Mark 13: 24-37
- Once upon a time, a fortune teller looked at the palm of a young man and said, "You will be poor and unhappy until you are thirty-seven years old." Naturally, the young man asked, "Well, what'll happen after that? Will I be rich and happy?" The fortune teller said, "No, you'll still be poor, but you'll be used to it by then."
That's the way many people look at the biblical predictions of the end times, as if they were a very mixed blessing. In fact, many people avoid sections like Mark 13 at all costs. They just seem too strange to modern ears.
On the other extreme, there are those people who try to read various events from the modern world into chapters like these to try to prove that the end of the world is about to begin any day.
That's where books like Hal Lindsay's The Late, Great, Planet Earth come from. They usually make for interesting reading, but they have very little to do with what the Bible is really trying to say. Inspite of what Hal Lindsay may believe, there's nowhere in the Bible where things like airplanes and army tanks are mentioned, not even in prophecies like this one.
The problem with books like The Late, Great, Planet Earth is that they're guilty of trying to squeeze the facts of modern life into the images of ancient prophecy, but in doing so they aren't true to either the Bible or the modern situation. It's like a form of negative wishful thinking.
The 13th chapter of Mark belongs to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, which is a style of religious writing that began about 200 years before Christ and continued on for a total of about 350 years. The word "apocalypse" itself literally means "uncovering" or "unveiling."
William Barclay says, "It must be noted [that] all these books were dreams and visions. They were attempts to paint the unpaintable and to speak the unspeakable. They were poetry, not prose. They were visions, not science=8A.They were never meant to be taken [literally] as maps of the future [or] timetables of events to come."
He adds, "Mark 13 is one of the most difficult chapters in the New Testament for a modern reader to understand, because it is one of the most Jewish chapters in the Bible. From beginning to end it is thinking in terms of Jewish history and Jewish ideas. All through it Jesus is using categories and pictures which were very familiar to the Jews of his day, but which are very strange, and [even] unknown, to many modern readers."
So what's the point of Mark 13 or any other apocalyptic passage for that matter? There are all kinds of scholarly answers to that question, but the best answer I've ever heard came from a janitor who may not have even had a high school diploma.
- Bernard Travaielle says that when he went to seminary, there was no gymnasium on campus, so he and some of his friends used to go to a nearby public school to play basketball. The school had an elderly janitor, who would sit and read his Bible until the seminary students were done playing and he could lock up. One day Bernard went up to him and asked him what he was reading. The janitor answered, "I'm reading the book of Revelation." That surprised Bernard because Revelation is such a difficult book to comprehend. So he asked the janitor, "The book of Revelation? Do you understand it?" He said, "Oh yes. I understand it." Bernard couldn't believe that, so he said, "You understand the book of Revelation! What does it mean?" The old janitor very quietly answered, "It means that Jesus is gonna win."
- Charles Swindoll makes the point that suffering can be a means of growth, using the New England fishing industry as an example. He says, "in the northeastern United States codfish are a big commercial business. Note the following facts: There is a market for eastern cod all over, especially in sections farthest removed from the northeast coastline. But the public demand posed a problem to the shippers. At first they froze the cod, then shipped them elsewhere, but the [freezing process] took away much of the flavor. So they experimented with shipping them alive in tanks of seawater, but that proved even worse. Not only was it more expensive, but the cod still lost its flavor and, in addition, became soft and mushy. The texture was seriously affected. Finally, some creative person solved the problem in the most innovative manner. The codfish were placed in the tank of water with their natural enemy - the catfish. From the time the cod left the East Coast until it arrived at its westernmost destination, those ornery catfish chased the cod all over the tank. And when the cod arrived at the market, they were as fresh as when they were first caught. If anything, it was better than before."
He adds, "Each of us is in a tank of particular and inescapable circumstances. It is painful enough to stay in the tank. But in addition to our situation, there are God-appointed catfish to bring sufficient tension that keeps us alive, alert, fresh and growing. It's all part of God's project to shape our character so we will be more like his Son. Understand [that] they are part of God's method of producing character in your life and mine."
I think that's a fairly common pattern. For example, many of us gain weight because we eat too much for the amount of exercise we get. And then we fantasize about getting liposuction or finding some miracle effortless diet that will magically melt our excess weight away rather than having to go about the hard work of exercising and become more careful about the amounts we eat and the types of food we choose.
Many of us are the same way in our spiritual life. We allow ourselves to get spiritually flabby because we don't want to go through the hard work of daily prayer and Bible study. We'd rather let someone else do it for us. That kind of attitude is pervasive in our culture.
Ray Stedman of the Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California, once asked a nine-year-old boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he answered, "A returned missionary." Think about that for a few seconds. This boy was willing to serve the Lord - as long as it was in some retirement capacity.
He must have seen something in the job that attracted him, but the years of graduate study and the years of separation from his home and loved ones weren't part of that. He wanted to skip straight to the final state of recognition and acclaim. But it can't be done. Taking those initial steps are vital to reaching the final goal.
Just as musicians regularly perform finger exercises and Olympic athletes do daily push-ups, the Christian's daily prayer can't be by-passed without resulting in spiritual flabbiness. As someone once said, "The trouble with many Christians is that they want to reach the Promised Land without going through the wilderness."
- A young Jewish student once asked his rabbi, "When is the best time to repent?" The rabbi thought for a minute and then answered, "The best time to repent is at the last possible moment." After he said that, the student replied, "But you never know when the last possible moment will be." And the rabbi answered, "Exactly!"
Edward Culpepper makes a similar point when he says, "The problem comes with our desire to know the future before we commit ourselves. God knows human nature. He knows that if we had precise knowledge of the future we doubtless would defer repentance and faith to 'the last possible moment.'We may miss the blessing of commitment to Christ [right now] while we wait for the time when we 'really need' salvation."
This idea also appears in Matthew 11:1-6, where Jesus tells the disciples of John the Baptist that they could judge whether or not Jesus was the Messiah by watching the things he did: "The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor."
It's significant that all the people Christ mentioned in that passage were people who were in pain or were forced to live on the edges of society. That's because God's presence can become more real to many people when they suddenly discover they have nowhere else to turn. That's when they're finally able to recognize that God has been with them all the time.
- Vance Havner says, "God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster jar that gives forth perfume=8Ait is [a broken] Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever."
Our God is a God of love and he will never abandon us. That's why Corrie Ten Boom says, "Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God."
I'd like to close this sermon with the story of another rabbi and one of his students. This student asked the rabbi about Deuteronomy 6:6, which says, "These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts."
The students asked, "Why is it said this way? Why aren't we told to place them in our hearts? The rabbi answered that it wasn't within human power to place divine teaching directly in the heart. He said, "All that we can do is place them on the surface of the heart so that when the heart breaks, they will drop in." Amen.
(Comments to Jim at jmccrea@galenalink.com.)