in him or not. These are the four great teachings of these two chapters.

There are three implications in these, three commands, three applications that come as well, more than that really, but these are the three I've chosen. In Matthew 24:13, you need to stand firm to the end. He who stands firm to the end will be saved. We need to persevere in our Christian lives. We need to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, it says in Philippians. We need to keep going in the Christian life, right to the end. Secondly, Matthew 24:42, you need to be ready and to keep watch, because you don't know at what time the master of the house is returning. So you need to be ready or vigilant at every moment of your life for the second coming of Christ. And the third great application is, you need to be faithful to what God has entrusted to you to do. Look at verse 45, 24:45, “Who then is the faithful and wise steward whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his house? It'll be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns.” So persevere to the end, be ready at every moment for the second coming of Christ, and be faithful to do those things God has entrusted to you to do.

So those are the four great teachings, and those are the three great applications. So that's the, kind of, overview of the overview. Now, let's go, kind of, through all of the sections of these two chapters. But you already have a sense of the main ideas of this chapter, alright? The first thing we have in verse 1-3, we've already seen the three-fold question of the disciples that sit there and Jesus begins to answer.

Secondly, in Matthew 24:4-14, we have, I believe, Jesus' description of life on earth between the two comings of Christ. Between the first and second coming of Christ, what is life going to be like? Look at these verses. Beginning of verse 4, “Jesus answered, ‘Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, “I am the Christ,” and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you're not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time, many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

So I really believe that's just describing life in this troubled, sin-cursed world between the two advents. It's what he's describing. Between the first and the second coming of Christ, this is what life is going to be like. Wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, various places, general statements of trouble in the world. And I don't think it's possible for any era or any age of the church to look and say, “Hey, this is coming true now. There's a famine going on in this place, there's an earthquake going on in that place, and there's a war in that place, and a rumor of war over there.” Can you tell me a century in which that didn't happen? That's just a general description of just how tough it's going to be to live in this world before the Lord comes back to end it all. 

It's the old order of things, and it's the writhing and churning of nations who do not know God, and all of the pain that comes as a result of that. And then within the walls of the church, it talks about the troubles that we Christians uniquely will face; persecution, suffering for our faith, being betrayed by those who were supposedly brothers and sisters in Christ, but under the pressure of persecution turn away and turn in their brothers and sisters in Christ. And so, he urges that call to all generations to stand firm to the end. And if you stand firm to the end, then you will be saved.

And then this glorious statement that really just kind of stands on its own even out of its context, but what a beautiful thing it is, and we'll talk about it in due time. But we can't look at it enough. Matthew 24:14, “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. Just hear your Lord speaking so definitively about these things. Hear his sovereignty concerning the Great Commission. This is a promise, this is a declaration of future fact that only God can make. This gospel will most certainly be preached all over the world as a testimony. And the end will most certainly come, that's what he's saying. So that's the first section, and that is the description of life between the two advents.

The next section is the horrors connected with the destruction of the temple. Look at verses 15-25. “So when you see standing in the Holy Place the abomination of desolation, spoken of through the prophet Daniel - let the reader understand - then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, but no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in the winter on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress” or great tribulation, “unequal from the beginning of the world until now, and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened. At that time, if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if that were possible. Behold, I have told you ahead of time."

So I believe that here Jesus is at least answering their question, the first question they ask, “When will these things happen?” Go back one step before that, Jesus said, “Do you see all these stones? I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another, everyone will be thrown down.” Destruction of the temple. Then they ask, “When will the temple be destroyed?” Jesus, I believe, is here at least answering that question.

Now, why do I say at least? Because there is a theory that the temple will actually be rebuilt right before Jesus returns. It's a fascinating theory. It's deeper than you might think, and I'm gonna devote a whole sermon to it, and I'm not telling you right now what I think, so we'll just move on. 

But the fact of the matter is, the abomination of desolation at least is talking about the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD. We have to admit that Jesus answered their question, and here he's describing just how horrendous that event will be. It's going to be demonic, and it's going to be human all at once, and it's gonna be horrible, and a million or more people will die. And he is giving a warning specifically here to the church, the elect, what to do when they see it happen. Run for your lives. That's what he's telling them to do. Now, will this be re-enacted again, we'll get to that in due time, but that's what he's talking about here.

The next section in verses 26 through 33, moves rather remarkably and somewhat seamlessly to the second coming of Christ, and for that reason, because he just goes right from the abomination of desolation to the second coming, it seems, that people say that the temple will be rebuilt, we'll talk about that in due time. But this section, I do believe, is talking about the second coming of Christ. The first section, I think, isn't so much because he says, “If anyone says that Christ is coming, don't believe it, because I'm not coming then.” But now, immediately in the next little section, that's when he is coming.

