Sermon Tone Analysis

*7 Characteristics of the Coming King, Part 3*

*Luke 17:25-30*

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     Well it was a number of years ago that I was preaching through the book of Romans here at the church and I came to romans chapter 9, 10 and 11 and I was determined that I wanted to be careful and precise and patient in going through those chapters because they are a battleground among theologians.

Romans 9, 10 and 11 deal with the future of Israel and you take them at face value, they tell us there is a future salvation for the nation Israel, but there is a large element in evangelical Christianity historically and in the present that denies that hope for national Israel.

So, I felt that in order to really understand that passage and unfold it verse by verse and word by word very carefully...I needed to go slowly.

And so, not realizing just how slowly I'd go, it took me one entire year to go through Romans 9, 10 and 11.

And I would say, honestly, about three months in the people were saying, "We get it, we give, please..."  They were pleading for a therefore...the therefore comes in chapter 12 verse 1, "Therefore..." they wanted me to get to that therefore so badly.

It just was a necessary exercise because there were so many issues related to the future of national Israel and to the prophetic promises of God laid out in the Old Testament, reiterated in the New Testament as well, regarding the future salvation of that covenant people of God.

And I needed to deal with it in great detail and with great precision, knowing not only did we need to know it, but it needed to be set down for the record on tape and CD and also needed to show up in the commentary because that's such an important part of this great Roman epistle.

And so there are times when we come to texts of Scripture that we have to slow down a little bit and capture something and understand that we're dealing with something that may be a bit controversial and requires us to have great clarity on it.

I feel a little bit like that going through Luke 17, however, it's not going to take us a year, it's just going to be this message and one more, so you'll have really nothing to complain about, but we have slowed down a little bit and we have done, I think, a handful of messages on this text, and could do, frankly, a lot more.

And I am aware that when you get into prophetic passages, and we're talking here about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, that you get into things that are controversial, you get into things where people disagree.

And the way you deal with that, first of all, is to apply to the text of Scripture the very same principles of interpretation that you would apply to any text, whether it's prophetic or whether it's narrative, or whether it's historical, or whether it's doctrinal, or whether it's polemical, whatever it is.

Whether it's prose or poetry, whether it's an analogy, whether it's a parable, whatever it is, you interpret using the same principles of interpretation, you use the same principles of understanding language no matter what form or genre the text of Scripture takes.

And so, the way you approach a passage that is prophetic that deals with the future, particularly in this case the Second Coming of Christ, is to apply the same principles of interpretation.

Now, having done that, we will then uncover the revealed truth as much as has been revealed.

That will also reveal to us that there is much that has not been revealed.

No part of theology has as much mystery in it as that which deals with the future.

There is no part of the Word of God that leaves us with more questions than those passages that deals with what has no yet happened.

We understand then that we're going to be left with some mystery and that's fine.

We don't want to leave, however, a true interpretation and get caught up in speculating in the category of mystery.

We don't want to launch off the facts that are revealed in to fiction, or in to fantasy and start mingling those things.

Neither do we want to say because we don't understand so much, we don't accept what is clear.

We take what the Word of God says about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ exactly how we would take what the Word of God says about the first coming of Jesus Christ.

We take as much as is here, we interpret it the clearest and simplest and straightforward way we can and you will find as we do that in this passage that it's clear, it's simple, it's unambiguous, it's understandable, it's comprehensible because the Lord wants us to know it.

And what we don't know, we're happy not to know and leave with Him.

And, in fact, He actually tells us, for the most part, what we don't know and we're glad to leave that with Him.

What we do know is this, the world will end with the return of Jesus Christ.

There's so much speculation in the secular world today about what's happening to the planet.

The environmentalists, of course, go absolutely crazy trying to protect and preserve this planet from everything they think attacks its viability in the future or shortens its potential life and therefore human existence.

We have all kinds of scenarios that have been laid out for us about what might happen to this planet.

We're finding ourselves reintroduced to the possibility of a man-induced nuclear war that could obliterate the planet in ways that people used to talk about during the cold war some decades ago.

We also have the environmentalists who are warning us about the fact that we're going to destroy life on the planet by continually releasing pollutants into the ozone.

We have those people who are looking into the sky through telescopes waiting for some asteroid to smash into the earth and break it into bits and send us into orbit forever.

We have all these kinds of scenarios, some of them with some scientific elements and many of them very, very speculative.

And I'm here to announce to the whole world and anybody who wants to listen, I can tell you exactly how it's going to end...exactly, because the Bible tells us specifically life on this planet as we know it and this planet as we know it and this universe as we know it will end with the return of Jesus Christ to earth.

The literally, physical, bodily return of Jesus Christ who will come back in the same way that He left.

And He left, as described in Acts chapter 1, while He was speaking with His disciples, ascending into heaven behind the clouds.

And He'll come back in the same way.

Now the Bible repeats and repeats and repeats this fact of the Second Coming.

The Bible gives us many descriptions of components and elements that occur around that great epoch event.

