144. End Times Signs And Imminent Destruction

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 144, The End Time Signs of Imminent Destruction. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.

We have officially passed 1 ,600 subscribers on YouTube and 2 ,500 subscribers on all platforms, which is a big deal for a brand new show that is focused on eschatology. We're also heading into the best time of the year, which is the Christmas season, and I don't care what you think.

I am not a humbug. I love Christmas time. It's fun, it's joyful, and all of that. Maybe we can get into that more later. But because we're heading into this Christmas season and because this show is post-millennial and trying to encourage you on how to have an optimistic eschatology, well, I thought that maybe this Christmas what we could do is we could have a bonus episode for the show where I look at the Old Testament prophecies concerning the birth of Jesus and show how they emphatically prove the post-millennial hope.

What I mean is that every passage that you hear every year at Christmas time in churches and on Christmas cards and all of that are some of the most bold and the most ostentatious passages concerning Jesus' reign.

And according to those passages, His reign is going to be total, global, and full. My contention is that if you understand Christmas rightly, and I'm not talking about wrapping paper and pencils and Red Ryder BB guns, but if you understand Christmas in the way that the Bible understands Christmas, then the only result is that you would be a post-millennial, that you would become post-millennial in your eschatology, but you would also be filled with the kind of joy that materialism cannot buy and liberalism cannot fake.

That episode, that special episode, is gonna be dropping on Tuesday, December the 24th, on Christmas Eve, and it'll likely be the last episode of the podcast that I do until the new year. I've got family coming in town, I need to rest, I need to recover, and I need to get ready for as we continue in this series in the book of Revelation, which is what we're gonna do right now.

So welcome, welcome back to this series on Revelation where we have been looking at Matthew 24. And maybe you're like, maybe it's your first time, and you're like, why would you be going to Matthew 24 if you're in a series on Revelation?

Well, what we've argued is, you should pause and go back and listen to those questions instead of sitting in your pajamas, watching YouTube and questioning me. But just to give you an explanation, Matthew 24 and Revelation are saying the exact same things.

Matthew 24 is Jesus' Olivet Discourse. And since the Gospel of John, it's the same writer who wrote Revelation, doesn't have an Olivet Discourse because it didn't make sense and it didn't fit with his purposes, well, he decided to write an entire book on the topic.

And he filled that book with vivid images and apocalyptic symbols and fantastic depictions of judgment and salvation about the collapse of the first century Jews and the rise of the church who's the new covenant people of God.

Because of that, Matthew 24 in the book of Revelation are saying the same things, but in a different genre. And because Matthew 24 is in a genre that is far easier to understand than the book of Revelation, we thought it'd be a good idea to begin there, to understand the end as Jesus describes it in Matthew, so that when we get to Revelation, all of these things will make good sense.

So with that, welcome back to the show. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for clicking the like button. Thank you for all that you've done. Thank you for those who are prod squad members, defenders and insiders.

Thank you for your memberships. Thank you for your encouragement. Thank you for your emails and your texts. And with that, let us jump back into the Olivet Discourse and to Matthew 24 as we begin our time today.

The Olivet Discourse and the Coming Destruction of Jerusalem

Setting the stage. As Jesus leaves the temple mount for the final time in Matthew, he gives a dramatic prophecy about the coming downfall and the destruction of Jerusalem. He told the Pharisees that the city was gonna be brought under the entire weight of the covenantal fury of God that had been stored up since the murder of Abel, Matthew 23, 35.

He announced to them that the temple was gonna be left in ruins and a desolation, Matthew 23, 38. That it was gonna be torn apart brick by brick in the day of God's covenantal wrath, Matthew 24, one through two.

And all of these things he told them were gonna occur within a single generation, Matthew 24, 34, which as we've argued so far, it's about a 40 year window. Now, because the disciples were horrified by this assertion, they came to him after they left the city on the Mount of Olives and they asked him three specific questions.

They said, Jesus, you need to tell us when are these things gonna occur? That's the first question. The second question is what's gonna be the sign of your coming in judgment against this city? And finally, they needed to know about the end of the Jewish age.

Was this the end of the Jewish age? They wanted to know these three things. Now, thus far, we've been looking at these questions of when these things would occur and Jesus has told them that the days of Jerusalem's destruction were near, not far.