Look at verses 26 through 33. “So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is out in the desert,’ do not go out; or ‘Here he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather. Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the nations of the Earth will mourn. They will see the sign of the Son of Man coming on the clouds with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” Verse 32, “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. And even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door.”

So here, I believe, plainly, Jesus is talking about his second coming. He says it will be visible to everyone, there will be no secret coming. He doesn't come in the night while we're sleeping and whisk people away. I won't get into the doctrine of the secret rapture, but I think it's impossible to see any of that here. This is an open, visible, obvious second coming, no faith needed. And that's the great tragedy of it, because the day of faith will be over. The time for justification by faith alone will be done when they see the Lord with their own eyes.

And if they had not come to faith in Christ while there was time, they will only see him in judgment, and they will be among the goats separated from him, put at Jesus' left hand, and how dreadful will that be. That's why it says, “All nations of the earth will mourn.” You don't need any faith to see the second coming of Christ, it'll be the lightning that flashes from one end of the sky to the other, obvious to everyone.

And he's gonna send out, he says, his angels, and they will find all of the elect, and they'll gather them up. As John the Baptist said, as wheat into the barn, he's gonna gather up the wheat. And so you get your own angel ride if you're a believer, alright. He's gonna come and get you, and he's going to bring you to Jesus, you're gonna be collected with Jesus. And the angels will come get you at the last trumpet. The gathering of the elect worldwide. And he knows, it says in 2 Timothy, “The Lord knows those who are his.” There's no doubt about it. He won't miss any of them, He'll gather them all, all of the elect, and bring them together.

The lesson of the fig tree is, you won't be in the dark about the coming of Christ. We're not in the dark, it says in another place. We will be able to see evidences and signs. I believe there are certain sections of scripture that don't make much sense to us now, but they will make much sense to those who are in the final generation. I'm not saying we're not the final generation, but basically when we need light to come from the scripture, it will come. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then read the last chapter of Daniel, and try to tell me what the 1,335 days are. I have no idea what those are, but I think some category of people will know exactly what those days are, and they will know what to do with that information. Right now, we don't need it, and so we're in the mystery, and so we write commentaries and we preach sermons, and we don't really know. But there will be one final generation and they will know exactly, and the leaves will come out and say, “Look, the time for fruit is near.” And they will know exactly what to do with that information. You don't know when, but you do know the signs.

The next section, Jesus says immediately concerning that very issue, you don't know exactly when it's going to come, so you need to be ready all the time. You need to be ready all the time. Look at verses 37 through 44, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. From the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, right up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. And that is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field, one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill, one will be taken and the other left. Therefore, keep watch because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. Understand this, if the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him."

We need to be ready at every moment, at any moment, and this is the mystery of Christian eschatology. We don't really know for sure what's going to happen. We don't know exactly when He's going to come. And so we have to be ready. 

If you look back at verses 34 through 36, Jesus says something that's very difficult to interpret concerning this, we don't know the time, and he says that even he doesn't know the time. Look at what he says in verses 34 through 36, “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Difficult verses, we'll talk about them again in due time. Jesus, some people said, makes a mistake here. Can you believe they actually even say that, that Jesus thought that these things would happen within one generation and they didn't? Can I tell you something? If Jesus is wrong about this, he could be wrong about anything he said, and therefore he's a false prophet and not worth listening to. It says in Deuteronomy 18, “Don't listen to him. Stone him.” Therefore, the Jews were right to put him to death because he was a false prophet. Jesus is never wrong. It doesn't mean I know what this means, I'm just saying Jesus is never wrong.

Clearly, these things did not all take place within one generation, so then I'm left with this verse trying to interpret it and I'll do the best I can, but clearly also Jesus admits to not knowing something. And again, this is a mystery here, but I think it has to do with the limitations of the incarnation and his physical life on Earth. He was God all the time, but he wasn't in some mysterious way omnipresent all the time, He couldn't be in many places at once. That's why he said, “It is to your advantage that I go away, because if I go away, I'll send the counsel of the spirit, and then I'll be with you always, even to the end of the age.

And so in a mysterious way, in some way, for the Father hid this information from Jesus while he was speaking these words. I do believe he knows now exactly when he's coming back. But from that assertion, he then says we have to be constantly vigilant. 'Cause you don't know when it's going to happen. And life is just gonna go on, it's just gonna keep on going just like we've always known, just like it was in the days before the flood, people are gonna be just eating, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage, all kinds of plans, women will be halfway through their pregnancies that there'll be all kinds of... Life is just gonna go on just like it has. 2 Peter, people are lulled into thinking that coming will never happen because life just keeps going on more or less like it always has.

