Signs of the Times (39)

We are going to conclude our discussion of the signs of the times which our Lord gave to us. I intend to conclude our discussion of them by making a few remarks about Matthew 25:31-46. I would really appreciate your reading these verses in your Bibles and reading also the chapter I wrote on these verses in Mysteries of the Kingdom.

 

These verses describe the final judgment that will take place when our Lord comes again to take His whole church into heaven. It is a fitting conclusion to the discussion of the signs of Christ’s coming, and it ties in perfectly with the two parables that Jesus taught in the earlier verses of this chapter. It explains what will happen to those who are not waiting for the Lord’s coming, and what the reward will be for those who do await His coming.

 

The interesting part of this passage is that Jesus both teaches the doctrine of election and at the same time speaks of the fact that the elect receive the reward of grace.

 

The doctrine of election is taught in two ways. The first is that the elect are separated from the reprobate before final judgment is pronounced. When the Lord comes again He will take His angels with Him and raise all from the grave: the righteous and the unrighteous. All who ever lived will be gathered before Him as He sits on His throne of glory. That will be billions and billions of people. We cannot imagine very well how that will be, but it will follow the general resurrection of the bodies of those who are already in heaven or already in hell.

 

The division of all takes place, of course, at the moment of death, for the wicked when they die go to hell, and the righteous go immediately into heaven – except those who are still living at the moment of Christ’s return. In the judgment, therefore, the wicked and the righteous are separated. And they are separated as already saved or rejected.

 

The second reference to election is that the elect are called “sheep” while the wicked are called goats. The name “sheep” is one of Scripture’s favorite ways of speaking of God’s people. This is most pronounced in John 10 where Jesus pictures Himself as the good shepherd who calls His sheep by their names and leads them. And John, in his gospel, was undoubtedly referring to Psalm 23. Christ loves His sheep and died for them. And they are now publicly called sheep.

 

On the other hand, the sheep are given the reward of grace, while the wicked are sent into everlasting destruction. But the judgment is according to whether or not men fed Christ when He was hungry, clothed Him when He was naked, gave him a drink when He was thirsty, and visited Him in prison. The Lord makes clear that taking care of Christ’s needs was done by caring for His brethren, even the least of them, or refusing to do these things to Christ’s brethren. There are many who claim to be doing these things, but actually are not doing them at all.

 

What is the difference that marks those who truly do these things to Christ and those who do not? It is most interesting and comes to the heart of the Christian’s life. Those who do these things in such a way that they merit Christ’s approval, are not aware that they do them; while those who do not truly do these things to Christ are eager to tell the Lord of all that they have done.

 

Why is this the difference?

 

The wicked claim to help people by all their good works out of the motive of self-glorification. They are quick to tell the Lord that they did these things at every opportunity.  They gave money for many worthy causes and they did much to alleviate suffering. But they know they did it. And so they did these things for their own glory.

 

But the righteous are different. They are not aware of doing these things. Why not? They did these things because they were conscious of the great miracle of their own salvation. They were conscious of the fact that they were unworthy sinners who deserved only hell. They were not thinking about what they had done for others, but what Christ had done for them. But knowing their salvation, they were so thankful that they lived in humble willingness to love their neighbor – which is to fulfill the law. They did these things thoughtlessly, with no regard to their own good work. They do not even remember it. They know that in everything they did they sinned. “When did we see thee naked and clothed thee? . . . .” They did not think about it at the time, and they had forgotten what they had done. What they did was truly for God’s glory, not their own.

 

And so, when the Lord rewards them, they are surprised and perplexed. ”We never did anything for Thee, Lord. All we did was sin. We are saved, not on the basis of anything we did, but out of Thy great love for us.”

 

To them the Lord says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!” They know that they are saved by grace. They gave and do now give all glory to Christ and to God.

 

Such is the Lord’s teaching concerning our calling while we watch and pray, waiting for the Lord’s return.

 

May God give us grace to live in constant hope of His coming and may we pray from our hearts, “Come, Lord Jesus; yea, come quickly.” There is nothing better in this life or in the life to come than to hear those blessed words from our Lord’s mouth: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!”

Prof. Herman Hanko

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Signs of the Times (38)

In my last article, I began a discussion of the parable of the talents that is found in Matthew 25:14-30. I made the point that the “talents” of the parable cannot refer to gifts and abilities (as we commonly use the term), for all men are not given these talents; they are limited to those who have a place in the church. They refer, therefore, to our God-given place in the church of Christ. Each one has such a place, some more responsible a place than others, but all a place.

