UnfulfilledProphecy: How Near Is The End?

                                                            Dr.Robert C. Newman

(transcription of a talk apparently given at Ithaca College)

Our subject forthis evening relates to prophecy that has not yet come to pass, though we thinkthat it might in the near future. A subtitle of our talk might be How Near Is The End?

This is aninteresting question. Many people who would not make any claim to be Christiansare interested in it. It's not been ten years now since Isaac Asimov, among thetwo hundred and some books he has written, wrote one called A Choice ofCatastrophes. He starts out by first listing several catastrophes that would wipeout the whole universe, that would end everything. Then he moves on to discussdisasters in which our sun might stop working; then catastrophes in which theearth might be so messed up that life could not continue on it; and finallydisasters that would mess up things badly enough that, though human life mightstill continue, there would no longer be any civilization.

Well tonight wewant to look at what the Bible has to say about ‘the end’ and how near it is. Isuppose the first question we'd like to ask is ‘Can we tell how near the endis?,’ This question has got a strange sort of answer: both ‘yes’ and ‘no.’

The Bible, on theone hand, says that we cannot in advance tell exactly how near the end is goingto be. Let’s look at Matthew chapter 24, verses 42 through 44. Here Jesus, inwhat we call his ‘Olivet Discourse’ C  his last public speech in some sense,says to his disciples:

Therefore be onthe alert for you do not know which day your Lord is coming. But be sure ofthis: if the head of the house had known at what time of the night the thiefwas coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his houseto be broken into. For this reason, you be ready too, for the Son of Man iscoming at an hour when you do not think He will.

The picture we gethere is that there’s going to be something surprising about the coming of Jesusto bring an end to this phase of history as we know it, and yet it’s somethingthat we should keep in mind; it’s something that we should ‘keep an eye outfor.’ It’s rather like a homeowner C if he knew thathis house was going to be burglarized on a particular night, he would havestayed up and watched for it; but, not knowing the particular night, he doesn’t.Well, we can’t stay up all the time; after about ten nights of that, you runout of steam! But you can be on the alert. The picture here is: you can’t tellexactly, but there’s a hint that maybe you can keep an eye out for things andyou will be able to know what you need to know.

Just a few versesearlier in this same discourse, we have another remark of that sort. Jesus says:

Truly I say toyou, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But of thatday and hour [of his return] no one knows, not any of the angels of heaven, northe Son, but the Father alone.

Here we have arather interesting remark. Verse thirty-four has often been taken by people tosay ‘Jesus said that he was coming back in his own generation.’ However, if youread the passage carefully, you'll see that he's talking not about his owngeneration, but the generation that sees certain things that he has justdescribed in this passage; that generation will see him come back. Apparently He meansthat, when things begin to wind up, they will do it quickly, and therefore weshould be on the alert. But the exact day and hour nobody knows. We don’t knowon earth; the angels don’t know; and at this point the Son C Jesus himself C did not know. Isuspect that that’s not the case now, but at that point in time he did notknow; only the Father knew at that time. So again, the picture is: we don’tknow exactly when Jesus will be coming, but we ought to be on the alert.

In the letter whichPaul wrote to a group of Christians in a church he had founded in the Greekcity of Thessalonica, he says to them:

You yourselvesknow full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in thenight.

Paul is probablyquoting Jesus’ words from this very incident we’ve just looked at in Matthewchapter twenty-four. Like Jesus, he says the day of the Lord will come like athief in the night. It will catch people by surprise.

Now Paul is notsaying it’s going to come like the sort of thief who sneaks quietly into yourhouse, tiptoes over, opens the drawer, takes out your silverware, and slipsaway without your knowing it. We see from another passage where this image isused that it’s like someone who sneaks up to your door and then breaks it open,comes in, ties you up, and carries off all your loot and leaves. You will knowit when it happens, but it will take you by surprise, unless you’re watchingquite carefully what’s going on.

And yet, thoughthese passages point rather clearly to the fact that we don’t know exactly whenit’s going to happen, yet both passages suggest that we should be able torecognize its approach. We should be able to tell when it’s getting close, thatit’s not necessary for us to be caught totally by surprise. Let's look again atthe same passage, but now I’ll read the whole text:

Now as to thetimes and epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you;you yourselves know full well that the Day of the Lord will come just like athief in the night. While they’re saying, ‘Peace and safety’ then suddendestruction will come upon them like birth pangs upon a woman with child, andthey will not escape.

So, just as thetime of birth can ‘sneak up’ and suddenly come on while the mother is notexpecting it for several weeks, so here. That complicates things!  Recall all those stories of people whodidn’t quite make it to the hospital in time, because the birth came up toosuddenly.

But you,brethren, are not in darkness that the day should overtake you like a thief.

So, it will be asurprise C nobody knows theexact day C but it will reallybe a surprise to people who aren’t looking for it. Paul is talking to believerswhen he uses ‘you’ here, to unbelievers when he uses ‘they.’ See he says ‘they’re’saying ‘Peace and safety,’ ‘destruction will come upon them suddenly.’ ‘But you,brethren, are not in darkness that the day should overtake you like a thief.’

You are all sonsof the light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of the darkness,so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober.

Paul is not sayingthat we should never have any time to sleep C we’ve got to have that C but he’s saying in a figurative way ‘Don't go to sleep.’He's saying ‘Don't let the things that mark the end of the age sneak up on youand catch you by surprise because you aren't paying attention or because youdon't believe that these are signs of what, in fact, the Bible says they are.’

So, we see right inthis very passage, where Paul is speaking of the Day of the Lord coming ‘as athief in the night,’ he says on the other hand ‘it shouldn't overtake you in asurprising way if, in fact, you are “staying awake,” so to speak; if, in fact,you are being sober.’

When we go back tothe Matthew passage we were just looking at, we see the same sort of thingthere too. We see there “of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angelsof heaven,” etc., and then a few verses later the remarks about ‘being on thealert,’ ‘you don't know when,’ ‘it will come when you don't expect it,’ but nownotice how it goes right here:

Immediatelyafter the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, the moon will notgive its light, the stars will fall from the sky, the power of the heavens willbe shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky; then all thetribes of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on theclouds of the sky with power and great glory. He will send forth his angelswith a great trumpet. They will gather together his elect from the four winds,from one end of the sky to the other.

Nowlearn a parable from the fig tree. When its branch has already become tender,and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. Even so, you too, whenyou see all these things [the things He's just been talking about] recognizethat He is near [Jesus; or it is near C the SecondComing C would be analternative translation], right at the door. Truly I say to you, thisgeneration [when you see these things] will not pass away until all thesethings take place.

Well, here’s apicture that certain things are going to happen C we’ve even got a sketch of some of these things: sundarkened, moon not giving its light, stars falling from the sky, sign of theSon of Man, etc., and then He gives this little parable. He says ‘Look, it’slike a fig tree. How do you tell when summer is coming? Well, the fig treebegins to put on buds, begins to put forth leaves C that’s an evidencethat summer is near. So, when you see certain precursors of the Lord’s return,that will be an evidence that He is about to come back.’

This passage hasbeen badly misinterpreted, at times, by evangelical Christians. One ratherfamous writer, Hal Lindsey (who's written a very helpful book), has yet climbedout on a limb here and got himself ‘cut off from it,’ and that warns us of theneed for care in handling God’s Word. He looked at this passage and he said, ‘Aha!It's a parable...so it must be that it's allegorical.’

And so he lookedthrough the Bible to find out how ‘fig trees’ were used allegorically. And witha little work, he found a passage that Israel was pictured as a fig tree. Andhe said, ‘Hmm...what does “branches becoming tender and putting forth leaves”represent? Well, that's when the fig tree begins to show signs of life at theend of the winter.’ And so he looks around and says ‘Now when did the nationIsrael begin to show signs of life? AHA! C the nation Israel becamea nation again in 1948 for the first time for almost 2,000 years.’

And then he wentdown here and he read, “This generation will not pass away until all thesethings take place...” C ‘How long’s “ageneration”?’ (Well, in fact, the Bible doesn’t give any definite answer tothat, but he found one C if you work on ita little bit you can do that.) He found that in “forty years wandering in thewilderness,” one generation of the Israelites “passed away,” and so a “generation”equals about forty years C so 1948 plus fortyis 1988.’

Now, Hal Lindseybelieved that the Christians would be taken out of the world seven years beforethe Second Coming, so he began to predict that Jesus would ‘take away’ all Hisfollowers in 1981. And this, of course, was pretty exciting in the 70s, thelate 70s and such. But, he was disappointed as you are aware (things havegotten worse since '81, but I don't think they’ve gotten bad enough that allthe Christians ‘slipped out’ without our knowing it).