The Lord Jesus is gonna come and interrupt it all, he's gonna come and interfere, he's gonna come and stop it, just like he did in the days of the flood. And people will be side by side, and the angel will come and get one and leave the other, he's gonna gather his elect, remember? And so he's gonna get one and they'll be working side by side, one will be taken and the other left. Two women working in the kitchen, one taken and the other left. Again, I don't think this is talking about the secret rapture, but I think it's talking about that collection of all of the elect at the time of the second coming.

In the next section, Jesus then says we need to be constantly faithful. Not only constantly vigilant, but you have to be constantly faithful. Verse 45 and following, “Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time. It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose that servant is wicked and says to himself, ‘My master is staying away a long time,’ and then he begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him, at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces, and assign him a place with the hypocrites where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Now, it's amazing to me the number of parables that Jesus tells that have to do with the principle of stewardship of a master entrusting property to a servant. And then at some point later on, expecting an answer concerning the stuff that was entrusted. It's a major principle in many of these parables. And so here he's saying, “Who is the faithful and wise steward?” It's the one who is doing the right stuff when the master comes back. He doesn't know when the master is coming. The master kind of interferes whatever that steward is doing. Woe to that man who is not doing what the Lord entrusted into his care. Woe to him, he'll be cut to pieces, it says, and assigned a place with the hypocrites. And so that the major lesson here is, we who are servants of Christ, we are entrusted with some things from him, he's given us some things to do, and we need to be faithful right to the end to do those things or else suffer the punishment of hypocrites who do not know the master's will.

Therefore, in chapter 25, having established these two great principles, keep watch, be constantly vigilant, principle number one there at the end. And then, be faithful to do what the master entrusted into your hand. These are the two parables that he gives us right away in Chapter 25. The parable of the virgins, five wise and five foolish, basically teaches the lesson, be vigilant, be ready now, you don't know when he's coming, so be sure you're ready right now for the second coming of Christ. The Parable of the ten virgins, be constantly ready. Look at verses 1 through 13, chapter 25. “At that time, the Kingdom of Heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps, but did not take any oil with them. Wise however took oil and jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight, the cry rang out. ‘Here's the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, give us some of your oil, our lamps are going out. ‘No,’ they replied. ‘There might not be enough for both us and you. Instead go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.’ But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived, the virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet and the door was shut. Later, the others also came. ‘Sir, sir,’ they said, ‘Open the door for us.’ But he replied, ‘I tell you the truth…’

[We apologize, due to a technical malfunction this sermon was cut short.]

Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on John 6. The main subject of the sermon is how we have hope that we will be raised on the last day by Christ.

We’re here this morning to celebrate the incredible victory of Christ over death, his glorious resurrection. We’re here to celebrate that he who shed his blood on the cross, whose lifeless body was taken down from that cross, wrapped up in strips of linen, with myrrh and aloes, he whose corpse was laid in a cave, a cold cave, a massive stone rolled in front of the entrance, this very one has come alive, on the third day, and sits at this present time at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. We’re here to celebrate the victory of someone else, the triumph of someone else, the glory of someone else, of Jesus Christ. But you know, as I was thinking about it, at it’s root, all true Resurrection Day or Easter celebrations are really a celebration of our own future resurrection in him. The fact that Jesus has distributed widely abroad to every nation on earth, the fruits of his victory. It’s for us that he came. We are his prize. We are what he got by taking on a human body. Christ’s crowning achievement is that multitude greater than anyone could count, from every tribe and language and people and nation, that someday we will be standing in resurrection bodies around that throne worshiping him, in white robes, praising him for the victory, radiantly, shining like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. We are Christ’s resurrection victory. And so it’s right for us to celebrate what Christ did on our behalf and to look ahead to our own resurrection through him. Jesus said in John 14:19, ” Because I live, you also will live.” So we can extend this concept, “Because I was raised from the dead, you also will be raised from the dead. Because I will never die again, you also will never die again, once you have received that resurrection. Because I have a resurrection body, you will have a resurrection body. Because I live in the presence of the Father, you also will live in the presence of the Father.” 

"We are Christ’s resurrection victory. "

And so we, today, celebrate Christ’s resurrection victory by looking ahead to our own resurrection victory. And no chapter in the Bible speaks so clearly of the certainty of Christ raising us from the dead as does John 6. So look there in your Bibles, if you would. Take your Bibles and look along with me. We’re going to be just unpacking the significance of a phrase that Jesus states four different times in John chapter 6. Four times Jesus states this phrase, “I will raise him up at the last day.” The last day is Judgment Day, and Jesus is plainly teaching here the bodily resurrection of anyone who believes in him. John chapter 6 teaches number one, the eternal plan of the Father for our own bodily resurrection. And number two, the giving of Christ’s physical body, his flesh and blood, to enable us to live forever. Number three, the absolute necessity of faith in Christ so that we can be raised from the dead. Number four, the complete inability of we sinners to come to Christ on our own. And number 5, the absolute power of God to bring us as sinners to Christ. And number 6, the absolute certainty of our final resurrection in him. So let’s dig into this marvelous chapter and just celebrate its glorious teachings. 