 

Nor must we forget the main point of the parable. The parable answers the question of what we must do here on earth while we wait for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ to take us to heaven. Christ is now in heaven, but history continues as Christ, from heaven, gathers His church. Christ will not come back until every elect is born and brought to faith in Christ. So the point of the parable is that each member of the church, in his own place, must work on behalf of the church, for the welfare of the church, and to the glory of Christ to Whom the church belongs. The church belongs to Christ Who bought it with His blood and we all are servants of Christ in His church.

 

There are two kinds of servants in the church: those who are faithful servants and those who are unfaithful. The former are the true people of God who are regenerated and converted and who love the church. The latter are not true members of the church, but are members only outwardly. Their main interest in life is not the church, but something that belongs to the world. They do not use their place in Christ’s church for the welfare of the church.

 

The unfaithful servant, when the Lord returns, makes his excuse for not using his place in the church for its welfare: “I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed. And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: Lo, there thou hast that is thine.”

 

It was a clever excuse. He said to the Lord: “Lord, I confess that Thou art the sovereign King of Thy church. Thou art able to save Thy church by Thy own power. Thou hast no need of us, for Thou art able to do it all. I was afraid that my puny and weak efforts would do more harm than good to the church. But I did take care of Your talent. I hid it in the earth. Here it is; take what is Thine.”

 

That was an outwardly pious but hypocritical answer to hide his own sin, for what he said about the sovereignty of Christ was true. Christ can do it all if that is His will. But Christ’s will is also that we who belong to His church must work in it. If we do not work in and for His church, we are hypocrites, and the text makes clear that hypocrites go to hell.

 

I think this wicked servant’s excuse hid other sins. I think the most important one was that the wicked servant was not satisfied with only one talent – an apparently small and insignificant place in the church. He was a janitor and he wanted to be an elder. He was asked to do very little of the church’s Sunday worship, and he wanted to be chairman of the worship committee – if there is such a thing. He was crabby and a complaining member who always found something wrong with those who worked hard. And so he said, “I am ignored. No one recognizes my abilities. I sit here in my pew with nothing worthwhile to do. I’ll show them; I won’t do anything.” And so, when he is asked to lead a Bible study, he refuses and says, “Let someone else do it.” In other words, he thinks he is more important than the church, and his criticism is not of the church, but of Christ who gives to each his place; and does so with a wisdom we do not have.

   

Underneath it all, of course, is a desire to accomplish big things in the world that prompts him to set above the church his earthly pursuits and interests. He, as it were, says, “If the church does not recognize my abilities, I’ll show them what I can do by being successful in my job and business.”

 

The sin is terrible enough to warrant the punishment of hell.

 

But the faithful servant recognizes that his place in the church, no matter how unimportant by the standards of men’s measurements, makes him humbly thankful for a place in the church given him by unmerited favor (grace) and even though he is undeserving. And so, with joyful thanksgiving, he puts the church first in his life and does everything else in his daily occupation to seek the welfare of the church. He loves the church, sacrifices for it, gives of his bounties, prays for the church, does whatever he is called to do, and does it joyfully and thankfully knowing that Christ will presently come again to take His own church to heaven. In heaven we shall serve Christ in the glorified church and in the new creation perfectly.

 

I can think of nothing I prefer more than hearing my Lord say to me when He comes again, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

Prof. Herman Hanko

Signs of the Times (37)

Having pointed out a few ideas in the parable of the ten virgins, in this article we will do the same with the parable of the talents. You may find it in Matthew 25:14-30. You should read that passage first: it would take too much space to quote it here. And I would personally like to see you read the chapter on this parable in my book, Mysteries of the Kingdom. There are points in that chapter that I cannot bring out for you in this short article.

 

This parable too is part of the conclusion of Jesus’ discussion of the signs of His second coming. The parable of the ten virgins is intended to teach us to watch and to pray, for we do not know the time of our Lord’s coming. The parable of the talents teaches us what we must do while we are waiting for the Lord to return. That is, this parable teaches us how to watch while He tarries.

 

I told you earlier in a forum article that we were going to have to spend more time on what exactly it means that we are called to watch – as well as to pray. This parable explains that.

 

The man is the parable who went to a far country is Jesus who was about to go to heaven. He goes to heaven as the King of His kingdom. He leaves His kingdom here on earth, for His kingdom here on earth is found in the hearts and lives of His people, whom He has made citizens of His kingdom, and has called them to live in this world (which Satan is trying to make his own personal kingdom) as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, while the King is gone to a “far country.”

