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Rev Graham Harrison           Sunday September 30th 2001 p.m.
 

'And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Menís hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.' Luke 21:25-28.

This chapter contains some of the most serious and solemn words ever spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ. It began in a very unusual way. The offering in the Temple in Jerusalem was not taken up in the way with which we are familiar. There were, so we understand, several trumpet-shaped receptacles and people would come and throw in their offering. It was very much a public thing and people could see what was being put in. Of course, as we have it elsewhere in the Gospels, the Pharisees liked to make a great ostentatious show of their giving and undoubtedly they would make it very clear to people the great amount that they were giving. But the chapter begins by the Lord Jesus Christ watching a poor widow woman who comes and gives two very small coins, in fact the smallest coins ó ëtwo mitesí is how the Authorised Version translates itó and she puts those in. Then our Lord makes a comment which, from a human point of view, appears to be not only incredible but ridiculous: ëOf a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they allí. In simple, straightforward financial terms that was absolutely ridiculous. Probably she had given less than anybody else who had contributed to the offering that day. Yet, as is so often the case, our Lord was not looking on outward appearance but on the heart. He saw that this poor widow, who was so destitute, gave out of her penury and in that sense had cast in all the living that she had.

That is how the chapter begins, but to all intents and purposes it is as if the significance of that incident is totally ignored by the disciples. You might have thought that it would have been a fit occasion for them to comment on what the Lord Jesus Christ had said. Perhaps it would have been something of a rebuke to them because undoubtedly none of them had ever given in the way and to the degree that the poor widow woman had given. The incident could well therefore have given opportunity for suitable spiritual comment and observation, but there is none of it. Instead as they go out of the Temple the disciples begin to call the attention of the Lord Jesus Christ to the magnificent building that it was. Now it had already been in the process of being constructed for almost half a century. Johnís Gospel records some words of the Lord Jesus that, like so many of His statements, were totally misunderstood: ëDestroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?í Of course He ëspake of the temple of his bodyí [John 2:19-21] but they did not understand that.

So this great Temple had been in the process of being constructed for almost half a century. Herod the Great had commenced it forty-six years or so before this particular incident. It really was magnificent. Listen to what one writer has said about it:

The group of buildings belonging to the Temple, as it was rebuilt by Herod, occupied a much larger area than that of Solomon and the whole of the Temple mount was surrounded by a high strong wall with towers on the northern side. On the other sides there were no towers because the steepness of those sides of the hill on which the Temple was built and the height of the wall made it impregnable on those sides. On the Temple Square there were beautiful colonnades, stairs and gates by which the various Temple buildings were combined to form a whole. The actual Temple was built on an elevation of white marble blocks with golden ornaments, so it dominated all the buildings of the temple site. The Jewish historian Josephus gives the following description of the Temple. ëThe whole of the outer works of the Temple was in the highest degree worthy of admiration for it was completely covered with gold plates, which, when the sun was shining on them glittered so dazzlingly that they blinded the eyes of the beholders, not less than when one gazed at the sunís rays themselves. And on the other sides, where there was no gold, The blocks of marble were of such a pure white that to strangers who had never preciously seen them, from a distance they looked like a mountain of snow.

Now Josephus wrote that in the year A.D. 73 when the Temple was no more. By that time the Temple had been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Jews had been slaughtered. Our Lord had prophesied it here in this particular chapter. In the earlier portion of the chapter, immediately following that incident of the poor widow woman and her offering, our Lord goes on to speak of the impending destruction of the Temple and forty years or so later, in the year A.D. 70, after a terrible siege that lasted for five months, the Romans finally broke into Jerusalem. The Romans killed anybody who was old and infirm but who had survived the terrible suffering that they had passed through, with the disease and the starvation that they had endured. The rest were carried off into a slavery from which they never returned. Our Lord meant what He said!