I think what he didwrong was he didn’t look at the parallel passages, first of all. If you look atthe other accounts of this incident in the gospels of Mark and Luke, you'llfind in the gospel of Luke that Jesus apparently said a little bit more here inverse 32 than we’ve got in Matthew. He said “Now learn a parable from the figtree and all the trees.”

I think Lindseycould have gotten around that if he’d tried hard. He could have said ‘Oh, well; all the other trees buddingmust be the other nations; and, when did all the other nations “bud?” C why, when theUnited Nations was formed, and all of the colonies were given up by British andthe Germans and the Italians and such,’ and he could have done that, and thatwould have been about 1948 also, and worked on.

But I think thething to do is to look and see that we’ve got an analogy here: when a fig treebegins to bud, summer is near; when these things begin to happen, He is near[the Lord] (or it is near [the Second Coming]). Now, if you go that way, thatjust leads you back to find out: ‘What are “these things” in this passage?’ Andthat’s the thing we’d like to have a look at tonight, then.

So, we want to takea look at what we call Jesus’ ‘Olivet Discourse,’ Jesus’ message of ‘the end,’that He gave on the Mount of Olives, and look and see what it has to say about“the end of the age.” So...

First of all, inverses one and two we see the setting laid for Jesus’ speaking these wordsabout the end of the age:

Jesus came outof the temple and was going away when his disciples came up to point out thetemple buildings to him. And he answered and said to them, ‘Do you not see allthese things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another,which will not be torn down.’

So Jesus, as he andthe disciples leave the temple grounds for the last time in Jesus’ earthlycareer (they're looking at the beautiful buildings C it’s a verybeautiful building there [actually, ‘building’ is not the right term; it’sa huge terraced platform about 1,500 feet from north to south and about 750feet from east to west], with right in the middle of it a very beautiful marblebuilding with gold-leaf inlays on it C it was consideredeven by many non-Jews as one of the most beautiful buildings standing at thetime of C well, this wouldbe the time of the Emperor Tiberias, about 30 A.D.) and I guess the disciplesdidn’t get down from Galilee too often, and so they’re really gazing at thebuildings in awe; and Jesus says there’s going to come a time when ‘not one of theseis standing upon another.’

And so thedisciples then (a little bit later, when they’ve crossed over the Kidron valleyand come up on the Mount of Olives, which is just east of the Temple, and got anice view of the Temple and of the city of Jerusalem from that slope C as he was sittingon the Mount of Olives the disciples) came up to him privately, saying:

Tell us, whenwill these things be? What will be the sign of your coming and the end of theage?

So, they ask kindof a multi-fold question: ‘When will this happen?’ (“...not one stone uponanother...”); ‘What will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age?’And Jesus begins to answer those questions for us.

The first thing hesays, in verses 4 through 6:

Jesus answeredand said to them, ‘See to it that no one misleads you. For many will come in myname, saying “I am the Christ,” and they will mislead many. And you will behearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for thosethings must take place, but the end is not yet.’

So, first hecharacterizes a period of time from his own departure until his return, and hesays, ‘Look, there are going to be lots of wars [Don’t think that because youget caught in a war and your life is in danger that that’s necessarily the endof the age C it may be ‘the endof the age for you’ C but it’s not theSecond Coming yet]. Okay?

There are going tocome lots of people claiming to be “the Christ” C don't listen to them! (He'll come back and explain whywe should not; He'll say down near the bottom of our passage, ‘You won't needanybody to tell you when the Lord comes back.’ You won't need any second-handinformation; therefore, anybody who gives you second-hand information that he'sback C they’re wrong. We’llwait until we get to the passages that explain that a little further, just abit down here.) But notice he says there’s going to be an intervening time; it’sgoing to be a long enough time to have some wars; it’s going to be a longenough time to have some false Christs.

Well, we’ve hadsome wars. We’re having plenty of them right now, but we’ve had plenty of themover the whole of history, and we’ve had plenty of people who’ve claimed to bethe Messiah, the Christ. Within a generation of Jesus’ own time there were apparentlyseveral people who claimed to be the Messiah and emboldened the Jews to revoltagainst Rome and many, many Jews were killed; we think over a million Jews werekilled in the siege of the city of Jerusalem, the starvation that went onduring the siege, the civil war that went on inside the city while they weredefending themselves against the Romans. There are some hints that suggest thatseveral of the leaders claimed to be the Messiah at that time.

We know, ageneration later, that when the Jews revolted against the Romans a second time,when the Romans were about to build a pagan city on the site of Jerusalem, aperson came forward to lead them in a revolt against Rome, and he claimed to bethe Messiah. We call him “Bar Kochba” today; his name was actually Simeon BenKoseba and he apparently claimed to be the Messiah, was recognized by at leastone of the major rabbis as Messiah, but he wasn't.

There have beenother claims down through the centuries; some of them have been in Jewishcontexts, claiming to be ‘the Messiah;’ some of them have been in Christiancontexts, claiming to be the Second Coming of Jesus C you’ve perhapsheard of the Swedenborgian religion (maybe not C it’s a smallishgroup, started by a very brilliant Swede, named Emmanuel Swedenborg, who, inhis middle age, after having a brilliant career in mathematics and science,suddenly claimed he was beginning to have visions, and that the revelations he wasgetting meant that ‘this was the Second Coming.’ But nothing spectacular happenedC the sun did notturn dark, the stars did not fall from the sky, no vision in the clouds C anything of thatsort; as we'll see, this passage would not allow Emmanuel Swedenborg to be theSecond Coming of Jesus). Well, a number of other examples of that sort C I'll get to acouple of them as we get down here a little further.

In verses 7 and8...

For nation willrise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places therewill be famines and earthquakes, but all these things are merely the beginningof birth pangs [‘birth pains’ if you like].

What's Jesus sayinghere? Well, warfare between nations, and famines and earthquakes are in somesense “the beginning of birth pangs.” Ah, “birth pangs” (or birth pains) is ananalogy used not only in the Gospels C and also, if younoticed, in Paul's letter to the Thessalonians that we mentioned a minute ago, ‘itwill come upon them suddenly, like birth pains upon a woman with child’ C it was, in fact, astandard term used by the rabbis at this time, to represent the disasterscoming before the coming of the Messiah. I'm not sure how far we want to pressthe analogy, but pains, of course, birth pains are something that the woman can'tescape from. There’s nowhere to run! It’s right there, it’s all around you, OK?C you can’t get away.

Some have suggestedthat a characteristic of birth pains C and I don’t knowabout this, I’ve never had ‘em! C is that they getcloser together and stronger, as you get nearer the time. OK? (I’ll take theword of it from people who know those things; some have suggested that that’swhat we’ve got here). Warfare, famines, earthquakes: there have been those allthrough the period from Jesus’ ascension until now; and, in fact, all throughhuman history since things got botched up at the beginning. But, as we get nearthe end they’re going to get closer together and worse.

Now, that stilldoesn’t tell you exactly when it’s going to be, just like ‘How close do thebirth pains have to be before the baby starts to come out?’ Well, you know, so ‘Howclose do these have to be before the Second Coming?’ But ‘they’re going to getcloser together and worse,’ I think, is probably the point here, so He’s sayingnow, ‘I’m beginning to give you some signs of the end’: “warfare between nations,famines, earthquakes” getting worse and worse.

Then, in verses 9though 14, He says

Then they willdeliver you to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by allnations on account of my name. And at that time many will fall away and willdeliver up one another, and hate one another, and many false prophets willarise, and mislead many. And because lawlessness is increased, most people’slove will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end, he shall be saved. Andthis gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witnessto all the nations and then the end shall come.

So we see there aregoing to be more false prophets, this is going to characterize the period insome sense C there’ve certainlybeen false prophets scattered throughout history; going to be lawlessness C that’s going tosomehow characterize this last period. The effect of this lawlessness and thefalse prophets will be: it will be very hard to show love and trust for otherpeople; that will begin to ‘cave in.’ But then a good note: the gospel C the message whichChrist has sent his followers out to proclaim to the world, good news C that, if you’retrusting in Jesus, He’s paid for your sins; if you’re trusting in Jesus, He’sprovided your righteousness; if you’re trusting in Jesus, God will forgiveyou, because He can do it and be just, whereas if you’re trusting in  your own works C our works aren'tgood enough. Our best works C when looked atunder the scrutiny of God who can see our motivations C they look like “filthyrags” to Him (and He's really got the true insight on the matter). It wasn'tFreud who first discovered that underneath the surface inside us there aredepths and there are things we don't want others to know about; the Bible'sbeen talking about that for centuries).

So, as a result ofthese things, it's going to become very hard to love other people, to trustother people. But this “good news” will go to all the nations. God'sforgiveness is still available; even though things are getting bad, it is stillpossible to trust in Jesus, and by trusting in Him, to have a life that in thelong run will be better than anything you can imagine, though you may have togo through some great difficulties before the earthly part of it ends for awhile.

