Synoptics - Matthew 24

The Challenge of Matthew 24 and Competing Eschatological Views

Have been secretly dreading this day, but it's time to get it over with. We'll get it over with quickly. This may be one of the fastest run-throughs we've ever done, which actually doesn't help me at all because once we finish this, then we run into all of the really, really, really difficult synoptic issues in Matthew, Mark, Luke in the final week of Jesus' ministry and the crucifixion and resurrection and all that stuff.

So, tough sledding ahead, no two ways about it, but we've got to press on. For those of you who remember a few weeks ago, the last time we were together, it seems like I've gone a lot recently, and will be next year as well, looking at the schedule.

But anyway, we're in Matthew 23, we have the condemnation of the Jewish leaders, and we have this word of warning. In fact, I was listening, I will honestly admit that I've been looking around for other people's perspectives at this point, and D .A. Carson says he doesn't know of any of the New Testament passage, like Matthew 24, in the sense of the huge number of interpretations and different perspectives that it has spawned.

So, I certainly have not had any interest in attempting to work through all of them, and given that there are all sorts of different perspectives, I would imagine there's probably going to be some different perspectives even in our own midst as to exactly how to deal with this.

One of the reasons I have been somewhat hesitant about its coming is that I was raised with one particular perspective that I no longer hold, but when you held a certain perspective for a lengthy period of time, it's possible that when you revisit certain passages that what you used to hold, which you no longer hold, might come sneaking back on you anyways.

So, who knows? It could be an interesting journey. I was listening to Dr. Kim Rydelbarger's exegesis and interpretation of Matthew 24. I actually listened to it twice. He has a book that came out a few years ago called A Case for Amillennialism, and so I was listening to his perspective and sort of combing through my library.

Again, it's not something that I really would be focused on in my writing or my research and things like that, so it's not like I had a huge amount of stuff, but I've got enough commentaries on Matthew and things like that to at least be able to say that the perspective I take is not unknown.

It's pretty standard historically, but I remember the fact that sometime back in the late 1970s, after I took one of those, I think, California Achievement Tests or whatever it was you had to take back when you were a junior or senior in high school, I don't remember which year it was.

Once you got done, you couldn't leave the room, but you could turn your thing in and then sit there and read. I distinctly remember that I was sitting there reading The Late Great Planet Earth, and I was unaware of the fact.

Anyone want to guess how many printings The Late Great Planet Earth went through? 140. 140 printings, and here is something I did not know. Wait, let me ask you a question. Some of you are looking at me like I'm from another planet.

It may have something to do with the bowtie, but how many of you have read The Late Great Planet Earth? You didn't finish it? Oh, come on. Seriously? You saw the movie? I didn't even know there was a movie.

I didn't see a movie. I saw Left Behind. The guitar music is still blazing in my mind, as well as the lawnmower. Didn't you play that once? Yeah, we watched that. That was great. Anyway, You've All Been Left Behind.

Oh yeah, I remember. In fact, if I recall correctly, back in the day, we would have these things where you'd watch movies, sort of like what we do on New Year's Eve, but you'd actually watch it till midnight.

We're not stupid enough to do that. I'm just too old to do it, actually, and I don't want to be out there with all these soft people driving home anyway, but we used to do that. I know one of the movies we watched till midnight once was that one, Thief in the Night.

Thief in the Night. That was great. Anyway, how'd I get there? Oh, what I didn't know was that Late Great Planet Earth was the top-selling book in the United States in the decade of the 70s. You want to know what's the number one bestseller in the decade of the 70s?

It was Late Great Planet Earth. So then, I forget how many millions of units, not just the books, but the coffee cups and everything else of the Left Behind series sold less than a decade ago. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's pre-millennial dispensation. It's a prequel to Left Behind. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hal Lindsey. Hal Lindsey's still around somewhere. Hal Lindsey's still got a show on TBN somewhere, I'm sure.

I see TBN. Oh, I'm sorry. The Channel Between 20 and 22. Anyway, Jewish Voice Broadcast. Jewish Voice Broadcast. Yeah, yeah. That wasn't TBN. That was, I've been on two programs at the same time. Me and Michael Brown debated two Unitarians who denied the deity of Christ on the Jewish Voice Broadcast and then Way of the Master also is on TBN and a number of other outlets.

