Why Mark 13 is so hard for me

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened.  These things must take place, but that is not yet the end (Mark 13:7).

I used to know a lot more about Bible prophecy than I do now.  –Warren Wiersbe in his mature years

They canceled Sunday School at my church for tomorrow morning. Some kind of issue with a busted water pipe in the fellowship hall area where construction people were doing something. So, we’ll be having church in the auditorium of a private school at 10:30 am.  And I am not unhappy at all about it.

The Sunday School lesson–which I was scheduled to teach–was really difficult to get my mind around.  Mark 13 is our Lord’s Olivet Discourse, with its counterparts in Matthew 24 and Luke 21.  Each of the three has its own uniqueness but for the most part they’re much alike.

Prophecy is hard for me.  And I don’t mind admitting it.  There is a little history to this.

As a college student, I worked for a preacher in downtown Birmingham. Reverend Jim Irwin owned the Upper Room Bookstore which I operated the summer between my freshman and sophomore years.  Brother Jim pastored a small church and had a radio program called “The Radio Bible School.” One night a week he held a Bible class in the bookstore for anyone wishing to attend. It was my job to type up his handouts, which is how I learned his views on prophecy.  On paper at least, he seemed to have it all figured out: The Lord was on the verge of returning and all the prophetic signs were being fulfilled even as we speak. Jesus was due to set foot on Planet Earth at any moment.

That was 1959.  Sixty-four years ago.

A big thing back in the day was the year 1948, the establishment of the nation Israel.  After all, taught the prophecy experts, didn’t our Lord say that “this generation would not pass away before all these things came to be”? That’s Mark 13:30. This clearly means, so they would teach, that within one generation of the establishment of Israel all these prophetic signs would be fulfilled. And how long is a generation?  Most said 25 years.  Some said thirty or thirty-five.

It’s been seventy-five years.

I learned early on that expounding on Bible prophecy was easy and easy to get wrong. As someone has said, “The graveyards are littered with the bones of prophecy experts.”

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Heresies inside my church

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine….”  “Preach the word….with great patience and instruction” (2 Timothy 4:2,3).

The best way to deal with bad theology in the church is for the pastor to always preach the Word.

Just hang in there, year after year, teaching and preaching God’s unchanging truth.  The changes in your people will come as you remain faithful.

The word “orthodox” means “right thinking.”  Straight shooting. Sound doctrine. Solid reasoning.

We think of heresy as something the bad guys do, the “spiritual gift” of cults, and the aberration of the rebellious. After all, aren’t all heretics nuts? (We interrupt to recommend a book. A half century ago, Walter Nigg wrote “The Heretics” to establish that the great heresies in church history were the work of some pretty smart people with real grievances, and not ‘nuts.’  Reading it was life-changing for me.)

As Walt Kelly’s comic strip ‘possum Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

There is enough heresy inside the walls of your church to start twelve new cults by breakfast.

In a half-century and more of churchmanship–pastoring, assistant pastoring,and denominational involvement–I have seen these heresies, beggars riding in king’s chariots, as the saying goes….

1) “If you are having trouble in your Christian life, clearly it’s because you are not saved.”

So–you struggle with temptations, with disciplining yourself to a daily time of prayer and the Word, with controlling your temper, and a thousand other things. “Obviously,” someone says, “You have never been saved.”

The solution is for you to “this time, get it right.” So, you go through all those spiritual contortions–praying, seeking, crying, pleading, and performing autopsies on yourself–hoping that “this time it takes.”  You ask the pastor to rebaptize you because “if I was not saved before, it was not real baptism.”

Right thinking–“orthodoxy”–says it would help a great deal if you knew the Word. Christians struggle with temptation, they war against wickedness in high places, they fight a never-ending battle to conform their desires to the mind of Christ.  Anyone teaching otherwise is a deceiver.

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Be wary of experts

“How shall we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?  When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:21-22). 

Someone said to me, “He may be an atheist but he has a Ph.D. in Greek and has studied the Scriptures in their original languages.  That gives his views a great deal of weight.”

I laughed.  Not even a little bit.

On the back of a book on prayer, a blurb described the pastor/author as an expert on prayer. I’m not sure why that offended me.  I felt as if one of my five siblings had claimed expertise in communicating with our parents. “What’s so hard about that?” I would have replied.  “They love us and are always available.”

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just anyone calling himself an expert that bothers me.

I have read that FDR had an innate distrust of anyone called an expert. It’s not a bad philosophy.

There are so few people in this life who should be called experts on anything. Veterans, yes, and we will accept advisors and counselors and instructors.  But rarely expert.

I’m remembering that in the early days of Jimmy Carter’s administration, youthful Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell were called “consultants” or “advisors.”  Some commentator observed that no one should be called such until they are at least forty and have had one great failure in life.

Historically, experts have a spotted track record

What follows is from Columnist Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University. His column appeared in our Clarion-Ledger on Monday, July 30, 2018…

–Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that if Donald Trump were elected, there would be a protracted recession within 18 months.  Did not happen.

–When it became apparent that Trump would be elected, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned that the world was “very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

–In 1929, Irving Fisher, a professor of economics at Yale, predicted, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”  Three days later, the stock marked crashed.

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Is the USA in Bible prophecy?

I’m trying hard to answer this question with a straight face.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Absolutely not! Whatever are you thinking??

On the interstate I passed a billboard advertising some ministry that is focusing on biblical prophecy. Big letters: “THE USA IN BIBLE PROPHECY!” And a website.

My opinion–and that’s all this is; this is my website and I can freely post it; thank you very much–is that the people involved in this kind of “find the USA in the Bible ministry” fall into two groups:

–1) well-intentioned unthinking believers who love Jesus but were never grounded in the essentials of the Christian life, and are now being led seriously off-track;

–2) clones of Harold Camping (the guy who was in all the news some years back for predicting the end of the world) who spend all their time trying to unlock the Rubik’s cube of the Bible so they can know more than anyone else as to what the Lord is up to.