Then Jesus turns totalk about what we call “The Great Tribulation” C it’s the phrase that comes up, in fact, in this verypassage.

Therefore, whenyou see the Abomination of Desolation (which was spoken of through Daniel theprophet) standing in the Holy place C  let the reader understand C  then let those who are in Judea flee tothe mountains; let him that is on the housetop not go down to get the thingsout that are in his house. Let him that is in the field not turn back to gethis cloak. But woe to those who are with child and to those who nurse babies inthose days. But pray that your flight may not be in the winter or on a Sabbath.For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not occurred since thebeginning of the world until now, nor ever shall. [Other than this time C OK? That’s thepoint here.] And unless those days had been cut short, no life would have beensaved; but for the sake of the elect, those days shall be cut short.

Thenif anyone says to you ‘Behold, here is the Christ’ or ‘There He is!’ C  don't believe him. For false Christs andfalse prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders so as tomislead if possible even the elect. Behold, I’ve told you in advance. Iftherefore they say to you, ‘Behold, He’s in the wilderness!’ C  don't go forth; or, ‘Behold, He’s in theinner rooms!’ C  do not believe them. For just aslightning comes from the east and flashes even to the west, so shall the Comingof the Son of Man be. ‘Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gathertogether.’

Thisis an interesting passage; it speaks first of all: “...when you see the ‘Abominationof Desolation’ spoken of by Daniel,” C do something aboutit, etc. That phrase occurs three times in the book of Daniel; one of the timeswhen it occurs, it refers to an incident that took place about 200 years beforeJesus’ time, and gives us what is probably the best ‘dress rehearsal’ for theevent that we have. This is an incident that occurred at the time of theMaccabean revolt (actually just before the Maccabean revolt) when a Greek rulerof the Middle East, a fellow named Antiochus (we call him Antiochus IV;historians putting numbers on the guys) C he was actuallyknown at that time as Antiochus Ephiphanes. “Antiochus” was just his name; “Epiphanes”was his nickname. The word “Epiphanes” means ‘manifestation,’ and to beunderstood ‘he’s the manifestation of the god Zeus.’ So, here was a ruler whothought pretty highly of himself C that’s not beenuncommon, particularly for dictators, to think highly of themselves; in apolytheistic culture it’s not uncommon for a dictator to think himself to begod, or at least to ‘use the PR’ that he’s god C this fellow thought himself to be the manifestation onearth of Zeus, and so he was very offended when he wasn’t worshipped. And theJews, as you know, are not ‘enthusiastic’ about worshipping humans, and so theyresisted. And he finally decided, that to have things run the way he wantedthem to in his empire, the Jews would have to be taught a lesson. And so hemoved his troops into Palestine, into Israel at that time (about 168 B.C.) andhe tried to get a hold of all of the copies of the Bible that he could and burnthem; he forced people to stop kosher, and so began to try to force them to eatpork and those sorts of things; he tried to stop the parents from circumcisingtheir children; he took over the temple and he set up an idol in the temple C it was apparentlya statue of the god Zeus with a face that had a distinctly ‘Antiochus’appearance to it, from the best we can tell; and he began to sacrifice pigs onthe altar in Jerusalem.

Theword “abomination” in the Old Testament is a rather standard word, a standardeuphemism if you like, for an idol, and so probably the force of the phrase asit’s used in Daniel is, ‘The idol that causes desolation,’ and the picture hereis that this Antiochus Epiphanes set up an idol in the temple and tried to takeover the temple of God for the worship of himself.

Well,Jesus is well aware that this event happened 200 years before his time in 168B.C. He’s saying Daniel is not just talking about that, but that the otherpassages are talking about something still to come, something at the end of theage, and hinting that this particular incident gives us an insight into thatincident. And I think that’s what we see here then C there’s going tobe someone who’s going to try to take over the temple of God in Jerusalem inthe interests of having himself worshipped. We'll come back to that in just abit.

Theadvice for anybody around Jerusalem is to `GETOUT OF THERE!' C that's the advice.And, as we see it mentioned here, and in Mark’s and Luke’s parallel passages, Jesuseven goes so far as to say, ‘If you're up on the top of your home...’ (and he’sthinking about the flat-roofed homes in Palestine) ‘and you see this thinghappen or you hear about this thing happening, don’t go downstairs and goinside to get some stuff out; you go downstairs and get out of there.’ C it doesn’t soundlike you’ve got a lot of time to fool around. ‘If you're out in a field, don'tgo back home to get an extra coat C get out of there.’C a very, verystrong statement. And it’s followed by this remark: “Woe to those who are withchild and to those who nurse babies in those days.” Why? It’s hard to get outof a place C fast C if you’repregnant, or if you've got a small child to carry. “Pray that your flight maynot be in the winter...” Why is that? Well, it’s not hard to guess: it’stougher camping out in the winter; it’s tougher making speed in the winter(we're not talking in general of deep snow in Palestine in the winter, but ofharsh weather C cold rain, thatsort of thing C so that seems tobe the picture we’ve got here). “Pray that your flight may not be on aSabbath...” Why on earth would anybody say that? C well, it sounds like it’s going to occur in a time whensome kind of Sabbath regulations are functioning. Take, for instance,right now; there are places where it is hard to buy gasoline in Israel on theSabbath, because the Orthodox Jews have sufficient influence to discouragecertain types of business activity C a thing of thatsort seems perhaps to be envisioned at that particular point.

Thennotice this next remark (‘Nothing to match it in human history’) C it pictures avery, very scary time: “...great tribulation such as has not occurred since thebeginning of the world until now, nor ever shall. Unless those days had beencut short...” C unless Godintervened in a striking way C ‘nobody who is oneof His people would survive,’ a strong statement there.

Thennotice, He comes back to this theme about false Christs C apparently, thatwhich has been mentioned all the way up here (not yet the end) is going tobecome much worse as you get to the end: “For false Christs and false prophetswill arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible theelect” C even in the middleof all this trouble you’re going to have people claiming to be the Christ, you’regoing to have people claiming to be prophets, and they would mislead C if it werepossible C they would misleadthose who are God’s people. So He says they shouldn’t be able to, because ‘I’vetold you how it's going to be in advance,’ and then He gives this ratherstriking test: He says, ‘Look, if they have to tell you where the Messiah is C that’s not theMessiah’s Coming.’ ‘If they have to say, “Look! He’s out there” C that’s not theMessiah’s Coming.’ ‘If they have to say, “Look! He’s in here” C that's not theMessiah's Coming.’

Andthen there's this: “Just as lightning comes from the east and flashes even tothe west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Here’s the point, I think:when you are standing outside and a lightning bolt flashes, you don’t need tobe looking in the direction of the lightning to see it C you’ll see theflash light up the whole sky. It may flash in the east, and you’re looking westC you’ll see thelightning, OK?

ThenHe gives another example: “Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures willgather.” When you're out in a desert area where there are vultures around, youdon’t need to stumble over a corpse to find it; five miles away you can seevultures circling around over the spot and dropping down occasionally to pickoff a piece [or something of that sort]. So, the Coming of Jesus: you don'thave to be right where He is; you can be a long way away and you’ll know aboutit.

Thisis an interesting passage that has been regularly mishandled by persons claimingto be the Messiah. It’s happened at least three or four times in the lastcentury that persons wishing to claim that they’re Messiah will say, ‘Thispassage fits me perfectly!’ The Achmadiya Muslims, for instance, believe that their teacher Achmadh is the SecondComing of Jesus, and they say, ‘Look! This is about him: he was born in PakistanC the east; and hismessage is being proclaimed in the west C “...for just aslightning shines out in the east and comes to the west...” Here we are C I’m the guy!’ Butthen, he has to tell you, you know, ‘Achmadh was the guy! He died fifty yearsago, but Achmadh was the guy,’ and this passage says ‘you don't need anybody totell you; you don't even need to be looking in the right direction; when ithappens, you'll know it,’ OK?

SunMyung Moon uses this passage as well. He says, ‘Look! Sun Myung Moon came fromKorea C the east; and he'sproclaiming his message in the west,’ C Sun Myung Moon. But,the followers have to say, ‘Yeah, Sun Myung Moon is the Messiah.’ When theMessiah comes you won't need anybody to tell you he’s the Messiah; you’ll knowit!

Thispassage is very nicely set up so that it undercuts the claims of all the falseMessiahs right off the bat. If everything is not caving in around you, that isn’tthe Messiah. If you don’t see the light in the sky, it isn’t the Messiah. Ifyou don’t see the sun and moon dark and then the stars falling (probably agreat meteor shower or something of that sort), it isn’t the Messiah C prettystraightforward. That's what this is about C the Lord’s return is unmistakable.

Now weactually get a narration of the Second Coming in verses 29 through 31:

But immediatelyafter the tribulation of those days...

