31. Wars and Rumors of War (End-Times Series Part 12)

Wars and Rumors of Wars in Matthew 24

Welcome to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 31 wars and rumors of wars. As Jesus and his disciples left the temple Mount on Tuesday afternoon, memories of what just occurred were still ricocheting in their minds.

Early that morning, Jesus had cursed a fig tree as a dramatic parabolic display of what would soon happen to Jerusalem. Then after a brief encounter with the Pharisees where they challenged his authority in the temple, Jesus delivered three scathing rebukes through parable.

With increasing clarity, he described the covenantal catastrophe that was soon going to befall old Testament Judah. The Jews while listening to their national epitaph received his parables with about as much grace as a decapitated rattlesnake still rhythmically opening and closing its mouth able and willing at a moment to bite.

It was at this point Jesus challenged their authority, humiliating them in front of all of Jerusalem. First, he did so by answering their trap like questions. Second by posing questions that they themselves could not answer.

And then third by declaring seven Deuteronomic woes upon the city that would soon feel the weight of God's awesome wrath. As the disciples were walking away from the city and from the temple that they adored, they must have been hoping that they misunderstood Jesus' words about the temple.

But after pointing to the complex of buildings that was looming over them, they were struck with the piercing finality of his linguistic precision. The temple before them would be destroyed. Brick by brick would be torn apart.

The city would be burned and God's redemption of sinful humanity would transition away from an era of priests and temples and sacrifices and feasts to a new and final era that is centered on Jesus Christ, our only hope of salvation.

With such seismic shifts that were about to break upon the landscape of redemptive history, there's no wonder that the disciples wanted to ask him these three specific questions. They wanted to know, number one, when would the temple be destroyed?

A very reasonable question for them to have asked. Number two, they wanted signs that would show them that the destruction of the temple was, was drawing near. Again, reasonable. And number three, they wanted to know if the temple's destruction would signal the end of the entire Jewish age.

Last week we saw Jesus tackling their second question first, giving them a few signs that were going to showcase the end of Jerusalem was coming. Jesus told them that it would be like a woman whose labor pains were increasing with intensity as her delivery was drawing near Matthew 24, eight.

Well, in the same way, the signs that Jesus gave them that we saw last week were going to increase in intensity until the city was finally destroyed. Last week we saw the first sign Jesus gave, which was the rise of increasingly volatile, false messianic figures who would lead the people astray into greater and greater ruin and disaster, climaxing in their downfall to Rome.

Today we're going to see the second sign that Jesus gives in this dramatic prophecy. We're going to see that he proclaims and prophesies that iterative wars and rumors of future wars are going to be unleashed in every conversation and every marketplace.

And people are going to hear that these things were about to happen. But first, before we get there, we need to very briefly remind ourselves about the importance of signs. You see, the disciples were asking Jesus a question and they were expecting a meaningful response.

They were looking for things that they would be able to see with their own two eyes and understand with the mind that God has given to them. They wanted to know things that they could be on the lookout for in their lifetime and not information about the end of the world or 21st century geopolitical politics.

I mentioned this as a cautionary reminder because as we read the text, our orientation must not be that Jesus is speaking directly to us. Although I do grant that the text speaks to us and teaches us not to be by the power of the Holy Spirit, that's true.

But in this case, we must remember that this is a conversation that we are reading among first century disciples and their Lord. In Matthew 24, we are seeing Jesus speaking directly to his disciples about specific questions that they have about their temple and their city, Jerusalem, and Jesus is giving them real answers that is going to be meaningful to them and important for their lifetime.

He is just simply not looking past them and using this moment as an opportunity to opine about 21st century wars, tribulations or some late great planet earth style Wonka Vader like rapture. He's not doing that.

If you can, if you think you can make the text say that, then you can twist it and manipulate it to say almost anything you want it to say. Jesus is speaking to them. Now let's begin with the text that we're going to be looking at today, which is Matthew 24, six through eight.

The Meaning of “Wars and Rumors of Wars”

And again, let's see how this text is speaking to them about things that would happen to them. Jesus says, you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end for nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.