And I was in the third season on Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and stuff like that. But you've never seen me sitting across from a poofy-haired lady on an overstuffed gold couch. No, that almost happened once.

That almost happened at the Christian Booksellers Association in 96 or 97, somewhere around there. But the Lord delivered me at the last second. It was a sort of supernatural thing. But anyway, I was actually replaced by, who's the guy with the distensational charts as big as the building behind him?

Hagee. Hagee. Was that him? Was that down in Dallas? Was that Texas somewhere? Big guy. Yeah, Hagee. I was actually sitting in a chair ready to do an interview on one of my books when they said, excuse me, but Brother Hagee's schedule is really tight.

Could we get him in here? And man, I got out of there and I went back to the booth and I said to the folks at the publisher, I don't want to do that. Okay, no problem. Don't worry. It was that close. I mean, that close.

And he almost ran me over when he came in with his entourage. Anyhow, I don't know how in the world I got into that. But the point I was making is that the perspective that I'll be presenting on Matthew 24 may be historically widespread, but especially in the United States over the past 100 years or so, it would be a minority perspective.

Because surely when we talk about anything eschatologically oriented, it's my experience that I'll get into a conversation and, you know, let's say you're sitting in a waiting room and you see somebody reading the Bible.

The Problem of Eschatological Presuppositions

Okay. Well, for example, I didn't tell you all about this, but last Friday, I flew to St. Louis, ministered in St. Charles. Again, same church I've been at for 11 years, 10 years in a row on the first weekend of December.

But the first year was sometime in June or something like that. But anyway, and most of you know that I'm a frequent flyer and that means I get upgrades. Yeah, I'm one of those snobs who gets to sit up front arrow as well.

And so I was up in 1F and that's the front row, which means you don't have anything. You can't put anything down in your feet and stuff like that. And I noticed that 2A was open and the guy next to me, he had bought a ticket for his wife that morning.

Their reservation had gotten messed up. So he had to spend a lot of money on her and she's in the back. So he's up front, she's in the back. I first thought across my mind, that's not how it would work if it was me and Kelly.

I would be in the back and she'd be up front. But anyways, he was saying to the flight attendant, if that seat remains open, could we bring her up? And I sort of went, I'd be happy to move over there so they could sit together.

If that happens, no problem. Oh, hey, thanks. Thank you. So that's what happened. The door closes. I get a few of my little things around me and I'm going over to 2A, which is fine for me because I figure I can lean this way against the window or that way against the window.

It's going to put my neck out the same direction one way or the other. And I noticed that there was a black fellow sitting in 2B. And as I got up, I noticed he has a Bible on his lap. Okay, good. I'll maybe have an interesting conversation with somebody.

Unfortunately, frequently those conversations, you know, as soon as they say, oh, I see you've got a Bible. Yeah. What do you think about the rapture? You know, it's just this immediately, you know, you're off into something like that.

That's not what happened in this situation. Um, he had to get up to let me in. I sat down and he had closed his Bible and we sat back down. I looked over, I introduced myself and I looked at the name on the Bible.

And then I looked at the guy and the name of the Bible was Meadowlark Lemon. And it was Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters. Uh, and you may not know this, but Meadowlark Lemon is a minister now.

And he was flying to St. Louis to do Albert Pujols birthday party, evidently right before Albert Pujols got a $250 million birthday present. Yes, indeed. And moved from St. Louis quickly driven out by angry citizens with pitchforks and torches.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there. I didn't get any sleep or any rest or anything else done all the way to St. Louis because, uh, he wanted to know about the Muslims and, uh, his family was getting him an iPad.

So he wanted to know what programs get the iPad. So I'm showing him what's right here in front of me right now. And he was just fascinated. He lives in Scottsdale. And, uh, once I was, I got done showing him a bunch of stuff and told him about the class I'm teaching in January.

He's like, I think I'm home that week. I want to take that class. So maybe, maybe I'll have a, an auditor in, uh, in the apologetics class in January, uh, who can, uh, tell you stories about Nikita Khrushchev jumping out of a limousine and bear hugging him and, uh, all sorts of interesting things like that.

It was a fascinating, it was a very short flight to, uh, to St. Louis sitting next to Meadowlark Lemon, but, uh, 80 years old. I asked him how old he was and he said, I'm timeless. But I found out once I got back, I looked up on Wikipedia, 80 years old.