C immediately afterthis great tribulation, worse than has ever been (there ought to be somestraightforward historical ways of judging whether something’s worse thananything you’ve ever heard of anyway; that should be straightforward enough); immediatelyafter the tribulation of these days

...the sun willbe darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the skyand the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man willappear in the sky...

Andthen notice this next phrase:

...and then allthe tribes of the earth will mourn.

It’snot going to be a happy time for many, many people, when they find out thattheir worst fears have been realized, that they thought, ‘Well, there's nogod...’ (and find out there is one); or, ‘There's not going to be anyjudgment...’ (and find out there is one C that’s a scary,scary time). One of the reasons Jesus has told us this is so that we don’t waituntil it’s too late to find out C why else tell us?God’s not interested in ‘gloating over us.’ He wants us to know.

So,very straightforward. It’s going to be a spectacular, visible coming surroundedby the worst disaster, as far as humans have been involved in, in their wholehistory. It’s going to have the darkening of the sun, the moon, the starsfalling, the powers of heaven shaken; the Son of Man will show up and He willgather His people from all over. Well, that’s certainly a detailed narration ofsigns of the end, and you can see them all sketched here for you.

TheApostle Paul gives us some material that reinforces that, plus some materialthat supplements this particular material. First of all, some supplementarymaterial C in the thirdchapter of Paul's first letter to his associate Timothy we have this passage:

“Realizethis...” he says, “...that in the last days difficult times will come.”

Well,you can kind of see how that fits in with what we’ve been discussing here C the worst situationthat people have ever gone through in the history of mankind. And then hebegins to point out that certain other features will be there that we haven'tseen much of in Jesus’ remarks:

Men will belovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient toparents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips,without self control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless,conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, and yet holding to aform of godliness, though they have denied its power. Avoid such men.

‘Religious’in some sense, but with no power. And this whole list gives traits C just the kind ofthings that you would hate to be around somebody characterized by these C will become very,very prevalent, apparently. That suggests Matthew 24:12 C “...becauselawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold.” This gives asupplement to that, describes the kind of thing that’s going on there.

Paulalso gives us a supplement to the remarks of Jesus related to the “abominationof desolation,” which we had not been told much else about; we see this in thesecond letter of Paul to the Thessalonian Christians, to the Christians at thecity of Thessalonica, chapter two, verses 1 through 12 .

Paulis writing to a group of Christians in a city called Thessalonica, north ofAthens about two or three hours. He had founded the church there; he had donethe first evangelistic work there. He had had to leave because of oppositionraised against him, and they apparently had forced some of the Christiansto put up bond, that there’d be no more trouble, and so Paul felt that, atleast to make it very difficult to charge that he had made trouble, he left;and things apparently died down.

Butthen people began apparently to try and turn this people away from Paul’steaching, and there are some hints here in the first two verses, apparently, ofwhat was being done C it was apparentlyby opponents who had raised the riot against Paul.

Now we requestyou brethren, with regard to the Coming of our Lord Jesus and our gatheringtogether to Him, that you may not be quickly shaken from your composure, or bedisturbed C either byspirit or message, or by a letter as if from us C to the effectthat the Day of the Lord has come.

Pauldoesn't sketch this in detail, so we’re not sure whether these arealternatives, or whether all of these had been happening, but the pictureapparently is that somebody had claimed to have a letter from Paul (that theDay of the Lord had come); perhaps somebody had claimed to have a message fromPaul, or perhaps they claimed to have a spirit of prophecy themselves, andsaying, ‘Thus says the Lord, “The Day of the Lord has come.”’ Now he sets outthose three alternatives and doesn’t tell us for sure which of those werehappening, or whether all three of them had actually happened. He says, ‘Thatcan't be, because something important hasn’t happened yet that has to happen beforethe Day of the Lord comes:’

Let no one inany way deceive you for it will not come [the Day of the Lord] unless theapostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son ofdestruction.

Theword apostasy typically represents a rebellion against God (normally –though it can be used for a secular rebellion), and so seems to picture theidea of a rebellion against God, and perhaps that is hinted at in the passagethat we just read in I Timothy chapter three, where we find that thesepeople who are “lovers of self, lovers of money,” etc. C that whole longlist C that we’re toldthey have a “form of godliness” but they deny its power. Perhaps the apostasyis rebellion against a supernatural and intervening God, perhaps that’s thepossibility here. But there’s some kind of departure, some kind of rebellion,and then this “man of lawlessness will be revealed, the son of destruction.”

We sawalready that “lawlessness” is mentioned in Jesus’ remarks in Matthew ascharacterizing the events approaching the end of the age, and now we're toldthere’s some particular man of lawlessness, someone that will characterize itin a strong way. He's called the “son of destruction” C a rather standardsort of Semitic phrase, meaning, probably, one destined for destruction, and we’llsee how that’s explained further on in the passage if we take it that way. Whatabout this person? Well C

he opposes andexalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship so that he takesa seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God

Doesthat sound familiar? That sounds like what Antiochus Epiphanes did in 168 B.C.,which Daniel called ‘the abomination of desolation’ and then uses thatterm for someone still future; and Jesus says, ‘When you see the abomination ofdesolation...get out of Jerusalem.’ So now we’re given a little detail: someoneis going to enter the Temple of God and claim to be God and demand worship.When you see that happen, you’re very close to the end.

Verse5 merely tells us that Paul is not giving this to them new; he had already toldthem about this at the time he was with them and founding the church. Then hesays something that’s been argued about over many centuries, but I think we’vegot a reasonable explanation; he says to the Thessalonians:

You know whatrestrains him now so that in his time he may be revealed. For the mystery oflawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until heis taken out of the way.

Thepicture seems to be that there is a restraining power, and the restrainingpower can be spoken of abstractly C “what restrains” C but can also bespoken of personally C “he who restrains.”There’s been some argument over this but most commentators think that probably it’sreferring to the action of God’s Spirit in the world, resisting the action ofevil. In the days before the Flood you have God saying, “My Spirit will notalways strive with men...” C you’re in a placewhere there is a great rebellion, where there’s a great moral collapse beforeGod sends the Flood; and you have the picture of God's Spirit “striving with,”resisting, struggling against man. And finally God says ‘Enough! I'm going tosend judgment.’

Youkind of get the picture that something of that sort is going on right here:there’s a restraint going on even now, a rather interesting picture, then. Thingsmay seem bad now, and they may have seemed bad for the past 2,000 years, but ifGod's Spirit hadn’t been restraining them they could be a whole lot worse. Itdoesn’t tell us how He restrains them; I think there are several suggestions wecould make. He has restrained many dictators by the fact that somebodyassassinated them. He’s restrained dictators by the fact that they lost somebattles; and, though they wanted to conquer the world (and would have madequite a mess of the place C a small ‘hell onearth’ if they’d succeeded), they didn’t succeed.

Thereare other ways in which He has perhaps raised up particular people, who havestruggled against some moral evil and been able to turn it back for a while C something of thatsort; we’re not told the details of how all this works, but there’s somerestraint going on. It’s obviously God’s restraint (certainly not Satan’srestraint!), and it probably is working through His Spirit C and whether it’sspecifically working through His people, whether it’s working providentiallythrough events, etc. C that’s not laidout for us.

Thenthe lawless one [the "son of lawlessness," the "man oflawlessness" (up here)] will be revealed...

Andthen he characterizes what will happen to him eventually:

...whom the Lordwill slay with the breath of his mouth and bring to an end by the appearance ofHis Coming.

This “lawlessone” is going to be destroyed personally by Jesus at His return. But now Paulcomes back to sketch the career of this “lawless one”:

...that is, the one whose coming isin accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and falsewonders and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish becausethey did not receive the love of the truth, so as to be saved.

Hesays: ‘When this fellow shows up, he’s going to be able to work miracles.’ Andif secular humanism is still a big deal when that happens, that’s going to getblown away like a little bit of smoke in the wind. The moment somebody shows upwho can do public miracles, zap! the theory that miracles don’t occur is downthe drain like that. OK? Everybody that hasn’t already got a set of standardsthat will allow them to identify who this guy is C they’re going to tend to be swept up by him.

Nowthere may be some people who, though they’re not Christians, have somemoral standards and they see he doesn’t fit them, but what are they going to beable to do? But those who are Christians will actually be encouraged in onesense, disaster as this is, by seeing that this guy C whatever his miraclesare C he fits into thepicture that the Bible has already given. We’re told back in Matthew that thefalse Christs and such who will come, finally the last ones will begin to domiracles and they would “deceive even the elect if it were possible...but I’vetold you in advance.” ‘You don't need to have this happen’ C “I've told you inadvance.”