Perhaps that is a point at which we ought to pause before going any further. Surely it is a good thing in life when we can test what somebody says: you are more likely to give credence to other things that he has said, the fulfilment of which perhaps lie in the future. And so it is with these words of the Lord Jesus Christ. A number of the prophecies that He made were to be fulfilled within a few decades of His death and this was one of them. The destruction of Jerusalem, the slaughter of its inhabitants, the escape to safety of the Christian Jews; and they did escape to safety. They went out to a city called Pella and afterwards some of them were permitted to come back and resettle in Jerusalem. But the generality of the Jews were not allowed back into the city of Jerusalem for many a year afterwards by the Romans. What our Lord spoke were not empty words: they were true and they came to pass. And that is all history, verifiable history! But what I am preaching about this evening is not something concerning which you can look back at it and say, ëWell, yes it has happened and we can see that it was trueí. It has not yet been fulfilled. Nevertheless it was spoken by the same person, Jesus Christ, in the same discourse, in which He is looking on to the end of the world. He, who never spoke an untruth in His life, meant every word that He said. And on the basis that what He has said in this case has already been fulfilled, we may be sure that what He has promised to be the case, one day will be fulfilled also.

So the latter part of this chapter from about verse twenty-five onwards deals not primarily with the destruction of Jerusalem but with the events that are going to take place before the Lord Jesus Christ finally returns. Christ, you see, had a wider concern than simply Jerusalem. He was concerned for Jerusalem; you have only to read those accounts that you have in the various Gospels of how He agonised over Jerusalem. He stood on a hill overlooking the city and wept tears of sorrow at the hardness of their hearts; He remonstrated with them again and again but they would not listen to Him. And eventually in a jeering mob they gathered on that little hill, Calvary, as the Lord Jesus Christ was dying. Our Lord agonised over Jerusalem.

But in a sense what you see in this chapter needs to be expanded and extended. It is as if our Lord is saying, ëWhat is going to take place with regard to Jerusalem, is somehow a parable of what is going to take place in the whole world. There is a time of judgment coming; a time that is going to be of tremendous upheaval.í Certainly it was like that before the fall of Jerusalem. The language that our Lord uses here in this Gospel and in the other accounts in Matthewís and in Markís Gospels well befits the terrible suffering that was involved in the siege and the subsequent slaughter of its inhabitants. But He is concerned to look on beyond that event because He is dealing with the eternal God. He is dealing with the principles in terms of which God always acts. So He points men on to the end of the world.

I want to consider what He has to say with something particularly in mind. It is this: one of the things that we surely need to face up to in these days is the contrast ó perhaps that is too weak a word ó the conflict that there is between the world view that we are presented with from the Bible and the world view that shouts its message at us from the very world in which we live and of which we are part. You could not have two things that are more diametrically opposed one to the other, and it is good for us simply to look at both of them, to examine the one against the other and then in terms of what the Lord Jesus Christ has to say in a passage like this, to analyse and assess which is right.

Now what do I mean when I speak, for example, of the prevailing world-view? There are many things that you can say, but perhaps the most significant is this ó the prevailing world-view leaves God out of it. God is an irrelevance. God, if He exists ó that is how some might even deign to speak about Him ó God does not really matter. This is the real world and we are real people in this real world. We have to make sense of what is. It is no good going back to these old religious statements ó and the pundits begin to pour contempt upon the sort of things that the Bible says ó you do not need anything like that! All that you need in order to understand and explain the world is found within the world itself. It is a sort of naturalistic view of things and you need nothing else in order to account for things as they are. All that you need, it is argued, is a very long period of time and what many people would describe as chance or luck. Throw those two things together and you have the world as it is today. Time and chance, that is all you require. You do not need God! If you want to account for how we have come about, you do it in terms of not just the theory of evolution but the whole philosophy of evolution. Who needs God if you have evolution! That seems to be the message that is shouted loud and clear from Infant School right up to the universities of our land. And anybody who has been in any level of that education process could confirm the accuracy of what I am saying.

Of course, if that is your position, you are just left with humanity as it is. But you then have to account for the human condition, for the ups and the downs of mankind. You begin, therefore, to look at history. You argue that man is improving; he is greater now than he was in the last century and certainly greater than he was two thousand years or so ago, when this old book, the Bible was written. In one sense it is a very simplistic point that they make when we just think of the scientific advances that we benefit from in the modern world. And so, on the face of it, it seems to be a very plausible argument. Man is improving, man can do great things, man is even able to get out of this little world, this globe on which we live, he is able to visit the moon and come back and, who knows, next will be some of the planets. Is anything impossible to man? So there is this great spirit of optimism.

