Verses 1-51
Chapter 24
We have already seen that it is one of the great characteristics of
Matthew that he gathers together in large blocks the teaching of Jesus
about different subjects. In Matthew 24:1-51
he gathers together things that Jesus said about the future and gives
us the vision of things to come. In so doing Matthew weaves together
sayings of Jesus about different aspects of the future; and it will make
this difficult chapter very much easier to understand if we can
disentangle the various strands and look at them one by one.
Matthew's interweaving of the sayings of Jesus lasts throughout Matthew 23:31.
It will be best if, first of all, we set down these verses as a whole;
if, next, we set down the various aspects of the future with which they
deal; and if, last, we try to assign each section to its place in the
pattern. We cannot claim certainty or finality for the pattern which we
obtain; but, the general picture will become clear.
First then, we set down the verses, and we shall number them to
make easier their assignment to their place in the pattern.
The Vision Of The Future (Matthew 24:1-31)
24:1-31 1. When
Jesus had left the precincts of the Temple, he was going away; and his
disciples came to him to point out to him the 2. buildings of the Temple
area. He said to them, "Do you not see all these things? This is the
truth I tell you--one stone will not be left here upon another that will
not be thrown down." 3. His disciples came to him privately when he was
sitting on the Mount of Olives. "Tell us," they said, "when these
things shall be. And tell us what will be the sign of your coming, and
of the 4. consummation of the age." Jesus answered, "Be on the look-out
5. lest anyone lead you astray, for many will come in my name saying, 'I
am God's Anointed One,' and they will lead many 6. astray. You will
hear of wars and reports of wars. See that you are not disturbed; for
these things must happen; but the end is not 7. yet. For nation shall
rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be
famines and earthquakes in various 8. places. All these things are the
beginning of the agonies. Then 9. they will deliver you to affliction,
and they will kill you, and you 10. will be hated by all nations because
of my name. And then many will stumble, and will betray each other, and
will hate each other. 11. And many false prophets will arise, and they
will lead many 12. astray. And the love of many will grow cold, because
lawlessness 13. will be multiplied. But it is he who endures to the end
who will be 14. saved. And the gospel will be proclaimed to the whole
inhabited world, for a testimony to all nations--and then the end will
come. 15. When you see the desolating abomination, which was spoken of
by the prophet Daniel, standing in the Holy Place (let him who 16. reads
understand), then let him who is in Judaea flee to the 17. mountains.
Let him who is on the housetop not come down to 18. remove his goods
from his house; and let him who is in the field 19. not come back to
remove his cloak. Alas for those who in those days are carrying children
in the womb, and who are suckling 20. children. Pray that your flight
may not be in the winter time, nor 21. on a Sabbath. For at that time
there will be great affliction, such as has never happened from the
beginning of the world until now, 22. and such as never will happen.
And, if the days had not been shortened, no human being would have
survived. But the days 23. will be shortened for the sake of the elect.
At that time, if anyone says to you, 'Look you, here, or here, is the
Anointed One of 24. God,' do not believe him. For false Messiahs and
false prophets will arise, and they will produce great signs and
wonders, the consequences of which will be, if possible, to lead astray
the elect. 25. Look you, I have told you about these things before they
happen. 26. If anyone says to you, 'Look you, he is in the wilderness,'
do not go out. 'Look you, he is in the inner chambers,' do not believe
him. For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as 28.
the west, so shall be the coming of the Son of Man. Where the 29. body
is, there the vultures will be gathered. Immediately after the
affliction of these days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not
give her light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the 30. powers
of heaven will be shaken. Then there will appear the sign of the Son of
Man in heaven. And then all the tribes of the earth will lament, and
they will see the Son of Man coming on the 31. clouds of heaven with
power and much glory. And he will send his angels with a great trumpet
call, and they will gather the elect from the four winds, from one
boundary of heaven to the other."
The Interweaving Of The Strands
There then is the composite vision of the future which Matthew
collects for us; we must now try to disentangle the various strands in
it. At this stage we only indicate the strands and leave fuller
explanation for the detailed commentary.