Thisis very scary right here {points to part of the passage}; the fellow is goingto be deceptive C wicked deception.It’s going to deceive those “who are perishing” C but there’s a reason: they weren't willing to “love thetruth;” they didn't care that much about truth. If you care enough about truth,you’ll die for it if you have to; but if living is what really counts C if you ‘only gothrough life once and you’ve got to get out of it all the gusto you can’ C if you’re going toavoid anybody who will kill you if you possibly can, you’re going to figure outsome way to give in to them if you ‘need’ to.

But ifyou really love the truth, you try and resist this person, though in factresistance may not do any good (in one sense – the guy will be too powerfulto stop; but it’ll do some good in another sense: you don’t want to be a personidentified with helping that; you want to be identified as a person who is againstthat. It reminds me a little bit of Winston Churchill's statements at thebeginning of the Second World War when they'd gotten into a situation where itlooked like they were going to lose, and he said ‘Well, we've got to do something...’[I'm giving a paraphrase; he’s a much better speaker than I am] ‘...and we mayhave to die now, but it’s better that we resist and die resisting this power ofNazism, than that we go along with it in any way.’ And notice this very scarything in verses 11 and 12:

For this reason[that they “didn't receive the love of the truth so as to be saved”] God willsend upon them a deluding influence so that they may believe what is false.

Thework of this “man of lawlessness” C though he’s sentby Satan, though he’s under Satan’s control C there’s some sense in which it’s also sent by God. Arather interesting feature of all the Bible’s teaching about history C everything thathappens, there’s some sense in which you can say: ‘God did it,’ ‘God sent it,’etc. That’s why Job, I think, doesn’t immediately jump to the Satan-hypothesesto explain the disasters coming upon him, because he knows that finally it’sgot to be God that allows it. God doesn’t do any evil, but He will allow theactions of evil men, and even of evil spirits, to do things which He willoverrule, in a very striking way, and in this case that’s what’s going on.

God isnot deluding these people C Satan is C but there’s somesense that God ‘sends’ it; some sense in which it is planned by God so thatthey believe what is false, but the reason He does it is a further judgmentbecause they wouldn’t believe the truth, and because they enjoyed sin. They preferredwickedness to doing what God wanted. They knew in their hearts that they ought notdo these things; they knew that they didn’t like other people doing it to them,but they weren’t willing to abandon it if it cost them anything. And so God, asa judgment, allows this to happen.

So wesee something very scary here, then, about Paul’s predictions: there’s not onlygoing to be this moral collapse that we see in 2 Timothy 3:1B5, but there'sgoing to be this “man of lawlessness”; he’s apparently going to commit the actwhich is called “the abomination of desolation,” and many people are going tobe swept up in following him because he’s going to work miracles, and themiracles are going to mislead. They’re going to cause people apparently tobelieve C in some sense C that this fellowis God. Note how 2 Thessalonians2:4 says:

takes his seatin the temple of God, displaying himself as being God.

That’sdoubtless part of the deception: a claim to powers that cannot be, because God’salready sent His Son, and He’s already told us that when He comes back again wewon’t be able to mistake it, and He’s going to be preceded by this guy. So, thefirst guy that shows up claiming to be the Messiah C that really lookslike he’s got some goods C he’s the Antichrist,not the Messiah. (The term is not used here by Paul; it comes up in the ApostleJohn’s remarks)

And it’sto a revelation given to the Apostle John that we turn now [I'm sorry that Idon't have this on an overhead, but I'll run through an outline again like wedid for the Matthew passage]. This is the thirteenth chapter of the revelationreceived by the Apostle John late in his life (while he was on the island ofPatmos, a very dinky volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, between Greece andTurkey near the coast of what is now Turkey; Asia Minor, then), a vision givenin a sort of parabolic style, allegorical figures. Revelation chapter thirteen,verses 1B10 speaks of thecoming of a “beast up out of the sea.”

And I saw abeast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads [strangeanimal!]... And on his horns were ten diadems [little crowns] and on his headswere blasphemous names. And the beast I saw was like a leopard, and his feetwere like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion, and thedragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority.

Let’sstop for an explanation. The dragon has shown up in the previous chapter of thebook of Revelation. The dragon is identified for us as Satan, and as the “serpent”in the garden of Eden in Genesis (in the account of the fall of Adam and Eve);and this dragon in fact was just mentioned in the sentence before where Istarted as “standing on the sand of the seashore,” perhaps calling up thisbeast.

Thisbeast looks very much like the dragon. Both of them we're told have “sevenheads” and “ten horns,” though there’s a little difference about them: the one’sgot seven crowns, the other’s got ten crowns and such. Here’s a beast then,that resembles the dragon very, very much, and yet there’s also another thinggoing on here: again and again in the book of Revelation the writer isreferring back to incidents in previous prophecy in the Old Testament. And theprophet Daniel (about [well let's see; must have been around 530 or something,so it's about 600, almost 650 years before this time]) had had a vision of fourworld empires; and one of them was “like a lion,” and one of them was “like abear,” and one of them was “like a leopard,” and the fourth one wasindescribable (though he does give some description, says it is a ‘terrible’beast, and talks about ‘iron claws’ and ‘bronze teeth’ and that sort of thing).

It’sinteresting that this beast looks like he’s a combination of those fourprevious empires. We’re told of him here that he’s a beast, OK, and it sayssome things about ferociousness and some things about blasphemous names, etc.,which seem to line up with the fourth beast in Daniel chapter seven. And thenit mentions he ‘looks like a leopard’ (and one of the beasts in Daniel 7 was aleopard) and he’s ‘got feet like a bear’ (another of the beasts there was abear) and he’s ‘got a mouth like a lion’ (another was a lion). Thus it lookslike it’s a combination of some sort of the world empires that had gone before.

Itfairly clearly has got Satanic backing. It's possible that the sentence rightbefore we started has Satan, has the dragon ‘calling him up.’ He at least (thedragon) is standing by the seashore watching. And then it says

The dragon gavehim his power, and his throne, and great authority.

If youremember the gospel passage about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness,Satan said to Jesus, ‘If you'll fall down and worship me, I’ll give you all thekingdoms in the world, because they're mine.’ Here is somebody to whom Satan isgoing to give all the kingdoms in the world. (We may guess that, perhaps, hehas worshipped Satan to get this sort of thing.)

And I saw one ofhis heads [the dragon with seven heads .. .ah, excuse me, the beast with sevenheads C we're away fromthe dragon now; the dragon’s the one who’s given him power]...I saw one of hisheads as if it had been slain, and his fatal wound was healed and the wholeearth was amazed and followed after the beast and they worshipped the dragonbecause he gave his authority to the beast and they worshipped the beast,saying ‘who is like the beast?’ and ‘who is able to wage war against him?’

The picturehere: a fatal wound healed [we've got a problem in these kind of passages: we’rein an allegorical passage. The beast apparently represents an individual (andperhaps his empire as well); the dragon represents Satan; and so the questionis, what does the ‘wounding of the head’ represent?]. Does it represent somedamage done to a part of the empire? Does it represent some damage doneindividually to this particular person? I think we're going to have to wait andsee what happens there; it may be an assassination attempt that’s pretty closeto being successful. (It apparently amazes the people; that sounds a little moreimpressive than just that ‘one seventh of his empire got mashed up somehow andhe was able to rebuild it,’ which doesn’t explain as easily “the whole earthwas amazed and followed after the beast.” So, we’re not told exactly what’sgoing on there. They worshipped the dragon [Satan] because he gave him hisauthority, and they worshipped the beast [who’s like him]. Here is anindividual, I think, showing up Satanic backing and he’s going to receiveworship from mankind.

Now webegin to get a little insight into some chronology:

There was givento him a mouth speaking arrogant words and blasphemy, and authority to act forforty-two months was given to him. And he opened his mouth in blasphemiesagainst God tot blaspheme his name and his tabernacle, that is those who dwellin heaven. It was given to him to make war with the saints and to overcomethem; and authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation was givento him. And all who dwell in the earth will worship him, everyone whose namehas not been written from the foundation of the world in the Book of Life ofthe Lamb who was slain. If anyone has an ear, let him hear. If anyone isdestined for captivity, to captivity he goes; if anyone kills with the sword,with the sword he must be killed. Here is the perseverance and faith of thesaints.

Thepicture here: he’s going to have a limited time in which he will be in power,and it’s sketched in words that sound like they’re literal: “forty-two months.”(Elsewhere in our own passage there’s a remark about “1,260 days” and there’s aremark about “a time, and times and half a time,” which should probably beunderstood as three and a half years.) Those all collapse together then:forty-two months is about 1,260 days; “a time, and times, and half a time”taken as three and half years is also forty-two months, etc. There seems to bea rather definite statement about the length of time that this being will havepower. We don’t know for sure when it starts (I’m suggesting from some parallelpassages in Revelation that it starts at the “abomination of desolation”; thatwhen he takes his position for worship in the temple, that’s when the period startsand it runs for three and a half years, and it’s apparently “cut off” [as wesee in the Thessalonians passage, we identify this fellow with “the man oflawlessness”] it’s cut off by the Second Coming. Jesus Himself personallydestroys this particular opponent.