But then of course there is a problem. It is the problem of history, because history does not seem to spell out an optimistic message. As you work your way right from ancient history down to the present day, it is all about wars and strife, empires rising and falling, one power block fighting against and eventually overcoming another power block and then itself being superseded by yet another that comes and pushes them into history. That is the human story. It is not a story of peace and virtue; it is a story of strife, a story of suffering, a story of great sin. And you would have thought that any rational, independent minded person as he tried to stand back from all that, would ask the question, ëWhat does this teach me? What does it teach me about this human race of which I am a part?í And what it ought to tell him is that there is something deeply wrong with mankind. But he will not accept that! He says, ëAh, yes, education, philosophy, man using his intelligence, will be able to overcome all these things!í Of course you would have thought that the last century was the sufficient answer to that! If you went back to the previous century, the nineteenth century, there is a sense in which you could understand people being optimistic. The empires of the western world were expanding; whether it was the British empire, or those of France, Belgium, Germany, they were all reaching out to the four corners of the globe and claiming various parts as extensions of their territory. Great scientific advances, great improvements socially were being made and so to some extent you could understand people going along with the evolutionary theories that became prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century.

But what should have put a lie to all of it was the twentieth century. You scarcely got beyond the first decade of the twentieth century and you had that so-called ëwar to end all warsí, the First World War with its terrible carnage. Then people thought that was just a little hiccup in mankindís progress onward and upward. But barely twenty years went by and you had the Second World War. At the end of it you had those terrible nuclear weapons being used, destroying more people in an instant than had ever happened before. But people shrug their shoulders and somehow they do not face up to the inevitable conclusions that they should draw from this and on they go. But the human story is still one of war, and riot and rebellion and suffering. Take the sort of things that our Lord mentions here ó the earthquakes, the famines, the pestilences. I wonder if ever there was a century like the twentieth century for things like that. If ever there was a period in history that ought to have caused the impartial observer just to stand back and say, ëThere must be something wrong with our theory. It simply does not fit the facts. Man is not on the up; man seems to be inherently evil and sinful. He needs some help, he needs something that is going to deliver him.í But here we are already into the twenty-first century and you do not get that message at all from the world, do you? The world seems never to learn. And that without endeavouring to caricature it or misrepresent it in any way, is the prevailing world-view. It is the view that is being taught to little children in infant school and then in more and more elaborate ways right through to universities. Indeed the people who think themselves to be the intelligentsia of this world; they would swear by that sort of philosophy.

There it is on the one side. In stark contrast to that there is the message of the Bible. It is different; it is different right at the beginning. ëIn the beginning Godí [Genesis 1:1]. Before ever you get the mention of man, before you get the creation of the earth and the whole of the solar system, ëIn the beginning Godí. If you do not start there, you do not understand what the Bible is about. It begins with God ó God, the Creator. It tells us in other words that this world, this universe that we know and of which we are part, is not the product of blind chance and extended time. It is a creation by a Creator, God. He made us. And man? He is not something that can scarcely be differentiated from the animals, as the other theory is basically telling us. Man is the summit and the crown of Godís creation. After everything else had been prepared, God created man and created man in His image. That is why the Bible begins in the way that it does, way back there in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, describing to us the creation that God brought into existence; and then as the pinnacle of that creation man, man made by God and made for God. This is how the Bible begins to unfold its story.

But then of course it faces the same phenomena that this other theory faces. Look at the world! Look at the history of man. Now those of you who have been coming on a Sunday morning will know that at the present time I am preaching through one of the most horrific parts of the Old Testament, the Book of Judges. It is a story of suffering and wars and rebellions, cruelty and unspeakable horrors in various places. In one sense it is not untypical of the story of humanity. You might say it is concentrated into a particular period of time but you can read your papers today and you can find its parallels. You can read your history and you can certainly find again and again the story of the Book of Judges has been repeated. But, you see, unlike this other theory the Bible is able to account for it. The Bible does not have to avoid describing the evil for the thing that is; it calls it by its name. It calls it sin. It tells us how sin first came into the world. It tells us that there is a whole spirit world and in that spirit world there was a rebellion against God, led by the one whom the Bible describes as Satan or the Devil. And being cast out of the bliss of heaven, he came down to earth, tempted our first parents, deceived them, caused them to sin and since then the story has been of continuing sin. And the story is one ó not of improvement, not of man on the rise, as it were, of man ascending to unbelievable heights, but of man seeming to descend deeper and deeper into the abyss of evil and of sin.

