181111 Sermon on Matthew 24:15-28 (3rd Last Sunday of the Church Year), November 11, 2018

181111 Sermon on Matthew 24:15-28 (3rd Last Sunday of the Church Year), November 11, 2018

Beginning today we have entered into that season of the Church Year where the readings direct our thoughts to the end of our lives, the end of the world, Christ’s second coming, the judgement of the living and the dead.  These are the last things and they have not yet come to pass.  One day the sun and the moon will darken, the stars will fall, the trumpet will sound, and Christ will come on the clouds in great glory.  Then all people will be resurrected from the dead, appear before Christ, and those who are righteous will be received into heaven, while those who remained in their sins will be cast into hell.  This is either going to happen while we are still living or this is what our bodily existence will awaken to after we have closed our eyes in death and been laid into the grave.

The end, the goal, the culmination of everybody’s life is in these last things, but we need some help or we won’t welcome these thoughts in the least bit.  God’s righteous judgment is the Old Adam’s greatest fear.  Past sins come to mind.  And have you gotten any better?  Have you quit sinning?  To understand God’s righteous judgement is to understand the impossibility of salvation in any other way than by the salvation Jesus has worked on the cross—his sacred head wounded, with grief and shame weighed down.  The cross is everything.  It is the sinner’s only hope. 

But it is not an empty hope or a hope that might or might not produce results.  We can know this by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.  Jesus was crushed for our iniquities and bore all the wrath of God for all your sins and for the sins of the whole world.  He became a worm and no man.  But God’s wrath was extinguished with the blood of his Son, and he raised him from the dead because He is his beloved Son in whom he is well pleased.  And so the Father also loves you because Jesus has joined himself to you.  It wasn’t his own sins that he suffered and died for, it was your sins—all of them.  You and he go together.  If he has been raised by the glory of the Father, then you also are raised to live a new life before God in righteousness and purity forever. 

And so when the sun and the moon wobble in their orbits, and nations rise up in war, and the sea roars, and the trumpet blasts, by faith in Christ you may lift up your heads and look up, because your redemption is drawing near.  By faith in Christ, we can scan the horizon, awaiting his coming with eager anticipation instead of cowering in the bushes in horror.  By faith in Christ you can say together with St. John, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.” 

But there is a lot of trouble that must be dealt with now and going forward until the end.  Jesus’s prophecies that are recorded in our Gospel reading today especially deal with these things.  But before we get into that, I’d first like to speak about the nature of prophesies in general, so that we can keep this in mind as we consider Jesus’s words.

The usual nature of prophecy is that things are not cut and dried as though we were dealing with a news report from the future transferred back in time before the event.  The Old Testament prophecies concerning Christ have this character, where it seems as though it would not have been so perfectly clear at the time that the prophecy was given. 

After the prophecy is fulfilled, then it is easier to look back at what was spoken or done and see more clearly.  St. John speaks of this in his Gospel.  Not all the things that Jesus said or did were altogether immediately clear.  Some of these things were understood more fully only later.  For example, when Jesus said that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, St. John says that the disciples did not understand him when he said that.  Only after he was risen from the dead on the third day, did they understood that he was speaking about his body.  Before it actually happened, I wouldn’t doubt that the disciples wondered whether this might mean that Jesus somehow moved great blocks of stone with miraculous power or somehow harnessed an incredible mass of people and machinery to rebuild Herod’s temple that had taken 46 years to build.  Perhaps none of them understood that he was speaking about his body until it actually took place.  Our thoughts about Jesus’s prophecies about the last things will probably have a good deal of this kind of thing also. 

Some of Jesus’s disciples, particularly the Pentecostals and those influenced by their theology, spend a great deal of time and energy on figuring out exactly how these prophesies are either being fulfilled or will be fulfilled.  They point to particular events and come up with theories.  Often they might be very specific about names, times, and places as fulfillments of prophecy.  These groups have been doing this for almost 200 years, and so these identifications have been wrong.  The end has not yet come.

Most people who look upon these Christians who are so devoted to figuring out the prophecies scoff at them.  That does not please me in the least bit.  If I had to choose between the scoffers and the Pentecostals, I would side with the Pentecostals  every time, because at least they know that these things that Jesus speaks about will come to pass, even if their theories are wrong and can end up doing much damage.

My advice to those who have grand theories about the end times is not that they should quit wondering about or believing such things, but that they should be humble and patient.  People who believe that they have figured out some great secret can’t help but become proud and excited.  Those who believe that they have discovered some secret about the end times are dealing with the biggest thing that will ever happen to this earth.  They might end up imagining themselves to be like those wise characters in movies who know exactly what is going on, while everybody else is either stupidly oblivious or frantic and perplexed.  This is a cheap spiritual high—a trick of the devil’s—who knows what we like and is happy to get us off on any tangent so long as we are not occupied with Christ and him crucified. 