Thenwe get another beast in the same passage; he's called the “beast from theearth” because he’s so characterized in this passage. Notice back in verse 1:

I saw a beastcoming up out of the sea...

Now inverse 11:

I saw anotherbeast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and he spokelike a dragon.

Idon't know for sure what the distinction between “coming up out of the sea” and“coming up out of the earth” is; commentators have made some guesses. I couldmake the same guesses, but I don't know. Some suggest the one arises “from thesea,” pictured a few places as the nations of the world, and the other arising “fromthe earth,” the word ‘earth’ in Hebrew is often used for the land of Israel,but I don't know that. We’ll have to wait and see whether that’s the rightinterpretation.

Thisrather cryptic remark about “two horns like a lamb but spoke as a dragon” Isuggest is to be understood this way: horns are typically used to represent powerin Scripture, on the analogy that an animal with horns uses his horns to wieldpower against another animal. And so my suggestion is the “horns like a lamb”mean he's going to have power like Jesus’ power, but that his message is goingto be like Satan’s message. So here, a rather important figure; I’ve alreadygiven away some things here which I’ll come back and try and justify here injust a bit.

Verse12:

He exercises allthe authority of the first beast in his presence. He makes the earth and thosewho dwell in it worship the first beast, whose fatal wound was healed. Heperforms great signs, so that he even makes fire come down out of heaven to theearth in the presence of men. And he deceives those who dwell on the earthbecause of the signs which it was given him to perform in the presence of thebeast, telling all those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beastwho had had the wound of the sword and has come to life. And there was given tohim to give breath to the image of the beast that it might even speak and causeas many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed.

Clearly,he’s going to work miracles on behalf of the first beast; he’s going to lead worshipof the beast (and that's why we call him a ‘prophet’ here C one who tries tobring worship of another; you could call him a ‘priest’ if you'd like C that’s also apossibility. He’s called “the false prophet” further on in Revelation;that's why I’ve adopted that particular name. I haven’t explained why I’veadopted that name; we'll get to that in just a bit through this passage.

Thenwe move into something which if you’ve seen some of the films about theend-times, will ring a bell for you: the idea of forcing all people to receivea mark.

He causes all[verse 16] both small and great, the rich and the poor, the free and theslaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead and heprovides that no one should be able to buy or sell except the one who has themark: either the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom;let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast. The number isthat of a man; his number is six hundred and sixty-six.

So, basically wehave this: a mark of some sort. Probably the mark represents either ownership (you’re admitting thisperson has ownership over you), or allegiance at least (you’re admittingallegiance to this person, the beast). There's obviously enough control of theeconomy that without this mark a merchant will not dare sell to you, andwithout this mark, nobody would buy from you C that seems to be the sort of thing. We don’t knowexactly how that’d be enforced, but the fact that the beast and the falseprophet will be able to work miracles suggests that people would be afraid tocross them.

The mark, we’retold, is in an obvious place: hand, forehead; and then we have this ratherinteresting comment. The mark will consist either of the name of the beast orthe number of his name. I’d put a question mark after the name of the beast;we’re not told what his name is. The number of the beast, however, we aregiven: it is “six hundred sixty-six.” There’s been an awful lot of discussionover the question of what this might mean, and I don’t know what it means. It seemsto relate to a practice at the time this book was written of using the lettersof the Greek alphabet to represent numbers.

Today we use aseparate set of symbols for our numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... All of you arefamiliar with Roman numerals which use just a small set of letters out of theRoman alphabet: they use “I” and “V” and “X” and “L” and “C” and “D” and “M,”and use those to represent different things, and then they put them together indifferent combinations. But the Greek alphabet (and actually the Hebrews used asimilar technique) used the first letter of the alphabet for 1, the second for2, etc., all the way up to 9; then the tenth letter of the alphabet stood for10, the next stood for 20, the next stood for 30, 40, 50, 60, etc., up to 90,and then the next letter for a hundred, and the next for two hundred, threehundred, four hundred.

The Greek alphabet,as it was used in Jesus' time, had only twenty-four letters; but there weresome letters that had been used earlier that had dropped out of use for theregular words but were kept in, in order to have twenty-seven letters in thealphabet for number purposes. And the result was you could do 1 through 9 withthe first nine letters, 10 through 90 with the next nine letters, and 100through 900 with the next nine letters. For numbers over a thousand they startedover again but put a little mark below the letter instead of a mark above it,to show that the letter is being used as a number and it is over 1000.

Well, sixsixty-six could be understood as a cryptogram, in which you take whatever thisguy's name is (written presumably in Greek) and you add up the numerical valueof each of the numbers, and you get the value 666, OK? And that may well be so,that may well turn out to be what happens. The most striking thing I have seen,however, that might be helpful in understanding this number is more definitethan this. The one unique way of writing six sixty-six is to use the letterthat stands for six hundred (that's the Greek letter Chi). The letter for`sixty' is Xi, and the letter for `six' was a letter Vav or Digamma, which wastypically written in John's time by the so-called final form of the letter Sigma.And so, you get this monogram when you do it that way:

χξς

What'sinteresting about this combination is that the Chi and the Sigma was thestandard abbreviation for Christos (Christ); but it's got something in themiddle C a snake! Thus, the‘Snake's Christ’ C I think this is ahint of the Apostle John that the fellow we’re looking at is the anti-Christ.It may also turn out to spell his name or something eventually; we’ll have towait and see how that works out. But this is the one simple interpretation ofthe structure that actually is a unique way of getting it; it’s the number forsix hundred, the number for sixty, and the number for six, put together in thatorder. Otherwise you have a four hundred here and a two hundred there and such,and you can get all kinds of possibilities if you just have them add up to thatparticular result. So that’s my suggestion right there.

Okay,we’ve been through a tour then, of signs of the end. We suggested that there'sgoing to be warfare, and famine, and earthquakes; they’re spoken of as “thebeginning of birth pangs” and if we press the analogy of ‘birth pangs’ (I’m notsure we should do that), it would suggest that as birth pangs get closertogether and worse as the birth approaches, so perhaps the famines and wars andearthquakes will get closer together and worse as we approach the end ofthe age.

Wesuggested that there will be a persecution that will occur near the end; therewill be a general hatred of Christians beginning near the end (though there’scertainly been some of that going on all through church history); there’ll bebetrayal, false prophets, increased lawlessness (and that is worked out ingreat detail by Paul in his second letter to Timothy); that there’ll be love“growing cold,” that there'll be the gospel preached to all the nations; thatthen this fellow will come, characterized by Paul as the “man of lawlessness,”characterized by the Apostle John as the “beast from the sea” (probably acryptogram for the antichrist), and he will apparently carry out the actcalled “the abomination of desolation,” which, to judge from what happened inAntiochus Epiphanes’ time, means ‘getting himself worshipped in God’s temple asGod,’ and that is spelled out in rather great detail by the Apostle Paul in 2Thessalonians 2, verses 1 through 12 C when that occurs,you’d better get out of the Jerusalem area if you’re there C there’s going tobe a time of difficulty for humans that surpasses anything that’s ever been;and then Jesus Himself will come again: the signs of the end.

Arethere any indications where we might be in all of this? Well, I think there are.[Don't have any overheads; we’ll turn that off.] Think about something unusual,about our own time: it’s hard for children to even realize it; every once in awhile they're struck by it, and the kid will say “You mean you didn't havetelevision when you grew up? What was it like to live way back there?” Maybenot many of us come from “way back there” although my father was not a bigspender and we never did get a TV ‘til I was in the ninth grade (I think it wasquite a blessing that we didn’t, but that’s another matter). There has been a hugesurge of technology in the last century. If you go back and think how yourancestors lived a century ago, they weren’t any dumber than we are; but becauseof certain things coming together we’re able to communicate with other peopleanywhere in the world in about a second (ignoring problems like getting throughon the phone lines; no answer on the other end; having to go find the otherperson on the other end; but ignoring those things, we’re able to communicatewith people anywhere else in the world pretty well in about a second.

We’reable to travel almost anywhere in the world (again you get problems of beingtwo hundred miles from the nearest airport, and things like that, but ignoringthose, we’re able to travel almost anywhere in the world) in a day now. And ifyou don't worry about the expense (think of an astronaut in the space shuttle)you can actually travel anywhere over the surface in about ninety minutes, butwe’ll ignore that C that’s notavailable in general. Think about that; such rapid travel has made thepossibility of a world government far easier to visualize now than it ever wasat the time Jesus was speaking, or the time John saw these visions. How couldanybody control a world in which by the fastest forms of transportationyou could perhaps go seventy miles a day on land C that only by trading horses pretty frequently C a rider can’t takemuch more than that; one horse can’t make that in a day; or maybe a littlefaster than that on sea because you can sleep on the boat which (if it’s gotthe wind going the right way) can keep making maybe five or ten knots fortwenty-four hours, but not much faster than that, which meant that you're weeksfrom most parts of the world C hard to control aworld that big.