He did not look 80 years old at all. In fact, he still goes out and, you know, spins basketball and does stuff like that at 80 years of age. So, um, anyways, that's a, I could tell you some more stories along those lines, but I won't.

Thankfully the conversation did not get into eschatology at all, though. I was worried it might. Um, frequently our conversations do go that direction. You end up, you know, you start talking to somebody and immediately you discover that, uh, you know, they, they have the left behind series, uh, all of it in their backpack on the plane.

And, uh, it ends up not really going the direction you want to. When you come to this text, um, your presuppositions are going to really, uh, come into things. The best way to handle this, if what we were going to be dealing with was eschatology, um, from my perspective would be to maybe look at, um, Sam Waldron's book, uh, the end times made easy, um, where, or book or whatever, and lay out because it seems to me, and if there are some who would like to take issue with this, please let me know.

But it seems to me that amillennialists, whether you're optimistic, optimistic or pessimistic, I'm not really sure how that works, but amillennialists and post-millennials pretty much look at Matthew 24 the same way.

It is the, the primary divisions, uh, as to how you look at Matthew 24 is on the one side you have dispensational premillennialism. On the other side you would have what's called pantelism or hyper-preterism, and I'm in the middle.

The, let's talk about the, what's called the full preterist or the hyper-preterist position. These are folks who, a hyper-preterist or a full preterist basically believes that everything in the New Testament has already been fulfilled.

There are no future prophecies left. We're in the end times. And so, to the point where they will believe that the resurrection has taken place and Christ has returned and everything. And most people consider that to be a heretical perspective and, but they would look at Matthew 24 and all of Matthew 24 is fulfilled in AD 70.

Everything in the New Testament pretty much is fulfilled in AD 70. It's just over with. It's done. And so, everything in Matthew 24 fulfilled when Titus and the Roman legions sacked Jerusalem in AD 70.

That's the coming of Christ and judgment, everything. It's all over. The dispensational premillennialist might leave room for a double fulfillment type theme, but in general, the real important stuff about Matthew 24 is all future.

The futurist view. So, that some would leave open that there was a lesser fulfillment in AD 70, but in my recollection, being raised as a dispensational premillennialist, I don't remember much about Jerusalem at all.

In fact, if I recall correctly, when you get to the section about when you see the armies surrounding Jerusalem flee and stuff like that, they'd almost immediately go to a video of Pella where the folks are going to flee in a future situation where the temple's been rebuilt.

And then the Antichrist comes with the armies and generally the Russians, which worked out really well in the 70s and 80s, make the Russians the bad guys. And Gog and Magog were the Russians and stuff like that.

And that fit real well, that point in time. And they're going to run off to a place called Pella, which I think is where they shot part of that search. It was the, what's the guy's name? The movie guy, you know, Indiana Jones and the, it's when they were looking for the Holy Grail.

Lascrisay. Lascrisay, is that what it was? Okay. All right. Whatever. I'm pretty certain they shot some of it there because it certainly looked like it. It looked like the pictures I've seen in the movies, stuff I've seen in the past, where all the Christians are going to flee, if they're Christians, because then you get, once you get into all the dispensational stuff, you know, is it, you know, after the rapture?

Is it, you know, now keeping the law that saves you and all the rest of this stuff? And that I, I don't, I'm not even going to bother to try to go there at this point in time. The point being that on the one side, you have everything's fulfilled.

And the other side, you pretty much have functionally, everything's still future, even if there is an immediate fulfillment of some elements in the destruction of Jerusalem. The more complicated way of dealing with Matthew 24, I think it's a fairly easy way of dealing with Matthew 24, is just simply to throw it into one extreme or the other, and then everything's future or everything's past.

But the problem is that I am convinced, I was convinced, you know, for a long time, I called myself a pan-millennialist. It'll all pan out in the end. And I just didn't want to, I just didn't want to argue about it.

And I, like I said, I had been raised one particular perspective. I had come to realize that the hermeneutical methodology that was used to substantiate that perspective was not consistent. But I just didn't want to, sitting down reading all the books that you'd have to read, I just didn't want to do it.

