Be Careful WHEN "The End Is Near"

I hope that you don't see singing as just a warm-up for the preaching. Of course, you might not think that at all, but I'll tell you, when we sing truths of God, it's implanted in our hearts and we encourage one another as we sing together. I love it when we sing here. Take your Bibles and let's turn to 2 Thessalonians. 2 Thessalonians 2 I'm going to read verses 1-12 although we're only going to get through verse 3 we want to get the whole context here as we dwell on this very important passage about the end times now concerning the coming of our lord jesus christ and our being gathered together to him we ask you brothers not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed either by a spirit or a spoken word or a letter seeming to be from us to the effect that the day of the lord has come let no one deceive you in any way for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed the son of destruction who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship so that he takes his seat in the temple of god proclaiming himself to be god do you not remember that when i was still with you i told you these things?

And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.

The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but have pleasure in unrighteousness Let pray Father as we enter into your word today as we study this text together we pray that you would encourage your people with hope. We pray, Father, we'd understand something that is absolutely necessary.

We pray, Father, that in this we might be better equipped to face what is around us today, to face it with hope. So help us now, Father, as we think about the hope that you've given us in Jesus. We pray this now in Jesus' name. Amen. I remember the year 1967 very well. In June 1967, the summer before I entered the seventh grade, all of the Arab nations in the Middle East in an unusual show of unity came together to launch a coordinated attack on the little nation of Israel.

In June 1967 they fought what was called the Six Day War. And in those six days the Israelis thoroughly thrashed their Arab foes. They took the Golan Heights from Syria. They took the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. And they took the West Bank from Jordan. And included in that conquest was East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

Well, I'm telling you right now, many Bible-believing fundamentalist Christians went crazy. This was it. the time of the Gentiles has been fulfilled. The Jews now have access to the Temple Mount. And you know what that means? That means it's only in a matter of time that they're going to rebuild the Temple. And you know what that means?

That means it's only a short time before Antichrist comes and he gets in that Temple. And so that means that the rapture of the church is just around the corner. It can't be far away. It surely was on the horizon. And there was a fever pitch going on after that six-day war. Now, I cannot say that I was excited.

I was alarmed and disappointed. There was alarm and anxiety because I wanted to make sure that I would be part of the great escape which was the rapture of the church And we leave all the unbelievers behind to suffer through the seven years of tribulation. But mostly, I was disappointed. I wasn't even going to make it to high school. And all the adventures that were there.

And frankly, there were a lot of fun things that I wanted to do in the next four or five years that I couldn't do when I was in seventh grade. For Pete's sake, I hadn't even kissed a girl yet. And not only that, forget about ever getting a driver's license. That was out of the picture now, right? and so for the next few years bible conference bible prophecy conferences were all the rage there were all kinds of news items in christian magazines about the limestone that was being mined in indiana to ship to the middle east so they were going to build the the temple again and we heard about the red heifer that was going to be sacrificed when they rebuilt the temple that was being raised somewhere in, who knows, Montana.

Rumors were flying around that the government was soon to give up all its currency and was toying with the idea of using identification that would be put on our hands and our foreheads. I remember one speaker at a youth event. By that time, I was about a junior in high school. And I remember as the event closed, he was praying and saying, Lord, we know that you're coming surely can't be beyond 1975.

And of course, a Christian production company produced a trilogy of movies called Thief in the Night, which scared all of us to death. You see, because of that particular view of the end times, everyone was excited about the return of Jesus. And lots of wonderful and strange things were going on. Now here's my question. Is it really important to understand eschatology Is it really important to understand eschatology Well what is eschatology Let define our terms Eschatology is the doctrine of last things, okay?

Eschatology is the doctrine of last things. If you go to seminary or any kind of a Bible institute, you will spend some time studying eschatology. Well, if we read this text correctly, eschatology does bear some weight. Now, when I came to LaRue to be pastor here, I couldn't care less about the end times. I was so tired of it all. I was tired of all that stuff.

Of course, what year is it right now? 2020? Right? After a while, you just start saying, what's going on? What is happening here? I didn't think it was that important.