Relatedto technology has been an amazing population growth. I’ve heard dozens of timesthat one out of twenty of the people that’ve ever lived in human history arealive now. Frankly, I’m not quite sure how to get that number, there not being anyorganized censuses in most parts of the world before a few hundred years ago,but we’ll take it as a ‘ball park’ figure. There’s no question the populationgrowth has shot way up in the last century due to medical improvements and toagricultural improvements. However, these advances have put us in a situationwe’ve never been in before: we now are in a technological situation where, whenthe technology is working, the earth can support a population of four and ahalf or five billion; but if the technology stops working, it can’t support apopulation anything like that. So although there’s real advance in one sense,there’s a certain fragility in another sense. If anything goes seriously wrong,that fouls the technology up, there’re going to be huge famines.

Italso makes disease and environmental disaster more severe if anything goeswrong; and you certainly know there’s some concerns about environmentaldisaster right now C that the environmentalistsC (thoughoccasionally some of us may be inclined to think that they’re overdoing it C that some of theconcern over mercury in fish turned out to be misplaced, because they dug fishout of bottles in the Smithsonian Institution that had been put there a hundredyears ago and found they had lots of mercury in them too, and some physicistcalculated that all the mercury that had ever been mined by man on the earthand put in the ocean couldn't possibly put all that mercury in fish [it turnsout fish have a way of concentrating mercury]) C so some of the environmental stuff has turned outto be a ‘false alarm’ C but it’s not clearthat all of it is. The ozone concern, for instance C pretty goodevidence now that the ozone layer kind of ‘dies out’ at the poles during thewinter, and there’s some pretty good evidence that it’s gotten worse in recentyears. We don’t know for sure whether that is some kind of cyclic thing (thatit gets worse for a few years and then it gets better for a few years), butmost people suspect that a class of chemicals, fluorochlorocarbons that havebeen put in the atmosphere a great deal since technology really got rolling(they’re the stuff that you use in refrigerators and air conditioners as arefrigerant, and which gradually seeps out, so that you have to go get your airconditioners recharged in your cars every once in a while, and that they usedto have in spray cans for putting on paint and hair spray and all of that sortof thing) that’s been going up there and it’s messing up the ozone. Well, if youmess up the ozone bad enough, you begin to get ultraviolet coming down to thesurface like it doesn’t with ozone there, and you find you can get in asituation where you start getting sunburned in five minutes, instead of severalhours, and you get in a situation where it may be very difficult for even plantsto live outside very well. Well, trying growing plants inside and feeding theworld population C you can see somecomplications that could develop in that direction. So there are some thingsgoing on right there.

Technology,of course, allows for larger scale, more disastrous wars. As far as anindividual is concerned, ‘when you're dead, you’re dead’ C you know, whetherit was a spear that was stuck through you, or whether you were zapped by alaser beam or something of that sort C but the ability ofa few people to kill millions of people is certainly a change from what it waslong ago.

And,of course, there's the danger of nuclear proliferation. It’s bad enough towonder whether somebody might accidentally set off the Russian or the U.S.nuclear arsenal, or that somebody might do it intentionally, but it’s a littleworse when you realize that certain types of nuclear weapons now don’t requireall that much technology to build. And when you start getting to smallernations C you start gettingplaces ruled by Khadaffi and Pot Pol and Idi Amin, and it’d be pretty scary ifpeople like that started getting their hands on nuclear weapons C or, worse thanthat, a private terrorist group could figure out how to use nuclear weapons orbuild nuclear weapons or steal nuclear weapons, for that matter. You can see howthe pressure, from something like that, might push towards a one-worldgovernment as the solution. If only ‘one group of guys’ has got weapons (wellthat even doesn’t sound very good, does it?!, but...but that’s going to soundlike a better solution than ‘fifty nations having nuclear weapons’). What itwill take to convince people to do something about that is not easy to answer,but a small nuclear war would qualify, wouldn’t it? We’ll have to see whathappens there. These things in technology have suddenly made the book of Revelationsound more realistic that it would typically sound to a person ever before inhuman history.

There’sanother thing that’s happened in the last century or so: the great success ofscience in explaining things about our natural world has led many people toclaim, “We don't need God for an explanation; it all happens ‘naturally.’” Wetried to suggest last night over at Cornell that that really does not solve theproblem by any means; it’s accepted by many, many people. Many people todayfeel that science has ‘explained away the need for God’ (and if you think awhile, ‘Well, if there’s no God, there’s nobody who is going to hold me accountablewhen I die C and, of course C yeah, I’ve got towatch what I do, that I don’t step out of line and get caught by thegovernment, but the government’s just people, and you can do things when peopledon't see you’), and so you begin to get a ‘practical morality’ among peoplethat ‘If you don't get caught, it’s all right.’ That has begun to grow and growand grow in our society (it’s always been around; there’ve always been peoplewho didn’t really believe in God, but now there is a phenomenon that’s happenedin the last two centuries that has caused many people to think there isn’t aGod and therefore ‘it doesn't matter, what counts is “me first”’) and suddenlythis whole list of things that we saw in 2 Timothy 3 begins to come on farstronger than it’s ever been before. Oh, it’s been around before C there’ve alwaysbeen some people like this C but there’ve neverbeen so many people like this: “...lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful,arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving,irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self control, brutal, haters ofgood, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than loversof God.”

Ithink we see in a strong way how that is true of our generation in a way that,as far as we know, it’s never been true before. Before C yeah, there’vealways been people like this C but there’s alwaysbeen sufficient belief in supernatural religion in most societies that peoplefeared to ‘get out of line’ too far C because it isn’tjust a matter of somebody human seeing them, some spirit being will see themand do something to them C but now that’s allcoming apart as a result of what I call “scientism” or “secular humanism” orsomething like that.

We sawin the Revelation passage that this antichrist is going to put together aone-world government (or take over a one-world government; it’s not clearwhether he puts it together or not), and he’s apparently going to get rolling aone-world religion (or, perhaps, take one over). It’s interesting that therehas been a strong force, a stronger force I think than we’ve ever had, that Iknow of, to unite all religions in the last century or so. That has beenfacilitated fairly heavily by the fact that many of these people who are leadersof religions no longer believe that their religion is absolute, but just that ‘Well,this is our way of trying to put things together,’ and so they can compromisewith another group and work things out: ‘We can get along together, but ofcourse we ought to have one world religion; we ought to agree on these things ‘causethat’ll hold our society together.’ And obviously C as you are aware C a lot of theconflicts going on in our society today are religious conflicts. The problem innorthern Ireland is a religious conflict. The problem in the Middle East is a religiousconflict. Well, if we got all these religions together and they could agree,all those conflicts would go away. You see a force to press in that directionas well.

Israelitself is, I think, an indicator of some sort. I didn’t say anything about it,but you must have noticed by now as we went through the Matthew passage that “theabomination of desolation” has something to do with the temple, and that whenthat happens, it’s going to be tough if it happens on the Sabbath. It picturessomething interesting; it pictures a temple (presumably in Jerusalem, ‘causeit’s ‘get out of the Jerusalem area’ when this happens), and it pictures somekind of society in which the Sabbath is being observed enough that it mighthinder your flight C you might not beable to get supplies that you needed, or you might not be able to get an extratank of gasoline, or whatever it is you need to get out of there.

Well,lo and behold, for the first time in nearly 2,000 years there is a Jewish statein Israel; it started in 1948. They haven’t built the Temple yet, and there aresome serious problems that stand in the way of their building the Temple (forinstance, the site of the Temple is the third most holy place in Islam C and Muslims mightnot be too pleased if the Jews had to tear it down to build the Temple C or even if theybuilt the Temple next door (it does now appear archaeologically that probablythe Muslim Dome of the Rock is not over the very site of the Temple, but it’sabout a hundred yards south of it, so there might be a possibility ofbuilding the Temple a hundred yards north) C but there’s some forces around that might open that up.Another war between the Arabs and the Israelis, if a stray missile blew up theDome of the Rock or something, the Israelis would not be enthusiastic aboutrebuilding it. And if they still controlled the area they might decide to dosomething else with the site.

Therehave been “Christians” trying to ‘help things along.’ I don't know whether you’refamiliar with Herbert Armstrong or not; he has a TV program, a radio program (TheWorld Tomorrow) and a newspaper Plain Truth (not a terriblyaccurate description of the paper). One of his followers, visiting Israel,threw a Molotov cocktail on the Temple platform, but he threw it in the wrongbuilding, in the Mosque of Omar at the south end instead of in the Dome of theRock in the middle. He didn’t burn the place down, but he did do somesubstantial damage. I think he was trying to ‘help things along.’ I don’t knowhow that might happen, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s not unreasonablethat some such thing would happen.

