Heaven and Earth Will Pass Away
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
We live in a world filled with broken promises. One of my favorite lines from Mary Poppins is when she is putting Jane and Michael to bed. They are asking for her to never leave them. Michael asked, “will you stay if we promise to be good?” And her response is “Oh, that’s a pie crust promise. Easily made. Easily broken.”
We grew up with these kinds of promises from our friends and siblings; perhaps even mom and dad made them. We made these kinds of promises as children too. Who among us did not say as children, “we promise to be good.”
But then as we grow up, we find broken promises are still a thing. Sometimes because they are unavoidable. A date night gets canceled because work ran late. A missed recital because of traffic. That kind of thing.
But then we get promised a promotion that never comes; we get passed over for that promised raise. Politicians make promises they never intend to keep so that can get elected or re-elected.
So excuse us, if we have a hard time taking promises seriously. We’ve grown up our entire lives being promised and then let down. It’s in our nature to be cynical and distrusting, even when it comes to Jesus perhaps?? Like any other promise, we go along for the ride, but we start to make contingency plans in our minds. We hope for the best but plan for the worst. We live, not out of the promise, but out of the reality we experience now.
This morning, we once again look at a promise of Jesus. And I will be honest, I can’t make anyone live according to the promise. The best I can do is show you this promise, and what it meant for Jesus to make it. And in making it, he gives us these three lessons: the first is that the coming of the kingdom is unmistakable. The second is that the timing of the kingdom is unclear. Finally, the promise of the kingdom is unchangeable.
The Coming of the Kingdom is Unmistakable
The Timing of the Kingdom is Unclear
The Promise of the Kingdom is Unchangeable
And he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees.
As soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.
So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.
Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
The Coming of the Kingdom is Unmistakable
The Coming of the Kingdom is Unmistakable
The first lesson that we see this morning comes from the parable that Jesus told his disciples and it is simply this: the coming of the kingdom is unmistakable. Now, we usually think about a parable telling us a story with a moral lesson. But a parable is simply an object lesson. Often times those object lessons involve stories; this one does not. It simply gives the lesson using an object: trees.
And he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees.
As soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.
So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.
What Jesus tells the disciples is that the coming of the kingdom is just as unmistakable as the coming of summer.
Now autumn tends to be the most favorite season for people. Forty-five percent of people say that autumn is their favorite season. Second place is summer at 24%. So what we see in autumn is that the color of the leaves changes from green to red and orange and yellow and brown. And as the winds blow, the leaves fall of their branches and fall to the ground. Before we know it, the trees are dormant and bare. With trees all around us, we tend to ignore the barrenness of it all, until maybe winter when ice crystals form and glean on them. But every once in a while, a tree might stand out. It’s limbs are shaped weirdly or the color of the bark is different. We notice a particular tree in the midst of all these other trees that are just as empty of their leaves.
I have read that this is how fig trees are in the Middle East. They are distinct in some way. They are eye catching. Perhaps, it’s because their leaves are so large that they look weird without them—like a fluffy dog who gets shaved. It looks unnatural.
And because they look so distinct, when the leaves start to bud, it’s just as noticeable. Now obviously other trees bud as well. Hence, Jesus says “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees.” But the point of the parable is simply that one can easily see that summer is coming because the trees are beginning to bud leaves. The leaves on the branches are unmistakable. At first there were only brown limbs, suddenly, throughout these limbs, there are green buds sprouting. It’s not like someone came to your tree in the middle of the night and painted little green spots up and down the branches. Clearly these are sprouts and the indication is that summer is near. The sprouts are unmistakable and so is the assessment that summer is near.
Jesus said that we we see these things taking place, the Kingdom of God is near. It’s just as unmistakable. As we see the light dim over our world, as evil grows and spiritual darkness covers the world, we know the Kingdom of God is near. As chaos and fear sweep over nation after nation and city after city, we can be confident that the Kingdom of God draws near.
The point in this continues to be the same as the previous weeks that we’ve been going through these prophecies. It is to bolster our faith. The wording that Jesus used in verse 31 is tied to verse 28.
Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
The Kingdom of God is drawing near and thus so is our final redemption. When these things begin to take place (v. 28), when we see these things taking place (v. 31), we should straighten up and raise our heads. We walk in confidence. We walk in faith and hope.
