Mark 13:1-13 “Signs of the End Times”

God is in control. Sometimes it may seem that things are spinning out of control. So much of the American ethos has to do with control; controlling the environment, controlling other nations, controlling our individual and collective destinies. Every game we play is about control; chess players try to control the board, volleyball players try to control the ball and return it over the net, the best basketball players control the ball well. True in our lives as well; we admire people who are in control all the time, in control of their emotions, in control of their jobs and families…

But the deeper truth is that only God has complete control. Someone who has everything together on the outside can have nothing together on the inside. And even a person who has everything under control cannot control very much. A person driving the opposite way on a road can drift across the yellow line. We can get a disease, or something can happen to our kids. As much as we strive for control, the only person with real control is God. But I look at our world, and it seems out of control. Things aren’t happening the way I would like them to work out. I’d like everyone to be peaceful, happy, and fed. I see war and strife, anger and massive problems feeding people. Things seem to my eye to be frequently out of control. But we are assured that things are not; God is in control, and everything works according to His purposes. Let’s take a look at Mark 13 and think about God being in control. Please stand….

As he was leaving the Temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?”

Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginnings of the birth pangs.

You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them. And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit.

Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.”

Let’s pray

We are in the midst of some of the last teaching Jesus does in Mark. His warnings about end times contrast with the theological combat Jesus has been winning against the Pharisees and chief teachers of the law. This is a very different sort of text than discussing whether people’s marriage relationships are intact in Heaven, or whether we should pay Roman taxes or not. Today’s teaching by Jesus is initiated by Him, rather than as a response to people who are hoping and working toward His downfall. In fact, it is Jesus giving us hope in a very backward way. We’ll get to why I say that a little later. To me, this is a hopeful text. But it is a little odd.

I don’t know about you, but I am often a bit uncomfortable when I read the Bible and it seems a bit vague; the prophesy may have happened, or it may be coming. And so some people point backwards and say the prophesy has been fulfilled, and others say the prophesy has yet to be fulfilled, and I listen to their reasoning and think they both have a point. Then I wonder why Jesus was not specific, you know believe in me or in 2010 really bad things will happen….but Scripture seems to never be so clear. The different interpretations confuse me, because both interpretations could be right. Then I worry that we are trying to figure out something that has been given to us as deliberately unclear, and yet we waste a lot of time and energy on something that is divisive to the Body of Christ rather than helpful. So I get uncomfortable with these sort of texts. But one of the good aspects of preaching through the entire text is that we get to look at stuff I would normally avoid. Some people really like to think about the future; I tend to be more practical in my following of Jesus. That’s not a good or bad thing, it is just the way I am wired. So today I have to step out of my place of comfort and into a bunch of prophesy.

I would rather know exactly what everything means, and when it is going to happen, but this isn’t what God has given us. He chose to make things more hazy, in part I suspect, so that we would learn to trust Him, rather than ourselves for the future. If we knew exactly what was going to happen when, we would abuse that knowledge. I’m convinced that is so. We would try and clean up our lives a week before the end of the world, or maybe even just a few hours ahead of doomsday. We would not live for God, but the end of the world. And God wants us to trust Him, and live for Him, rather than the end of time. So anyway, let’s look at the text.

As he was leaving the Temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

We know this has happened already. The Temple Herod built has torn apart following the insurrection that began in 67 AD and lasted 3 years. The Temple was burned to the ground by Roman legions finishing the fight against the rebel Jews in AD 70. The great Temple, wonderful to see, was thrown down in pieces. Today there is only one wall of the Temple remaining, you may have heard or seen video tape of the “Wailing Wall” where Jews put prayers onto pieces of paper and stuff them into the cracks of the wall. I’ve been told the wailing wall is beautiful and wonderful to behold. It is the last bit of the Temple, and will never be rebuilt because the “Dome of the Rock”, a holy place for Muslims, sits where the Temple used to be. So we know when this prophesy happened. What about the rest?

See, for me, this is where things get odd. There have been nations fighting against other nations for a long time now. And that trend doesn’t seem to be going down, but rising. I found a spot on the web that details all the current conflicts. It lists 42 current conflicts. Some are uprisings within the country, like the Basque separatists in Spain. Others are the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. South Korea and North Korea have officially been at war for over 50 years. That war stopped fighting, but there has been no peace agreement signed. I didn’t bother to check out the number of earthquakes since Jesus said these words, but having grown up in So Cal, I know there have been several earthquakes. Having worked with Moses’ family and friends in Africa, I know there have been famines as well.

So how do we know which wars are significant to us knowing God is moving, and which are just ordinary wars that happen? How do we know which earthquakes are important markers that God is doing something, and which are just tectonic plates moving as they do? Those are the sorts of questions I used to think about. I have come to the place where I think there aren’t any tectonic plates just randomly moving against one another. God is in control; God knows how He made the earth and He ordains it to move as it does. Likewise, God is in control even over the wars that nations fight, that real people fight. God is in control over that. All that we think is probably random isn’t. These things have to happen for reasons that will always be beyond our understanding. I don’t feel comfortable assigning some reason to these happenings, many of which are tragic. But I do know that God is in control, over time, space, the physical world, over nations. The world moves to His purposes, not ours. And while we strive for peace because Jesus was the prince of peace, it seems that we are inherently, because of original sin, not a peaceful species.