And in various places there will be famines and earthquakes, but all these things are merely the beginning of the birth pains. Matthew 24, six through eight, the Pax Romana. When Jesus says that you will be hearing, he does not mean 21st century Christians who was eavesdropping on his conversation with his disciples.

He's not saying that you and I are going to be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. He means you as in the disciples who's looking him right in the eyes as he's speaking, are going to hear about these things in their lifetime.

The disciples were going to be hearing of wars that are happening and rumors of wars, which is a far more important fact than maybe you would even realize. When we open up our Bibles to the new Testament, we're ushered into a world that had recently experienced significant political volatility and massive change.

When we open up to Matthew one, we are opening up to about five or six BC and there is a context. After 500 years of senatorial rule in Rome, Julius Caesar successfully converted the burgeoning Republic into an imperial empire with him as its sole dictator in 44 BC.

This is less than 40 years from the birth of Christ, so this event is highly relevant to the context of New Testament history. That same year, Julius Caesar was violently assassinated on the Senate floor by men who wanted to convert the empire back into a Republic, but their plan backfired.

Julius Caesar's assassination plunged the newfound empire into years of chaos, confusion, and civil war. Then after a decade of bloodshed and infighting, it was Julius Caesar's adopted son, Octavius, who we also know as Augustus Caesar, who emerged from the struggle triumphant, who consolidated universal dictatorial power around himself, becoming the sole emperor of Rome by the year 31 BC, less than 25 years from the birth of Christ.

As emperor, Augustus furthered the work of his father Julius by unifying the disparate Roman province into a single empire with a centralized Roman government. We can see this in the New Testament where he issues a decree that all of the world would be registered.

Octavius or Augustus, however you know him, is attempting to centralize Roman power in the city of Rome under his rule. We get this even in the New Testament. He's the man who put down all the factions, dissenters and enemies that sort of were lingering after the death of his father, and he's the one who stabilized the Roman empire, and he achieved an unthinkable reality in the history of world empires and especially in the ancient world.

He achieved something that later writers would dub the Pax Romana or the, in English, Roman peace. In essence, Caesar Augustus convinced the war hungry and bloodthirsty population of Rome who had been used to ongoing and violent warfare in their entire history.

As long as they could remember, they were used to war. He convinced them that peace was a more profitable reality for the empire than protracted and risky wars. Now after being successful at convincing the population of this, Augustus and his predecessors, I'm talking about the emperors who came after him like Caligula and Claudius and Tiberius, all of them adopted the same political structure as Augustus and all of them reinforced this era that Rome is in an era of peace, a Pax Romana.

That prosperity lasted from 31 BC when Augustus initiated it till 30 AD when it began to finally crumble and break apart. Now scholars will list it as 31 BC to about 180 AD, but the crumbling of the peace happens earlier, which we will show in just a moment, which will actually reinforce what Jesus says.

Now I do want to mention this, such an era of peace is not only miraculous, an era of a hundred years over such a vast empire as Rome actually was at that time. That's not only miraculous in the ancient world, but that's never been repeated.

There's never been an era of a hundred years of peace in such a vast empire on that scale ever. It's never been repeated. It was unbelievable. Then it is unbelievable. Now it is something that baffles scholars today.

The era of Roman peace was unbelievable under the second imperial emperor named Augustus or again, the son of Julius Caesar, the Roman empire was brought under such a tremendous and lasting stability that peace was the universal expectation of every single citizen.

There were no wars. There were no rumors of wars and the state existed in total control so that an unparalleled era of peace lasted undisturbed for a hundred years. That is the time period and the setting that the disciples and Jesus were born into.

And that is the very reason why the prophecy of upcoming wars and rumors and wars would have been so meaningful and significant to them. Unlike us, they had never seen nor heard about war wars and rumors of wars.

Again, the opposite is true for us today. We do not live in an era of universal peace, but an era characterized by constant war waging and conflict among the nations. Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the war with ISIS.

And let us not forget, most recently we've been bombarded with news about the war between Russia and Ukraine. And before that it was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the shameful withdrawal. To be frank, war is about as novel of a concept to you and I who live in the modern world as water would be to a fish.

And it's not a unique thing to our time period alone. Every single era of human history has been plagued with war. In fact, the century existing between 30 BC and 30 ad called the Pax Romana stands almost alone as one of the most unique and consequential eras of large scale peace in all of human history.