(i) Some verses which foretell the terrible days of the siege of
Jerusalem by Titus, the Roman general, a siege which was one of the
most terrible in all history. These are Matthew 24:15-22.
(ii) Some verses tell of the ultimate complete destruction of Jerusalem and its reduction to a heap of ruins. These are Matthew 24:1-2.
(iii) Some verses paint pictures taken from the Jewish
conception of the Day of the Lord. We have spoken about that conception
before but we must briefly outline it again. The Jews divided all time
into two ages--this present age, and the age to come. The present age is
wholly bad and beyond all hope of human reformation. It can be mended
only by the direct intervention of God. When God does intervene the
golden age, the age to come, will arrive. But in between the two ages
there will come the Day of the Lord, which will be a time of terrible
and fearful upheaval, like the birth-pangs of a new age.
In the Old Testament itself there is many a picture of the Day
of the Lord; and in the Jewish books written between the Old and the New
Testaments these pictures are further developed and made still more
vivid and still more terrible.
It will be a time of terror. "A day of wrath is that day, a day
of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of
darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness" (Zephaniah 1:14-18). The pictures of that terror became ever more lurid.
It will come suddenly. "The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2). "Three things," said the Rabbis, "are sudden--the coming of the Messiah, a discovery, and a scorpion."
The universe will be shattered to pieces. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood (Joel 2:30-31; Isaiah 13:10; Isaiah 13:13).
It will be a time of moral chaos, when moral standards will be
turned upside down, and when even nature will act contrary to herself,
and when wars and violence and hatred will be the common atmosphere of
life.
Schurer (The Jewish People in the Time of Christ ii, 154) sums
up the Jewish ideas of the day of the Lord, ideas with which Jewish
literature was full and which everyone knew in the time of Jesus. "The
sun and moon will be darkened, swords appear in heaven, trains of horses
and foot march through the clouds. Everything in nature falls into
commotion and confusion. The sun appears by night, the moon by day.
Blood trickles from wood, the stone gives forth a voice, and salt is
found in fresh water. Places that have been sown will appear as unsown,
full barns be found empty, and the springs of wells be stopped. Among
men all restraints of order will be dissolved, sin and ungodliness rule
upon earth. And men will fight against each other as if stricken with
madness, the friend against the friend, the son against the father, the
daughter against the mother. Nation will rise against nation, and to war
shall be added earthquake, fire and famine, whereby men shall be
carried off."
Such were the terrible pictures of the day of the Lord.. The verses are Matthew 24:6-8 and Matthew 24:29-31.
(iv) Some verses deal with the persecution which the followers of Christ will have to endure. These are Matthew 24:9-10.
(v) Some verses deal with the threats which will develop against the life and purity of the Church. These are Matthew 24:4-5, Matthew 24:11-13 and Matthew 24:23-26.
(vi) Some verses speak directly of the Second Coming of Christ. These are Matthew 24:3, Matthew 24:14 and Matthew 24:27-28.
So, in this amazing and difficult chapter of Matthew, we have in Matthew 24:1-31
a kind of sixfold vision of the future. We now go on to look at this
vision, not taking the verses of the chapter consecutively, but taking
together in turn those which deal with each strand.
24:1-2 When
Jesus had left the precincts of the Temple, he was going away; and his
disciples came to him to point out to him the buildings of the Temple
area. He said to them, "Do you not see all these things? This is the
truth I tell you--one stone will not be left here upon another that will
not be thrown down."
It may well be that at least some of the disciples had not been
very often to Jerusalem. They were Galilaeans, men of the highlands and
of the country, fishermen who knew the lakeside far better than they
knew the city. Some of them at least would be like country folk come up
to London for a visit, staggered by what they saw; and well they might
be, for there was nothing quite like the Temple in the ancient world.
The summit of Mount Sion had been dug away to leave a plateau of
1,000 feet square. At the far end of it was the Temple itself (the
naos, Greek #3485).