 First, our resurrection, as proclaimed by God the Son. Look at verses 39 and 40, it says, “ And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.” Verse 40, “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” Again, verse 44,” No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.” And then again in verse 54,” Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” This is, for me, the most awesome promise in the Bible. I want you to feel the weight of that. I want you to feel the joy of that. He’s gonna raise us up at the last day.

This is really actually an odd chapter to be preaching on Easter Sunday, ‘cause it doesn’t mention Jesus’s resurrection at all. So you’re wondering why in the world are we doing this? I hope I’ve already explained that. Because Jesus’s resurrection is ours, and Jesus’s resurrection is the pattern of what he promises to do for us here. This is a thing, unfathomable and mysterious, worthy of mockery, I think, by many philosophers and scientists and atheist, unbelievers. Paul, when he was preaching on the resurrection of Christ from the dead and our future resurrection in him, on Mars Hill, in Athens surrounded by all these philosophers. It says in Acts 17:32, “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered.” Perhaps you felt that sneer at different points of your life. There are some that sneer at the resurrection. “How can it be?” they say. We die. Our lifeless bodies shut down, our circulatory system no longer works, cells die. Corruption begins immediately, decay, the stench of death, as of bad meat on a hot summer day. The bodies are buried under the ground, worms are able to consume all but our skeletons. In some cases, the skeletons themselves are consumed in flames, like the sad victims of the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center, 767s crashing into these buildings, 92 people on one flight, 65 on the other, their bodies entirely incinerated in the heat, nothing left. And yet Jesus is promising, here in this chapter, to raise them up on the final day, if they believed in him. How can it be, they say. 

And the Bible teaches we will be raised to an eternal physical existence. Jesus’s resurrection, which we celebrate today, was a bodily resurrection. He said this to his disciples in Luke 24.”’Why are you troubled and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, ’Do you have anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.” This is a bodily resurrection, we’re looking forward to! And a week later, he told doubting Thomas to put his finger in the wounds in his hand and the side, and to come to that conviction that Jesus had been physically raised from the dead. 1 Corinthians 15 makes it plain that this is exactly what we will experience as well, a bodily resurrection from the grave. 1 Corinthians 15:22-23 “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.” And then at the end of that chapter, “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.” I love those words, ‘cause it tells me what I’m going to get. I’m going to get an imperishable, glorious, powerful, spiritual body and I’ll be in it forever. How awesome is that? 

And these verses also tell us who is going to raise us up. It’s going to be Jesus himself who will raise you, personally. He’ll come and get you. Like the bridegroom, his bride, he’s gonna come and get you up out of the tomb, personally. He says four times, “I will raise him up at the last day.” Just as he had taught earlier in John 5, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out.” Jesus pictured this multiple times in the Gospels. Those were just resuscitations, not resurrections. The dead were raised into the same life they’d experienced before they had been sick and died. But they were foretastes of what he’s gonna do for us all on that final day. He raised Jairus’s 12-year-old daughter from the dead by getting down with her and taking her little hand and looking her in the face and saying,”’Talitha cumi,’...Little girl get up.” In Nain, he raises the widow’s son from out of his coffin, and it says in Luke 7,”He went up and touched the coffin…” Jesus is just right there,”And those carrying it stood still. He said,‘Young man, I say to you, get up!’ The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.” And of course, most famously of all, Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus, where it’s his own voice that calls into the darkness of the tomb, “‘Lazarus come forth!’, and the dead man came forth, his hands and feet wrapped in strips of linen.” And so John 6 teaches very plainly, it will be Jesus’s own voice, it will be Jesus himself who raises you as a believer, raises you up out of the grave.

And when will he raise you up? When will it happen? Well, it said four times, “I will raise them up at the last day.” This is the final day of human history. In this present era, this present age, the end of the world, Judgment Day, the end of this present era of death and mourning and crying and pain. No more of that! On the final day of that, he will raise us up on the last day and death, the final enemy, will be defeated. Hallelujah! Paul teaches the same thing in 1 Corinthians 15. “Christ, the first fruits [is raised], then at his coming those who belong to Christ.” Or again, at the end of that same chapter, 1st Corinthians 15. “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed-- in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” So there it is, the last day equals the last trumpet, and all the plagues and judgments and the wrath of God depicted so vividly in the book of Revelation are finished, when the Lord returns on that white horse for war, and he takes on the armies of the wicked, defeats them, and the antichrist is defeated and thrown in the lake of fire. And so four times in John 6, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, proclaims our future resurrection from the dead. He proclaims it. He says it. It hasn’t happened yet. We have to believe these words. All we have is the proclamation here. The Son of God proclaims it will happen. John 6 teaches us much more about our resurrection than that.