I have found myself often looking at the trees beginning in late February or early March. I look at them as I go out to my car and when I get home going into the house. I’m looking for the buds. And one day, I see them! And even though I don’t do back flips, I feel excited. Winter is nearing an end. It’s going to be warm again. The days are going to be bright again. The gloomy gray skies are going to clear. And I put on a happy face! That’s the idea that Jesus wants us to have. Not just a happy face, but hope and faith in the promise.
Why do we get such a call to hope? Because we can become timid, scared, hopeless.; the gray skies cause our countenance to fall. Jesus said he was coming back, but it’s been so long, things are just getting worse; life is getting hard; no one is living like they should and no one wants to hear about Jesus. Spiritual darkness will surround us and discourage us to the point we lose faith, lose hope, and lose perspective.
As if we need others to tell us what we sometime think on our own, we have outsiders discouraging us.
knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.
They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
But that’s the thing. To the scoffer, the unbeliever, things seem to be the same. But as believers we ought to know what to look for, and as surely as the blooming of the trees indicates summer, so the darkness over the world, the chaos and fear of the people indicates the coming kingdom. But then, when will this be?
The Timing of the Kingdom is Unclear
The Timing of the Kingdom is Unclear
That leads us to the next lesson. The first lesson is that the coming of the Kingdom is unmistakable. The second though is that the timing of the Kingdom is unclear.
Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.
The big problem is that no one exactly knows what Jesus meant by “this generation.” We tend to think of generations as a section of time. We’ve got baby-boomers, baby-busters (aka Generation X), Millennials, Gen Y, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha. If that’s the way we think of “this generation” in this lesson, then we have a major problem. If this was the case, then Jesus had to have come back already. If generation meant the very people who were standing before Jesus, they’ve all died. And since, the return of the Son of Man on the clouds and the redemption of God’s people is part of “all” Jesus would have had to come back before they died. But we know he did not.
There are those who are called Preterists who believe that Jesus did come back; he returned spiritually at the destruction of Jerusalem. If so, John totally ignored it as he wrote all of his letters and gospel account after Jerusalem was destroyed. Preter means “past” and thus Preterists believe all this has happened in the past already. Preterism is considered heresy by the church.
Partial-Preterists say everything thing Jesus predicted except his return, the redemption of God’s people, and the Kingdom happened at the destruction of Jerusalem (in essence the final consummation of God’s kingdom). They point to Josephus’s work and show how he pointed out the heavenly signs of judgment during the rebellion against Rome. Partial Preterists see us living in the last hours, not just the last days, and we’ve been living in these last hours since AD 70. Partial Preterism is not heresy as it does not believe that Jesus has returned. However, it argues that “this generation” saw all the things Jesus intended. As he was stating that they would see all the evil and destructive forces just as surely as they would see the leaves sprouting from the trees. The sprouting let them know summer is near, the wars, destructions, and heavenly signs let them know that God’s kingdom was near. All of those things are the budding of the leaves pointing to the summer, but not the summer itself. So Jesus didn’t mean that they would actually see the Kingdom ushered in. It’s possible, but not plausible in my opinion.
So, those are the two main theories that accept generation as the very people who were before Jesus. But this is not the only way generation can be understood. Some would say that Luke recorded Jesus’s use of the word “generation” throughout his gospel account, it generally referred to a mindset of rebellion than anything else. However, it still seems to emphasize the contemporaries of Jesus. It’s not just a rebellious mindset, but the rebellious mindset of those with whom Jesus is dealing. For example:
When the crowds were increasing, he began to say, “This generation is an evil generation. It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.
Yes. It’s a rebellious people, but the emphasis is also on the people in Jesus’s day.
So then what can Jesus mean? Let’s start over and think through this. If Jesus in his prophecy uses the “you” the same way that we use “you” to indicate people in general and not “you” in particular, then we can start to make sense of things. “When you see these things...” is the same as saying, “when a person sees these things.” Jesus didn’t mean “you, the people I’m talking to,” but just “you, people in general.”
Then, we can see that “this generation,” doesn’t mean “this generation in front of me,” but “this generation living at the time they see these things happening.” And since Jesus went way beyond talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, his reference is to all those things he brought up about the coming kingdom—those things that we find starting in verse 25.