It was built of white marble plated with gold, and it shone in the sun
so that a man could scarcely bear to look at it. Between the lower city
and the Temple mount lay the valley of the Tyropoeon, and across this
valley stretched a colossal bridge. Its arches had a span of 41 1/2
feet, and its spring stones were 24 feet long by 6 inches thick. The
Temple area was surrounded by great porches, Solomon's Porch and the
Royal Porch. These porches were upheld by pillars, cut out of solid
blocks of marble in one piece. They were 37 1/2 feet high, and of such a
thickness that three men linked together could scarcely put their arms
round them. At the corners of the Temple angle stones have been found
which measure from 20 to 40 feet in length, and which weigh more than
100 tons. How they were ever cut and placed in position is one of the
mysteries of ancient engineering. Little wonder that the Galilaean
fishermen looked and called Jesus' attention to them.
Jesus answered that the day would come when not one of these
stones would be left standing upon the other--and Jesus was right. In
A.D. 70 the Romans, finally exasperated by the rebellious intransigence
of the Jews, gave up all attempt at pacification and turned to
destruction, and Jerusalem and the Temple were laid waste so that Jesus'
prophecy literally came true.
Here speaks Jesus the prophet. Jesus knew that the way of power
politics can end only in doom. The man and the nation which will not
take the way of God are heading for disaster--even in material things.
The man and the nation which refuse the dream of God will find their own
dreams shattered also.
24:15-22 "When
you see the desolating abomination, which was spoken of by the prophet
Daniel, standing in the Holy Place (let him who reads understand), then
let him who is in Judaea flee to the mountains. Let him who is on the
housetop not come down to remove his goods from his house; and let him
who is in the field not come back to remove his cloak. Alas for those
who in those days are carrying children in the womb, and who are
suckling children. Pray that your flight may not be in the winter time,
nor on a Sabbath. For at that time there will be great affliction, such
as has never happened from the beginning of the world until now, and
such as never will happen. And, if the days had not been shortened, no
human being would have survived. But the days will be shortened for the
sake of the elect."
The siege of Jerusalem was one of the most terrible sieges in
all history. Jerusalem was obviously a difficult city to take, being a
city set upon a hill and defended by religious fanatics; so Titus
determined to starve it out.
No one quite knows what the desolating abomination is. The phrase itself comes from Daniel 12:11.
There it is said that the abomination that makes desolate is set up in
the Temple. The Daniel reference is quite clear. About 170 B.C.
Antiochus Epiphanes, the king of Syria, determined to stamp out Judaism
and to introduce into Judaea Greek religion and Greek practices. He
captured Jerusalem, and desecrated the Temple by erecting an altar to
Olympian Zeus in the Temple Court and by sacrificing swines' flesh upon
it, and by turning the priests' rooms and the Temple chambers into
public brothels. It was a deliberate attempt to stamp out Jewish
religion.
It was the prophecy of Jesus that the same thing would happen
again, and that once again the Holy Place would be desecrated, as indeed
it was. Jesus saw coming upon Jerusalem a repetition of the terrible
things which had happened 200 years ago; only this time there would
arise no Judas Maccabaeus; this time there would be no deliverance and
no purification; there would be nothing but ultimate destruction.
Jesus foretold of that siege that unless its days had been
shortened, no human being could have survived it. It is strange to see
how Jesus gave practical advice which was not taken, the disregarding of
which multiplied the disaster. Jesus' advice was that when that day
came men ought to flee to the mountains. They did not; they crammed
themselves into the city and into the walls of Jerusalem from all over
the country, and that very folly multiplied the grim horror of the
famine of the siege a hundredfold.
When we go to the history of Josephus we see how right Jesus was
about that terrible future. Josephus writes of these fearful days of
siege and famine: "Then did the famine widen its progress, and devoured
the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms were full of
women and children that were dying of famine; and the lanes of the city
were fun of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young
men wandered about the market-places like shadows, all swelled with
famine, and fell down dead wheresoever their misery seized them. As for
burying them, those that were sick themselves were not able to do it;
and those that were hearty and well were deterred from doing it by the
great multitude of those dead bodies, and by the uncertainty there was
how soon they should die themselves, for many died as they were burying
others, and many went to their coffins before the fatal hour was come.
Nor was there any lamentation made under these calamities, nor were
heard any mournful complaints; but the famine confounded all natural
passions; for those who were just. going to die looked upon those who
were gone to their rest before them with dry eyes and open mouths. A
deep silence, also, and a kind of deadly night had seized upon the city.
