Signs of the Times

Today we are going to fast forward in Matthew to chapter 16. After leaving his hometown where Jesus performed few miracles due to their lack of faith Jesus Fed 5000, walked on water, confronted the Pharisees, cast out a demon, and fed 4000 people, and then we have chapter 16.

So here Jesus is going around teaching and performing miracles and he is getting a lot of attention. Now in come the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Now what do you suppose they want.

Matthew 16:1–4 NASB95

The Pharisees and Sadducees came up, and testing Jesus, they asked Him to show them a sign from heaven. But He replied to them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ “And in the morning, ‘There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ Do you know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but cannot discern the signs of the times? “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah.” And He left them and went away.

They came to Jesus and asked him for a sign. Now why do you suppose they wanted to see a sign. What were they after? Do you suppose they thought Jesus might be the Messiah and they just wanted to make sure? Do you think that if Jesus had performed a miracle they would have said this is the one and followed him from then on? Nope, not a chance.

In fact the text gives us a clue what there intentions were, it says that they came up testing Jesus. Now this is not the kind of test you take in school. In School the idea is that you have already learned the material and not the test is where you prove to the teacher that you have mastered the material and are ready to move on. The assumption is that you have everything you need to pass the test and that you should be able to answer the questions successfully and pass the test.

In fact if you fail a test in school something went wrong. Either the student didn’t learn or the teacher didn’t teach or the test was messed up. The tests are based on the information that has already been taught with the expectation that everyone should be able to pass the test. That’s how its supposed to work in school but this is not that kind of test.

In fact the Pharisees and Sadducees had set up this test hoping that Jesus would fail. They were not there to see Jesus succeed or to find out if He was true they had already decided that he was false and their test was designed for him to fail.

If Jesus has shown them a sign then they could explain it away and spin it to mean something different than it actually meant. If Jesus didn’t show them a sign they could take it as proof that he couldn’t provide a sign so he was false. They were not hoping that Jesus would pass the test but planning for him to fail.

So Jesus didn’t play their game. Maybe there is a lesson there for us. If someone sets you up to fail, if they have arranged things so that there is no way for you to win then don’t play their game.

What Jesus did was turn it around on them. He said you claim to know how to interpret the signs about the weather but you don’t see or interpret the signs of the times.

We interpret signs all of the time. In its most literal sense here are some signs, what do these signs mean?

(Use three or so street signs and talk about their meaning and the consequences of not following the signs)

What about other types of signs, what if you came home one day and walked through your front door and said Hi dear and “dear” hollered back to you don’t you dear me you don’t know what’s happened today. Is there a sign there that you should pick up on? Is there a particular way you should act or speak or something you should say or not say, should you be careful, and what if you decide not to be careful, what could be the result?

What if you show up to work and the boss is standing by the door glaring at you with hate in his eyes is there some sign there that you should react to.

Did anybody else have a mother who could give you the look. The look was different for every mom I ever knew but when you got the look everyone knew what it was and what it meant. Sometimes even spouses get the look.

All day long we use visual and verbal clues to help us understand what is going on in the world around us. We look at how someone stands or sits, the curve or their mouth, the look in their eyes to tell us what they are feeling.

We get in a car to drive and we look at the way the other drivers are behaving, how fast they are going or how close they are to each others bumpers and we determine how our commute is going to go.

We look at the price of gas or the price of milk to help us gauge how the economy is doing. The government tracks unemployment, which doesn’t help you much if you are the one unemployed.

You can buy book and books and books on ways to tell if your marriage is healthy, there are studies upon studies upon studies telling us what developmental stage our kids should be in at what age. We love to look for signs.

We need reassurance that we are on the right path, that we are not behind schedule or that we are not just plain lost. But what does Jesus mean by the signs of the times.

It is a common enough phrase. If we think about it we could probably all give some kind of a definition of the signs of the times. The examples we used might be different for every one of us. We might say something like this “the things we see in the world around us that indicate how things have changed and to anticipate how they might be in the future.

So if you believe that the economy is getting stronger and stronger you might be tempted to start a business or invest in order to make money in the booming economy, but if you believe that the economy is getting worse and worse you might decide to save more or even to stock up on canned food.

The idea being recognizing the signs of the times and what they mean is to be ready to respond to the changing times. After all, if you are just barely keeping food on the table it doesn’t matter if the economy gets better or worse you are going to just keep trying not to starve. If you have to spend all of your resources just to survive then there is no point in knowing what is going on or what is coming in the future because what you are going to do won’t change. If it takes everything you have just to survive you will either give everything you have or die, no options, no choices.