That false messiahs were gonna appear all over Judah and they were gonna mislead many people into following their violent revolutions. That was a sign he gave. He also warned them that the Roman world, which had been categorized by the Pax Romana, a total cessation of war at that time, was gonna be thrown into a temporary chaos as wars and rumors of wars were gonna break out all over the Roman world in that 40-year window of time.

He predicted that the earth itself was gonna be thrown into chaos and as earthquakes and famines ravaged the Roman Empire in that terrible generation. And if those things were not bad enough, in the lead up to 8070, Christians were gonna experience tremendous tribulations as they would be persecuted violently for their faith.

Now today, we're gonna look at more of these signs of the times by looking at several pieces of evidence that Jesus gave. And what I'd like to do actually today is instead of going deeper into Matthew 24, we need to lay some crucial groundwork about what a sign is, something we haven't covered yet, so that we will understand what Jesus is doing in Matthew 24, in John's gospel, in the book of Revelation, and in general.

We need to understand what a sign is, why a sign is so important, why a sign guarantees that Jesus is gonna bring imminent destruction to that people in that generation. All of this, we need to understand.

So with that, part one, signs and imminent judgment. Today, we're gonna be talking about signs, and signs in the ancient world function much like signs do in the modern world. For instance, when I pull up to a stop sign, I am not thinking that I should have stopped a mile earlier.

I'm also, when I see the stop sign, not thinking that I should stop somewhere miles into the future. Imagine if a cop pulled me over and said, why didn't you stop? Well, I was intending to stop a mile down the road.

Of course, that wouldn't make sense. I also wouldn't have the gall to say to that cop that, yeah, I saw the sign, but I knew that it didn't apply to me. Actually, it applies to someone who has not even been born yet in the distant future.

They're gonna see this sign, and it's gonna make sense to them, and they're gonna obey it. It's not for me. That would be the kind of ignorance where I would expect my family to go searching for a well-secured padded room for me to live out my days.

And yet, this is how so many people treat signs in the Bible. They rip them out of their historical setting and their context where they make good sense, and they apply them haphazardly in our world where they don't make any sense at all.

They actually are nonsense. This is how, by the way, we get Apache helicopters out of the locust in the book of Revelation, because people, mostly dispensationals, rip a perfectly good sign out of its world and out of its setting, and then they apply it to our world as if that's where it belongs.

Listen, I would create less confusion if I tore down all of the traffic lights in Manhattan and replaced them with cardboard signs written in Egyptian hieroglyphics than dispensationals have inflicted upon the church.

Now, back to the stop sign metaphor. When I approached that stop sign, I immediately realized that the sign wants me to make an imminent stop. It's not a suggestion, it's a command. It wants me to do something, and what it wants me to do is to maneuver my car that's moving at a brisk 55 miles an hour to a total cessation of movement.

Then, and only then, once I've satisfied the conditions of the stop sign, then I get to move forward again in freedom, having fully obeyed it. That is precisely the way that a sign works in the Bible.

They are given to people who see them from a distance, who need to do some form of repentance and action before they can move forward in freedom. If they disobey the sign, they're not gonna get arrested by the state police, but they are going to come under the wrath of Almighty God.

So in that way, I guess you could say that signs are kind of a big deal. Now, throughout redemptive history, God has used signs to authenticate his messengers, to warn of coming judgment, and to bring deliverance to his people.

Simply put, whenever you see a sign in the Bible, whenever you see a sign in the Bible, which includes visions, parables, and miracles, then you ought to know that the generation that received that sign is getting ready to undergo a period of judgment and salvation.

Signs are warnings. If you keep going, you're gonna drive over the cliff's edge and down into your doom. But if you come to a stop, and if you repent of what you were doing, the sign actually is good news, and it's for your salvation.

In the same way that a sign right on the edge of a cliff would be salvation for those who obey it, and judgment for those who fall off the cliff's edge. That is the two outcomes that every sign undergirds in the Old Testament.

Every sign is either pointing to judgment or salvation for the generation that received that sign. Let me show you what I mean. Example one, the Ark of Noah. Now, just before God drafted the covenant with Noah, he looked down upon the world that he had made, and he was sorry for having made it.

This wasn't because humans messed up the scenery and didn't plant enough palm trees for God's liking. In fact, God was grieved at the fact that the world, a good world that he created, had devolved into pure chaos, misery, and death.