Despite all the great people who have been raised up, despite the very learned philosophers, despite the great religious figures who might have paraded their views at different times and in different places, the story seems to be an uninterrupted story of human sin and the judgment of God upon that sin of man. And here in these verses the Lord Jesus Christ is really just giving an extended view of that same story, the repeated failure of man. He moves on to the very end of time and speaks of that day when He Himself is going to return. What He is saying and what the message of the Bible is saying ó the message that men and women in the world so often will not listen to, refusing in many cases even recognise its existence ó is this: surely our human predicament demands, if there is to be any hope at all, an intervention from God!

And in one sense that is the whole story of the message of the Bible ó God has intervened. He did it repeatedly in the Old Testament. He raised up great men who were generally known as prophets, inspired by the Holy Spirit, speaking the message of God often to a people who did not want to know what God was saying, and who would not listen to what He was saying to them. Many of those prophets paid for their faithfulness with their lives. But it was the message that God is intervening. God is not an impartial spectator somewhere in heaven, not really concerned about what is happening on His earth. God is concerned; it matters to Him and so again and again He sent the prophets. Do you remember the very famous opening of one of the greatest books in the New Testament, the Epistle to the Hebrews? ëGod, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Soní [Hebrews 1:1,2]. Here, you see, is the greatest intervention of all. God incarnate, God has come Himself down to earth in the person of His Son.

It was to be less than a week before men and women, who had been made by Him, took Jesus, nailed Him to a cross and killed Him. But even that was the intervention of God. And the Lord Jesus Christ, not only in this particular portion that I am speaking to you about this evening but throughout the whole of His ministry, was concerned to get across to people that they need the intervention of God. There were times when He explained His coming into the world precisely in these terms: ëFor the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lostí [Luke 19:10]. That was how He spoke of Himself and of His ministry. He did not just happen, He was not just an ordinary person who was born and who had a particular religious gift with an ability to speak and the peculiar power to perform miracles. No! He had come from heaven. Why had He come? He had come to seek and to save that which was lost. In other words, He had intervened in this world of chaos and sin and rebellion and confusion. He had come to bring men back to God ó and supremely that was what He was going to accomplish by dying less than a week after He spoke these words.

But here He is describing the human condition for us. Wherever you drop into the ongoing story of history it is the same. You can do it today, especially since the events that took place just a couple of weeks ago in America on the 11th September. ëAnd there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nationsí (v.25). Do you not get that on the news bulletins that are coming across on your televisions and on your radios and as you read your newspaper? They are all anxious, they are agitated. What is going to happen? If America does this, what is going to be the consequence of it? All the nice things they are saying about Islam, why are they saying them? Well it is because they are afraid. They wonder what on earth possibly could happen. Who would have thought that two aeroplanes flying into two blocks of buildings in New York City could ever have had such a world shattering impact? But it has done! ë Menís hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shakení (v.26).

You would never have predicted in terms of the current theory that this man hiding somewhere in the remote mountains of Afghanistan could do something, even to topple the greatest military power that the world has ever known. You would have thought that the very suggestion was ridiculous ó before Tuesday 11th September! But now men do not know what is going to happen and so you have this distress, this agitation, ëdistress of nations, with perplexityí (v25). Then our Lord uses an illustration that is a very frequent illustration in the Scriptures; ëthe sea and the waves roaringí. He is not thinking of the seaside there and all the waves beating against the shore; He is speaking of the turbulence of the nations. Often in the Old Testament the state of the world is compared to a troubled and agitated sea. It is not calm, it is not peaceful; there is disturbance, there is agitation. That is what our Lord is picking up here: ëdistress of nations, with perplexityí. And some of the versions link the perplexity with the sea and the waves roaring, men not really knowing what to make of all the disturbance, all the trouble. They do not know what is going to happen. Anything is possible! You can gather that, can you not, from some of the comments and the movements of the various political leaders, not just of our nation but of the nations of the world. Who knows what is going to happen?

I am not here this evening to try and turn myself into a prophet; there have been too many of those in the past and history rightly forgets about them and ridicules their failures and their falsehoods. I do not want to add to their number. All that I want to do is to call your attention to this ongoing state of affairs and to tell you that before the Lord Jesus Christ returns, there is going to be even more agitation, even more distress. Do not believe those humanists that tell you that the world is becoming a better place and manís ingenuity knowing no bounds will be able to solve all his problems. Tell them to read their history; tell them to ask the question, ëWhy have they not solved things up to the present day, if human ingenuity is all that is needed for it?í No, you see the message of the Bible is this, there is something wrong with man; there is something deeply wrong with man, with every individual man, with all the collective activities of men. They are all marked by sin ó and nothing but the intervention of God is going to deal with that.