 

That calling to live as citizens of the kingdom of heaven is pictured in the parable as “talents.” Each citizen has a certain number of talents.

 

It is too bad that the word “talent” has taken on a different meaning in our vocabulary than the meaning it has in the parable. We use the word to designate gifts and abilities that people have. “John,” we say, “has a talent for music,” or “a talent for playing the piano.” “Betty is an artist, and has talent for drawing and painting.”

 

The trouble with this meaning of the word “talent” is that most people in the world have talents of one kind or another, whether they are wicked or righteous. There are many wicked people who have marvelous “talents” for music. But Jesus says that He gives His “talents” only to His servants. And His servants are His people. He does not give “talents” to the wicked.

 

What then does Jesus mean with the word “talent?”

 

Our Lord means, a place and a calling, a responsibility and an obligation in His kingdom while we are still on earth and waiting for His coming. He gives such a place to a child, to a young person, to a ten-ager, to a parent, to an elder or deacon, to a minister or a Bible Class teacher, to a teacher in a Christian school, to an old man or woman, to sick people and healthy people, to rich people and poor people, to an American or a Chinese, to a factory worker or a farmer, to everyone whom He has, by His grace and power, called to be a citizen in His kingdom. Each will finally inherit the perfect kingdom in heaven when they die, but they are citizens already while they still live in this sinful world.

 

The citizens of Christ’s kingdom must not find a mountain top on which they can sit as they look toward the distant horizon while they wait for Christ to come. They must not do all they can to make their brief stay in the world as pleasant as they possibly can – something like a person who spends his time playing rummy while he is waiting in the airport for his dearest friend to arrive. He must not act like Roman Catholic monks acted: get out of the world, crawl into a dark and damp cell, have as little to do with the world as possible, and torment your body with a hair shirt or a whip to drive the world out of your flesh.

 

But there is another mistake they can make. They might say that since their Lord is so powerful to establish His kingdom no matter what he does or does not do, that he just sits in his chair and twiddles his thumbs since Christ is doing all the work anyway and will come when He is ready regardless of anything. This is what the man did who hid his talent in the earth. And you know what happened to him.

 

So Christ, the King of His kingdom, gives to each citizen a place in that kingdom where, as a servant of his Lord, he is called to serve his Lord and, as Jesus said earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, seek first the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 6:33).

 

The places that Christ gives to each of the citizens are different from each other; they even vary in importance. An elder has a more important place than a janitor; and a minister has a more important place that a Bible Class teacher. Yet, we must not think that the more important a place a person holds, the more important he is. That is pride. Jesus puts an end to that kind of talk when He tells us that in heaven the first shall be last and the last, first. The position one occupies is the important thing. If a person thinks he is important because he is given a more important position, then let him listen to the words of the apostle Paul: “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall” (I Cor. 10:12).

 

And, if that warning is not enough, the Lord himself reminds His servants that the one who is given much, from him shall much be required. If one fails to give as much as his position requires, he is beaten with double stripes. A minister’s sin that he commits in his place is worse than that the same sin committed by a man or woman in the pew. That ought to make every one of us do some serious self-examination. I know, it has made me, at times, afraid to go to the pulpit to preach. What if I preach a poor sermon because I didn’t work hard enough to make it during the week? I still am filled with apprehension every time I walk on to the platform and begin a worship service. To preach is daunting, frightening, and a very weighty matter. But so is the place in the kingdom you occupy.

 

I suppose that it is impossible that the common meaning of “talents” be abandoned and that the word be used only in the sense in which Jesus uses it, but in any case, remember that you have a place as a citizen in Christ’s kingdom. That place may change as you get older, but the calling remains the same. You may have one talent, or two talents, or five talents. The calling remains the same. And don’t try to beg off and excuse yourself by saying, “The Lord didn’t give me any talents; I can’t do anything.”  Are you going to excuse your own sloth by criticizing the Lord because He did not give you any talents? Don’t do that.

 

We shall have to wait till next time to finish our discussion of this.

Herman Hanko

Signs of the Times (36)

We have finished our discussion of the signs of Christ’s coming that he gives us and that are recorded in Matthew 24. To conclude this series of articles, I want to deal with the three parables our Lord taught, and that are recorded for us in Matthew 25: the ten Virgins, the talents, and the final judgment. In this article, I intend to make a few remarks about the parable of the ten virgins. I discuss these parables in detail in my book, Mysteries of the Kingdom. I know you are busy, but I really wish you would take an hour out of your time and read, for now, the parable of the ten virgins. It is a parable that Jesus taught to enforce His command to His disciples to live in constant, conscious expectation of the Lord’s coming. Let me make a few observations about some of the elements in the parable.