As you remember, God hovered over the great floodwaters of creation, and now was bringing a new floodwater upon the world that had devolved back into chaos. Now that chaos returned, the primordial floodwaters returned as well.

But just before God wiped out every living creature and creeping thing that creeped upon the face of the earth, he called a man named Noah, and he told him to make an ark out of acacia wood coated with pitch, which was a really, really big boat.

And to add a little bit of irony and humor to the story, God didn't tell Noah to move to a port city near an ocean in order to build this massive titanic figure. No, he told him to build a boat in the middle of a landlocked region, where the only way that a boat this size was going to float is if God unleashed a global flood.

That's why the Ark of Noah is considered a sign. It's a sign to the people who were living in that day that they were being warned that all of their evil rebellion against God was going to come to a pitiful end if they did not repent.

It was a sign for them to pump the brakes, to repent at the preaching of Noah and return again to their God and their maker. And yet, after a hundred years of Noah preaching and Noah building this landlocked behemoth, at the end of that hundred years, no one repented.

And God called Noah and his family to enter into that ark, to close the doors and to abandon the world to its own destruction. For Noah and his family, the ark was a symbol of their salvation. It was the vehicle by which they were delivered.

And yet to the rest of the world, it was a sign of their imminent disaster. Example two, the confusion at Babel. Now, undergirding the wonderful narrative of salvation and blessings that God offered to Abraham and his offspring in Genesis 12 through 20 is the dark black blot of Babel in Genesis 11.

At Babel, humanity united in order to defy God's law by building a glorified anthill as a celebration of their magnificence and glory. Instead of spreading out to fill the world with the glory of God, they were seeking to consolidate their own power and to make a name for themselves on the earth, which turned out to be a really bad idea.

In response to their insolence, God performed a dramatic sign. He came down. He came down in their midst and he confused their languages, which accomplished two critical purposes in redemptive history.

First, it accomplished imminent judgment. When God confused the languages in the plains of Shinar on that pitiful day, the immediate effect was that everyone on earth started sounding a bit like farmer Fran.

Me tug dog, yeah.

Okay.

Everyone was yelling out something, but amid the cacophony of the first multilingual seconds of earth's history, the once ambitious and prideful people were now reduced to helpless babes, crying out like no one could understand their shriekings because they couldn't.

By disrupting their ability to communicate with one another, God dismantled their unified rebellion and he ended their collective defiance of his commands to fill the earth with worshipers, Genesis 11, eight through nine.

That was their judgment. But the sign of confused tongues also signaled salvation for the people of God because in the aftermath of Babel's judgment, God's plan of salvation came into really bright and beautiful focus.

He turned from the rebellious nations and he chose one man, one people, who he was gonna make into a nation for his purposes. Abram's call right after Babel was an act of grace by God. All the nations had fallen short of his glory.

All the peoples deserved his wrath. And yet in grace, he called Abram out of the nations. He called him to become a nation, his family to exist in a relationship of blessing with their covenant God. The sign of babbling not only executed judgment on the wicked, but it opened up a path of salvation and covenant blessings for Abraham and his family in righteousness.

God says this to Abraham in Genesis 12. Now, the Lord said to Abram, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land which I will show you and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.

And so you shall be a blessing, Genesis 12, one through two. I want you to notice something here. The people who wanted a great name apart from God ended up nameless in the narrative and they ended up speaking nothing but babble.

But the man who obeyed God, who starts out with one name, gets a great name by the time that the narrative is over because he obeyed God. The sign is showcasing both salvation and judgment. Example three, the birth of Isaac.

After Abram settles in the land, the Lord comes to him and promises the most remarkable sign. He tells Abram that even though he is long past the years of Cialis, that God is going to make him great by giving him more offspring than he could ever count.

According to God, Abram is gonna have more kiddos than the grains of sand on every seashore and more children than the countable stars within the Middle Eastern sky. All of this, God tells him, will come through his nursing home-aged wife named Sarai getting pregnant and having a child of promise that they were going to name Isaac.

Wasn't that a phenomenal sign? Now, so far, and this kind of proves my point, we've seen that signs in the Bible are far from ordinary. In fact, they're nothing short of norm-reversing. They're upheavals that are coming upon people who thought that they had a certain standard of living or a certain standard of way that they do things.