The origin of it is the plan and command of God the Father. That’s the second point. Our resurrection is planned and commanded by God the Father. Look at verses 38 and 39,”For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.” Christ entered the world ultimately as a man under authority, coming to do the bidding of his Father. He entered the world to rescue the elect, the chosen ones from death. These verses 38 and 39 teach that Christ had a definite purpose in entering the world, and that was to do the Father’s will. He wasn’t here to do his own will, he says. By this we do not mean he disagreed with what the Father wanted him to do, but that he wasn’t operating independently from the Father, but he was here to do the Father’s will. He came down from heaven to accomplish the Father’s eternal plan. And this is an eternal plan, a plan from eternity past. This, the Father’s plan was crafted before the world began. Many verses teach this in the Bible. The verse reveals that the Father’s command to the Son thus occurred before the world began as well. Before God said,”’Let there be light,’and there was light.” Before God made the heavens and the earth, before there was sun, moon, and stars, before there was a sky, before there was ocean and dry land, before there were fishes swimming in the ocean, and birds flying through the air, before there were beasts of the earth, and before there was the first man and woman. Before any of that, this plan had been crafted.

 Before the foundation of the world, God chose to give to his son a love gift. People. The Bible calls them the elect, the chosen ones, who will most certainly come to faith in Christ in due time, and that Christ would rescue them from the grave. He says, “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” This language Christ uses for the chosen ones. They were love gifts from the Father to the Son before the world began. The Son agreed to take them on, he agreed to love them, he agreed to receive them and to die for them, and to raise them up on the final day. And thus our bodily resurrection from the grave, on the last day, was planned by God the Father, commanded by God the Father to God the Son, and Jesus entered the world to carry out his Father’s command.

Third, our resurrection was paid for by God the Son. Dear friends, it’s not free. It is not free. It is incredibly expensive. As a matter of fact, it’s more expensive than you can possibly imagine. It’s of infinite cost that we’re gonna be raised up on the final day. And it was Jesus that paid the bill. It was paid for by God the Son. This is after all, we’re speaking of a resurrection from death. And death in the Bible is clearly portrayed as a penalty for sin. From the very beginning God said to Adam, “But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” And by that one act of disobedience, Romans 5 says, sin and death entered the world. Romans 6:23 says,”For the wages of sin is death.” Ezekiel 18:4,” The soul who sins shall die.” And so the just payment for our sins was our own death, and I don’t just mean physical death, but I mean an eternity in Hell, under the judgment of God. And in order for God the Son to rescue us from that eternal death of Hell, he himself had to pay that death penalty on the cross. And so John 6 makes it plain that Jesus took on a human body with flesh and blood, in order to give that body, that flesh and blood body, as a sacrifice for our sins. And only in this way could we sinners be raised from death to live forever.

So our eternal life has a source. Like all life, all physical life is dependent life. Nothing lives apart from God, and God set it up that way. Biologically, now we can see that the plants need carbon dioxide, they need sunlight, nutrients, they need water to live. So also animal life needs air and water and food to keep on living, to survive. God created, physical life dependent on him to provide. And so our resurrected life in Christ is dependent life. We are dependent on him to keep living. Well do you think Jesus is gonna keep living in heaven? Dear friends, death no longer has any mastery over him. He will live forever, and so will we. But we don’t have an independent resurrected existence. We basically in effect forever feed on Christ’s resurrection so that we can keep on living. Now, the context of John 6 is the day after the feeding of the 5,000. Remember how Jesus fed that huge crowd out in the desert with five loaves and two fish? Everybody got a portion. Everybody ate their fill. They filled themselves with what Jesus had done, and they were satisfied. 

But you know how it is with the stomach. The sun goes down the next day and, you know, you feel a little hungry. As a matter of fact, I’ve noted the day after Thanksgiving, the more you eat, the day before, the hungrier you are the next day. Have you ever noticed that? And so they were there. Where’s Jesus? They have to find Jesus, and he’s over there in Capernaum. And they’re saying, in effect, “What you did yesterday, let’s keep doing that. That was really, really good. And then we can quit our jobs, and it’s just gonna be a great, great life.” And Jesus has to adjust them immediately concerning this. He says, “Do not work for the food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” The people responded citing the example of Moses, how he fed the Israelites day after day for years in the desert. Jesus’s timeless answer stands even still. Verses 32 through 34,”Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’” The bread of heaven is he. They answered “‘Sir…from now on give us this bread.’" I don’t think they’ve understood. “...From now on give us this bread.” They were yearning for this bread, but still they did not understand. So he declares in verse 35 and 36,”’...I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” The true bread from heaven then is Jesus’s body dead on the cross, alive from the grave. Look at Verses 48-51,“I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I give for the life of the world.” And Jesus is clearly, in my opinion referring to his own bodily death on the cross, he’s paying the price for our resurrection and by his death by giving of his body and his blood, Jesus has paid the penalty for our sins and has redeemed us from death, so we can live forever.