 

First of all, the ten virgins represent the church visible. That is, the church as it appears in the world at any given time. These virgins do not represent a congregation such as CERC in Singapore, or a denomination such as the PRC in America; they represent all that calls itself Christian and claims to believe in the second coming of Christ. (There are churches that call themselves “Christian,” but deny Christ’s second coming. Christ has nothing to say to them; they are of no interest to him – or to us.)

 

Waiting for Christ is depicted in the parable by the virgins waiting for the bridegroom, who would come to get them. All those churches who profess to be waiting for Christ to come are pictured by these virgins. But only half of them are prepared; half are not. Not membership in a church, nor an outward profession to believe in Christ’s second coming make any difference. Preparation makes all the difference.

 

The ones prepared are those with oil in their lamps; the ones not prepared are those without oil in their lamps. These latter probably reasoned that they could get oil the last minute. Why waste time in the present to buy oil? There will be enough time to do that.

 

Whether the lamps and the oil signify anything or not is, I think, an open question, and commentaries disagree on the question. For my part, I think that the lamps are the Word of God, for Psalm 119:105 calls God’s word “a lamp unto our feet.” And the oil is, in Scripture, a picture of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, for oil was poured on the head of those who were so anointed. The one, then, who lives close to and out of God’s Word, and who, by the Spirit, believes it and acts according to it, is the one prepared for Christ’s coming.

 

It is a striking element in the parable that the bridegroom does not come at the time expected. In fact, from the viewpoint of the virgins, he does not come for a very long time after he is expected. This is Jesus’ way of reminding the disciples (and us) that no one knows the time of His coming, and that when the church expects Him to come, He does not come. This has happened many times in the history of the church. Already in the apostles’ times, some of the church, especially when persecuted, thought Christ would come at any time. In the years preceding the end of the first millennium, many thought Christ would return in 1000 AD. The same was true of the end of the second millennium; they though Christ would return in 2000 AD. He did not come when He was expected.

 

The trouble is that all ten of the virgins fell asleep; even the prepared ones. This idea of falling asleep is purposely included in the parable to warn us that in a sense, the whole church gives up that Christ will come again. He doesn’t come and He doesn’t come. Even God’s people are tempted to say that perhaps the world is right: He will never come (II Peter 3:1-4). And so, even the people of God are surely tempted to quit waiting for Him. If they would do that, it would be disastrous! It would mean that the church would give up completely in waiting for the Lord. And, indeed, many do give up. “What’s the use?” they will say; “He doesn’t come and is not going to come.”

 

But the Lord does come – as He said he would. Suddenly the whole church wants to enter the heavenly marriage feast (Rev. 19:9). But it is too late for those who have not prepared themselves for Christ’s coming. They beg to be let into the banquet hall, but the door is slammed in their faces. The bridegroom himself tells them that they never did really prepare themselves for His coming, and preparing one’s self cannot be done the last minute – even after the bridegroom has come. But to us the Lord says, “Watch therefore. For ye know not the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (Matt 25:13).

 

And so you and I (and all the church) stand before the question; “Are we prepared? Do we watch?” It is a terrible thing to have the door of heaven shut when the Lord comes again. The only other place to go is hell.

 

I want to say something about what it means for you and me to watch and thus be prepared for Christ’s coming. But that is really taught in the parable of the talents. So we will wait till next time for this. 

Prof. Herman Hanko

Signs of the Times (35)

We have finished our discussion of Matthew 24:36-41. There is one more section in Matthew 24, verses 42-51, which I want to write about in this forum article. Jesus now turns His attention (and ours) to our calling to watch and pray. The calling to watch and pray is necessary because we do not know the day or the hour when the Lord does return. Our lack of knowledge of the time of our Lord’s return is hidden from us by God.

 

That is a good thing. Suppose for a moment that we did know. Suppose that God told us the date of our Lord’s return is on February 28, 2025. That’s more than ten years from now. What would you and I do? We would almost certainly say to ourselves: “Well, we do not have to worry about that for at least another nine years, so we can put it out of our minds for a while and concentrate on gaining for ourselves as much of the wealth and treasures of this world as we can, for there is still plenty of time to enjoy this world and its pleasures. So, let’s eat and drink and be merry.”

 

On the other hand, if the Lord would tell us that He is coming back on September 1, 2015, we would, because we are such foolish people, do all sorts of foolish things such as: quit our jobs and spend our time in church, or forget all about getting married, or sell everything we have and squander our money to get as much out of life as we can before the Lord comes back, or live in fear and shrink into a corner to sit and wait.

