Is The End Near? Transcript

When I was in high school, I was a part of the Bible Club. There was a handful of us, maybe six or seven, most of us guys, but there were a couple of girls there and one of the topics that kept grabbing our attention, that we seem to always want to talk about, was the end times, the end of the world. When would the end times come? When would Christ come back? This was in the late 90s. That was around the time that the left behind series came out, where it originally started as a three-book series and eventually turned into a 12-book fictional account of the end of the world. There were movies and rumors going on about the end being near. There were the talks about how barcodes are the sign of the beast, and we would talk about these things. We would read the scripture and say, okay, what are the signs around us? What are the signs that we can see that the end is near? And we thought for sure, like so many others, that the end indeed was close. What we didn't realize for some time how many people before us had also come to the same conclusion, how many generations had predicted that it would happen on a particular day or in their lifetime. And we seem captivated by it. And little did we pay attention to the passage where Jesus says no one knows when the time will come, not the angels, not the Son, but only the Father. So what are we to make of those that spend so much time and energy saying, predicting that the end is near, making bold statements that this, in these moments in the world right now, are the worst that it's ever been and Jesus is going to come back at any moment because of it? And there are some that are waiting for the end to come imminently, but they do so with a little bit of glee. They want to see the end of the world, they want to see the destruction of everything, they want to see their enemies crushed and the heathens put away. They want to see God's justice reign, or so they say. And so they sit back and wait, thinking it'll happen at any moment. But what if that's not the point of this passage? What if that's not the point of what Jesus was trying to say? What if our Christian obsession with the end of the world misses the point entirely, like I did back in high school that it wasn't about saying what are these helicopters that are being sent to Iraq and Iran at the time, and are they what's mentioned in Revelation? These are honest conversations that I remember having way back when, and people still have today To say the end is near. 

There's earthquakes, there's wars and rumors of wars. There's wars going on right now in multiple places around the world and nations are fighting against nations. Surely the end is near. There's the eclipse coming up in just a few weeks and saying look, the sky is darkening, the sun will go out. Surely the end is near. When there's a natural disaster or an earthquake, there's always going to be somebody that stands up and says surely the end is near. I think it's every 18 months. There's a solar eclipse somewhere on the world. Most of the time it's over water, so nobody pays attention to it. 

There are earthquakes that have been happening since the dawn of Earth's existence, since the dawn of civilizations. Nations have waged war against nations. Rumors of wars have risen against nations. This is nothing new to us and it's nothing new to the people that Jesus was speaking to, because he was talking to them in Jerusalem, an occupied city of the Roman Empire. They were surrounded by soldiers. They were surrounded by foreign occupiers. They had experienced multiple revolts over time. 

All of these hangs happen all of the time, maybe not the stars falling and and the moon not shining. Everything that he mentions is something that has happened before and does happen now. So what if our mistake is looking at them and saying, look, these things are happening, the end is near, but instead reminding us who is in charge, where our hope come from and where our assurance come from, because it is so easy for us to get lost in the pains of the world. It is so easy to feel like the world is falling apart. I mean, there was a time in the beginning of the pandemic where there was fires and earthquakes and the pandemic and people were going hungry and there was food shortages in grocery stores in America. 

I was like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe the end really is here, near, and Jesus tells us that there will be people coming and saying that he's coming and that he's here and will try to lead us astray from the source of our hope and our foundation, for our foundation is in Christ and our trust is that when he comes, everything will be revealed. Now, jesus wants us to be ready. He wants us to be ready at any point for him to come, but I don't think what he was telling us is you will know when it's going to happen, but I think we will know when it does happen. And that's the difference between what Jesus is talking about. He goes from saying there are wars and rumors of wars being just the beginnings of the end to the sun no longer shining, stars no longer shining and everything that is being destroyed and rebuilt. We go from commonplace things that happen all over the world every day to the cosmic, and so we don't have to guess when Jesus is coming. We don't have to guess when he's come back, because it will be abundantly clear in the cosmos that he has. So why does he want us to be ready? Why does he want us to live as if any point could be our last? 

At any point he may come again, and I think there are two reasons. One is to give us hope, and I know this sounds surprising. How do we find hope in the destruction of everything that exists? How do we find hope in the destruction of the old earth and the old heavens to give way to a new earth and new heavens? How do we find hope in that? We find hope in it because we get out of the despair that we get trapped in when we think about the world around us, when we are thinking about it being the worst that it's ever been and will never get better, when we get stuck in thinking at the end has to come, because it can't possibly get any worse than it already is, and that also has been said by multiple generations before us. 