Jesus intensified his statement even more at the end of the chapter. Verse 52-58,” Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.’” Feel the weight of that! We’re going to live forever because of something. It’s a dependent eternal existence on the resurrected body of Christ.  “This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever." Oh, how I yearn for that, to see him. I yearn to be able to look him in the face and tell him, "Thank you”. And in the way that he intends here, to feed on him forever. I don’t think any of the people standing there really understood what he said. I know that I don’t fully understand it. I know that these are difficult words to preach. They probably make no sense whatsoever to an unbeliever. Jesus is not teaching cannibalism here, but he’s teaching a spiritual sustenance that we will feed on forever. Christ’s body then is the life of our resurrection bodies.

Fourth, our resurrection is impossible apart from God the Son. It’s impossible. We’re talking about the impossible here. It is impossible for us to raise ourselves up out of the grave. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius or a theologian to know that. What are your plans for raising yourself up from the grave? “Well, actually, I have none.” Well, that’s good, because whatever plans you have, they won’t work. It is an impossible thing for us to raise ourselves up out of the grave. It cannot be done. Christ must do it. He must come and raise us up out of the grave. So it is also that in this life, we must come to faith in Christ or we will not be raised on that final day. It’s a Christ-centered resurrection that I’m talking about here, and God therefore requires this. He requires that you come to faith in Christ in this life, or you will not be resurrected to eternal life. You must come to faith. And he says it again and again and again in this passage. Look at verse 28 and 29, “Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ’The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” In other words, to be raised from the dead in the final day we must simply believe in the only begotten Son of God. That’s it.

Jesus declared in verse 35, ”I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” This is just that typical Hebraic repetition where it says the same thing twice in slightly different language but he’s saying the same thing. To come to him equals to believe in him, and the result’s the same, full satisfaction of feasting. But you have to come to Christ. You have to believe in Christ. Again, look at verses 37-39, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.  And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.” In other words all the elect will come to Christ. And whoever comes to Christ, Christ will accept. And he’ll not lose any who come to him but will raise them up on the final day. So you have to come to Christ to be raised on that final day. Verse 40,” For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."

He’s given you four different ways of saying the same thing. You have to come to him. You have to feed on him. You have to drink from him. You have to believe in him. You have to look to him. I think we get it. You need to come to Christ. You need to look to him and trust in him to forgive you for your sins. You have to partake of him the way the group of 5,000 fed on the actual bread, the way that they fed on it, and ate it. You have to come and do that with Jesus. You have to come and believe in him, and there is no resurrection apart from Christ. Verse 53, ”I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. “  Verse 57, “Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.” But the passage goes beyond that. And here’s where we get really mysterious. The fact of the matter is the thing that’s required in this text, the text tells us we cannot do. It’s actually impossible for us on our own to come to Christ. We’ll never do it! We’ll never believe in Jesus left unaided. It’s an impossibility. God has willed that no one can independently of him, come to Christ. He’s willed it. The Jews that were standing there argued with him every step of the way, they’re arguing with him there against him. Jesus said, “You don’t believe.” They were his enemies. They’re standing right there. Frankly, at the end of this whole thing, large numbers of his so-called disciples walked away from Jesus and went with him no longer. Verse 66, “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” And why? Well, Jesus made it plain. Just as we cannot live unless we come to Christ so we cannot come to Christ unless the Father draws us.

Look at Verse 44, ”No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.” So apart from the father’s direct saving action of drawing, no sinner suddenly decides on a random Tuesday, “I think I’ll become a Christian today.” Or even on a random Easter Sunday. No, you know what happens? The Father draws people, very much like a fishing net, a large net let down into the lake. Picture it. And the fishermen are there and then they start to pull with force and the net moves through the water, and then a fish is there, and the net goes around the fish and pulls it until the fisherman pulls it up into the boat. And so, the same idea is given here that the father has to draw you, and that drawing process is really infinitely mysterious, It doesn’t violate the human will. It doesn’t violate the human personality. He made your will. He made your personality. He made your loves and your hate. He knows everything about you. He knows how to draw you friends. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows what will be effective. He’s just saying that if he doesn’t do it, you won’t come. Never. You could have a million eons hearing the same Gospel message and you will never come to Christ. It is impossible. God must exert a direct saving action on you or you will not come.

