Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Signs of the Times (21)


In this forum article on Jesus’ teaching of the signs that come before His return from heaven, I will concentrate on Matthew chapter 24:19-20: “And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days. But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day.”
            You will recall that the Lord commands us to flee from our homes and cities when Antichrist comes to power and sets up an image of himself in the churches so that it becomes impossible to worship God as a church and congregation. In verses 16-18 Jesus speaks of the urgency of immediate flight, a passage that I discussed in the last article. In these verses we now consider, our Lord points us to the suffering that is involved in fleeing for our lives.
            There is an interesting sidelight to this entire passage. As you probably know, the church suffered terrible persecution ordered by the Roman world power. This persecution lasted from about 50 AD to 325 AD, when Constantine the Great issued a decree of toleration of Christianity. During those 275 years the church was not under constant persecution, but it was somewhat sporadic and was more or less severe in the different provinces. But it was a time of great distress during which the Roman emperor claimed to be divine and all men were supposed to worship him. The emperor of the Roman Empire was a pre-figure of the Antichrist, and was the legs of iron in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, which Daniel interpreted (Daniel 2).
            When the Christians were persecuted by the Roman authorities, some of the ministers especially, but also office bearers, fled into hiding to escape persecution. When the persecution stopped, they came back to their congregations to resume their labors, but in some instances the people and other churches would not have them, because they fled to escape persecution. I am not in a  position to judge whether these men were right or wrong in fleeing, for the Lord’s command in these verses is a command that must be obeyed, but the Roman Empire was not yet the antichristian kingdom. Nevertheless, the saint that lived at that time could not easily see it in any other way than that the Roman emperor was himself the Antichrist. God will have to judge and He will judge righteously, because He can read the heart and know the deepest motive for their fleeing.
            However that may be, when Antichrist himself sets up his world-wide kingdom, all God’s people will know that the time has come to obey the command of the Lord to flee.
            This text underscores how difficult the flight will be. Pregnant and nursing mothers will have an especially difficult time of it, for the care of an infant will make flight all the more difficult. And if the time of flight comes in places like the place where we live, it will be very difficult to endure the snow and ice, the cold and winds when we are without shelter and must flee, perhaps hundreds of miles.
            I am not sure why the Lord adds “But pray ye that your flight not be . . . on the Sabbath day.” Some commentators say that a Sabbath day’s flight will be more difficult because less people will be working and great hordes of people can be assembled to chase and catch fleeing Christians. Other commentators say that a flight on the Sabbath day would harm the consciences of believers who refuse to travel on the Sabbath and consider it a desecration of the Sabbath.
            I am not sure about the reason why Jesus includes this statement about the Sabbath, but I do think that God’s people who have all their life worshipped in church on Sunday would find it very difficult not to go to church, but instead to be running away rather than worshipping. Keeping the Sabbath by church attendance is very important to them.
            At any rate, Jesus ties His command to us to flee to the persecution that will begin when Antichrist comes to power. And surely the Lord means that we must flee because it will help us escape persecution. This is not exactly so easy to understand, for today’s electronic equipment in many ways can find fleeing people very easily. And modern methods of chase, such as helicopters and satellite-carrying cameras, will make hiding very difficult. And by verses 19-20 the Lord means to underscore how difficult flight will be.
            But we are commanded to flee. When the saints in the early church were persecuted, some were so eager to suffer for Christ’s sake that they ran to the authorities to tell them they were Christians and to beg the authorities to persecute them. A man by the name of Origin was one of the greatest theologians in the early church; though he was eccentric and sometimes heretical. But when his father was imprisoned and was waiting to be put to death, Origin wanted to join him in prison and in death. The only way his mother could keep him in the house was to hide all his clothes, for he was too modest to go out into the public naked.
            The Lord does not command us to seek persecution. We are to flee. If it is God’s will that we endure the suffering of fleeing or the suffering of outright persecution, we are to bear this suffering, rejoicing that God considers us worthy of suffering for Christ’s sake (Acts 5:41). But it is also necessary that some saints (though only a few) are still alive when Christ comes back. It is the Lord’s command that we flee. This then, is what we must do in obedience to Him.


Prof. H. Hanko

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