Since then, I've changed my mind, and I've changed my mind because of what the Bible says. Now, in some sense, we need to be careful not to overemphasize eschatology. In some sense, we need to not overemphasize it. We can have different views about the end times and still be within the bounds of Christian belief. I mean, even in our own fellowship of churches, in the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals, our fellowship of churches to which we belong, you're going to find different views, right?

There's Jerry and his post-millennialism and Jim with his amillennialism and there's some that are pre-millennial and some that are pre-trib, pre-millennial. You can find them all. They're all within the context of Christian belief. But you find here, though, that a wrong understanding of eschatology can rob God's people of hope and thus cause trouble, even moving some of them away from the faith.

So it does bear some importance for us as Christians. And in fact, this passage, 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 11-12, tells us some real important things about eschatology, about the last days. I want us to look at the first three verses this morning just to set the stage for what follows. So you look as I read again, verses 1 through 3. Now, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ and are being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word or a letter seeming to seeming to be from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.

Let no one deceive you in any way. now this passage is going to give us some significant truths about the end times and what is yet to happen but note that it grows out of a pastoral concern God did not have these words penned in order to satisfy our curiosity about the end of the world. That is not why these are here. They are here to persuade you to believe these particular truths so that you will not lose hope.

He wants to persuade us of these particular truths so that we will not lose hope. And all that follows about the man of lawlessness and exalting himself in the temple of God and all that was not written so that we could put together a nifty chart that tells us how the world ends. It was written because people were losing hope. They were alarmed. They had moved from their original beliefs and he is concerned about that.

And so this passage, which by the way, I might add, is one of the most difficult in the Bible, at least in my 35 years of experience, to figure out what's going on here. It wasn't written so that we would read the newspapers with the idea of who we can figure out, who the Antichrist is. It was written for us so that we would not lose hope. So in our text this morning, the Apostle Paul writes to a congregation whose beliefs and emotions have been stirred because there's been a lot of talk about the day of the Lord, that final climactic day of Jesus' return.

They're upset. Things aren't what they ought to be because they got some wrong information or distorted information. So let's look at these three verses and let try to get a grasp here of why this was written And when we get into the following few paragraphs please please understand that they were written so that God people would have an understanding of the end time so that they would have hope and they wouldn't lose that hope that they have.

Here's the first thing we see. Embrace your hope in Jesus' return. The first thing you see is embrace your hope in Jesus' return. Verse 1. Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together with Him. Alright?

He's talking about the day of the Lord. The Apostle Paul had taught these folks and he had wrote in his first letter to them about this final glorious day. Look at verse 5. Notice what he said. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? This had been part of the teaching when he and Silas and Timothy had been with this congregation.

Now that day includes two things here. The coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and being gathered together to him. The day includes the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. You remember in the first epistle, if we do a real quick run through, he said that on that day, this missionary team would point to the Thessalonians as their hope and joy and crown before Jesus at his coming.

He was looking forward to that day when he could say, look, here is what you did, Lord. He said that when Jesus comes in chapter 3 of 1 Thessalonians, our hearts will be established as blameless and holy before God. So here's another thing he said. on the day of the Lord, your heart will be established blameless and holy before God. There's your hope.

When you stand before God on the last day, your heart will be blameless and holy. Had Paul not also said in chapter 5, that God himself would sanctify you completely, that your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. God's going to work in you in such a way, He says God himself is going to sanctify you so that your whole person will be blameless at the coming of the Lord Jesus.

That hope right Isn that hope I love that That part of the very end of the book where you know when you saying to yourself this is so hard, Lord, as Jim prayed today, Lord, we dishonor your name so many times. Jesus taught us to honor your name and we dishonor it, and yet here is God saying, I myself will sanctify you completely. I'll do it. I'm faithful.

I'll do it. It's that you're blameless when the Lord Jesus comes. And in this letter, you remember in chapter 1, he had labored to make the point that when Jesus returns in glory, he would mete out justice to those who are persecuting his people. So there's hope in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. All these things are going to happen at his coming.

And he also says we're going to be gathered together with him. Jesus intends to return and gather all the exiles to himself. He tells us in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. Remember what he wrote in chapter 4. By the way, it's interesting. Paul used this language here that the Jewish people used a lot.

