11/15/20 Mark 13:1-8 “Not End Times but Beginning Times?”

13 Nov 11/15/20 Mark 13:1-8 “Not End Times but Beginning Times?”

11/15/20    Mark 13:1-8      “Not End Times but Beginning Times?”

I think that most of you know that I really love being a pastor.  However, there are times when I have to do things that I really don’t care to do.  Today we will be talking about the end times as Jesus talks to us.  The reason that I don’t like to talk about end times is that we really don’t know what is going to happen or when.  Now some of you may argue that this is going to happen, and then this will happen and this will happen, and you will probably be right.  But the reason I don’t like to talk about this too much is that people have been talking about this same thing for centuries.  As a matter of fact, we have been waiting for this since Jesus died.  Therefore, in my logical thinking, this might not even happen in our lifetime.  So, I think we should be more concerned about our personal salvation and the salvation of those around us.  We need to know about the end times but we also need to know about our personal end times on this earth.  Also keep in mind that many of the end time prophecies were written on several levels.  Today we will take a glance at the end times in Mark.  Let’s see if we can personalize this message.  Let’s see if we can find the good news.

There are a lot of things that people like to zero in on about the end times.  One of them is trying to figure out who the antichrist is.  In just our recent history, we were sure at one time that Hitler was the antichrist.  Then we thought it was Stalin.  There were people who assigned numbers to letters and came up with Soviet leader Gorbachov as the Antichrist because his name added up to 666.  As a matter of fact, there was another group that used a similar method and found out that Henry Kissinger was the Antichrist.  Osama bin Laden has been called the antichrist.  If I am not mistaken, I think that every president of this country has been called the antichrist in the last 30 years and that includes President Trump.  The only thing that all of these people have in common is that everyone has been wrong about them.  For those of us who are really curious about these things, we should take a look in the 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2 for a good description of the antichrist.  He will be evil, do counterfeit miracles, and proclaim himself to be God.  I’ve got a feeling that when the antichrist comes, we will know it.  We won’t have to be guessing.

We begin with one of the disciples saying, “Look, Teacher!  What massive stones!  What magnificent buildings!”  I would say that these disciples were a bit on the country side.  What I mean by this is that when they got to see the Temple in its magnificent splendor, they were spellbound.  It would be like taking me to New York City.  I would be in total awe because I have never been there before and the sights would probably strike me as awesome.  I’m not only a country boy but I am also a flatlander and I get like this when I see mountains also.

This disciple is struck by the magnificence of these structures.  I want you to remember that some of the smallest stones that made up this building would be on the order of 2-3 tons each.  These stones were so big that they didn’t even use mortar in-between them.  They were so heavy that their sheer weight held it all together.  These stones are huge.

Jesus then tells them that every stone shall be thrown down.  The temple would be destroyed.  One of the things that we don’t generally know is that the Temple was in a huge remodeling process that wouldn’t be complete until 64 AD.  Herod the Great had started this project before Jesus was born.  However, he wasn’t doing this to appease God.  He started this project for the benefit of the Jews so that they would not rebel.  The Temple was being remodeled for the wrong reasons.

After the Temple was completed, it would only be another 6 years before it was destroyed and it was completely destroyed by the Romans.  At that time the Romans had completely had it with the Jews.  It must have taken them a couple years to complete the job of destruction.  They didn’t have bulldozers.  They didn’t have dynamite.  They only had the same tools to tear it down that they had to build it.  They tore it down by hand.  This would have been a huge undertaking so the Romans must have really hated the Jews.

This grabs the interest in the disciples so later they ask ‘when will these things happen?’  Now Jesus starts on a long discourse of which we will only look at the beginning today.  The first warning here is that we are to watch out so no one deceives us.  This was a problem then and now.  There was a whole religious group that followed John who were not Christians.  The Gnostics used the book of John for their religion only they left out certain parts.  They left out the parts where Jesus was human.  There were many other religions of the time that started out as Christian and then went their own way.

We see this today.  And we really have to be careful with what we hear.  Supposed learned scholars from prestigious seminaries are trying to tell us that many of the things of the Bible were myths and stories.  We have so called scholars trying to tell us that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but born in a normal way and he worked his way to be a deity.   This sounds like we would be able to work our way to salvation instead of it being grace based.  We have scholars trying to deceive us by telling us of language differences.  This way they can change the meaning to be more to their liking.  These things are happening right now in our seminaries and our churches.  We have to be so careful that we are not deceived.  Jesus told us last week to beware of the teachers and scribes!

As a society we have already been fooled into wrongful thinking.  How many times have we heard that the Bible isn’t relevant anymore?  I would guess that you could pick up any newspaper and read about this at least once a week.  I was at our annual conference a few years ago and a couple of lay delegates told me that the Bible had better catch up with our society or it will get left behind.  What blasphemy!  A few years back, the Episcopal Church decided that the Bible was wrong in some of its teachings.  The result has been a huge decline in membership.  There is a branch of the Lutheran Church that has done the same thing and the results are similar.

These types of deception are just plain wrong.  The Bible has been relevant since its inception and it will continue to be so until the end of times.  The Bible is not out of whack, our society is out of whack and I don’t think I need to give any examples.  All these things are part of the deception that the evil one uses to separate us from God.  Beware!  This is a sign of the end times.