. . . And every one of them died with their eyes fixed upon the Temple"
(Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 5. 12. 3).
Josephus tells a dreadful story of a woman who in those days
actually killed and roasted and ate her suckling child (Josephus, Wars
of the Jews, 6. 3. 4). He tells us that even the Romans, when they had
taken the city and were going through it to plunder, were so stricken
with horror at the sights they saw that they could not but stay their
hands. "When the Romans were come to the houses to plunder them, they
found in them entire families of dead men, and the upper rooms full of
dead corpses. .. . They then stood on a horror of this sight, and went
out without touching anything" (Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 6. 8. 5).
Josephus himself shared in the horrors of this siege, and he tells us
that 97,000 were taken captive and enslaved, and 1,100,000 died.
That is what Jesus foresaw; these are the things he forewarned.
We must never forget that not only men but nations need the wisdom of
Christ. Unless the leaders of the nations are themselves led by Christ,
they cannot do other than lead men not only to spiritual but also to
physical disaster. Jesus was no impractical dreamer; he laid down the
laws by which alone a nation can prosper, and by disregard of which it
can do no other than miserably perish.
24:6-8,29-31
"You will hear of wars and reports of wars. See that you are not
disturbed; for these things must happen; for the end is not yet. For
nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there
will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
"Immediately after the
affliction of these days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will
not give her light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers
of heaven will be shaken. Then there will appear the sign of the Son of
Man in heaven. And then all the tribes of the earth will lament, and
they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power
and much glory. And he will send his angels with a great trumpet call,
and they will gather the elect from the four winds, from one boundary of
heaven to the other."
We have already seen that an essential part of the Jewish
thought of the future was the Day of the Lord that day when God was
going to intervene directly in history, and when the present age, with
all its incurable evil, would begin to be transformed into the age to
come.
Very naturally the New Testament writers to a very great extent
identified the Second Coming of Jesus and the Day of the Lord; and they
took over all the imagery which had to do with the Day of the Lord and
applied them to the Second Coming. None of these pictures is to be taken
literally; they are pictures, and they are visions; they are attempts
to put the indescribable into human words and to find some kind of
picture for happenings for which human language has no picture.
But from all these pictures there emerge certain great truths.
(i) They tell us that God has not abandoned the world; for all
its wickedness, the world is still the scene in which God's purpose is
being worked out. It is not abandonment that God contemplates; it is
intervention.
(ii) They tell us that even a very crescendo of evil must not
discourage us. An essential part of the Jewish picture of the Day of the
Lord is that a complete breakdown of all moral standards and an
apparent complete disintegration of the world must precede it. But, for
all that, this is not the prelude to destruction; it is the prelude to
recreation.
(iii) They tell us that both judgment and a new creation are
certain. They tell us that God contemplates the world both in justice
and in mercy; and that God's plan is not the obliteration of the world,
but the creation of a world which is nearer to his heart's desire.
The value of these pictures is not in their details, which at
best are only symbolic and which use the only pictures which the minds
of men could conceive, but in the eternal truth which they conserve; and
the basic truth in them is that, whatever the world is like, God has
not abandoned it.
24:9-10 "Then
they will deliver you to affliction, and they will kill you, and you
will be hated by all nations because of my name. And then many will
stumble and will betray each other, and will hate each other."
This passage shows the uncompromising honesty of Jesus. He
never promised his disciples an easy way; he promised them death and
suffering and persecution. There is a sense in which a real Church will
always be a persecuted Church, so long as it exists in a world which is
not a Christian world. Whence comes that persecution?
(i) Christ offers a new loyalty; and again and again he declared
that this new loyalty must surpass all earthly ties. The greatest
ground of hatred in the days of the early Church was the fact that
Christianity split homes and families, when one member decided for
Christ and the others did not. The Christian is one who is pledged to
give Jesus Christ the first place in his life--and many a human clash is
liable to result from that.
