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