But what does that mean for us? It means that we may or may not be part of this generation that Jesus is talking about. The point of saying this generation is to say that when these things begin to happen, they will be completed in relatively short time. The generation that sees evil’s presence upon the world like never before will still be around when the Son of Man comes in the clouds to usher in God’s Kingdom and our redemption.
So here we are. We are on a trip and like kids, we keep asking, “Are we there yet?” And many want to look at the Bible as a GPS to tell us our ETA. The Bible is a great GPS if we want it to direct us along the way, but not to give us our time of arrival. Because that is not the point. The answer to the question, “Are we there yet?” is “We’ll get there when we get there.” The timing of the kingdom is uncertain because it is not meant for us to know.
He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.
The Promise of the Kingdom is Unchangeable
The Promise of the Kingdom is Unchangeable
This takes us to the third lesson. The first is that the coming of the kingdom is unmistakable. The second is that the timing of the kingdom is unclear. And finally, the promise of the kingdom is unchangeable. As we look at Jesus’s words here, we need to keep in mind that until now people hung on them. They saw Jesus as one who had power and authority because he had proven many times over that he had. That was one of Luke’s objectives was to show the authority of Christ to Theophilus. He brings up authority and power time and time again. So when Jesus says,
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
he is speaking with the authority that the people already believed he had. His word is his bond. At one point in the Old Testament, Balaam was given instructions by God himself, and in recounting those instructions to Balak, he said
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?
Though now, at this point in time, God has indeed become man and presented himself as the very Son of Man, this verse still is true. He does not lie. He does not change his mind. What he said, he will do. What he has spoken, he will fulfill.
The fact that Jesus has promised the coming of the kingdom, the coming of himself on the cloud, and the redemption of those who eagerly await him, is unchangeable. Heaven and earth will pass away. That same heaven and earth of God’s creation, of Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That which has been from the beginning of time, will have a time where it is no more. But the words that Jesus has just spoken—the promise of his return to consummate the kingdom and give final redemption to his people, that promise will never cease. It will never change.
Think about what that means for you and me. It means that all the things that we find our hope in, our worth in, our identity in, our affections going to, will be burned. At best refined; at worst burned to ashes. John wrote it like this:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.
And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
That’s what Jesus is getting at. As believers we are to be in the world but not of the world, but if we look closely and if we were to be honest, we will find that we live not just in this world but for this world. We’ve fallen into the trap that this world has the best for us and so we follow along blindly. And when this world lets us down we lose heart and hope because our world is wrapped up in this world. Jesus’s lesson here is that this world is passing away. But his word—the word of hope and life and redemption—is steadfast and true and unchanging.
Peter gets to the heart of it (which we often miss because we don’t read far enough).
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness,
waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!
But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Conclusion
Conclusion
As we finish up with Luke 21:29-33, we’ve seen that the coming of God’s kingdom is unmistakable. Things will be at a point where we aren’t just guessing and saying “it could be.” At the same time the timing of God’s kingdom is uncertain. We know that when the unmistakable signs happen, it will be within that generation, but which generation will receive it, how long before that generation would pass away will the end come? We don’t know. But we’ve been promised that it will happen and that promise is unchanging.
As Peter said, according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Until that time comes, as we wait, we are to be a people living lives of holiness and godliness. And that starts be entrusting your entire being—your entire life—not just your future spiritual body to Jesus, but this temporal, corporeal body and life as well.
Jesus lived and died and rose again so that if we surrender ourselves to him, he will save us from the wrath that is to come, make us children of God, adopted in love into the family of God. As an adopted child, we then surrender not just our future selves, but our present selves to the will of the Father. We know that the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. That’s the promise. Abide in—live in moment by moment—the promise. These are words of power, strong to save, that will never pass away. So stand on every promise of his word.
Prayer
Our heavenly Father,
We ask that you would remind us daily about the coming of your kingdom that we would be ready. Let it be the first thing we seek; may it be give its rightful place in our minds, our hearts, and our daily work. Though we do not know when your Son shall come again, let us live as if it would be in the next hour. May we be as Edwards, who Resolved, never to do anything, which we should be afraid to do, if we expected it would not be above an hour, before we should hear the last trumpet. May we hold your promise dear to our hearts. In Jesus’s name. Amen.