 

But now we do not know when the Lord is coming back. And so, the Lord teaches us to go about our daily life in the way we now do: working, raising our families if we are married, going to school, attending regularly our Bible Study meetings, witnessing to others around us, or whatever occupies our attention and performing what God calls us to do. If I am writing a book and I know I need another year to finish it, but I also know the Lord is coming back in five months, I should just keep on writing the book – even if I never finish it.

 

You might say, “But then you are wasting your time; your half-finished book will be burned up along with the world when God burns the world up.” I would answer, “Yes, but even writing the book was a blessing, for I learned more about the Bible and God’s will for us. And even if the unfinished book is burned, what is so bad about that? We may think we have really done something great when we survey our pile of books that we have written. But in the eyes of God they do not amount to anything at all, except a little pile that could just as well be a pile of garbage.”

 

So, because we do not know when Christ is coming back, we are called to continue to do our regular and daily work as long as we can. To use the language of verses 40 and 41, we are to go to our fields if we are farmers and we are to keep preparing meals if we are housewives – even if the wicked do these same things. Only (and here is the point), we must do them with the prayer in our hearts and on our lips, “Come, Lord Jesus, yea, come quickly.”

 

In verses 41-54 the Lord uses a couple of parables to underscore the calling that comes to us to “Watch!” The first parable is this. A man with a house where he and his family live is in an area that is threatened from time to time with thieves who break into houses and plunder all the worthwhile contents of the house. The man, knowing this was going to happen, would, of course, be concerned about the danger of thieves coming to his house. And if he knew the exact time the thieves had planned to break into his house, he would make preparations to foil the thieves’ efforts. He would call the police to be waiting in the house. He would arm himself with a weapon to ward off any attacks of the thieves. He would check all the locks on the windows and doors. He would, in other words, take what precautions he could to guard his house.

 

But if he did not know when the thieves would come, he would have to take such precautions as he could all the time. Every night he would check all the locks. He would alert the police to the possibility of a break-in and be sure the police would come if he needed to summon them. He would not be careless, leave doors open, put his valuables in full view of anyone entering, and take an indifferent attitude towards the real possibility that sooner or later the thieves would hit his house as well as others in the neighborhood.

 

So, Jesus says, we too must live our normal life, but always do so in anticipation that Christ may come at any time.

 

The second parable is this. A man who owns land and has many servants must go on a lengthy trip that takes him away from his home. Of his servants, he has one servant to whom he entrusts responsibility to see to it that the work is properly done and on time, that the servants do what they are supposed to do, and that the farm operates as it would if the owner himself was around. The date of his return is not known, not by the owner or by anyone else.

 

The question is: What are the servants going to do while their master is gone? If the servants love their master and are interested only in the good of their master, they will be diligent in the care of their master’s fields and other possessions. They want to be sure that the master finds everything just as he left it when he returns.

 

But if these servants are wicked and it seems to them that the master does not return when he was expected, they will decide to have a riotous time, ignoring their responsibilities and using their master’s possessions to get drunk and have one party after the other. Or if the servant appointed to be in charge misuses his authority and begins to beat the other servants, while he is making the most of his position by misusing his master’s possessions, he will leave his master’s fields and houses in a mess.

 

The meaning is clear. Christ is the “Great Landowner” for all the world is His. We sing this in our Psalters: “The earth and the fullness with which it is stored; the world and its dwellers belong to the Lord” (Psalter 57). Nothing in all this vast creation is ours. We do not possess one thin dime that we can call our own. We are the servants in the vast estate of our Master. But He is gone on a long journey to heaven where He will stay for an unknown period of time. He entrusts the care of His creation to us. We are to take care of it for Him so that He is benefited by it even though He is not here. We may never say, “This flat in which I live is mine; this car I drive is mine; these savings I have are mine; I am my own and I may do with myself what I please.” We may never say that because it is not true. As we sing in another Psalter; “All that I am, I owe to thee; thy wisdom, Lord, has fashioned me” (Psalter 383). I may never, never say, therefore, “I may use this money as I want to use it, for myself, for my pleasure. I have given the Lord what belongs to Him by putting money in the collection plate on Sunday. Now, what is left is mine – to do with as I please.” Nothing is ours; we may never use what belongs to Christ for ourselves.

 

But the “Great Landowner” will come again. He is going to claim it all as His own. And He will change it to be glorious and without sin in the heavenly creation.

 

And so we must live in this world, using everything that the Lord gives us of this world, in the hope and confidence of our Master’s return. If we do not, then our Master will, when He comes, cut us in pieces.