I was too busy doing other things. I was reading, I was reading all the books nobody else wants to read. I still am, for that matter. And I just decided to leave that to other people. And besides that, I had been a part of churches where the statement of faith may have been incredibly vague on the central issues of the faith, but when it came to eschatology, whoa, it's about yea long and, you know, absolutely down to the nth degree of, you know, I mean, let's face it, there are churches where, if I say pre-trib, mid-trib, and post-trib, do you know what I'm talking about?

If you don't, let me know, because I'll explain it. Eh. Within the context of a belief in the rapture and the seven-year tribulation, even if it's even seven years, then, even then it's divided. There are people who believe that the rapture takes place pre-trib, before the tribulation, and then there are those who make it mid-trib, in the middle of the tribulation, and there are those who make it post-trib, at the end of the tribulation.

And I honestly, as a younger person, was involved in conversations and visiting in churches where, by taking one of those positions, you actually anathematized the other two. So, I mean, there are folks out there who are like, mid-trib, but if you're pre-trib, you're going to hell in a handbasket.

I mean, you are clearly not a Christian, and you're just like, aye, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I had experienced that kind of, I don't know, shall we call it post-eschatological stress trauma, something like that, post-eschatological discussion trauma, P-E-D, PEDS, post-eschatological discussion, no, syndrome, P-E-D-S, PEDS.

I'd experienced PEDS, and PEDS causes you to become a panmillennialist. It'll all pan out in the end. I don't want to argue with you about it, because I don't want someone biting my head off again, okay?

And it's really easy to slip into that, and I had. Then, sometime in the mid -90s, I don't remember when it was, and I don't remember who gave it to me, but this is, tell you how long ago it was, someone gave me a tape series.

Yes, I know for some of you, that's still a comforting thing. You still have your cassette tape recorder, and you still, you know, I understand all that, but for the younger generation, they're going, the what?

The cassette what? They just don't understand. Is that like an MP3? No, it's quite different. And I was given a tape series by Dr. Nichols, and it had been delivered at Trinity Ministerial Academy, and it was on this age and the age to come.

Now, it wasn't specifically meant to be a presentation on amillennialism, but that's in essence what it ended up being, was it was a study of Jesus's teaching about eschatology. And when you look at all, and this would take a long time, it's not really easy to do the way we've been doing this study, but if you have been tracking it, maybe Brother George has been tracking me, that's what he's always doing over there.

He's writing notes. He's actually tracking the eschatological views of Jesus. I don't know. It's possible. He could be writing, you know, his next workout schedule. I really don't know what he's doing over there.

I've never really looked, but the way to do it would be to look at everything that Jesus said about this age and the age to come. And that's basically what was done in this tape series. And Sam Waldron does the same thing in End Times Made Simple.

There's a book called The End Times Made Simple. You can go on Sermon Audio, and Dr. Waldron has done a series on this. I listened to that in preparation for this as well. And fundamentally, I am convinced that in Jesus's teaching, and this fits with Paul, this fits with Paul's perspective and things like that as well, I am convinced that what you have is you have this age this present evil age, and you have the age to come.

And Jesus is consistent in teaching about the nature of these two ages. It is not this age, and then a mini age, and maybe some mini, mini ages between the mini ages, and then the age to come, and then sort of the beginning of the age to come, then the middle of the age to come.

No. It's this age and the age to come. That's what it is. It's pretty straightforward. It doesn't leave a lot of room for the late great planet Earth, or left behind, or anything else. And so, I went, that makes sense.

And if you start from there, and then look at Matthew 24, if the end of this age is what Jesus presented elsewhere, then you have to look at Matthew 24, and you have to look at the questions that are asked by the disciples, and interpret the rest of the passage in light of that.

The Temple, Jerusalem, and the Disciples’ Questions

What do I mean? Well, let's take a look at it. Jesus came out from the temple, and was going away when his disciples came up to point out the temple buildings to him. And he said to them, do you not see all these things?

Truly, I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another which will not be torn down. Now, stop for just a moment. According to Josephus, the temple at this time was built with massive marble-colored blocks.

I'm not talking about the kind of building blocks you see around here. You know, the type of, you know, the front of my house is slump block, and so, you know, no, no, no. These were about 32 feet by 11, 32 feet wide by 11 feet tall.

