If You See the Signs, Come

Mark 13:1-13

And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

And as he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished?” And Jesus began to say to them, “See that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. These are but the beginning of the birth pains.

“But be on your guard. For they will deliver you over to councils, and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them. And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations. And when they bring you to trial and deliver you over, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. And brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

Pray

Krysta and I were in IKEA once in Round Rock. If you have never been there, it is a large square building that maybe about 10 times the size of this place. It is laid out where you have to walk through the store like you are playing a real life version of Candy Land. There is a path you can take to show you everything in the store, but if you are paying attention there are also shortcuts and if you get lucky enough to see the signs you can take the shortcut and miss the towel section. One time we were in there and the power went out. It was the darkest dark I think I can ever remember because there are few windows and none where we were. Even the light on your cell phone was engulfed by the darkness.

This text this morning is a little like that. There are clear text in Scripture that point you down the road and there are unclear text that leave you standing there groping around for things. When we meet those text I think it is important for us to remember where we have been and where we are going to try to make it out the other side. Some people come to text like these and throw their hands up and move right along.

If you are one of those people that like to read ahead and you found yourselves in the text for this morning, you likely had three responses: excitement, apathy or confusion. Those could probably be combined in some way.

Those of you that are excited, i am sure it is because this text, along with Matthew 24, has some themes about the end of the world to you. People like to talk about the second coming of Christ and when it will be. I promise I will be charitable to your position the best that I can, but will hopefully offer a different perspective that you can ponder or disagree with.

Those of you that are apathetic, or do not really care, sit back and enjoy the ride and tell me what the really excited people say in the pews under their breath after the service.

Those of you that are confused, you are in good company. If you listen or read theologians, there are more questions than there are answers and there are more camps and tribes than you can count. What I pray the Lord will have me do today is not to say that I have all of the answers, but to always be pointing back to what the text is actually speaking on. Pointing back to the road that we were traveling before all the lights went out. There will be times when we will have strong evidence to draw the line and there will be other parts that may not be so easy in this whole chapter of Mark 13.

Let’s break down the text.

And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!”

Remember where we were last week. Jesus has just gotten through telling everyone that He was officially breaking with the teachers of the law, the religious elites. They had nothing to offer the people except slavery. They were focused on the externals and not on the heart, which is God’s main goal. He wanted the Jews hearts and He wants your hearts. He chastised them on their love of fine clothes and the glory that their position brought them among the people and their piers. They looked great on paper. They looked great on the outside, but inside they were far from God. This sets up today perfectly. This anonymous disciple turns and does to the temple what the people of that time did to the religious elites, “look how beautiful that structure is.”

This would not have been an uncommon saying. Herod’s temple was incredible. Joshephus, the Jewish historian that actually lived through this time, who will be our friend as we walk through this chapter, says that some of the stones they used for the temple were 37 feet long by 18 feet wide and 12 feet tall. The doors to the temple were “adorned by embroidered veils, with their flowers of purple, and pillars interwoven; and over these, but under the crown-work, was spread out a golden vine, with it’s branches hanging down from a great height, the largeness and fine workmanship of which was a surprising sight to the spectators.”

The pillars inside the temple were 27 feet tall and were so wide that three men joining hands could not touch their fingers to the other side and there were 162 of these columns.

A part of the temple had large marble walls plated with gold that when the sun hit it you could barely stand to look at it. Josephus said, “That its fineness, to such as had not seen it (meaning people who had just heard about it), was incredible and to such as had seen it, was greatly amazing.”

So you and I would probably also stop and say, “Wow”. This disciple that is pointing out the beauty of this building has probably been there a hundred times but it still has that effect on him.

Krysta and I were fortunate enough to go to Rome a few years ago and we visited the Vatican. You see movies and pictures of the Sistine chapel, but when you actually go in, it is breathtaking. To look up and see the paintings of Michelangelo and to see the detail and the brush strokes, it is a sight to see that pictures or descriptions cannot do justice,….but those paintings are just a shadow to show that the artist has been there. The artist is gone, long dead. You cannot get to know Michelangelo only his work remains. The Jews were holding on to the idea that you can know God through keeping his law and outwardly looking amazing, but Jesus is saying don’t worship the things, but worship the one and the heart behind the things. To drive home this point Jesus says,

“Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

That is a pretty big statement. You know when Jesus said that, the disciples looked at each other and went, “huh?” Some of the single stones that were used were close to one million pounds each and remember from previous weeks that the whole temple area was 36 acres. How would that happen? But notice they don’t ask the “how” or the “why” question.

3 And as he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, 4 “Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished?”

