In
our on-going discussion of the signs of our Lord’s final coming at the
end of time, I will devote this article to the teaching of the Lord in
Matthew 24:36-41. The passage is quite long, and so, rather than quote
it in this article, I urge you to read the passage in your Bibles.
It
is clear from the passage that the Lord is teaching here the
impossibility of our knowing the exact time of Christ’s return. And He
wants us to know that we cannot predict the time of our Lord’s return
not only, but we must not even try.
It
is a favorite pastime among leaders of sects to guess this exact time,
and it was not unusual, in the long history of the church, for groups of
people to gather, perhaps, on a mountain top on a specific day, to wait
for Christ’s return on the clouds. They do such things in spite of our
Lord’s clear words, “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the
angels of heaven, but my Father only.” Charlatans, lusting for influence
over people, try to convince others that they really know when our Lord
will return.
A
recent and startling example of such an imposter appeared in the camp
of Reformed Churches in the last couple of decades. His name was Harold
Camping, and you may have heard of him. He was a member of a Reformed
Church and started a radio program in which he, in its early years,
spread the Reformed faith. But he separated from the church and, as is
true of all those who separate from the church, he began to have strange
unbiblical ideas. He soon owned a radio station and developed a network
of stations in our country and abroad. He even, from time to time,
aired sermons that were preached by Protestant Reformed ministers.
He
soon became obsessed with the idea that the exact date of the Lord’s
return had been revealed to him in the Scriptures by various
mathematical formulas that were to be found especially in the books of
Daniel and Revelation. A number of years ago he announced on his
stations the date in which he expected the Lord to return. He gained
thousands of converts to his view and was a very disturbing voice in the
church world. But the date came and went and Christ did not return.
Not
at all embarrassed by his failure, he came on the air only a few years
later with another prediction of Christ’s return. He had, he said, made a
mathematical error and he was now confident of his new prediction. He
told people to leave their churches and send in money to help promote
his views. It seems strange, but he gained thousands of followers who
sent in millions of dollars to carry his predictions to the ends of the
earth. When that day too came and went without Christ’s return, he
brought mass confusion on those who believed him. Soon after that
failure he suffered a stroke and eventually died.
We
must not be tempted to follow his example and listen to those who claim
to be able to predict Christ’s coming, nor must we ourselves attempt to
do this. It is a flat denial of our Lord’s own words.
The
warning not to make such predictions is made even stronger in Mark
13:32: “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels
which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” (It might be
well to insert here that Christ says that He Himself does not know the
time of His coming, but while He is on earth and within the limitations
of His human nature. As the eternal Son of God and as He is glorified
now in heaven, He surely knows the date of His return. But it was hid
from Christ in His humiliated human nature.)
The
Lord is good in not telling us the exact time of His return. We,
because we are so wicked, would abuse our knowledge. If we knew that the
Lord was not coming back for a long time, we would be sorely tempted to
forget all about His coming, and forget that we are pilgrims and
strangers in the earth. And if, on the other hand, we knew that our Lord
was coming next week or next month, we would do all kinds of strange
things, just as thousands did when Harold Camping announced his idea of
the exact date when Christ would come back. We might quit our jobs, or
sell our home, since in a week we would not need them anymore; we might
let our children stay home from school, and we might not go to the
grocery store or wet market to buy anything necessary for our life in
the world. We might not even go to church because we will, in a few
days, be in the church in heaven.
The
Lord does not want us to do anything foolish, because we are, in so far
as possible, to live our regular, normal life, but to do so as pilgrims
and strangers on the earth who are called to live normal lives, but to
the glory of God as always, and praying, “Come, Lord Jesus; come
quickly.” Persecution will come, of course, and we will be forced to
flee as Jesus told us in Matthew 24:16, and that will make a “normal”
life impossible, but we are to live our normal lives as long as we are
able. That is Jesus’ point. He warns: “Don’t do foolish things because
you think you know when Christ is coming back.”
There
are three or four other things that need to be said about this matter,
but I will wait with those things until the next article.
Prof. Herman Hanko
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