What the Lord Jesus Christ was to accomplish, less than a week later, was to die because of sin. Some people of course would say, ëHow does that help? What use was that!í Some of them will speak of Jesus in a noble way. They admire Him. They say, ëIf only the world were to pay attention to the sort of things that He said, if only instead of seeking revenge they had turned the other cheek, if they would go the second mile, if they would be forgiving, what a lovely place this world would be!í Then if you ask them the question, ëWell why do not men do that?í they are stumped for an answer. The Christian can say, ëI can tell you why men do not do that! It is because they are sinful; and the heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked. Man himself does not realise how wicked it is, only God is able to plumb the depths of human wickedness.í Even those people who praise Jesus and will admire Him, reduce Him to the status of a martyr, or a man who stuck to His principles, right to the end even though it cost Him His life. And they admire Him for it. That, they think, is the great story of Jesus.

They do not understand Jesus, they do not understand themselves, they do not understand God, they do not understand sin ó and they do not see that why Jesus died was not to be a martyr, not to show that He had the courage of His convictions and was not going to change them even at the cost of His life. He had come to save sinners and the only way in which sinners could be saved was by something being done about their sins. And that something necessitated sin being punished. If sin were to be punished and sinners were to be absolved of their sin, a substitute was necessary to bear their sins and to bear that punishment ó and His Name was Jesus. That was what happened less than a week, in fact just a few days, after the events of this chapter, when Jesus was nailed to the cross of Calvary. It was the greatest intervention of all ó God had become man, not in order to live, but to die and to die in the place of sinners, so that sin might be dealt with and eternity might open before human beings as a prospect, not to be shunned and feared but to be welcomed with eager arms because you knew that when you trusted in this Saviour, one day He would take you home to be with God ó reconciled and at peace with Him. The greatest intervention of all.

Jesus is here telling His disciples, who are so obsessed with this magnificent Temple that they thought was absolutely secure. Little did they realise at the time that less than forty years afterwards it was going to be razed to the ground, torn stone from stone. All that is left of it day is the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Some of you have been there and you have seen it ó a few blocks of stone, raised up one upon the other. But the Temple? Gone, devastated! The Romans hurled it down from its place of prominence.

Yet Jesus said that there is going to be another intervention. This time not an intervention of hope and of mercy and of salvation, but an intervention of judgment. That is coming at the end of the world. He does not say when He says that. He gives certain signs that are indicative of the coming, most of them here are of a fairly general nature ó but does He not speak to us with all the agitation that is going on in the hearts of so many people today: ëMenís hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shakení (v.26). What we need to do is what He tells us here: ëthen look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nighí (v.28). He is telling us, you look up from this world, you look out from its humanistic philosophies and theories ó they are all worth nothing! You look to this great intervention of God; you rest in Him. In Him alone is safety and security.

The impossible, as far as the disciples conceived it, was going to happen, the Temple was going to be devastated and destroyed. Jesus said it and in saying it probably not only amazed them but possibly offended some of them. This was the very centre of their religious life. It is going to be destroyed, said the Lord Jesus Christ. But something is going to remain to eternity ó are you ready for that? He ends, as you remember, by calling us to watchfulness: ëWatch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.í They crowded in to listen to Him. Each night He went back and slept in the mount called the mount of Olives and first thing in the morning He was back in the Temple and the crowds flocked to listen to Him. But they did not believe Him and just a few days later many of them were there jeering at Him as He was hanging in agony on the cross.

Is that a picture of you? Oh, you say, you would never do something like that! But, I ask, do you believe what He says? Do you take His Word as true and authentic? Do you trust in Him? Do y ou agree with His assessment of the human condition and of the history of mankind? Or do you think somehow that ëlittle youí has got it right? Or these great figures of the world, who are always telling us what should and what should not be, do you think that they are the ones who speak truth? Is it they, or Jesus Christ? Oh, look to Him, trust in Him, believe Him. He never spoke a lie. All that He said either has been, or will be proved true. If your heart is failing for fear, if you are in perplexity, if you are anxious because of what is going on in the world ó lift up your heads, your redemption draweth nigh! Look to Jesus and ask Him to intervene in your little life that all might be well with your soul.
Amen
 
 

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