Fifthly, our resurrection is therefore guaranteed by the Father. It’s not, “Maybe he’ll raise me up at the last day”. No. He will raise me up at the last day. It’s a guarantee. Look at Verse 37, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” John Murray, commenting on this said this, “It is a moral and spiritual impossibility for a person to come to Christ apart from the Father’s drawing.” And what we find in verse 37 is that it is a moral and spiritual impossibility for the person given by the Father to the Son, not to come. They’re all gonna come, friends! All of them. Not 99% of them. All of them are gonna come. There is by Jesus’s verdict, the invariable conjunction of these two diverse kinds of action. “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” The Father does the giving and the sinner does the coming, and they come together. So before the foundation of the world, the Father had given to Christ his sheep, his loved ones. And then in space and time, at just the right time, when the father is working in your heart and hearing the gospel, at just the right time, the father then gives you to the son. At that moment in history, you become his just as it was promised before the foundation of the world. 

And the Father knowing you, having searched you, having studied everything you’ve loved and hated your whole life, he knows exactly what to do in your heart to draw you to come. And you cannot, and in the end, you will not resist. He will overcome your resistance. And so we speak of this doctrine of effectual grace. “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and everyone who comes, I’m gonna raise up at the last day.” And there is the guarantee. Jesus will never drive away any that come. You might think, “Perhaps he’ll grow weary of me. I do a lot of wandering. I am a sinner. Perhaps at some point in the future, Jesus will just grow weary of me and drive me away.” He says, “It’ll never happen. I will never drive you away.” Perhaps you’ll think, “Well, maybe I’ll just walk away from Christ.” Where upon Christ, not having driven you away, has really just lost track of you. He just lost track of you. “Whatever happened to so and so? I had him for a while. Where did they go? Oh, well, I still have 99% of them.” Jesus says it cannot be. In Matthew 18, he said, “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. “ Is Jesus not better than the shepherd in his parable? He’s better than that! He’s not gonna lose any of us, and so we will be raised up on the final day. Look at verse 40, “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” There’s your guarantee.

So what applications can we take from this marvelous text? First of all, come to Christ, dear friends. Believe in him. Look to him. Feed on him. I’m mindful of the fact that on Easter Sunday it’s possible that there may be unbelievers here who’ve gotten up this morning, perhaps out of habit or because your parents brought you to church when you were little, perhaps you had a friend that invited you, perhaps you just felt it was the thing to do, and God has brought you here today to hear this message. Look to Christ. Turn away from sin and look to Christ, and he will forgive you, and he will raise you up at the last day. Let today be for you the day of salvation. Come to Christ. And if you’ve already come to Christ maybe years ago, why don’t you celebrate the work of God the Father in drawing you to Jesus so long ago and keeping you there all this time. Celebrate the Father today. Say, “Father, thank you for drawing me to Jesus, I’m among those that were given to the Son before the foundation of the world, and at the right time you drew me to Jesus and I look to Jesus and I believed in him and I am still looking at him and I’m still believing in him. Thank you, Father. I praise you for that great work, and thank you Jesus for keeping me this far.” Don’t think for a moment, “Say, you know, I do believe the Father drew me, but I’ve been keeping myself with Jesus ever since. You know, I’m such a good believer. I’m really strong at the whole believing thing, and that through all these decades I’ve been clinging close to Christ.” You know the truth, don’t you, dear friend? You know that it’s really been Jesus clinging unto you, and he will not ever lose you. So celebrate Christ’s work as a good shepherd in your life.

And fourthly, anticipate your future joy in a resurrection body. Just picture, if you could, just picture in your mind what it’s gonna be like to walk with resurrected feet on a resurrected earth, which is what I think the new earth is. Just picture what it’s gonna be like to see with resurrected eyes, the resurrected beauty of the new heaven and the new earth. Feel what that’s going to be like to stand up on some kind of hill and look down at the sparkling river of life that has flowed down from the throne of grace, and you just look at it and it’s so beautiful. What a world that’s going to be, and you’re gonna be in a body to see it and to experience it, to sit down at table with the redeemed, with people from the east and the west and feast with Christ. What is that going to be like? 

And finally, face physical death with great courage and faith, face physical death with courage and faith, your own, and that of loved ones in Christ. Face physical death with courage and faith. Death is not an easy river to cross. I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t think it’s going to be easy. I don’t wanna stand up and say, “Well, for you, it’ll be easy. You’ll get to skip all of the pain and agony and ignominy of the actual dying process.” No, you won’t. But face it with courage and faith based on John 6 and other set promises. The most dreadful account of the death of a Christian I’ve ever read in my life was that of David Brainerd. And I wanna close with just some readings of what it was like for David Brainerd to die. And I’m not doing it, so it’d be any kind of a downer. I actually see glory in the story, but I just want you to be realistic. Someday you’re going to die, or you’ll watch a loved one die. I want you to do so with faith and confidence and joy that I see in David Brainerd. David Brainerd was a missionary to the Indians in the early 18th century. Jonathan Edwards published his diary and also did some of his own recollections about his life, and it’s one of the most famous accounts that Edwards ever wrote. He died of consumption, tuberculosis. A very, very difficult death, coughing up blood from his lungs, and so it took him two weeks of agony to actually die.