Sign involved things like building a boat in the middle of the wilderness or populations instantly being incapable of understanding one another or a very, very, very, very, very old woman getting ready to have a baby when her womb has been dead for 40 years.

In this way, signs always define logic. They are spectacular on purpose, which signals that ignoring them will lead to ferocious judgment. Because if God goes out of the way to do something that spectacular and you don't notice it, well, you deserve judgment.

That's the point. Now, in the case of Sarai having a baby boy in her octogenarian years, the same two purposes that we've seen already were likewise accomplished. It brought judgment on God's enemies and salvation for God's people.

Think about it. The promise of Isaac's birth is given in the exact same narrative context as God's judgment and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They're literally right in the same part of the Bible.

Two cities that epitomized human depravity, their moral decay, their rebellion against God's authority, and their attempts to violate the angelic visitors, which looked like Nephilim-like behavior that proliferated before the flood, that is happening at the same time that God is promising to Abraham that he's gonna have a son.

God even declared to Abraham in the same conversation that the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is indeed great and their sin is exceedingly grave. I will go down now and see if they have done according to its outcry, which has come to me.

Genesis 18, 20 through 21. Just like God did at Babel, he promises to go down to the wicked city, take an assessment of their behavior, identify their depravity, and unleash destruction upon them. Thus, while living in the land of Canaan, God gave Abraham a multifaceted sign.

His sign was gonna bring life to Abraham's loins. It was gonna bring a child of promise into his family so that he would inherit the land, so that he would possess that nation, and he would receive blessings.

His son would receive the blessings that were promised to his father. And that sign also signaled the doom of nations like Sodom and Gomorrah and also the Canaanites, because it was Abraham's son, Isaac, and his grandson, Jacob, and the family of Israel that end up pushing the Canaanite tribes out of the land.

So the sign is a blessing in the fact that it gave birth to one family and it brought death to another. Example four, the collapse of the Egyptian nation. Now, after Abraham passed away, his grandson and children found themselves fleeing a massive famine and settling in the land of Egypt, which became a temporary cocoon for the newly minted people of Israel.

But as the centuries rolled on, the refuge that they were living in actually turned into a prison. It says that Pharaoh forgot who they were and actually started attacking them. 400 years had passed since the time of Jacob and Joseph and Judah.

And now the people who were becoming fruitful and multiplying across the face of the earth, Exodus 1 -7, were now becoming hostile and a threat to the serpent-loving people of Egypt. Instead of welcoming them as guests, they turned on them and made them slaves, thus setting the stage for God's amazing redemption and retribution on that generation.

Now, from the very first lines of the book of Exodus, the story explodes with a proliferation of signs and wonders like a firework show put on by old Gandalf himself. If you remember the scene in the Lord of the Rings where Mary and Pippin steal the dragon firework and it explodes and it's this massive thing, that's sort of like what Exodus was, but on a scale of magnitude larger.

In fact, in the Bible, there is no period of time that has more signs and more wonders than the Exodus account, than Jesus's ministry in the book of Revelation. Tuck that away for a little bit, that's gonna be important.

Now, these are not just spectacles that are happening in the book of Exodus where Yahweh is just kind of flexing and showing his power over the gods of Egypt. These are flashing neon signs of judgment, warning those people to turn from their wicked ways or else they're going to be destroyed.

God is using a megaphone that tumultuous things are getting ready to happen. Upheavals were looming upon the horizon and for the discerning Egyptians, these signs should have produced repentance and contrition, and some of them actually did repent and follow Israel out of Egypt, which is a sign of God's grace and his mercy as well.

Now, let me give you a few examples of how this works out in the Exodus. The book begins with a very subtle sign of the birth of baby Moses. This little baby is hidden in a miniature little floating ark that is covered with pitch, just like the Ark of Noah, which means that Moses is like a second Noah.

He's gonna deliver his people from the disaster that's getting ready to come. Like the global flood, one group is gonna pass through the waters unscathed and the other group is gonna be drowned in their sins.

This baby Moses was a living sign that God was about to do something spectacular. Signs are imminent expressions of salvation and judgment. Now, 80 years later, after thoroughly humbling Moses from a piece of smoky quartz now down into a lump of pliable clay, God comes to him in the wilderness and speaks to him through a burning bush, which is a sign.