Do you suppose they didn’t ask the “how” question because every time they did Jesus came through in a completely different way? When they were in the boat fighting the storm, Jesus was sleeping, they woke him up and said “don’t you care about us.” I don’t know if they expected Jesus to just come up to the top and give them a hand, but Jesus quiets the storm with his words. After that they asked themselves, “Who is this man?” When they needed to feed 5000 people and they didn’t have enough food or money they said, “time to let everyone go home.” Jesus rings the dinner bell and feeds them by multiplying the food they had. They didn’t see that coming. Jesus always comes through in ways that we don’t see coming. If you have been walking with the Lord for anytime and you have trusted Him with something, isn’t it funny how it works out. Have you ever had one of those, “I didn’t see it going down like that” moments? Me standing up here in this position preaching to you about this topic is one of those moments for me.

Jesus makes this claim that the temple is going to be destroyed. Was it? This is where history is going to help us.

What history shows us is that in 70AD this prophecy was fulfilled. That beautiful temple was destroyed by the Roman army. The population of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus was about 80,000, but according to Josephus there were about 2.7 million people in Jerusalem when the attack occured. That is about 34 times the normal amount of people that lived there. Passover brought Jews in from all over the known world. When the attack started the Romans cut the supply lines and killed most of the inhabitants by famine. Josephus said of the event, “Accordingly the multitude of those that therein perished exceeded all the destructions that either men or God ever brought upon the world.” So many were killed in the siege, that Josephus said that it “made the whole city run down with blood to such a degree indeed that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men’s blood.”

Once all of the people were either killed or sold into slavery the Romans set fire to the extreme parts of the city and burnt them down and entirely demolished its walls.

Two thousand one hundred and twenty-seven years had past since the building of the tabernacle in the wilderness and 70AD. Josephus tells us, “not its great antiquity, nor its vast riches, nor the diffusion of its nation over all the habitable earth, nor the greatness of the veneration paid to it on a religious account, been sufficient to preserve it from being destroyed.”

There was nothing that could save this temple that God had judged. God is no respecter of history or a perceived greatness of a country. Which leads me to another question? Why did the disciples not ask why? Why destroy this beautiful building, couldn’t we save it for something or repurpose or reform?

If we look back at the teaching of the fig tree in Mark 11, Jesus sees the fig tree and it looks beautiful but it has no fruit. Just like the temple and the priests and the religious elites. They all looked great but there was no fruit, in fact it was poisonous fruit. They no longer loved the Lord, they loved the things He created. The loved the world and their own self interest. There are warnings in the Old Testament to the Jews that if they did not heed the law and did not love the Lord their God that if they did evil there would be consequences. One of these warnings was in Deuteronomy 28,

58 “If you are not careful to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, the LORD your God, 59 then the LORD will bring on you and your offspring extraordinary afflictions, afflictions severe and lasting, and sicknesses grievous and lasting.

The consequences span the rest of the chapter, but God keeps His word. Later on in verse 68 the scripture says, “And the Lord will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey that I promised that you should never make again; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but there will be no buyer.”

In Josephus’ writings in the War of the Jews, he says that they killed all of the old and affirmed and took the strong young men to be shipped to Egypt to work in the mines and quote, “sold the rest of the multitude, with their wives, and children, and every one of them at a very low price, and that because such as were sold were very many, and the buyers were few.”

Josephus goes on to say that the generation that was destroyed in the sacking of Jerusalem was so wicked that they deserved to be overthrown.

Sometimes there is nothing to save. I had a little house on my property and I wanted to refurbish it as a guest house. It looked ok from the outside, the roof was nice, the walls were pretty straight, but once I got inside and started to open up the walls and really see what was going on, I saw that it was riddled with termites and frankly I didn’t know how it was standing other than Jesus holding it together with His might. There was no salvaging that structure. If I scabbed on to it and tried to save it, there might have been termites left over that would go into the new build and corrupt that as well.

Jesus says that not a stone would be on top of another. In the historical record, that beautiful temple and city “was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited.”

This was a complete and utter upheaval of the old system. There was no room for religiosity in the New Covenant. The time for sacrifices of blood were over, there was no need for it. The true sacrifice came in the name of Jesus. He let his blood for us so that He could do what the bulls and rams and grain could never do, cleanse us once and for all of our sins. The old way was a perpetual state of sinning and offering your sacrifice and the priest was up and working, killing, but Jesus makes His sacrifice and sits down at the right hand of God, putting an end to the perpetual sacrifice. Because He has done this, when we come to know him, we are to put to death our old self. We should be working everyday to unearth all of the foundations that we once built our life on and replace it with the true foundation in Jesus.

Paul talks about these new foundations that we should have in Romans 6:11

6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

What will be the signs of the destruction of the temple, we will explore more of that in the coming weeks, but……

Today, if you hear His voice, run to him. Jesus is calling you and offering you a new life. Not one of going through the motions in an empty faith, but a real life that is alive with a real savior that is alive. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, he will help you put to death the old self and live a brand new life.