This is what he wrote in his own journal, “About 2:00 [in the morning] I went to bed, being weak and much disordered, and lay in a burning fever till night, without any proper rest. In the evening I got up, having lain down in some of my clothes; but was in the greatest distress that ever I endured [in my life], having an uncommon kind of [coughing spasm]; which either strangled me, or threw me into a straining to vomit; and at the same time was distressed with griping pains. Oh, the distress of this evening! I had little expectation of my living the night through, nor indeed had any about me: and I longed for the finishing moment! l was obliged to repair to bed by 6:00 and through mercy enjoyed some rest; but was grievously distressed at turns with the [coughing spasms]. My soul breathed after God, ‘When shall I come to God, even to God, my exceeding joy?’ Oh for his blessed likeness!’”

He still had two weeks to go at this point. Three days later. The Lord’s day, September 27th  “Early this morning, as one of the family came into the room, he expressed himself thus: ‘I have had more pleasure this morning, than all the drunkards in the world enjoy.’ So much did he esteem the joy of faith above the pleasures of sin. He felt that morning an unusual appetite to food, with which his mind seemed to be exhilarated, looking on it as a sign of the very near approach of death. At this time he also said, “I was born on a sabbath-day; and I have reason to think I was new-born on a sabbath-day; and I hope I shall die on this sabbath-day. I shall look upon it as a favour, if it may be the will of God that it should be so: I long for the time. Oh, ‘why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?’ I am very willing to part with all: I am willing to part with my dear brother John, and never to see him again [in this life], to go to be forever with the Lord. Afterwards, the same morning, being asked, how he did? he answered, ‘I am almost in eternity. I long to be there. My work is done. [There’s nothing more for me to do] I have done with all my friends. [I have nothing more to do with them] All the world is nothing to me. I long to be in heaven, praising and glorifying God with the holy angels. All my desire is to glorify God.’“

One week after that, again the Lord’s Day, October fourth, Edwards wrote, “As my daughter Jerusha (who chiefly attended him) came into the room, he looked on her very pleasantly, and said,’ Dear Jerusha, are you willing to part with me?—I am quite willing to part with you: I am willing to part with all my friends: I am willing to part with my dear brother John, although I love him the best of any creature living: I have committed him [and you] and all my friends to God, and can leave them with God. Though, if I thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend a happy eternity together!’ In the evening, as someone came into the room with a Bible in her hand, he expressed himself thus; ‘Oh that dear book! that lovely book! I shall soon see it opened! the mysteries that are in it, and the mysteries of God’s providence, will be all unfolded!’ [All those dark mysteries of scripture I will see unfolded by God himself] That same evening he was seized with such violent coughing spasms that his agony was unutterable... all there thought he was about to die [at that very moment].” He still had four days to go. Two days later, October sixth, “He lay for a considerable time as if he were dying. At which time he was heard to utter, in broken whispers, such expressions as these; ‘He will come, he will not tarry. I shall soon be in glory. I shall soon glorify God with the angels.’” 

Finally, October 8th, the dying day has come,” He was in great distress and agonies of body; and for the greater part of the day, was much disordered as to the exercise of his reason. [He wasn’t in his right mind] In the evening he was more composed, and had the use of his reason well; but the pain of his body continued and increased. He told me, it was impossible for any to conceive of the distress he felt in his breast. He manifested much concern lest he should dishonour God by impatience, under his extreme agony; which was such, that he said, the thought of enduring it one minute longer was almost insupportable. He desired that others would be much in lifting up their hearts continually to God for him [in prayer], that God [would sustain him] would support him, and give him patience. He signified, that he expected to die that night; but seemed to fear a longer delay.” And then he spoke these remarkable words which is the reason why I’m reading this to you this morning,” It is [a different] another thing than men suppose it is to die!” In other words, it’s gonna be a different trial than you think it will be. One might think that God would spare such a faithful, godly, pious, prayer-warrior, missionary, servant who died so young in the service of the Lord, but he didn’t. It seemed if anything, to make it even more agonizing to put his faith on display. At last, after two weeks of unspeakable agony, David Brainerd, one of the godliest men I’ve ever studied in history at last departed this world. It’s hard for me to imagine more agonizing last two weeks on earth. God didn’t spare him. And where is he now? You know what he’s doing now, he’s testifying to Paul’s statement,” I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Someday, you’re going to die, if the Lord doesn’t return in our generation. Get ready for it, and face it with courage. Face it with faith, face it with confidence. Based on the four-fold promise of John 6, “I will raise you up at the last day.” Close with me in prayer.