Sermon Tone Analysis

*7 Characteristics of the Coming King, Part 4*

*Luke 17:31-37*

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     I want you to open your Bible again to the seventeenth chapter of the gospel of Luke...Luke chapter 17.

We are looking at the subject of the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and our teacher is none other than Jesus Himself.

These are the words of Jesus concerning His own return.

There are a number of places in the gospels where Jesus talks about His coming.

We will come to one in Luke yet ahead of us in the twenty-first chapter which is really parallel to the great Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and 25 in which Jesus speaks of His return.

Those two passages, Matthew 24 and 25 and Luke 21, tend to be a bit more chronological, although they do deal with themes and elements that are around the return of Christ.

They do give us a bit of a chronology, a bit of a flow of the events that will take place in that great day when the Lord returns.

This particular sermon by Jesus in Luke 17 focuses not on the chronology of the sequence but on the nature of His coming.

And the idea really is to convey to the Jews, both the Pharisees and the disciples of Jesus, both those who rejected Him and those who accepted Him, that their expectation of His Second Coming as a wonderful, joyous, happy celebration needs to be altered because the reality of His Second Coming is that it will be the most horrific event the world has ever seen.

Yes, it will result in the establishment of His long promised Kingdom.

Yes, it will result in righteousness and peace and joy prevailing upon the earth.

Yes, Jesus Christ will establish His throne in Jerusalem and will reign over the whole earth.

Yes, it will be begin only with the righteous, those who are alive on the earth at the establishment of that Kingdom and the saints who have been with Him in heaven returning with Him so that you have the glorified and the earthly saints together making up the inhabitants initially of that Kingdom.

Yes, it will be a restored earth.

Life will be very different here.

The lion and the lamb will lie down together.

Children will play in a snake pit, etc.

Those things which are part of the curse in our world today will be reversed in that age.

It will be a time when knowledge fills the whole earth and wisdom reigns supreme.

But, before the establishment of that Kingdom, it will be the day of the Lord in the sense of judgment.

Judgment, the likes of which the world has never seen...judgment that surpasses any and all collectively of past judgments, it will be the worst judgment ever.

It will be the total destruction of all the ungodly and they will be sent to hell forever as Jesus establishes His reign of righteousness.

Now the Jews didn't understand that.

They assumed that the Messiah would come and set up His Kingdom and for them it would be joy and bliss and knowledge and wisdom and peace and righteousness and it would be an opportunity for them to sort of be proud of their condition rather than experience the kind of humiliating oppression that they had endured for so many centuries.

But the truth is, because they rejected their Messiah and because the world has continued to reject the Messiah, before the Messiah comes to set up His Kingdom, He comes in massive global judgment.

Now that is the message of this text primarily.

It doesn't really look at the Kingdom which follows that judgment, it looks at the judgment.

In fact, as we already know in the passage, it is likened to the judgment, as verse 26 puts it, in the days of Noah.

It is likened in verse 28 to the judgment that came in the days of Lot...devastating, massive, far-reaching judgment in which only a few escape.

Eight in the case of Noah on the entire planet...three in the case of Lot, Lot and his two daughters in terms of Sodom and Gomorrah the cities of the plain at the south end of the Dead Sea...it is going to be a sweeping fearful terrifying judgment the likes of which the world has never seen.

And the world will see it, as you remember from verse 24, it will be like lightning flashing out of one part of the sky, shining to the other part of the sky.

That is to say, it will be visible to everyone.

Verse 23, "If somebody says look there and look here, don't do it."

Why?

Because you don't need to look over here to see the Second Coming or look over here to see it, or over there...it's not going to be secret, nobody is going to have to point it out to you, it will be visible like lightning that flashes across the sky to everyone who's watching.

And so, there will come this time of judgment that will be seen by and experienced by the whole world.

This is part of the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And you might think in one sense that this is a part of the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ that we don't like.

There is a bitterness to it, admittedly.

There is a sadness to it.

There is a sorrow to it.

But part of loving His appearing as Paul put it in 2 Timothy 4, part of loving His appearing is loving the fact not that He just appears to establish His righteousness, but He appears to put an end to sin.

He appears to put an end to the rebellion.

He appears to bring a finish to the dishonor and the reproach and the scandalous and blasphemous attitudes that prevail in the world toward God and toward Christ and toward the blessed Holy Spirit.