We find hope in that it doesn't matter how bad things get, it doesn't matter how broken anything gets. It doesn't matter how hopeless the world and its structures seem, because they are fleeting to begin with, everything that we have created, everything around us that are signs of the old way of living, will be torn down and rebuilt. The very foundations that we have built ourselves on, including the sin in our lives and the sin in our society that builds up these structures that devalue people, that find worth in things and find worth in what people can do for us, these things that shape our society are fleeting and they will come to an end. And that should give us hope, because there are a lot of people hurting in our world today because of those very structures and those very things that say somebody is valued, blessed, because of who they are how they were born, who they love or whatever conditions we want to put on it, and those structures will one day be wiped out. 

But the second thing is what do we do in the meantime? Be ready like a watch, a keeping watch in the night. Be ready as if the slaves were kept in charge of the estate. When the master goes and leaves the slaves behind to care for the estate, they just didn't sit back and wait. They didn't just stop doing their work because the master was away. They kept their work up, knowing that the master could come back at any time. They went about the work that they were called to do because the master was away and could come back. 

So I think Jesus is telling us this that we keep sharing the gospel, that we keep challenging the evils in our world, that we keep living out God's call in our lives and not just sit back and wait for the end to come. So we give hope that one day everything will be remade and remade right. But we are given a task now that in the meantime, there are people hurting, there are people suffering, there is pain in this world that can be mitigated, that can be adjusted, that can be addressed. There is evil and prejudice and hate in this world that can be challenged by each and every one of us every day. The question is are we waiting for Jesus to come back and do it, or are we active in our world, doing what he has commanded us to do? 

Sometimes I find myself sitting and waiting. I'll be perfectly honest. Sometimes the task seems so too great for me to do anything. On a Sunday morning, like this morning, when everything seems to be going wrong, part of me is just like I just need to sit and we'll just. I can't do it. But it's in those moments. It's in those moments when I'm reminded, those hopeless moments where it seems like nothing can go right, nothing can change, nothing can be transformed, when death seems like the only answer that the world will ever see. I must be mindful of the signs around us and say that death is not the final answer, destruction and pain and suffering are not the final end for this world, that there will be a time when all of that is erased and destroyed and all of the things that encourage it, support it and empower it will be destroyed. And if it's going to be destroyed in the end, why not start now, so that life can grow in here and now, when we can get a foretaste of the kingdom to come. 

At Bible study, I told of a trip that I went on in Haiti after the earthquake back in 2012, shortly after Joshua was born, and while we were there, we visited one of the mass graves where bodies had been buried in large pits and the gravel and the dirt and the concrete had been pushed over top to bury these bodies. And everywhere I looked, there was no signs of life. The ground was hardened and compact. There was no greenery to be seen, just ruggedness, sharpness, signs of the death and the carnage that had just happened. And if that's all I had seen, it would be hard to imagine any hope. And looking at Haiti today, it's still hard to imagine any hope for those people. 

But as I was wandering and looking down at the gravel and the ground around us, knowing that there were countless bodies buried underneath where we were standing, something caught my eye. So a yellow flower of some sort, a primrose maybe. I'm not a botanist, I'm not a gardener, so me trying to identify it is beyond my ability. As my grandmother would attest, I could never identify a weed or the difference between a weed or a flower. She maybe thinks I was doing it on purpose to get out of helping her weed, but it was God on his truth. 

I saw this yellow flower breaking forth through the hardened earth that bore no life, nowhere else. It was given a sign of hope that death, destruction, barrenness, hardness, none of that is permanent, no matter how much it seemed at the time. The new light and life of Christ, empowered by his death and resurrection, taking root in the world around us, gives us a sign of life that it is possible. Even in the bareness of places, even in the hardest of places, where you would never imagine new life ever happening again, it still finds a way to break through, and the same thing is true for the world around us. 

I fully believe that Christ will come again. He promises us that he will do so, but all of the efforts that I went into trying to figure out when it would happen, if it was near and what were the signs were, were all for nothing. I can't control it, jesus said. Even the Son didn't know, only the Father. But instead of trying to predict it, hearing Christ's call to live ready, now Look forward to that time when all of the world will be rebuilt, but it be ready now, not in a waiting ready, but in a working ready, so that new life can grow, soils can be tilled and prepared for the seed to be planted, and signs of faith and life and hope will take root, and that gives us hope Rooted in Christ. Amen.