Okay, they're big. They're huge, massive things. And this is, I don't remember how thick they are, but they're, they were big. Remember, they'd have cranes. That's why it took so long. It was huge, massive.

And when the sun would hit it, it would just glow, because it was not only, the stones aren't white, but there's a tremendous amount of gold that had been used in the construction of the temple. So, it must have been pretty, a pretty impressive site.

Very impressive site indeed. Now, if someone came to you, and if you were walking around through the Capitol Mall, okay, and, you know, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Washington Monument, and U .S. Capitol, the White House, you've been walking around Washington, D .C., and you've managed not to get mugged in the process.

And someone came up to you and said, I tell you that very soon, all of this will be destroyed. There won't be one stone left standing upon another. What would be your assumption of what they're actually saying?

Would you go, oh, there's going to be a localized incident that's going to massively damage Washington, D .C.? Or would you think more that they're talking about the American nation is going to be destroyed?

The Jewish connection to the temple was much more central than our connection to any of the monuments or buildings in Washington, D .C. The Jewish temple represented the very presence of God, and they had already seen that temple destroyed once, almost, well, right at 600 years earlier.

You know, for us, looking back, that doesn't seem like a long period of time. That was 600 years ago, at that point in time. And the messianic expectation was that the Messiah is going to make this city the central city of the world.

All the nations of the world are going to flock to Zion. And what's the very essence of the symbol of Zion? Temple. I mean, if you sat on the Mount of Olives, you looked, we've all seen the pictures. I might, there's a possibility floating around that I might get to go to Israel next year.

I'm not sure, but it's possible sometime in the next 18 months, something like that, possibly. But I've not been there. And, well, we've all seen pictures. We've all seen the videos, all this stuff. You're up on the Mount of Olives, you can see Jerusalem.

And what dominates the skyline? Well, now it's the Dome of the Rock. It's the Islamic mosque, which was built where? On top of where the temple was. Interestingly enough, and I only discovered this this week, and I need to verify this, but I don't have any reason to question the source.

But evidently, the Grand Mosque has sayings from the Quran around the outside. This will be something I want to check out, maybe for myself. But including a quotation of Sir Dali Klas, Surah 112 from the Quran, the third ayah of which says, He begetteth not, nor is he begotten.

And it just so happens, evidently, that the quotation of that on the side of the mosque is the side facing the Church of Holy Sepulcher. So it may well be almost a Islamic way of, from many, many hundreds of years ago, of saying, He begetteth not, nor is he begotten, aimed right at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the idea of the resurrection of Christ.

He is the Son of God, and so on and so forth. Which I would like to, it should be something I can verify without going there myself, actually. There should certainly be enough online to do that. But anyway, you would see that.

And so back then, you would have seen this massive structure. Massive, huge structure. A beautiful structure. Gold and white. And it would have, in your mind, been directly associated with the grandeur of this city.

So if this is going to become the central city of the world, and all the nations are going to flock here, then it's easy to understand, you know, the disciples. We're with the Messiah. They've been talking about who's going to sit at His right hand, His left, when He judges.

Where's He going to judge from? Well, certainly from right here. Isn't this beautiful? Oh, this is great. And Jesus' response is, I mean, the only thing I can picture in my mind is somebody all excited about something, and then someone just takes a big bucket of cold water and just, right in the face.

That's the only way I can picture this. Do you not see all these things? Truly, I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another which will not be torn down. We just had the triumphal entry.

And we just had people putting their cloaks on the ground. You know? What are you talking about? What do you mean? How can this be? Everything against the idea of the Messiah that these guys would have going on in their minds.

Because to destroy Jerusalem again would require you to what? Fundamentally reorient your understanding of who the people of God really are. And the connection to a specific geographical location, and the connection to a specific set of physical structures, forms of worship, you wouldn't be able to continue to hold on to that.

Because after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, there's no temple. There's no temple worship. And that's why in certain forms of dispensationalism, you've got to come up with this idea of somehow the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and the rebuilding of the temple.

Because you've got to have that temple there for certain understandings of how the Second Coming is supposed to happen. And so it's easy to understand. As he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, tell us when will these things happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?

Now, this will be key to everything else that follows. And this is why, as D. A. Carson has said, there's probably not a single text in the New Testament that has spawned more interpretations and more controversy than Matthew 24.