It’sreported (I can’t verify this) that a newspaper reporter asked an Israeliofficial in 1967 (that’s when the Jews first came into possession of the oldcity of Jerusalem C they had notgotten that in the ‘48 war C that had been heldby the Arabs, but they got it in ‘67) C the reporter said “Areyou guys going to rebuild the Temple now?” And the official said somethinglike, “Well I don't know; but thousands of years ago David conquered the cityof Jerusalem and within a generation his son Solomon built the Temple. Well, we'venow conquered Jerusalem...” I don’t know what that’s worth, but it’s asuggestion that something is happening there. The regathering of the Israeliteshas produced tension in the Middle East: a superpower confrontation, anoil embargo. And those two things have made that not just a ‘little local thing’in the Middle East, but a possibility that that might be something to set off aworld war, something to set off a huge oil thing. If you haven’t noticed itmuch, you should go back and read newspapers and listen to TV talk shows andsuch; the Jews had it pretty good in this country with the media until thefirst oil embargo. Then the situation began to shift: they didn’t have as muchblack support as they used to have, and they didn’t have as much liberal whitesupport as they used to have. This has happened as a result of those things.

Itlooks like we might be ‘setting the stage’ for some of these things in what isgoing on in Israel. A passage I did not read (but which you will find veryinteresting) is the twelfth through the fourteenth chapters of Zechariah, thenext to last book in the Old Testament, where it pictures Israel as being ‘aburdensome stone’ that ‘everyone who tries to pick it up will hurt themselves.’You kind of get the idea that ‘the Israel problem’ will be an insoluble problemas the end of the age approaches. This seems to fit very well what's happenedjust in the last forty years now C 1948B1988 C in Israel.

One ofthe things you’ve noticed in these passages surely is the disasters. How isthat coming? Well, we haven't had much yet. We’ve had some famines: you’ve certainlyheard about the problems in Ethiopia, the problems in the Sahel, the sort ofsouthern boundaries of the Sahara, and that sort of thing. We’ve had the usualearthquakes: I’ve heard several people say ‘the earthquakes are getting moreand more’; as best as I can tell, there’s nothing to that. I’m not a specialistin it; a friend of mine is a specialist in it; he's an evangelical Christian,and has got no ‘axe to grind’ against it; looking into the details, he couldn’tfind anything. But, even if the earthquakes remain at the same frequency asthey do now, the fact that the population has gotten denser will pretty wellguarantee that psychologically earthquakes may begin to get very, very bad.

Takefor instance the ‘San Francisco’ type earthquake. We think they’re going tohappen every fifty or a hundred years in that area from figuring out the past(what’s been happening with the San Andreas fault slippage); that area’s waymore built-up now compared with 1906. An earthquake of that sort in that areawould be bad, bad news.

Butthe San Francisco earthquake is nothing like the worst earthquake that’s everoccurred on earth; if you've ever read anything in the earthquake literature,there’s an earthquake that occurred in New Madrid, Missouri in 1811. That earthquakewas by far the biggest earthquake that’s ever happened in the United Statessince white men have been here, anyway. But there wasn't anybody out there in1811 hardly. It had some very big effects, but there wasn’t anybody there. There’s somebody there now, and if somethinglike that happened (we’'ve no idea how frequently a ‘New Madrid’ typeearthquake would happen), we’d be in trouble.

There aresome other things happening that are a little scary. You can’t have missedhearing about AIDS by now; everybody hopes, of course, that science will find aquick fix (we haven’t). Who knows? If they don’t, big troubles are headed ourway from that direction. You can guess what some of them are: a lot of peopleare going to die; some people who know they’re going to die are going to becomemore irresponsible than they already are C there’s alreadysome talk about that. Medicare and such like things are not going to be able tohandle that sort of situation. When you begin to run out of money and healthfacilities there’s going to be some pushing and shoving; you can work out somepretty fierce scenarios that could come out of something just like that. Thereare people already talking in newspapers (and not in the ‘Letter to the Editor’column, where all the wackos will send in stuff now and again, but elsewhere)suggesting the possibility that AIDS may reach the proportions of the BlackDeath. Who knows? Scary.

Whereare we now? Well, I can't tell you: “Nobody knows the day or the hour....” Butsome of the signs that are pictured in the Biblical scenario are pretty obviouslybeginning to happen. It’s hard to see where we’re going to go in a generationregarding nuclear proliferation; we don’t know what to make of CO₂and the ‘greenhouse effect’ and some of those sorts of things.

There’scertainly some strong pressure for a one-world government. It looks like to methat there are things happening that strongly suggest we might be in the lastgeneration. How near is the end? We don't know; but it may be close. Whether “theend of the age” is near or not, your end, my end, may be close. We never knowwhen we’ll get struck by a terrorist's bomb, something will go wrong with ourcar and we'll run over the edge, get hit by some disease, get mugged on thestreet C we really don’tknow how much time we’ve got. It might happen tonight, it might happen nextyear, it might happen ten years from now, we might die peacefully in bed sixtyyears from now. We don’t know. All we know is that we've got now.

TheBible says we should do something about this. We need, first of all, to thinkseriously about where we stand with God. Most people who think of it at allsay, ‘Ah, I’m all right.’ After all, the Bible says, ‘Put your good deeds on abalance scale, your bad deeds on the other balance, and whichever one isheavier, that’s it,’ doesn't it?

No, itdoesn’t.

TheBible says “The wages of sin is death.” The Bible says, “There’s no one thathasn’t sinned.” We’ve all sinned and “come short of”C what God intendedus to be C “the glory of God.”The Bible says C you don't have totake my word for this C our chiefresponsibility is ‘to love God with all our heart and mind and soul.’ The vastmajority of people don't ‘love God with all their heart and mind and soul,’they don't even know who He is! They’ve never spoken to Him, never listened toHim to find out whether He’s got anything to say to them. They want to ‘livetheir own life,’ they don't care whether God’s got any purpose for them. Whatdo you suppose God thinks of that? Well, He’s told us in His Word.

ButGod’s also told us something else: ‘that can change, if you'd like.’ ‘If youwant, you can come back to God; if you want, you can turn a life that's headedfor disaster into a life that, although you may go through some very difficulttimes here, will be joyful and glorious beyond anything you'd imagine.’

Whatdo you need to do?

Well,you need to realize that you're not in good shape with God. Every one of us hasgot to realize that. We’ve got to realize that if we keep going our own way, we’regoing to one day have to face Him and we won't have any answers that are goingto ‘stand up in court.’ We have to realize that God has made a provision; Imean, after all, the Bible speaks of the message that God gave His followers asgospel C good news (yousay, ‘that doesn't sound like good news!’ C well, I haven'tgotten to the ‘good news’part yet; I'm telling you the ‘bad news’ you need toknow so when you hear the good news you'll realize it is good news): thegood news is that you don’t have to continue in rebellion against God; that Godhas given us His Word so that we can have a life that is so much better thanthe life we’ve got now that we wouldn’t believe it if somebody told us.

All wehave to do is tell God that He’s right C that we havemessed up our lives, that we are going our own way, that we don’t deserveanything from Him, that we realize now that ‘ninety-nine percent is a failinggrade’ in God's ‘final exam.’

Weneed to depend upon what He’s done to straighten things out, that God didsomething very, very striking in the person of His Son, Jesus: He provided ourrighteousness if we’ll trust in Him; He paid for our sin if we’ll trust in Him;and He promises to ‘come inside’ us and begin to change us if we’ll trust inHim. That's the good news!

Thatgood news is offered now, and it’ll be offered until Jesus comes again, but wedon’t know whether we can wait two days, or ten days, or a year, or somethingof that sort, because we don’t know that we’ve got that much time left in ourlives. Whether Jesus comes back any moment or not, we may ‘go away’ any moment,and we need to be ready to face that.

Whatdo you do to trust in Jesus, and how do you accept Him? Well, you need to tellHim (you don't need to tell us, you need to tell Him), ‘Lord, I see now thatI'm not what I ought to be, that I don't come anywhere near “loving you withall my heart, and soul and mind...” C I don't know youwell enough to love you like that. I want to be different, Lord; I ask that you’llforgive what I’ve been before, and that you'll change me, and I’m asking thisbecause of what Jesus did C I’m depending onwhat He did.’

If youdo that C if you do thatsincerely, honestly C He’ll change you;and, although you may have to go through some of this (we may all have to gothrough some of this C we may have to gothrough all of this), on ‘the other side,’ it’ll turn out that it was worth itall. It may be we won’t go through this C we may go beforethis happens C but even if we gothrough this it will be worth it all.

Well, “HowNear Is The End?” I don't know; but what we see about the end is importantenough that we need to do something about it.