Signs of the Times
0 comments | Posted by Steven Layson on 28 Mar 2010 in From Steve's Study ::
You can get a pretty good idea of what time of year it is just by walking into the local supermarket. You know it must be getting towards the end of January when you see love hearts and fluffy bears saying “I love you”, in preparation for Valentine’s Day. You can tell it’s somewhere between February and April when you see the store festooned with eggs, bunnies and all manner of chocolate delights (not to mention Hot Cross Buns). It must be almost May when you can see all the “I love my mum” banners hanging from the ceiling. Surely September can’t be far away when you see the place covered with lots of pictures of Dads doing DiY. And you can tell it must be October or later when you see the first Christmas trees or tinsel appear in the shop windows.
In today’s passage, Jesus tells us that you can also get a pretty good idea of the times just by looking at the world around us.
We live in the days between the establishment of the Kingdom of God (which came through the person of Jesus), and its final revelation on the day when Christ returns. Many have tried, and continue to try, to second guess the timing of the return of Christ, but to no avail. They look at the kinds of things Jesus describes in Luke 21:5-38 (wars, famines, earthquakes and the like) and see those things happening and think, “surely this is the time”.
Now, they may be right or they may not be, but Jesus’ intention is not to give us a timetable to guess when he’ll return (indeed, he tells us elsewhere that we’ll never know), but rather, to look at the sorry state of the world around us and to understand that this is a sign to us that all is not as it should be. As we see the sickness, poverty and depravity of our world, we should not be surprised, but should rather make sure we are ready for the day when Jesus will return to put it all to right. His advice to us is to “be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man” (21:36). In other words, look around you… this world can’t continue like this forever. Make sure you’re ready to stand before Jesus on the day he returns to put it all right.
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