The nature of the questions, when will these things happen? Now, do they have a full understanding of what these things are? I mean, all Jesus said is, well, part of what Jesus said is, not one stone here will be left for another.

There's going to be destruction of the temple. But remember, we can't just look at chapter 24. Remember, I said, this is all a whole. And what did Jesus say in verse 38? Behold, your house is being left to you desolate.

Chapter 23, verse 38. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate. This long judgment section in chapter 23 leads right into chapter 24. And so the disciples say, when will these things happen? What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?

Now, are those all the same things? They might have been in the disciples' mind. Because for them, this is, they're reeling. This is a complete reorientation of what they have thought. And in fact, they still don't fully get it, because these are the same disciples who, after the ascension, are going, time now?

Woohoo! Are we ready to establish kingdom? And still haven't gotten it. It's going to take time for the Holy Spirit to lead these men to understand the nature of the kingdom and fulfillment of prophecy and things like that.

But the question is, I've never seen that happen before. The question is, when we look at these questions, is the answer to all these questions the same? That is, when will these things happen? Well, what's the happening?

The destruction of Jerusalem. What will be the sign of your coming? Now, the hyper-preterists would say, same thing, because he comes at that time. And in the sense that he comes in judgment, that's fine.

But is that the coming of Christ? And the end of the age? Because the problem is, Jesus' consistent teaching throughout the Gospels about this age and the age to come. This is still this age. And when the age to come comes, there are no longer, for example, one of the things he says, in this age, men marry to get into marriage.

In the coming age, that's not the case. In this age, you have the wheat and the chaff together. The wheat and the tares, I'm sorry. The wheat and tares together. In the coming age, they're not there. Well, we clearly have all of that still now.

So, it's not the next age yet. That's the problem with hyper-preterism. But how does Jesus answer these questions? And does he limit himself to the order and categories of the questions of the disciples?

It seems to me that what you have in Matthew 24 is you have an answer to all these questions, but not in the way that the disciples would have expected it. Because they're connecting things together that Jesus doesn't connect together.

It seems to me that when he's talking about the destruction of Jerusalem, he gives very, very specific indications. For example, in verse 15,. So, there's something about people in Judea and fleeing. And when you see certain specific things.

But then, when he's talking about the coming of the Son of Man, they're not specific things. They're very general things. And so, it seems that you have warnings given concerning the destruction of Jerusalem that's coming.

Becoming at this point in time within 40 years. Certainly, within the lifetime of people who would be reading this, we know that Christians in Jerusalem, when they saw the Roman armies approaching, fled.

They knew this story. This is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And it's not that they were carrying around copies of the Gospel. They might have at that point in time. But certainly, the preaching had been there.

And they boogied. And hence, very few lost their lives. Because they did what Jesus said. They got out of there before the Romans encircled the city, built a siege wall, then kept everybody inside, starved them out.

So, they saw it and they responded. But then, when it talks about the coming, the end of the age, things like that, it's much more the kind of general prophetic statements that don't have, well, if you want to misuse them, you can connect them to all sorts of stories, as they have been for many, many years now.

You know, Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin and, you know, people are long dead now, have all been crammed into Matthew 24 at some point. Because those more general signs are open to that kind of abuse.

And I think they are abuse. So, it would seem to me, then, that what you have in Matthew 24 is the discussion that answers both, but separates them from one another. The destruction of Jerusalem is one thing.

The coming of the Son of Man is something else. We would always be looking for that in our regular lives, rather than looking for a specific thing. You know, armies on mountains and things like abomination, desolation, Daniel.

That's one thing. The other is a general watchfulness for the coming of the Son of Man, because you don't know when that's going to be. So, you have two things going on in Matthew 24. And that makes it, of the three positions, the more complicated of them.

But it's demanded of us by Jesus' teaching elsewhere, all through the Gospels, concerning this age and the age to come. All right. So, there is a bit of introduction, which will allow us to get started in working our way through the seconds.

Okay? All right. Let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, indeed, we do thank you for your Word and your preservation of it. We ask that you would guide and direct as we seek to handle this section, that we might do so from a perspective that allows us to see its purpose and to benefit from it.

Be with us now as we go into worship. Lift up our hearts and minds and worship to you. We pray in Christ's name.