It is a bush where fire has enwrapped it, but not consumed it. And God gives Moses, after giving him that sign, God gives Moses the ability to perform signs and wonders in order to convince the children of Israel that salvation is coming.

And signs in order to harden Pharaoh's heart because judgment is coming. By putting his hand into his cloak and it turning leprous, or by throwing his staff down and it turning into a snake, God wasn't only wowing the crowds with the ancient Criss Angel kind of episode, but he was instead showing them that imminent rescue and imminent judgment were coming.

Israel's gonna be saved, Egypt's gonna be doomed. That's what God was doing. And then, that wasn't even enough, then shortly after this, the 10 plagues began, which were 10 devastating blows that were raining down on Egypt, like Muhammad Ali in the eighth round with George Floyd.

Every blow was like a hammer shattering the pantheon of false gods and their pride for thinking that they could stand against the Holy One of Israel. Rivers of blood, swarms of frogs, darkness so thick that you could feel it.

Every plague was a vivid sign of an announcement that Egypt's end was coming. And meanwhile, in the land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived, everything was peaceful, tranquil, and they were living out God's blessings.

God spared his people, showing that his judgment was precise, that his mercy was intentional, and that he had divided them out for salvation as opposed to the Egyptians who were divided out for destruction.

Now, of the 10 plagues, the 10th plague was certainly the most severe. God commanded the Israelites to paint the blood of a lamb on their doorpost, which would be a sign to the destroying angel that they were to be protected by the blood.

This was also a sign to that very same angel who went all over the land of Egypt, that if that blood was not there, then the Egyptians who were left naked and uncovered, their firstborn son would die.

That night, the angel of death swept through the land, taking every firstborn in all the homes that did not have the blood. And that night, while we do not know specifically how many people it was, it was hundreds of thousands of Egyptian males who died.

Every old man who was a firstborn son, every middle-aged man who was a firstborn son, and every baby who was a firstborn son died that very night, which made this one of the darkest nights in all of human history.

But God gave them signs. He gave them 10 plagues. He gave them Moses who was performing signs. He gave them warnings. He gave them the sign on top of the cliff, don't keep driving. And yet they did, and it led to their disaster.

And their disaster came very quickly after this 10th plague. In a way, all of the previous signs were ratcheting up the intensity because they were leading to the final sign, a final showdown that happened at the Red Sea.

Picture it. God allowed the Israelites to draw the Egyptians hundreds of miles outside of their country for a brutal and a glorious trap. Pharaoh's army had began charging the people of Israel, and they seemed to be pinned down right in front of this large body of water when just then and there, God acted.

He parted the sea, and he turned that ocean into a death trap for Egypt, but a highway for his people. The Israelites walked across the firmest dry ground, likely taking note of the coral formations that once used to sit at the bottom of the sea, but now littered their newly minted freeway.

And as they hustled across the water, or across the floor of the sea, as they hustled across with water towering on both sides, the haughty Egyptians followed in after them like a mouse that comes up to a finely set trap with peanut butter on its spring.

They went for the bait, the trap sprung, and they all lost their heads. As the sea came crashing down, wiping them out in one final stupendous act of definitive judgment. And it declared that God's salvation was for Israel as they sang that song in Exodus 15 on the banks of the sea, that God's salvation was for them.

They said, thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Exodus 14, 30. Judgment and salvation, side by side, given on the generation that received God's warning signs.

Now, let me give just a few extra just for fun. Before moving on, I do want to add just a few more examples of this, because I want us to see with picture perfect clarity what this phenomenon means. Because when we arrive at the Gospels and we see Jesus talking about signs and doing signs and performing wonders and telling parables that he says are signs, or making prophecies about signs and wonders, when we see that, we need to understand what he's doing.

He is calling down judgment upon the Jews. And when we see that in the book of Revelation, we need to know what signs mean. We need to know why they're given. We need to know why that as people 20 centuries later that these signs are not for us.

We are not meant to figure out what they mean or to try to look at the news and to look at Reddit sub-threads and to look at news going on in other countries and try to discover what this means for us.

No, these signs we're giving to them. The signs that Jesus gives were given to them. The signs that John gave in Revelation were given to them. So in order for us to get there, I just want to lay this on a little bit thick and I want us to see how these examples proliferate scripture.