It was this language that says, we as exiles are someday going to return to our land. And he uses the same language as if to say, someday we're all going to be gathered to our land with the Lord Jesus as King. We're all aliens and strangers and exiles in this world. We're out of place in a dark and evil world where sin pressures us constantly. It's constantly pressuring us inside and outside.

We're exiles longing for home on a perfect earth. An earth where everything is operating as it should. Everything's in harmony. The environment is operating in perfect harmony. And we're relating to one another and to the earth itself. which is under a curse, right? And we're living in a world in perfect harmony with the environment and with one another.

And Jesus will come and gather all of His people. Remember we saw this in 1 Thessalonians? He's going to gather all His people for this triumphant parade as He descends to the earth and all of us with Him, coming with Him in glory. but remember some of the exiles have died before the parade can even start and again as he says in 1 Thessalonians 4 they will be raised from the dead And those of us who are alive will not precede them, but we will join them.

We will all ascend to Jesus in the air and then come down with Him to the earth in this great, triumphant parade. Being gathered to Jesus guarantees the physical resurrection from the dead of all those who have died. So you see, if your eschatology is right, you have reason for hope. You can embrace the hope of Jesus' return. Embrace the hope of Jesus' return.

However, there's a problem if your eschatology is wrong. And so you must guard your hope in Jesus' return. Alright? So we need to embrace the hope in Jesus' return. But you know what? we got to be careful if we get the wrong eschatology we lose our hope so we need to guard you need to guard your hope in jesus return what happens to all what happens to all of that hope if the day of the lord has come do you see where the problem is he says at the end of verse 2 that they've got word to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.

It's already happened. Do you see what happens to all that hope if the day of the Lord has come? Okay, where's the hope and joy? You could say, I'm not blameless or holy in my whole being like you promised, Paul. And shouldn't that be the case if the day of the Lord has occurred? I don't, I'm not entirely blameless.

I still have problems. Have we been gathered to Jesus? Because I expected a triumphal celebration with Jesus and I expected to celebrate with those who have died, who are going to be resurrected. Have I missed something in my understanding? And what about justice? Will those fiendish persecutors who kill our families, who chop off the heads of faithful servants of God, will they ever have to answer for their wicked deeds?

Where is the justice if the day of the Lord has come? What happens then to the resurrection and a life that's going to be glorified? What happens to all that if the day of the Lord has come? has already come. You see? You've got to guard your hope. And so the Apostle Paul expresses some urgency then about this at the end of verse 1 when he says, we ask you brothers.

That's not really a good translation. It should be, we beseech you brothers. We beg you. We beg you brothers, please listen carefully to what I have to say. Why is there such urgency in his voice because of what happens to a congregation when it doesn't guard its hope what would happen what happened to that congregation well here's what we find wrong eschatology can move you away from what you already know he says you've been quickly shaken in mind now here he's not talking about emotions and this in this in that turn in that phrase he's not talking about their emotions.

He's talking about their beliefs. Do not quickly abandon what you learn. Do not be shaken so quickly in your understanding, in your mind, you see. And so it is with us when something new comes along. Don't be so quick to abandon what you've understood as the truth. Don't be so quick to abandon it, all right?

Now look, here's what happens, right? And, you know, this happens all the time. I go down to the post office, I get the mail, I find something from some ministry, I open it, and they're telling me that they figured it out. Here's when Jesus is coming. And a lot of people go, oh, praise God, there it is, right? And suddenly they're jumping on the bandwagon.

I'm amazed sometimes at these things that go out alright these things that go out and people suddenly they're like oh wow this is it and they just by the thousands by the tens of thousands by the millions sometimes they abandon everything they've been taught and they jump on they get on board and Paul is saying why are you so quickly abandoning what you learned right? think about it not only that but wrong eschatology can provoke confusion and distress he says they alarmed if the day of the Lord has come what happens to the promises of God All those promises that we enumerated that happened in the day of the Lord, what happens to all those? Of course they're alarmed. Of course they're alarmed.

They're distressed. Listen, confusion and distress can invade the congregation. People are upset. They're confused. they're distressed because of something they've heard about eschatology somehow heretical doctrine somehow heretical eschatology had made its way into this congregation it might have been introduced by someone claiming to have a prophetic word of God that's what he means by if you've heard it by spirit sometimes that phrase is translated as prophecy I think that's what the Apostle Paul means when he says, don't be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed either by a spirit, by a prophetic word from God.