It is not just a time of righteousness on the positive, it is a time of the destruction of the sinful world system over which Satan and demons prevail which is so familiar to us and has been since the Fall.

And when saints are found under the altar in Revelation 6 saying, "How long, O Lord?  How long?

How long before You come and make things right?"

they're not only crying for the prevailing righteousness to enter the world, but they are crying for an end to sin.

It's much like the prophet Habakkuk who said the same thing, "How long, O Lord, how long?

How long are You going to tolerate rebellion in Israel?

How long are you going to tolerate unrighteousness?

How long are you going to allow your name to be dishonored and scandalized?

It's what the psalmist said, "The zeal for Your house has eaten me up.

The reproaches that fall on You fall on me.

I feel the pain when Your name is dishonored.

How long, O God, is Your name going to be dishonored."

It's the same thing that Jesus said when He made a whip at the beginning and ended His ministry and cleansed His Father's house.

It's that same attitude that longs for God to be vindicated and glorified and exalted and Christ to be lifted up and worshiped and not to be so dishonored as He is today.

Spiritual maturity can be defined in those terms, you know.

The spiritually mature are those who look for the Second Coming not for any personal gain but for the glory of Christ.

That's what spiritual maturity is.

It's when you love His appearing for His sake.

It's when you long for His appearing for His sake.

It's when you're so caught up in wonder, love and praise toward Christ that you want to see Him vindicated, you want to see Him exalted, you want to see the glorious manifestation of the children of God not just for the sake of the children of God as wonderful as that is, but for the sake of the one who has made us the children of God, our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.

You understand the words of the psalmist that reproaches that fall on You fall on me, I feel the pain when You're dishonored.

It grieves me when our Lord is dishonored.

It grates on me.

It...it pains my heart when He is dishonored by those who are anti-Christ, anti-God and He is dishonored and it is painful sometimes more painful when He is dishonored by those who name His name and then misrepresent Him and use His name to abuse people and gain their own ends.

But whenever His name is dishonored, it is a heartache and a heartbreak to those who are spiritually mature.

When I think about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, I don't want to engage myself in some selfish thinking about the fact that I'm going to be there to see the novelty of what the world is like when that happens.

It isn't just a curiosity or a fascination to me.

It has to be beyond that.

That's why I'm not interested in the fictional approach to the Second Coming and I'm not interested in a fantasy when it comes to the Second Coming.

I'm interested in the reality of the honor and the glory and the majesty of Christ being on display.

I want His humiliation to come to an end in this world and His glory to begin.

I don't think many Christians seem to understand that today, many professing Christians.

We live in a very self-centered, very, very overly personalized narcissistic world.

People are programmed to believe that they are the center of the universe, that the whole universe revolves around them.

And even God is one of those revolving planets that moves around them to serve them somehow.

There's a very superficial understanding of divine glory, a very superficial understanding of divine exaltation, divine honor, the lifting up of the majestic Christ.

Really for decades, I think, evangelism efforts in the church in our sort of minimalist theology have been mostly sinner-centered.

And even more so lately.

God loves you, He loves you unconditionally.

He loves you so much He wants you to be happy.

He loves you so much He wants you to be satisfied.

He loves you so much He wants you to be healthy.

He loves you so much He wants to deliver you from all disappointment and all pain and to take you to heaven.

And if you don't let Him do that, He's really upset and unfulfilled.

In other words, you're the key to God's fulfillment.

It's as if the salvation of the sinner is the goal of redemption and God is the means to that.

That's the very opposite of what Scripture teaches.

The glory of God is the goal of redemption and the salvation of the sinner is the means to that.

We are saved only that we might forever give glory to God, that we might forever exalt Christ.

That's why we're here doing what we do on the Lord's day and only people who really understand that know what worship is all about.

It's not about a mood induced by certain music, it's about being consumed with the honor and glory of God and Christ.

And when you have a world where all the emphasis is on personal fulfillment, and then you devise a gospel that simply fits into that world of personal fulfillment, you cheat people out of understanding the very purpose for salvation, the very essence of worship and the very reason why we hope for the return of Christ.

Look, you've got a whole society of people who think the world exists to fulfill them so they can find their satisfaction, their fulfillment, their purpose, their place, be all they can be, their comfort zone.

And if they haven't found it already, then Jesus will help you find it.