 

It is striking that the Lord speaks of hypocrites in verse 51. The wicked people in the world are not hypocrites. They openly claim the whole creation as their own to do with it as they please. And so they use it for their own pleasure, raping God’s world, grabbing remorselessly everything they can get their hands on, storing up the treasure of the creation for themselves. If you tell them that they are doing this to someone else’s belongings, they will laugh at you and tell you that you are a fool. They will say to you, “Have a life man. Enjoy yourself. Have fun. Life is short. You are here only for yourself. Live by the motto, ‘Me first, and the devil take the hindmost.’”

 

The child of God says, “All these things are not mine. Even I do not belong to myself for I belong to Christ. I have to be very careful how I use these things, for the “Great Landowner,” of whom I am only a servant, owns them all and will claim them for Himself when He returns from His far journey.

 

Hell awaits those who misuse God’s gifts. There is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. If you want to know about hell, then read Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon: “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.” You can find it on the internet.

 

And do not forget: Christ’s return is not only at the end of the world, but Christ returns for each of us at any time – when we die. That’s the end of the world for us.

Prof. Hanko

Signs of the Times (34)

I shall make a few remarks in this article on Matthew 24:36-41. The text reads: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, not, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.  But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”

 

In a way, these are strange verses, and many have taken them up wrongly and have made some serious mistakes that have deceived the children of God.

 

One such error is to take verse thirty-eight wrongly, interpreting it to mean that we must give up, insofar as possible, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and other normal aspects of our calling here in the world when we know Christ’s coming is near. This was, for example, the error of the members of the church in Thessalonica. The congregation thought that Christ would come any moment, and so some of them even quit their jobs and began to stick their noses into other people’s business. Paul addresses himself to that problem in 2 Thessalonians 3:10-15. But people have frequently appeared in the church with the same error. I mentioned in my last forum article that Harold Camping did the same thing. I would not want any of you to do any such wrong thing. Earlier in that article, I told you of an incident with my father in which he told us that we should keep on doing what we were doing, even if we knew that Christ was coming back that same day.

 

Others, appealing especially to verses 40 and 41, claim they find in these verses proof for the rapture, and, in a way, especially if one disregards the context, it sounds that way: two people together: one taken and the other left.

 

Both groups of people do not put these verses in the context of the rest of the chapter, nor in the context of what Jesus is teaching here. We must remember that Jesus’ coming is after the great tribulation in which God’s people will be forced to flee. They will hardly be doing the things described in the text: eating and drinking, etc. Persecution will be so intense that there will hardly be any elect on the earth when Christ comes. In the parable of the importunate widow, Jesus concludes the parable by saying, “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). When the flood came (and Jesus compares the days before His coming to the days of Noah), there were only eight people in church – Noah and his family. Persecution was terrible. And if God’s people are forced to flee, they will not be eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and grinding at the mill.

 

In these verses Jesus is once again reminding us how important it is to “Watch and pray” for Christ’s coming. He underscores our need to hear and obey His admonition by contrasting our life with the lives of the wicked who deny His coming.

 

The world denies Christ’s coming. Read 2 Peter 3:1-4. The wicked are devoted to their accursed error of evolutionism, and that heresy has no room for a second coming of Christ. Many wicked men believe that the world will be destroyed, but not by Christ’s coming, but by man himself destroying his own world.

 

Yet strangely enough, while they deny the Lord’s coming, they really, deep down in their hearts, know it is true. Once, when I was a child, we saw the most spectacular display of northern lights that I have not seen anything like it since. The next day the news told us that police stations, newspaper offices and government officials were flooded with telephone calls made by terrified people who thought the end of the world had come.

 

The wicked do not want the coming of Christ. They do not want Christ to come because Christ comes as Judge to judge them and all their wicked deeds. They are so frightened by Christ’s coming, and so terrified at the thought, that they deny His coming.

 

And so they live as if Christ’s coming is not going to happen. For the wicked, each day is life as usual. The beginning and end of a day, the cycle of a week, the passing of the months and the years – it is all so normal. “All things continue as they were from the beginning.” They go about their business as if the world will go on, and on, and on. . . . They marry and are given in marriage, and they go about their daily work as if things are always going to be the same.

 

That is the way it was in Noah’s day. For 110 years they watched Noah build his ark. For 110 years they mocked and jeered. “All things continue as they were.” “How crazy can a man get.” “Noah talks about rain; no one has ever seen rain. He talks like a fool.” “Who in his right mind builds an ark on dry ground, far from the ocean?” “Why does he build a monster boat for 8 people?” “Let’s get back to our usual life; nothing is going to happen anyway.” But the flood came and swept them all away.

