The World Will Continue! - Mark 13:7-10

The World Will Continue! - Mark 13:7-10
by Pastor Lee Hemen
January 2, 2011 AM

I will never forget when my father died. It was right after New Year's Eve in 1968. He had gotten up to get a drink of water and smoke a cigarette. He was dragging his oxygen tank behind him when his heart gave way. My brother Ed and I were the first ones to find him. We heard him sigh and fall in the hallway of our little house. As Ed tried vainly to revive him I phoned for an ambulance. We now know there was nothing we could have done. His heart muscles were so weak, he died instantly. It has impacted my entire life. I can still smell the mixture of cigarette smoke and the Aqua Velva aftershave he always wore. Even at my age of 57 I still miss him and think of him often, but life goes on.

What would you do if the one person you depended upon the most in life was suddenly taken from you? As I have shared, some of us have already had to face such a prospect and it is not an easy thing to go through in life. Now imagine if you will that you followed someone for three and a half years, came to realize he was the answer to your nation's and perhaps the entire world's problems and he is summarily arrested, illegally convicted of crimes he was not guilty of, and then killed? What makes it worse is the fact he was truly a kind and righteous person. All of this was about to occur and Jesus knew it. He knew his disciples would be shaken to their very core and perhaps their faith would not withstand what was about to happen. Jesus wanted more than anything to let them know ahead of time that the world will continue. Let's discover what Jesus shared with his disciples so that we too can be prepared when our world is shaken.

READ: Mark 13:7-10

As Americans we want everything including our theology placed in simple boxes so that we can open one right after another and not have to think too hard. However, when we study the Bible we realize that it simply does not work that way. And this is no more evident than in the verses in Mark we will be looking at for the next several weeks. No matter what you have watched on TV, heard in the past, or read from some hyped up book concerning the latest theory on the End Times, we have to look at what the Scripture actually says and why. This is why Jesus tells his followers that...

I. The world will continue and bad things will happen to good people! (Vv. 7-8)

1. “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed.” (Luke 17:28-30 NIV) Jesus continues his discourse to his disciples’ questions concerning when the temple would be destroyed by reminding them that when they heard “of wars and rumors of wars” they were not to be “alarmed.” Wars and battles were commonplace in that day and age and they were not to be frightened by them. Tacitus, a Roman historian, wrote: “The history on which I am entering is that of a period rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace. Four emperors fell by the sword; there were three civil wars, more foreign wars, and often both at the same time.” (The Histories, 1:2). “Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” Jesus tells them. The believer is not to become caught up in speculation concerning when the Lord would eventually return. There are far greater things believers are to concern themselves with. In fact, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines.” Notice Jesus does not say "more wars, more famines, more earthquakes." I find it humorous when folks begin to panic over every earthquake that occurs thinking that there are more now than ever before. This is simply not true. According to the USGS there are no more major earthquakes than before, we simply have more recording stations - 350 in 1931 and now we have over 4,000! In fact, Jesus tells his listeners, “These are the beginning of birth pains.” Jesus meant that these things would continue and were not “signs” of the temple’s destruction or of his own return, only the same pains and sorrows sinful humanity has always gone through. The end of the temple would come, and as harsh and terrible as that would be, as his disciples they were to concern themselves with other things first. Historians of the time note that “There were earthquakes in Crete, Smyrna, Miletus, Chios, Samos, Laodicea, Hierapolis, Colossae, Campania, Rome, and Judea.” The city of Pompeii was also damaged by an earthquake in 63 A.D. We know that starvation was predicted by a prophet “named Agabus, [who] stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.)” (Acts 11:28) Jerusalem was finally destroyed after wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines had happened. Jesus let his followers know that the world will continue and bad things will happen to good people!