But then, that hardly ever happens. You almost always have at least some options. Sometimes you may not like the options you have, they may all seem bad but you still have to choose between them. Sometimes it may seem like no matter which way you go it will be fine but you still have to go one way or another.

Just like coming up on a stop sign while driving you can observe it or ignore it and each choice has its own consequences. Or how about a 45 mph curve ahead sign you can observe it, ignore it, or choose to slow down to 55 and give it a shot, haven’t we all done it. Sometimes it is fine and sometimes it is a little scary. Sometimes I think the people who decide what the speed of the curve should be are not very good at their job.

What if we see signs of the economy going up or down, you can ignore it or take advantage of it. Your choice, Your consequences.

So what does Jesus mean by the signs of the times? In that time what was happening in God’s master plan, what evidence was there that something was changing and that God’s people needed to be ready for it.

First there had been generations of prophecies predicting the coming of the Messiah, everything from where he would be born to really unique things like being born of a virgin. It was foretold that the messiah would perform miracles and call people back to worship of the true God. The Pharisees and Sadducees were the ones who studied the prophecies and in fact taught the prophecies to others but they couldn’t or wouldn’t see that Jesus was the Messiah.

A huge change was coming, perhaps the most important change in all of history as far as mankind is concerned. The saviour is born and the Messiah is come to die for the sins of the world. Satan is to be defeated once and for all, a turning point is coming in the world. Everything will change.

In fact everything did change. The earth went from looking forward to a time when there would be a saviour to having a saviour, God came down and lived among men, died like a man and was raised from the dead to conquer death and sin forevermore, and they missed it.

They never saw it coming and they missed it when it all happened right in front of their noses. They didn’t recognize the signs of the times and they completely missed it. Some of them looked backwards and saw that they had missed it, they recognized the signs later on and realized what they had missed, I wonder how much they regretted having had their saviour right there in front of them and never realizing it until after he ascended into heaven. Some of them never got it and will live with the consequences of sin for all of eternity.

So what about us, what signs of the times are we missing? What is God doing in our lifetime, where it God working and how is he doing it. Are we watching, do we see it, or have we missed it completely.

Churches are closing every day here in America, Southern Baptists are losing ground, the Methodist church has split over theology and America came out on the liberal side rather than the conservative side. What has been accepted as the norm for generations has changed, values are not what they were and everyone is redefining themselves and each other. These are signs of our times.

Our people are losing respect for authority, we have no faith in our government, for the first time in our history most Americans believe things are getting worse rather than better. More people believe that their kids will have it worse than they did and many today believe that their parents had things better than they are now.

What does it all mean? How are we supposed to react to these changing times. With so many single parent families can we still do things the way we always have? Do we do church in the best way for our times, our church services don’t look much like the early church, they had no building or budgets. What about evangelism. How about the way we do evangelism, once we could just announce a revival and get a good speaker and people would come, now many people see no good reason to go to church how do we reach them?

Jesus and his disciples healed the sick and talked about freedom from a conquering government. The times they lived in had little health care and the Roman government was hostile to Christianity.

We have lots of healthcare and we get to vote on our leaders. Yet a staggering number of us are addicted to drugs, or alcohol, we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world and yet so many of us are depressed and miserable.

Maybe the if we look at the signs of our times our greatest need is not to see miracles but to relieve hope. To believe that things can get better. To believe that we are not out of control on a downhill slide but that somebody somewhere has a plan to make everything right again. To believe that it is possible to kick an addiction, to believe that you can start over and that it isn’t too late.

Maybe what the world needs most today is what it needed then, not miracles and signs but hope. Maybe the world needs to know that not only can things get better but that there is a guarantee that things will be better than ever before.

The world needs to know that God has a plan, that he is going to fix the mess that we are in, that no darkness, no matter how bleak it looks at the time is permanent. The world needs to know that Jesus has already beaten death and sin, that the plan is already in place, that not only is there hope for the future but that the future is assured.

I can put up with a lot if I know that its going to be better in the end. I can endure a lot if I know it will be worth it, so can you. The signs of the times today look mighty bleak to most of the world, but I know the end, I know how it all winds up, I know Jesus and I trust him to make everything perfect.....and so I have hope, and you can too. Its right there, in the signs of the times.