 

When I was in the early grades of my schooling and heard my teachers tell us the story of the flood they pictured it as if the water of the heavy rain gradually made the water rise inch by inch. The higher it rose, the more frantically did the people and the animals climb to higher and higher ground to escape the rising waters.

 

But it wasn’t that way at all. Suddenly the windows of heaven burst and it was not a heavy rain, but an ocean being suddenly dumped on the earth. And the fountains of water underground burst up into the surface. There were volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis, crashing waters that tore the earth apart and created mountains and continents. Most people did not even know what hit them. God’s fury came in a huge burst of judgment that changed the entire earthly creation and destroyed everything in the old one.

 

Jesus means to say that the child of God does not live as if it is “business as usual.” They know, as Noah knew, that judgment is coming and that this earth is going to be destroyed in an explosion of unprecedented horror. And they live accordingly. It is not business as usual. Christ is coming! That is an event so crucial that it determines how we live in every part of our life.

 

We may not conclude from all this that we are not to eat and drink, marry and give in marriage, nor go about our daily tasks the Lord lays on us. That is not the point of contrast between faithful Noah and his family on the one hand, and the wicked world on the other hand. We too are called to do all these things as long as we can -- given persecution, apostasy and the decline of the church.

 

It is in this light that we must also understand verses 40 and 41. Jesus means to say that God’s people as well as the wicked live in this world, working in the field and preparing meals. The difference is not in these daily and necessary duties. The difference lies in their reason for doing what they do. It is a difference in motive. God’s people look eagerly for Christ’s coming, and perform their daily tasks in the longing for that day. They are praying in their hearts, “Come, Lord Jesus: Come quickly.” The wicked are scared of that coming. And they really are saying, “Lord, don’t come. We do not want this world to end.”

But we are to do our work, not with the motive of “business as usual,” but watching and praying. It is not my purpose to spell this “watching and praying” out in detail. Scripture describes this kind of life in different ways. It describes this kind of life as the life of a spiritual pilgrim and stranger. It speaks of seeking and minding those things that are above, and not things on the earth (Col. 1:1-3).

 

Some might say (and many do say), “Well, I do not have to worry too much about it all for a long while. Christ is not going to come back to bring His church to glory for a long time. Many other things have to happen first. I’ll put this all on the back burner for a while. I can always get at it later. Now I am really too busy with my schooling and my work to give this much thought. I’ll just carry on with “business as usual.”

 

You may be right. The end of the world may not come yet for a number of years. BUT WHAT IF CHRIST COMES NOW! FOR YOU! BEFORE YOU GO TO BED TONIGHT! That coming of Christ is also part of the end of the world – for you! Is it then business as usual?

 

You do not know; nor do I, when Christ is coming. It is a good thing God does not tell us when Christ shall come to take us to heaven. But to watch and pray is necessary now. Christ is coming! Let us rejoice and be glad.

Prof. Herman Hanko

 

Signs of the Times (33)

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

Signs of the Times (32)

In the last article, I discussed Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:32-35, where Jesus uses the figure of a fig tree to underscore the importance of the signs of His coming. We will be able to tell how near His coming is by the signs of His coming in the world, the creation and the church.

 

There are just a few more points I want to make about the signs of Christ’s coming and the nearness of His coming.

 

One question that is sometimes asked is this: These signs of Christ’s coming that Jesus points out were there already in the first century when Jesus gave them. Now it is the 20^th century and Jesus still has not come back. So, how do the signs help us to know the nearness of the end? Maybe the Lord will not come back for another 20 centuries.

 

It is possible that the saints sometimes make a mistake about the nearness of the end. There are two examples of this in the Bible. One is the example in the church of Thessalonica. The saints in that church thought the Lord would come back any day. They were so sure of this that some even quit their jobs, arguing that there was no point in working any more if Christ was coming back very soon.

 

The answer to this problem is found especially in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, but partly also in his first letter. It would really be good if you would read these two letters for your evening devotions. Paul sharply rebukes those who have quit their jobs to wait for Christ to return. He tells them that the one who does not work may not eat. In his second epistle, Paul reminds the saints in Thessalonica that it is impossible that Christ come back in their day, for other signs, especially the sign of Antichrist and the sign of apostasy in the church must still happen.