(ii) Christ offers a new standard. There are customs and
practices and ways of life which may be all right for the world, but
which are far from being all right for the Christian. For many people
the difficulty about Christianity is that it is a judgment upon
themselves and upon their way of life in their business or in their
personal relationships. The awkward thing about Christianity is that
anyone who does not wish to be changed is bound to hate it and resent
it.
(iii) The Christian, if he is a true Christian, introduces into
the world a new example. There is a daily beauty in his life which makes
the life of others ugly. The Christian is the light of the world, not
in the sense that he criticizes and condemns others, but in the sense
that he demonstrates in himself the beauty of the Christ-filled life and
therefore the ugliness of the Christless life.
(iv) This is all to say that Christianity brings a new
conscience into life. Neither the individual Christian nor the Christian
Church can ever know anything of a cowardly concealment or a cowardly
silence. The Church and the individual Christian must at all times
constitute the conscience of Christianity--and it is characteristic of
men that there are many times when they would wish to silence
conscience.
24:4-5,11-13,23-26
Jesus answered, "Be on the look-out lest anyone lead you astray, for
many will come in my name saying, 'I am God's Anointed One,' and they
will lead many astray.
"And many false
prophets will arise, and they will lead many astray. And the love of
many will grow cold, because lawlessness will be multiplied. But it is
he who endures to the end who will be saved.
"At that time, if
anyone says to you, 'Look you, here, or here, is the Anointed One of
God,' do not believe him. For false Messiahs and false prophets will
arise, and they will produce great signs and wonders, the consequence of
which will be, if possible, to lead astray the elect. Look you, I have
told you about these things before they happen. If anyone says to you,
'Look you, he is in the wilderness,' do not go out. 'Look you, he is in
the inner chambers,' do not believe him."
In the days to come Jesus saw that two dangers would threaten the Church.
(i) There would be the danger of false, leaders. A false leader
is a man who seeks to propagate his own version of the truth rather than
the truth as it is in Jesus Christ; and a man who tries to attach other
men to himself rather than to Jesus Christ. The inevitable result is
that a false leader spreads division instead of building up unity. The
test of any leader is likeness to Christ.
(ii) The second danger is that of discouragement. There are
those whose love will grow cold because of the increasing lawlessness of
the world. The true Christian is the man who holds to his belief, when
belief is at its most difficult; and who, in the most discouraging
circumstances, refuses to believe that God's arm is shortened or his
power grown less.
24:3,14,27,28
His disciples came to him privately, when he was sitting on the Mount of
Olives. "Tell us," they said, "when these things shall be. And tell us
what will be the sign of your coming, and of the consummation of the
age."
"The gospel will be proclaimed to the whole inhabited world, for a testimony to all nations--and then the end will come.
"For as the lightning
comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so shall be the
coming of the Son of Man. Where the body is, there the vultures will be
gathered together."
Here Jesus speaks of his Second Coming directly. The New
Testament does not ever use the phrase the Second Coming. The word which
it uses to describe the return of Christ in glory is interesting. It is
Parousia; this word has come into English as a description of the
Second Coming; it is quite common in the rest of the New Testament, but
in the gospels this is the only chapter in which it occurs (Matthew 24:3, Matthew 24:27, Matthew 24:37; Matthew 24:39).
The interesting thing is that it is the regular word for the arrival of
a governor into his province or for the coming of a king to his
subjects. It regularly describes a coming in authority and in power.
The remainder of this chapter will have much to tell us about
it, but at the moment we note that, whatever else is true about the
doctrine of the Second Coming, it certainly conserves two great facts.
(i) It conserves the fact of the ultimate triumph of Christ. He
whom men crucified on a cross will one day be the Lord of all men. For
Jesus Christ the end is sure--and that end is his universal kingship.
(ii) It conserves the fact that history is going somewhere.
Sometimes men have felt that history was plunging to an ever wilder and
wilder chaos, that it is nothing more than "the record of the sins and
follies of men." Sometimes men have felt that history was cyclic and
that the same weary round of things would happen over and over again.
The Stoics believed that there are certain fixed periods, that at the
end of each the world is destroyed in a great conflagration; and that
then the same story in every littlest detail takes place all over again.