And certainly would have been an appropriate era to give this sign of upcoming wars and rumors of wars to that generation who knew only peace. Jesus warned that a coming era of instability in the empire would arise so that they would hear about it and they would, they would and it would become a sign of Jerusalem's eventual downfall.

That is exactly what ended up happening. After Jesus's crucifixion, the tenuous Alliance that existed between Rome and the Jews quickly evaporated. False messianic upstarts as early as the thirties going all the way until the sixties began popping up all over Judah, leading the people into a series of revolts against Rome.

These attacks caused the superpower to tighten its grip on Judah at first. But then when the revolts kept coming and increasing measure, emperor Nero eventually ordered an all out war on the Jews in 67 ad dispatching his very best general Vespasian to oversee the campaign back home in the imperial city.

Nero had become such a national embarrassment for his increasingly erratic, immoral, and insane behavior that the Senate was forced to act in the year 68 ad the Senate of Rome declared emperor Nero an enemy of the state, which led to his fleeing from the city of Rome and his suicide.

Just a few days later, that irony of that event cannot be understated because it was the assassination of Julius Caesar, which began the Julio Claudian line and it was the suicide of Nero that effectively ended it.

Rome was being plunged into chaos as Nero killed himself. The empire fell into a brief period of devastating civil wars that had not occurred since the Pax Romana began. In that turbulent period from 80 68 to 80 69, a period of about 18 months, four different emperors arose to power, bringing legions of armies upon the city of Rome, shedding countless vials of blood on the soil of Rome.

Three of those emperors were all put down. Some of them were murdered. Some of them committed suicide, but all of that caused the empire to teeter on the verge of permanent collapse. If it were not for emperor Vespasian, you know the one that Nero sent to to have this massive war against the Jews.

If it were not for him, the empire would have devolved into a dramatic and permanent downfall. Now here's the point. While Jesus was alive and he was ministering in Judah, no one would have would have suspected an era of instability and war.

Things were looking bright, hopeful, and peaceful within the empire. Things weren't perfect, but there was no war. Yet in perfect fulfillment of Jesus's prophecy, just 40 years later, Rome was fighting multiple devastating civil wars.

She was defending herself from uprisings happening all throughout her territory. She was spread thin all while waging one of the most catastrophic campaigns ever waged against the hostile nation state of Judah.

Out of thin air almost by the sheer providence of God, an empire in a state of perpetual peace fell into a state of all out war and Jesus Christ predicted it with brilliant and beautiful clarity. When we read Matthew 24, six through eight, we must not allow ourselves to be afraid.

Jesus says, don't be afraid. The wars and rumors of wars that Jesus mentioned were all part of the downfall of Jerusalem. They're not a modern event. They're because Judah's covenant crimes against her covenant God.

And in the period of 40 years after Jesus's resurrection and ascension, God used all kinds of events to accomplish his plan. And today we can celebrate that Jesus has gained tremendous glory from perfectly predicting these events were going to happen just as he said that they would.

We don't have to be worried about wars and rumors of wars. We need to see that Matthew 24 is one of the greatest displays of predicted prophecy ever given. And what we also need to see with joy in our hearts is that Christ has brought an era of better peace than Rome could ever bring.

At the time, the Roman Caesars were called sons of God because they were the sons of Julius Caesar, a man who was declared to be God post mortem. In Christ, however, we know the true son of God. We know the one who will bring true, everlasting peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

We also know the one who has brought a better peace and the fact that he has brought peace between us and God. And we know that our God, our Christ, the one who reigns on the throne, even while the Caesars now lie dead in the sands of the city of Rome, our Jesus will accomplish all of the things that he intends to accomplish through the ministry of his church, who is declaring his gospel to the ends of the earth.

Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid when it comes to the end of the world or end times or passages like Matthew 24. We are living in the best era of human history. We are living in the kingdom of God's beloved son.

Today, a prophecy about wars and rumors of wars need not paralyze you, but pump you up knowing that Jesus has created a kind of peace that can never be taken away. And as you think about that thought, may it bless you the deeper and deeper it works itself into you.

Until next time, God bless you.