 

It all reminds me of an incident from my childhood or, more probably, in my early teens. I went to a Christian School, but not a PR school. And so, while the instruction was, in a general way, Christian, it was not always correctly Biblical. We used to go to chapel from time to time in which guests, chiefly missionaries, would speak. Some of them were believers in Pre-millennialism – although I did not know at the time what that error was. At any rate, many of them would ask us the question: “What would you like to be doing at the moment the Lord returns?” They believed, of course, in the rapture, and they would mean by the question, Jesus could come back at any moment. The answer they expected was that we would like to be reading our bibles or praying, or listening in church to a sermon.

 

The fact was that the idea rather appealed to me, for it would be a good excuse to refrain from such chores as washing dishes, vacuuming rugs, pulling weeds in the garden and such like things. At the same time, I was having trouble with a picture of myself sitting reading a Bible all day long. So I thought I would ask my father about it all, which I did.

 

My father had a way of answering my questions without going into great detail, but giving an answer that stuck with me the rest of my life. He said to me, “Well, I’ll tell you what you must do. If you are in the garden hoeing the weeds out of the corn – and, by the way, I noticed the weeds, and it is high time you get out there and do the hoeing – and you know the Lord is coming back in the next five minutes, you just keep right on hoeing.”

 

He meant, of course, that we must be faithful in the work God gives us to do always, but do our work to the glory of God. But it took me a little while to figure it all out.

 

The saints in Asia Minor also thought the Lord was coming back at any moment. They were convinced of this for some pretty good reasons, for they were being persecuted. But Peter writes them a letter: it is found in our Bibles in II Peter. The wicked were mocking the Christians and saying that the Christians were fools for believing that Christ would come back. They were making Christians suffer every kind of cruelty, but Christ did not come to save them. And so the Christians thought the Lord did not care about them, was not moved with pity when He saw their suffering, and delayed His coming again for who knows what reasons.

 

Peter tells the saints four things (II Peter 3:9): 1- The Lord is not slack concerning his promise that He will come again, but He comes as quickly as possible. 2- The Lord is longsuffering: that is, He bears with the suffering of His people even though their suffering makes Him sad. He does this just as a surgeon operates on his own son whom he loves but who will live only if he goes through the agony of an operation and all the pain involved. He does not like to see his son suffer, but it is necessary to save his life.  So our suffering makes the Lord sad, but He knows it is the only way we can be saved; “It is through much tribulation that we enter the kingdom,” Paul tells the saints in the churches he establish on his first missionary journey. 3- The Lord cannot come again until all His people are saved, for He died for them too. “The Lord is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”  4- The great mistake we make is that we are so terribly time-bound that we think 2000 years is a long time. But with the Lord “a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” In the Lord’s reckoning it is only two days ago that Christ went to heaven.

 

But we must also remember that the Lord comes back every day, for part of His coming, as He said, is when a saint dies and goes to heaven. This is what Jesus says in John 14:1-3. “I will come again and take you to myself…”

 

If we want to look at the Lord’s coming from our narrow, cramped viewpoint, then first of all, we know that He cannot come just yet. There are signs the Lord gave us which more immediately precede His coming. Two of them are the reign of Antichrist and the world-wide persecution. We can know with certainty that the Lord will not come in the year 2014.

 

But the Lord’s coming, even from our point of view, may not be too far away. We can tell this also by the signs He has given us. It is true that these signs are present in the whole new dispensation; but as time moves along, these signs increase in frequency and in severity. Someone just wrote me recently that we are experiencing vast changes in weather patterns and that storms and calamities in the creation are increasing in number and in the damage done and people killed.

 

We must notice too that the world grows increasingly wicked, and along with that wickedness, it becomes also more and more hostile to the church. There is outright opposition to all the church teaches and even faithful pastors are being imprisoned in our country for condemning homosexuality. Very recently, the mayor of Houston, Texas, herself a lesbian, issued a directive that all the pastors in the city had to submit their sermons and articles in magazines to a committee appointed to review them when they were issued a sub poena. Any condemnation of the dreadful sin of homosexuality would be punished severely. She was finally forced to back down because of a public outcry, but that day is coming and is just around the corner.

 

Other signs that the end is near even from our perspective is the universal proclamation of the gospel. Few are the places where the gospel has not come. Jesus says that when that day comes, the end also comes, for all the elect will be gathered. Another sign of great importance is apostasy in the church. Few are the churches where the truth is held and esteemed. Yet another sign is the rise of Gog and Magog. Perhaps we cannot be sure who exactly Gog and Magog are, but the fact is that radical Islam is, at this writing, the greatest threat to the world today. That, especially seems to me to be a clear sign that we are near the end. 

Prof. Herman Hanko