Both groups are in bad trouble.

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Fearmongering: The cheapest kind of preaching

“Men’s hearts will be failing them from fear” (Luke 21:26).

“Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (I Thessalonians 4:18).

When I was a kid–sometime in the early 1950s–I recall attending a revival meeting with my grandmother in Birmingham.  The preacher scared the living daylights out of everyone with his prophecies about the future, his warnings about Russia and Communism, and his forecasts about what was about to happen.  Later, as Grandma and I walked down those dark streets to her apartment, every plane going over seemed to be carrying an atomic bomb with our address on it.

Scary preaching is foreign to the New Testament.

The great apostle actually thought teachings of the Lord’s return and the believers’ victory over and escape from this world should comfort us.

But listen to the typical prophecy preacher.   So many will use passages about the Lord’s return and the end times to strike terror into the hearts of the faithful.  They speak of the martyrdom of millions of the faithful, of the havoc to be wreaked throughout the world by the Lord’s death angels, of the Beast and the Antichrist and the desolation of abomination.

Matters of which they understand little.

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Things prophets and angels do not know

To my knowledge, there’s nothing quite like Second Peter 1:10-12 anywhere else in the New Testament.  From this text, we learn that prophets and angels often did their work without understanding the big picture.

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances in which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.

It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from Heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.

One of the bedrock principles of many Bible scholars holds that in order to understand a prophecy, a student should go back and try to learn what the prophet who announced it understood it to mean.  What was in the mind of the one speaking?

As though the speaker was the ultimate authority on his prophecy.

This principle–clearly mistaken, according to the Apostle Peter–has led to the undermining of some of the great doctrines of the Christian faith (at least by some; not all, of course).

In fact, the prophets said more than they knew, says the Apostle Peter. They were the instruments of “the Spirit of Christ within them.”

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Jesus did indeed claim to be God. Why that matters.

“How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe.  The works that I do in my Father’s name, these bear witness of me.  But you do not believe because you are not of my sheep.  My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me….” (John 10:24-27).

If Jesus Christ is not the God-man, then we’re out of business and the universe is in the dark.

Nothing is more basic to the Christian faith and everyone’s hope than His deity.

Theological liberals like to say Jesus never claimed to be God, that this claim was put in HIs mouth by Christians who came later.

What fun they have with the story of Jesus.

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Things to know–and not to know–about Bible prophecy

“But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of Heaven, but My Father only” –Matthew 24:36.

“But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels in Heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”  –Mark 12:32

Make a list of what we do not know concerning the end times.  What we put on the list would tell a great deal about us.

One of the greatest Bible teachers of the past fifty years is (or has been) Dr. Warren Wiersbe.  Once, when he was asked to speak on Bible prophecy, he began with this disclaimer:  “I used to know a lot more about prophecy than I do now.”

I appreciate that.

What Dr. Wiersbe was saying was that in his earlier years, he sounded forth with certainty on matters about which he knew little.  But with maturity came a healthy dose of humility.  In time, he was able to say just as confidently that “I do not know” concerning some of these prophetic subjects.  That’s what maturity and integrity do:  Admit when they do not know something.

I’m personally convinced that no one has all the answers to the mysteries of Revelation.  The only way, of course, to prove that assertion wrong is for the events to proceed to unfold just as someone has predicted.  Until then, every Bible teacher who sounds forth claiming to have the answers does so by faith.

“We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).  Our faith may be in Christ, it may be (also) in Scripture, but it just as easily could be in ourselves, as I suspect is true of some of the most dogmatic interpreters.

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Deceived and being deceived: Trumpets sometimes blow wrong notes

“If the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle?” (I Corinthians 14:8). 

A woman in a friend’s Sunday School class took exception to his reading a passage from The Message, the paraphrase of Scripture from the highly esteemed Eugene Peterson.  “It’s evil,” she said.  She will not be back to that church.

And if you think she’ll be spreading the word that that church is liberal and has gone over to the dark side, I’m betting you’ll be right.

An evangelist asked a man what translation of Scriptures he was reading from. “The NASB,” he said.  “The MacArthur Study Bible.”  “That’s a terrible translation,” he said. “It’s wrong.  And wicked.” Just so easily does he dismiss the work of hundreds of biblical scholars who know far more about Hebrew and Greek and the ancient manuscripts than that evangelist (or this preacher!) can learn in several lifetimes.

One of two things is true.  Either the attacker is correct and the overwhelming majority of God’s redeemed are deceived.  Or, the attacker has been deceived, is seriously misguided, and is now slandering a huge part of the family of God.  The latter, I believe, is the case.

Speaking of deceiving and being deceived…

The Friday June 22, 2018, issue of our Clarion-Ledger carried a full page advertisement from some end-of-the-world people who did not name themselves other than to give their website– www.worldslastchance.com.

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Misleading God’s people: A national pasttime?

“See to it that no one misleads you….. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many” (24:4,11).

Our Lord knew His people.  He knew that there was something about their makeup which would make them susceptible to being misled.  By “being misled,” we mean being conned, scammed, hoodwinked, deceived, tricked, lied to, fooled, and abused.

In Old Testament days false prophets came through the land, preaching half-truths and whole lies and filling God’s people with false expectations and pagan ways.  The New Testament church, just beginning to find its way and choose its methods, quickly became the target of these scammers and con-artists.

In Matthew 24, our Lord cautions His people to keep their guard up concerning prophecies about end times: His return, signs of the end, fulfilment of certain prophecies, apostasies, portents and omens.

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