Someone in the congregation may have claimed that he or she had a vision, a word from God, about what's really happened with the day of the Lord. It's possible that happened. It might have arrived by some itinerant preachers who had appeared in the congregation after the mission team of Paul, Silas, and Timothy had left. In the New Testament, you read a number of verses that indicate that itinerant teachers were part of the process, or part of the Christian culture of that day, these itinerant preachers.

I mean, we always talk about the false teaching that had invaded the church in Colossae and things like that, where the Apostle Paul is addressing some false teaching, like in Galatians. How'd they get there? You've got these itinerant preachers and teachers coming along. So who knows? Maybe one arrived and offered to be their speaker at their spring Bible conference on Bible prophecy.

Right? And got up and taught them a whole different way of looking at the day of the Lord. It might even have infiltrated this congregation by a forged letter. A forgery. A letter claiming to have been written by Paul and his associates. Now it's clear that Paul did not write his letters by himself.

He dictated them. We see evidence of that, for example, in Romans chapter 16 verse 21 I don know if you ever Read through the whole book of Romans You get to the last chapter almost near the very end All of a sudden you see this verse I Tertius who wrote this letter greet you in the Lord What? Well, Tertius was his secretary. He's writing along as Paul's dictating all that wonderful stuff.

And then Paul went out to get a drink of water and he writes, hey, I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord. right who is tertius well he was his secretary he was the guy who was writing it down and you know the apostle paul was very much aware of someone forging an epistle so he often at one epistle he wrote himself that's galatians and in galatians he says see with what large letters i am writing to you with my own hand it appears maybe that he had real problem with his eyesight and so he wrote Galatians it was big. But on the other hand in Colossians chapter 4 he says I Paul write this greeting with my own hand. At the very end of Colossians he signs the letter.

Probably in big letters so that they know it came from him. And look how he ends this epistle. With this in mind you might have gotten a forgery. Notice what he says in verse 17 of chapter 5. I Paul write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign of genuineness in every letter of mine.

It is the way I write. So he signs off so that they know it's from him. And so quite possibly a letter that claimed to be from Paul and his associates had gotten to the church and it upset everybody about the teaching on the day of the Lord. What's the point? What's the point? Turn back to 1 Thessalonians just for a moment.

Chapter 5. Look at verse 19. Do not quench the spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything. Hold fast what is good. It's stained from every form of evil.

He says, don't accept anything without testing it. Put it through the lens of Scripture. Put it through the lens of Scripture. No matter what you hear, no matter how famous the teacher is, no matter how big his congregation is, no matter how big is his reputation, no matter how many radio stations he's on, you listen with the Word of God in mind. You run it through.

You look at it through the lens of Scripture Okay Always examine views through the lens of Scripture And if you still confused then come to your leadership and ask them Be careful. Be careful. Look, you already know this is kind of a hot-button issue with me. You already got that picture, didn't you? And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why.

Because in those crazy days of the mid-60s, when all this was going on, all right, there was just craziness. You know what? You know who got lost in the dust in all of it? You know who got lost in the dust? Jesus. No one talked about Jesus.

That's the whole point of your doctrine of end times. It's about Jesus. We didn't talk about Jesus. We spent a whole bunch of time talking about, did you know that in Israel the license plates all have 666 on them now? Did you know that the Russians, who are supposed to invade Israel from the north, have started a cavalry corps? Because, you know, the Bible says, it's somewhere in Ezekiel, that the prince of Rosh, which people meant to take as Russia, when Rosh is the Hebrew word for chief, the chief of princes, which at that time was referring to Babylon, was going to invade from the north with these overwhelming horses and cavalry.

And so we started hearing stories about Russia is tuning down their tank corps. They're not putting money in tanks, they're putting them in horses now. And all this kind of craziness and foolishness was going on all over the place. Of course, it scares the 7th grader to death, but why should it it's about jesus you see it's about hope it's not about putting the puzzle together so you can figure out if saddam hussein is the antichrist it's not about that and that's what's happening here that's exactly what's that these people are alarmed they're upset.