As Chrysippus had it: "Then again the world is restored anew in a
precisely similar arrangement as before. The stars again move in their
orbits, each performing its revolution in the former period, without any
variation. Socrates and Plato and each individual man will live again,
with the same friends and fellow-citizens. They will go through the same
experiences and the same activities. Every city and village and field
will be restored, just as it was. And this restoration of the universe
takes place, not once, but over and over again--indeed to all eternity,
without end." This is a grim thought that men are bound to an eternal
tread-mill in which there is no progress and from which there is no
escape.
But the Second Coming has in it this essential truth--that there
is "one divine far-off event, to which the whole creation moves," and
that event is not dissolution but the universal and eternal rule of God.
The Coming Of The King (Matthew 24:32-41)
24:32-41 "Learn
the lesson which comes from the fig tree. Whenever the branch has
become tender, and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
Even so, when you too see these things, know that he is near at the
doors. This is the truth I tell you-- this generation shall not pass
away, until these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away,
but my words will not pass away.
"No one knows about
that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven, not even the Son, but
only the Father. As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the
Son of Man. For, as in those days before the flood they spent their time
eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day
that Noah entered into the ark, and were quite unaware of what was to
happen until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the
coming of the Son of Man. At that time there will be two men in the
field; one is taken, and the other is left. There will be two women
grinding with the mill; one is taken, and the other is left."
Few passages confront us with greater difficulties than this.
It is in two sections and they seem to contradict each other. The first (Matthew 24:32-35)
seems to indicate that, as a man can tell by the signs of nature when
summer is on the way, so he can tell by the signs of the world when the
Second Coming is on the way. Then it seems to go on to say that the
Second Coming will happen within the lifetime of the generation
listening to Jesus at that moment.
The second section (Matthew 24:36-41)
says quite definitely that no one knows the time of the Second Coming,
not the angels, not even Jesus himself, but only God; and that it will
come upon men with the suddenness of a rainstorm out of a blue sky.
There is a very real difficulty here which, even if we cannot completely solve it, we must nevertheless boldly face.
Let us take as our starting-point Matthew 24:34
: "This is the truth I tell you--this generation shall not pass away,
until these things have happened." When we consider that saying, three
possibilities emerge.
(a) If Jesus said it in reference to the Second Coming, he was
mistaken for he did not return within the lifetime of the generation
listening to his words. Many accept that point of view, believing that
Jesus in his humanity had limitations of knowledge and did believe that
within that generation he would return. We can readily accept that in
his humanity Jesus had limitations of knowledge; but it is difficult to
believe that he was in error regarding so great a spiritual truth as
this.
(b) It is possible that Jesus said something like this which was changed in the transmitting. In Mark 9:1
Jesus is reported as saying, "Truly I say to you, there are some
standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of
God come with power." That was gloriously and triumphantly true. Within
that generation the Kingdom of God did spread mightily until there were
Christians throughout the known world.
Now the early Christians did look for the Second Coming
immediately. In their situation of suffering and persecution they looked
and longed for the release that the coming of their Lord would bring,
and sometimes they took sayings which were intended to speak of the
Kingdom and attached them to the Second Coming which is a very different
thing. Something like that may have happened here. What Jesus may have
said was that his kingdom would come mightily before that generation had
passed away.
(c) But there is a third possibility. What if the phrase until
these things have happened has no reference to the Second Coming? What
if their reference is, in fact, to the prophecy with which the chapter
began, the siege and fall of Jerusalem? If we accept that, there is no
difficulty. What Jesus is saying is that these grim warnings of his
regarding the doom of Jerusalem will be fulfilled within that very
generation--and they were, in fact, fulfilled forty years later. It
seems by far the best course to take Matthew 24:32-35 as referring, not to the Second Coming, but to the doom of Jerusalem, for then all the difficulties in them are removed.
Matthew 24:36-41 do refer to the Second Coming; and they tell us certain most important truths.
(i) They tell us that the hour of that event is known to God and
to God alone. It is, therefore, clear that speculation regarding the
time of the Second Coming is nothing less than blasphemy, for the man
who so speculates is seeking to wrest from God secrets which belong to
God alone. It is not any man's duty to speculate; it is his duty to
prepare himself, and to watch.