There will also be many who come that claim to be Jesus.  This is something else that has been happening since Biblical times.  There was a man that came along in 6-700 AD who made these claims and he still has millions of followers today.  It’s called Islam.  Some of our so-called religions of this country were founded by men who thought they had some extra special connection to God that no one else had.  They still have thousands of followers today.  All these religions are wrong.

Even in modern times we have had people like David Koresh at Waco who claimed to be god.  There was also a guy named Jim Jones who did the same thing.  These people led their followers to their terrible and unnecessary deaths.

We need to be extra careful about some of these charismatic people that come along.  We need to study what the antichrist will be like.  We need to get back into our Bibles.  And most of all we need to be telling people that they are wrong.  We cannot afford to be quiet about these things.  The eternal lives of people are at stake.  When the Holy Spirit gives you that feeling that something isn’t right about something, then listen and act.

I once read a book about the United Methodist Church of about 25 years ago.  The liberal movement was getting stronger and one of the bishops led the way by trying to be a scholar.  Many people were fooled.  It was through the work of just a few people that got things turned around.  They stood up and spoke from the Bible.  This needs to be a lesson for all of us.  And now 25 years later they have been fooled again.  The United Methodist Church is being taken over by the devil!

The next thing that Jesus told the disciples is that there will be wars and rumors of wars.  I don’t remember where I read this and I have brought this up before.  There has been something like 200 years where there have been no wars in the last 5000 years.  This means that about 95% of the time we are in war someplace on this planet.  It seems to me that we really have a hard time getting along.  Whatever happened to the times like during the tower of Babel where we could all get along and try to build something?  Well, one of the things that have happened is that we have a world where more and more people do not know God.   Others cultures try to tell us that they worship the same God as we do but that is not true.  We don’t worship a God who kills just for greed or just because he can.  Our God doesn’t kill people because they convert out of Christianity.  We have a God of love and when things happen that are not of love, then we should look at Satan and place the blame squarely at his feet.  All religions except Christianity are Satan driven, no exceptions.

Anyway, we are not to be alarmed by these things.  These things are going to happen.    Every time that I hear that Israel is engaged in another conflict, I also hear that this will be the war for the end of the world.  We will also have earthquakes and famines.  A few of years ago when the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean areas there more than 200,000 people died.  We also heard at this time, if we were listening, that this was the beginning of the end times.  Every time we get a couple of earthquakes close together, we hear of the same thing.  I do find it rather strange, however, that we don’t hear this cry nearly as often when we think of all the famines and starvation that takes place on a daily basis in Africa and the Middle East and other places.  All we have to do is the math.  There will soon come a time when we will not be able to produce enough food for our world population of billions.  This finite earth cannot produce enough for our mushrooming population.

To me it would make a lot more sense if we did something positive when we hear of these signs of the end times.  I hear people tell me things like this and say there is nothing we can do but sit back and watch.  But they are wrong.  These are warnings for us to take action.  This action needs to be in the form of going to our neighbor and telling him about Jesus.  If we really and truly believe that these signs are happening right now, then we should almost be in a panic mode trying to tell people of Jesus.  It may be someone’s last chance.

So, these are some of the things that Jesus is telling the disciples.  This is not a pretty picture.  And it is not supposed to be pretty.  We are a broken people living in a very broken world controlled by very ugly creature named Satan who makes us do very ugly things.  But there is some good news here if we just look at the last line in verse 8.  “These are the beginning of birth pains.”

We are living in birthing pains.  What does this mean?  It means that these are not the end times.  These are the beginning times.  This is just the start.  God has a plan for us that goes far beyond what we can understand.  But first we must be birthed.  And with this birth of a new heaven and a new earth and new people, there will be pain.  This is what all these things we have talked about today are.  They are pains that we must go through.

Think of it like this.  Everyone loves a baby.  We love it when a baby comes to church.  I know parents get upset when a baby cries in church, but I think that we all love the sounds of babies even during church.  It is a sign of vitality.  It is a sign of life.  One of my favorite times is when we baptize a baby.  Then we get to watch that baby grow.  Now I know that it took a lot of pain to birth that baby but I also know that the memory of that pain is put on the back burner because we just love that baby so much.  He or she is worth it.

This is what Jesus is talking about here.  We have spent the last 2000 years or so in wars, famines, and earthquakes.  We have con artists trying to tell us that they are Jesus who has returned.  We have all these things and they are only the birthing.  We have forever in front of us.  This isn’t a passage about the end times.  It is about the beginning times.  We have wondrous things ahead of us.  We are worth it to God.

Unfortunately, we aren’t done here yet.  As long as we are still here, we have a job.  If you know someone who doesn’t have a church, invite them to join us.  If you know someone who is in some kind of trouble, help them in the name of Jesus.  If you don’t know Jesus on a personal basis, then ask Him into your life today.  Jesus Christ loves you far beyond anything you can imagine.  He is preparing a new heaven and a new earth that you cannot begin to imagine.  After we have been birthed, Jesus has an eternal plan for us to be with Him in this wondrous new world, a world without hate, a world without pain.  Jesus loves you so much that He will always, always be near you.  This is a promise, a glorious promise from the maker of life.  Thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.