Discerning the Signs but Looking for the Lord
I do listen. As I get older, I forget more easily, but I do listen to people’s concerns. In the last several years, a number of devoted Christians have asked me some form of the following question: “Are we close to the return of Jesus Christ?” As with any Biblical teaching, we must be careful with this subject. In Matthew 24:36, Jesus said, “Of that day and hour knoweth no man.” Later, in Acts 1:7, He added, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons.” Paul wrote in I Thesssalonians 5:2 that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.” Thus, date-setting defies God’s Word and dishonors our Savior. However, in Matthew 16:3, Jesus pointedly asks, “Can ye not discern the signs of the times?” We do not know and cannot know the exact time of Jesus’ Second Coming and the resulting period of the Tribulation, but we are told to seriously study the signs found in Scripture. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
A seventeenth significant suggestion of the consummation is a dramatic increase in world population – really, what we would call a population explosion. In Luke 17:20-37, Jesus speaks of the coming end. He predicts His rejection in verse 25, at the end of His first advent. He then prophesies in verse 26: “As it was in the days of [Noah], so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” Verse 27 clarifies that the unexpected and rapid nature of God’s righteous judgment is in view: the flood in Noah’s day was unprecedented (God did, though, give mankind many decades of warning). Moreover, the background of this flood in Genesis 6 is crucial: verse 1 says, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth,” indicating remarkable population growth due in part to the lengthy life spans of that era. With this population increase came an alarming rise in sin. Jesus in Luke 17 uses this Genesis account as a point of comparison for the future judgment. The world’s population did not top 1 billion until the early 1800’s. By 1965, it had risen to about 3.2 billion. Since then, it has more than doubled, closing in on 8 billion. This explosive uptick is consistent with Jesus’ specific warning. It is hard to ignore almost 8 billion signs of the times.