I also urge patience.  These folks are in a rush to get to the meaning of the prophecy and will not rest until they have settled on something, on anything.  They are also impatient with the way the Word of God speaks.  They want it to be like a news report from the future with precise unmistakable details.  But this is judging God’s Word and rejecting what it really is, so that it can fit their own thinking.  Realize that God and his Word just might think differently than you think.  It is yet another subtle trick of the devil’s when God’s Word is jammed into the requirements that we lay upon it for how we think it should speak.  Humility and patience is what is required to be a lifelong student of God’s Word, and all who take this advice will find that the Scriptures are an inexhaustible spring, and there is always more to take in than we are capable of consuming.

I realize that my cautioning against speculation about end times things does not apply to most of you.  If anything probably the opposite should be urged upon you—that you think more about end times things, and not be like the unbelieving world who imagines that this is fairy tale stuff.  Jesus’s prophecies truly say something to us—they are not gobbledy-gook.  They have warning and instruction.  But not only might they be fulfilled in surprising ways, they will most likely be fulfilled in ways that our foolish reason does not expect.

I’ve spent a long time this morning dealing with preliminary things without getting into the prophecy itself.  I’d like to look at Jesus’s prophecy itself a little bit.  We can’t go into all kinds of specifics, but I’d like to spend some time on one of the main thoughts.  Jesus says that a time is coming where there will be false christs and false prophets who will perform signs and wonders.  These signs and wonders will be so astounding that if it were possible they would mislead even the elect—the elect are the ones chosen by God for salvation.  And so what Jesus is saying is that these signs and wonders are so good that they almost have the power to thwart God’s own will, which, of course, is impossible.

I’d like to try my hand at interpreting this.  I think we are living during this time.  The signs and wonders that Jesus is talking about are all the marvelous inventions that have been made—especially in the last 300 years or so.  There are so many things today that would totally dazzle someone from the past coming upon them for the first time.  They’d truly believe that it was magic. 

I’ll just mention one example among countless others.  Suppose one of the ancient people saw a modern printer print a piece of paper.  Out of nowhere suddenly there emerges a beautifully square sheet with perfect edges, perfect whiteness, perfect print, and it hardly takes a second to write something that would take several minutes to write by hand.  They wouldn’t know where it comes from.  They can’t even see any moving parts.  This would be flabbergasting and stupefying.  And you know that this is by no means the greatest of the signs and wonders we can see today.

What does this have to do with Jesus’s prophecy?  It’s not the signs or the wonders themselves that are so bad, but the false christs and the false prophets that are attached to all these signs and wonders.  These false christs and prophets have a message to preach, and it is this: If you like all this stuff—if you like toilets and computers and modern medicine—then you better not spend your time with God’s Word or Jesus’s prophecies or wondering about the end times.  Thinking those kinds of thoughts is what kept civilization in the dark ages for so many years.  Instead, you must put all your energy into earthly and personal progress.  The false Christ—the false salvation here—is that if we only try hard enough and work long enough, we can solve every problem we come across.  One day we might even be able to cheat death.  And that—to them—is not so farfetched.  All the progress we’ve made in medicine is proof positive that we are well on our way.

Now look around you and ask yourself what has captured the people’s attention?  In what terms do people think of their lives, and what are we teaching our children?  In even the very best of our Christian homes the end point of our existence—that Jesus will come, the dead will be raised and judged, and the righteous will enter heaven and the guilty will be cast into hell—this message is muted and overshadowed by other concerns, and that’s if it is there at all.  What parents want for their children is that they should be healthy, wealthy, and have the respect of their fellow Man.  God doesn’t enter into it.  And so schooling, training, getting jobs, and otherwise equipping the children for this kind of life is the main concern if not the only concern. 

What do the children know of God or God’s Word or the history of the world from this perspective?  Almost nothing.  The parochial schools are closed.  The ones that are left are corrupted by the same philosophy that is taught in the public schools.  The signs and wonders of our modern age and the preaching that accompanies it have captured almost everybody, so that hardly anybody is looking for the coming of the Christ.  It seems to me that Jesus’s prophecy is being fulfilled.  Even the elect are barely keeping before their mind’s eye that all will be judged by God, and that our only hope is in Christ the crucified.

And so we should heed Jesus’s instructions when he says, “So if they say to you, ‘Look, he is over there,’ or ‘here!’ do not believe it.”  We are all being taught by false christs and false prophets who wish to give us the meaning of life, the purpose of it, and the way that we should think.  They say that this is how we have been successful and blessed, and if you do not do as they say then you are hindering progress.  They might even say that you are being evil. 

Do not believe them.  Listen to Jesus.  He is the center of the universe.  He is above all things.  The story of this world is that God has sent his Son to redeem all people with his death so that we can be set free from death and damnation.  The false christs and the false prophets would have you believe that there is nothing that can be done about death.  You just have to accept it as a fact of life.  And so you might as well get busy fixing the things you can change, and so join us in our striving for progress.

No.  Death is not just a fact of life.  It is the wages of sin.  But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  There is a whole ‘nother life set before us, and it is even our true life as we will be set free from sin and have perfect fellowship with God our Creator.

As I mentioned, there is a lot more that we could say about Jesus’s prophecy, but this is enough for today.  Make use of Jesus’s words and thereby be prepared.