What are we to believe? Why? Their hope is being robbed from them because they have a wrong view of what's going to happen at the end. Listen. Be careful. Now you might ask, how in the world could anyone believe that the day of the Lord had occurred?

How could anyone, because of all the things that Paul said, this blazing glory, remember in chapter 1, he returns with these angels, these flaming angels to mete out justice. How could anyone believe the day of the Lord had arrived? How is that possible? Friends, anybody can distort scripture. look over at first timothy the very next book okay now you understand something the the the the books of the bible are not arranged chronologically so first and second thessalonians should really were really like the second and third epistles that paul wrote after galatians galatians the first one then he wrote this and then he wrote uh the corinthian epistles and romans and all that so when you come to first timothy we're years down the road from when 2 Thessalonians written.

So with that in mind, look what Paul is going to face in the future. Probably something he had already faced here. I'm sorry, it's 2 Timothy. 2 Timothy chapter 2. This is the very last epistle that Paul wrote. The very last one.

And here's what he says in chapter 2 beginning in verse 16. But avoid irreverent babble for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness and their talk will spread like gangrene okay false teaching spreads like gangrene goes fast among them are hymenaeus and felidus who have swerved from the truth saying that the resurrection has already happened they are upsetting the faith of some Wait a minute I haven seen any graves open Right? They obviously have spiritualized that.

They said, sure, the resurrection has happened. The promise has been fulfilled. You've been born again. There's the resurrection. You don't need any physical resurrection. So they spiritualize it.

You say, really? I say, yeah, it happens all the time. How many have ever heard of Charles Taze Russell? Probably doesn't ring a bell. One of the founding, one of the key members to the founding of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Okay?

Charles Taze Russell. One of the key founders of Jehovah's Witnesses. He said that Christ returned invisibly in 1874. and that the saints were resurrected in 1875. How many millions of people are following that? You say, yeah, they spiritualized it. They put a different spin on it.

So the day of the Lord now becomes something else. Listen, Greg Beal is one of the guys that I love because he's a great Bible scholar. He's a terrific Bible scholar. I love his books. Here's what he wrote some years ago. Now he's talking about evangelicals here, Bible-believing Christians.

He says, I was invited to a meeting of theologians in order to discuss a teaching that was spreading and continues to spread among a number of churches, namely, that there will not be a final general bodily resurrection of Christians at the end of the age and that Christ second coming and the resurrection of saints already happened in some figurative and invisible manner in AD 70 Now what happened in AD 70 The temple was destroyed. So some of these people go back to Matthew 24 and he says you're going to see before this generation ends you're going to see the fulfillment of these signs. Now we don't have time to go into that.

I did that about 12-15 years ago. But they take that and they say, see, when the temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, that's when Jesus returned and that's when the resurrection happened. It's a position called the full preterist position. And it's alive and well in a number of Bible-believing churches. So you say, how can that happen?

It happens. It happens. People can be moved. and as a result, there is no hope. And so he says in verse 3, do not let anyone deceive you. And then proceeds to tell us what we should believe so that we have hope. Now look, many of you get real excited about the end of the world.

Some of you here may get real excited about eschatology. Why? Because you like to figure things out. You like to put the pieces together and figure it all out. Some of you aren't really interested in eschatology. And to you I ask, why not?

The point is, we do need to be interested in it. And we need to have the right eschatology so that we will have hope because eschatology the right eschatology will give you hope for today and the right eschatology will help you to guard the hope that you have And so as we embark, Lord willing, into this passage that gives us more details, don't lose sight of hope. That's what it's all about.

Okay? We want to build a foundation for hope, not the foundation for a system which we can use to bludgeon someone else. Okay? It's about hope. So Paul says here, you need to embrace the hope of Jesus' return and you need to guard the hope of Jesus' return. Father, thank you that your purposes for us are not so that we can put all the pieces together and have pride in our scholarship.

Rather, your purpose is that we be a people of hope and that we know that when Jesus returns, when the day of the Lord does come, you will glorify us and glorify your son and in that we have hope so father help us to embrace hope help us to guard that hope help us not to misuse it for different ends God help us we pray to that end Amen