There are a number of features to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

It is called a day, but it is a day because it is a singular epoch but it has many components.

It involves the Rapture of the church, followed by a period called the Tribulation, a seven-year period of judgment on the earth.

The second three and a half years of that are escaladed judgment, fierce judgment, devastating judgment, culminating in the actual return of Christ to the earth with the redeemed saints who have been with Him in glory to destroy all the ungodly and to alter the earth as we know it and to establish His Kingdom for a thousand years.

At the end of which, He will destroy the universe and in its place create a new heaven and a new earth which will last forever.

The ungodly will spend forever in the Lake of Fire prepared for them and for the devil and the fallen angels.

That entire scenario which sweeps from the Rapture through the seven-year Tribulation, through the thousand-year millennial Kingdom and culminates in the new heaven and the new earth, encompasses the great event of the return of Jesus Christ.

And so the Bible fills all of that understanding with amazing detail.

If you do not take that detail at face value as it is laid out in the Scripture using the normal approach to interpreting anything that you would interpret in an ancient document, implying the same principles of understanding, if you do not do that, if you say that it does not meant what it appears to mean in the normal sense of language, then we have absolutely no idea what it means.

If it doesn't mean what it says, then whatever you say it means is meaningless to me because you would then have to have some secret insight into the mind of God when God Himself has not made it clear to anyone else.

So, we believe that God reveals His truth in order for us to understand.

That's why the book of Revelation begins with a very, very simple, unmistakable sentence, "Blessed is he who reads and those who hear, or understand, the words of the prophecy."

You're blessed if you read it and understand it.

How could you be blessed if you read it and didn't understand it?

Blessing comes with reading and understanding.

And so we can know many, many details, volumes can be written on the details.

A two-volume commentary I wrote on Revelation is nearly a thousand pages just going through the details of the book of Revelation.

You can go through the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and 25 and you can go through the same Olivet Discourse in Luke 21 which we'll do in a little while, and Mark 13, and you can find the marvelous letters of Paul to the Thessalonians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians and how importantly they look at the future.

You can read Isaiah, and you can read Daniel, and you can read Ezekiel.

You will find vast amounts of material looking down into the future and the glorious return of Christ.

You can find it as well in the other prophetic writers of the Old Testament.

There is an abundance of material, but nonetheless there is still an element of mystery about the future and the things we don't know about the future I suppose could be summed up in this simple way.

We don't know when and we don't know why and we don't know how, we don't know exactly how this is all going to happen in detail.

We don't know when it's going to happen.

And we don't know who all the principle players are.

We obviously know Christ is coming back, but apart from that, we don't know who is the Antichrist...who is the attending false prophet, who are the rulers and the kings who set themselves against the Christ and so forth as spoken of by the psalmist.

We don't understand all of those elements.

But that shouldn't surprise us because in 1 Peter 1 verses 10 and 11 Peter says the writers of the Old Testament didn't understand when and who either that they were writing about.

They couldn't even imagine who the Messiah would be or when the Messiah would come.

So there are some elements of the Second Coming that we cannot really know for sure.

The one pervasive point of mystery that I must lay before you is this one.

Listen to the words of Jesus in Mark 13:32 and 33, "Of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son but only the Father.

Take heed, watch and pray for you do not know when the time is."

And in Luke 12:40 you remember Jesus said, "Watch and be ready, for no one knows when the Son of Man is coming."

The big mystery is when...when is this going to happen.

And that mystery is a very helpful one.

That is the great reality of what we call imminence.

No one knows when this will begin.

Nothing prophetic needs to happen before the Rapture of the church, that's the next event.

It could happen any time.

Nothing has to happen on the world scene before the Rapture of the church which will launch the series of events that will make up the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

And so, we cannot know when it is going to happen.

And the Lord then left us with this great doctrine of imminency.

It could happen at any time...it could happen at any time so that every generation of Christians can live in the light of that anticipation.

Why would the Lord do that?

Why would He want us to think it could happen at any moment?

First John 3 tells us why, in that it says, "He who has this hope in him purifies himself."

He who has this hope in him purifies himself.

If you live as though Christ could come back at any moment, it has an impact on how you live.

Jesus says in the book of Revelation, "Behold, I come quickly, or suddenly, and My reward is with Me to give to every man according to his work."

I'm coming and when I come I will reward you based upon what I find you doing when I get there.

I can certainly identify with that.

You can identify with that.

Having an imminent on the surface, come at any moment authority such as the sovereign Lord Jesus Christ looming in front of you every waking moment of your life should have an impact on how you live your life.

That's why we're told to watch and pray and occupy and to be ready for He could come at any moment.

Even as a child, there were times when I hoped my parents did not show up.

Can you identify with that?

There were lots of times in school, those...the greatest times of my childhood education and I don't know why I was like this, was when the teacher left the room.

And the worst times was when she came back suddenly and I didn't hear the pitter-patter of those orthopaedic wedges heading toward the door.