EXAMPLE: We can take comfort that folks like Vice President Al Gore and his dire global weather predictions are based more on sensationalism than on actual science. Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, had to admit he erroneously wrote that by “1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots.” He wrote that the “Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the infamous author of “The Population Bomb” and a professor at Stanford University, is another alarmist who was completely wrong in his writing on populations, our ability to feed them, and what would occur. He wrote, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people” and predicted that “England will not exist in the year 2000.” His answer was to advocate mandatory population control. Christian authors are no better in their dire predictions. Hal Lindsey has continually speculated on Christ’s return. Tim LaHaye has predicted who the antichrist would be, what nations would be part of a global spiritual conspiracy, seven years of pestilence, and when the end would come. He has set dates and been completely wrong. Jesus knew this would occur. He told his disciples, "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:33 NIV) Jesus knew that the world will continue and bad things will happen to good people!

The world will not be suddenly frozen by severe weather conditions caused by global warming. Which, I find as humorous because I see it as more of a made up excuse for the actual cooling the earth is now experiencing. For anyone to think that the world’s weather is static is contrary to what we actually know about climate change. The world has been a lot warmer and a lot colder, and no matter what we try to do about it, it is going to happen. I have kind of the same view of when Jesus will return. He said he would and he said no one knew when it would occur, people just needed to be ready. Jerusalem would fall, the temple would be destroyed, and Israel would cease to be a nation. This is why Jesus states that…

II. The World will continue but believers need to be on guard and ready to witness! (Vv. 9-10)

1. “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.” (Ezekiel 33:6 NIV) Least they forget Jesus immediately tells his disciples, “You must be on your guard.” They had to be aware of what was going on around them otherwise they could lose focus as to what their lives were now about. Sadly, much of the church today has done just that. We have lost our focus in understanding that Jesus came to seek and save the lost, not to give us a better worship. The sin-darkened world hangs by a thread and far too many believers are more concerned about how they feel than their neighbors dying in their sin. As the hymn reminds us, “Millions grope in darkness, waiting for thy word,” yet few Christians ever share their faith. Perhaps this is why we love to sing "Silent Night" during this time of year? We are starkly reminded, however, of what these early believers faced after the death, burial, and resurrection of their Lord. Jesus bluntly tells them of their future, “You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them.” Few of us have faced such a prospect for our daily lives, but this would be the disciple's lives from that moment on. Jesus is warning them that they would be wrongfully retaliated against. They would be willingly handed over by those who would hate them for what they dared to believe. They would be beaten with 39 strokes, in the synagogues they would be called heretics, and judged by civil authorities. All of them would be horribly martyred, which by the way means “witness unto death,” except for one of them and he would be constantly hounded and persecuted. Why would Jesus be so blunt with them? He tells them that it is because “the gospel must first be preached to all nations.” That was their duty as believers and it is the duty of every Christian since. We are to be his witnesses in this world until either we are taken in death or he returns. In fact, every single gospel and the Book of Acts, reminds us that Christians are to “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” (Mark 16:15) Jesus warned that the world will continue but believers needed to be on guard and ready to witness!

EXAMPLE: We live in a day and age whereby much of Christianity is asleep at the wheel. We are caught up in a self-induced spiritual stupor. Christianity revolves around us modern-day Pharisees whereby our worship means more to us than the unwashed masses. We are dead to the world while on guard duty. We yawn at the fact that the world is becoming enslaved by a fanatical fantasy where five times a day billions bow their foreheads to a paganist shrine devoted to perverted rendition of God. We slumber thinking people have a personal right to be deceived. To pray to manmade idols, dead people, spirits, or gain a self-induced state of euphoria hoping that they can forget who they are. When Jesus turned his face toward the cross, he was wide-awake knowing what he would endure paled in comparison to the eternal death people will suffer without knowing him. And still Christians snooze. We have willingly sated ourselves into a politically correct state of embarrassment. We would rather be found asleep on guard duty and allow the world to spend eternity in agony. This is why Jesus warned that the world will continue but believers need to be on guard and ready to witness!

Conclusion:
The world will continue and bad things will happen to good people! The world will continue but believers need to be on guard and ready to witness!
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Pastor Lee Hemen has been the outspoken pastor of the same church for 25 years in Vancouver, WA. He writes regularly on spirituality and conservative causes and maintains several web blogs. This article is copyrighted © 2010 by Lee Hemen and is the sole property of Lee Hemen, and may not be used unless you quote the entire article and have my permission.

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