(ii) They tell us that that time will come with shattering
suddenness on those who are immersed in material things. In the old
story Noah prepared himself in the calm weather for the flood which was
to come, and when it came he was ready. But the rest of mankind were
lost in their eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage,
and were caught completely unawares, and were therefore swept away.
These verses are a warning never to become so immersed in time that we
forgot eternity, never to let our concern with worldly affairs, however
necessary, completely distract us from remembering that there is a God,
that the issues of life and death are in his hands, and that whenever
his call comes, at morning, at midday, or at evening, it must find us
ready.
(iii) They tell us that the coming of Christ will be a time of
separation and of judgment, when he will gather to himself those who are
his own.
Beyond these things we cannot go--for God has kept the ultimate knowledge to himself and his wisdom.
Ready For The Coming Of The King (Matthew 24:42-51)
24:42-51 Watch,
therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord comes. Understand
this--that if the householder had known at what watch of the night the
thief was coming, he would have been awake, and he would not have
allowed him to break into his house. That is why you, too, must show
yourselves ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not
expect.
Who, then, is the
dependable and wise servant whom his master put in charge over his
household staff, to give them their food at the right time? Happy is the
servant whom his master, when he has come, will find acting thus. This
is the truth I tell you--he will put him in charge of all his
belongings. But if that bad servant says to himself, 'My master will not
be back for a long time yet,' and if he begins to beat his
fellow-servants, and if he eats and drinks with drunkards, then the
master of that servant will come on a day when he is not expecting him,
and at an hour which he does not know, and will cut him in pieces, and
assign him a place with the hypocrites. There will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth there."
Here is the practical outcome of all that has gone before. If
the day and the hour of the coming of Christ are known to none save God,
then all life must be a constant preparation for that coming. And, if
that is so, there are certain basic sins.
(i) To live without watchfulness invites disaster. A thief does
not send a letter saying when he is going to burgle a house; his
principal weapon in his nefarious undertakings is surprise; therefore a
householder who has valuables in his house must maintain a constant
guard. But to get this picture right, we must remember that the watching
of the Christian for the coming of Christ is not that of
terror-stricken fear and shivering apprehension; it is the watching of
eager expectation for the coming of glory and joy.
(ii) The spirit which leads to disaster is the spirit which says
there is plenty of time. It is the comfortable delusion of the servant
that he will have plenty of time to put things to rights before his
master returns.
There is a fable which tells of three apprentice devils who were
coming to this earth to finish their apprenticeship. They were talking
to Satan, the chief of the devils, about their plans to tempt and ruin
men. The first said, "I will tell them there is no God." Satan said,
"That will not delude many, for they know that there is a God." The
second said, "I will tell men there is no hell." Satan answered, "You
will deceive no one that way; men know even now that there is q hell for
sin." The third said, "I will tell men there is no hurry." "Go," said
Satan, "and you will ruin them by the thousand." The most dangerous of
all delusions is that there is plenty of time. The most dangerous day in
a man's life is when he learns that there is such a word as tomorrow.
There are things which must not be put off, for no man knows if for him
tomorrow will ever come.
(iii) Rejection is based on failure in duty, and reward is based
on fidelity. The servant who fulfilled his duty faithfully was given a
still greater place; and the servant who failed was dealt with in
severity. The inevitable conclusion is that, when he comes, Jesus Christ
can find us employed in no better and greater task than in doing our
duty.
A negro poet writes:
"There's a king and a captain high,
And he's coming by and by,
And he'll find me hoeing cotton when he comes.
You can hear his legions charging in the regions of the sky,
And he'll find me hoeing cotton when he comes.
There's a man they thrust aside,
Who was tortured till he died,
And he'll find me hosing cotton when he comes.
He was hated and rejected,
He was scorned and crucified,
And he'll find me hoeing cotton when he comes.
When he comes! When he comes!
He'll be crowned by saints and angels when he comes.
They'll be shouting out Hosanna! to the man that men denied,
And I'll kneel among my cotton when he comes."
If a man is doing his duty, however simple that duty may be, on the day Christ comes there will be joy for him.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)