It seems to me hard to tell which wars are significant, and which aren’t. Most generations since Christ left earth have thought that theirs would be the one to experience the fullness of the Revelation of John; all the people leaving earth, the Anti-Christ, Armageddon, the chaos at the end of time. I guess what I want to convey to you is that things have always been chaotic, they always will be because of human nature, but God is still in control. God knows what is happening and uses it to His purposes. There isn’t anything that happens outside of God’s knowledge and permission. Not a hair from your head, not a sparrow dying during the winter. It all happens in God’s control. Not that we always want specific things to happen, but God is still in control, even though sometimes we wish things had turned out differently. And in the course of things that happen we wish wouldn’t, it is God who turns what was intended for evil into good. God did it with Christ’s death, and He can do it with the tough times in our lives as well. The problem is that we always see the truth of that in our lives looking backward, not in the moment, and not looking into the future. So we have the choice to trust the God who is in control, or be out of control in our actions and thoughts.

This next section, fortunately, doesn’t totally apply to us American Christians right now. But in the history of the church, it has applied to many people. From the beginnings of Christianity, the persecutions in Israel grew to the persecutions of Christians in the entire Roman Empire. The persecutions were sometimes really bad, and sometimes less so until Christianity was legalized in 311 AD by the Emperor Constantine. Despite the persecutions, Christianity grew and spread to the far ends of the Roman world and beyond. Many martyrs gave their lives to the truth of the gospel, starting with most of the apostles that were with Jesus, including Peter, the apostle behind the writing of the gospel of Mark. Christians really were thrown to the lions in Rome and torn apart. They were imprisoned, they were beaten, they were tortured. But the disciples of Christ stood up, were counted, and died for their Lord and Savior. I wonder what we would do if faced with life and death; the choice to deny Jesus and live, or proclaim Christ and die. I wonder what most of us would do.

The truth is that there are many people today, Christians all over the world suffer persecutions. There is a significant Christian minority in Egypt, in Lebanon, and in Iraq. There are Christians in Iran, Turkey, all over the Middle East. There are Christians persecuted in India, in Pakistan and even Afghanistan. There are Christians in Indonesia and Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. There are terrible persecutions of Christians in China and North Korea. In fact, I’ve read recently that some North Koreans that escape North Korea and get into China are voluntarily going back into North Korea to spread the gospel. Many of them are killed, are caught and put into work camps until they die. And we aren’t doing much about that. We are incredibly lucky to have the life we do, but I wonder if we aren’t taking that for granted, and complaining about the smallest little things. I hear complaining about different aspects of worship when people, our Christian brothers and sisters are dying for spreading the Word of God. And we complain about some little part of worship or the church. Maybe its time that we grow up.

The promises for the early church, that God will speak through the persecuted Christians when they are caught is now true for the persecuted church all over the world. Northern Africa, the former republics of the Soviet Union, Burma and Nepal, all those places it is hard to be a Christian, a disciple of Christ lives each day fully for Christ because it could be their last. I think we need to be more actively supporting our brothers and sisters in hard places. A good way is to get information from Voice of the Martyrs. You can sign up to receive information at www.persecution.com to get their newsletter either online or mailed to your house. They list places to write letters for people in specific circumstances and other folks to pray for. This text is not without meaning in the history of the church or even in modern day. But it doesn’t always apply to us. We aren’t in places of physical danger; but we are in places of spiritual danger. We need to think about what differences that might make to the promises that are here in the text for us.

All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.

The Christian life is not always going to be easy. Not everyone will find it interesting or cool that you are a Christian. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know. There is something though, to standing firm in the face of persecution, in praying for people to stand for the truth of the gospel, the truth of Jesus Christ; Him sacrificed, Him ready to forgive those who would come to Him and ask Him to rule their hearts. IN fact, Paul tells us the same thing in Ephesians when he describes the full armor of God. Eph 6:13 “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything to stand.”

We stand knowing that God is in control. We prepare as much as we can; but the victory for us is in standing firm. It is living as sons and daughters of the king, it is putting our faith fully in the God who knows us, who loves us, who has a plan for the universe that everything fall into. We aren’t privy to everything, but we know God is in control; through the wars, through the problems in our lives, through the muck and the mire, God knows us, God cares for us, God is working in the world to accomplish His purposes. Sometimes this is hard to believe as we go through the circumstances of life; deaths, diseases, financial hardships, broken relationships, betrayals, enduring the lies and slander of others. But God uses even these things to shape us into His mold, to be His hands and feet here on earth, to be parts of His body, His broken body, broken for us that He Himself would be sufficient, would be enough to meet all our needs in everything. He is in control, even when we aren’t, even when it doesn’t feel like He is.

Let’s pray.