So to that end, here are just a few more examples for us to consider. And maybe there are things you haven't considered before. Number one, think about Joshua and the events of his day. Joshua comes to power just after Moses dies.

So everybody's going to be looking at him and saying, okay, are you the guy? Are you the guy that's going to lead us into the promised land? Are you the guy that Yahweh's power is going to manifest itself upon?

So what does God do to confirm that? Well, he brings Joshua and the people of Israel to a new body of water to show them that he's the same God and still perfectly mighty to lead Joshua as he did with Moses.

He brings them to the River Jordan, Joshua 3, 14 through 17. Then they come to the city called Jericho, a massive fortified city in the ancient world with, it says, descendants of the Nephilim called the Anakim, who were soldiers that made the Israelites feel like grasshoppers.

And without a single arrow and without a single sword and a single javelin, God gave the city over to the Israelites by first giving it a sign. He had the Israelites march the Ark of the Covenant around the city for seven days, allowing every single person to see it.

There was no one inside Jericho who hadn't saw it. The guards who were on the wall told everybody, they're marching around the city and they're doing it for seven days. That signified their judgment. That Ark marching around the city, not their military prowess, not their weapons, not their ability to fight in war, that Ark was a sign of Israel's salvation and Jericho's judgment.

And as they cried out with this massive roar on the seventh day, after they walked around the city seven times, the massive walls came crumbling down into pure rubble and dust and the Israelites burned the city into ash.

Salvation and judgment follow immediately after the sign. See the pattern? Same is true when God calls the sun to stand still in the sky under the conquest of Joshua. Joshua, in order to win an important battle, the sun stopped and it hung in the air and it became a sign of God's love and care for the Israelites and yet a sign of his furious anger for the Canaanites who decided to continue living in darkness, Joshua 10, 12 through 14.

God was bringing Israel home into a safe land where he would be their God and they would be his people, which means salvation. To do that, he was literally going to bring calamitous judgment upon the peoples of the land.

That's Joshua. Think about Elijah and the prophets of Baal. The sign of fire was given. Salvation came out of the sky down and burned the sacrifices that were on the altar and because of that, salvation came to Israel and judgment came upon the prophets of Baal and eventually Jezebel and Ahab's house.

You think about the prayer that Hezekiah gave. Judgment came upon the Assyrians in battle and yet salvation came to the Judeans. We can go on and on and on throughout the Bible with these signs, but what do all of them have in common?

That's the question. They're not just miraculous wonders, but they're showing that judgment is coming quickly on God's enemies. Every time a sign is given, judgment is coming quickly and salvation is coming to God's covenant friends.

It never takes thousands of years to pan out. It just doesn't because that, again, would make nonsense of the idea of a sign. A sign is for the people who see it. You don't see a sign and think that's for someone else.

Signs require actions of repentance or the consequence of death. That is how signs work in the Bible. Now, knowing this, the Judeans of the first century should have repented when they saw the signs that Jesus was performing.

When He came offering them signs and wonders through parables and prophecies, they should have known what was getting ready to happen, but they didn't and they missed it like a drunk driver who was missing the flashing warning signs on the freeway and to that end, they crashed.

And to that end, we need to turn to the ministry of Jesus so that we can see those bright, shining lights of His signs that He littered all through the gospel so that we can see that this theme continues, not just in the Old Testament, but it continues into the New Testament and it gives us great confidence when we interpret Matthew 24 as the end of Jerusalem.

Jesus's Signs in John's Gospel

Part two, Jesus's signs and imminent judgment. The sheer number of signs in Jesus's ministry was not accidental. Jesus, just like it happened before in the Exodus, was heaping up a litany of signs and wonders so that the Jews would let His people go.

Some, because of the signs, repented and they joined Him and praised God for that. They become a part of the mixed multitude that was in union with Jesus, just like the mixed multitude come up out of the land of Egypt, but many like the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes and the upper echelons of Jewish aristocrat power, well, they refused to see the signs at all.

They hardened their hearts like Pharaoh did and they persisted in their sin. To that generation, Jesus gave the signs to damn them. He didn't give them the signs to talk about the comings and goings of 21st century politics, but He gave them to them at their time to remind them that their ruin was upon the horizon.

For instance, let's look at the signs in John's gospel. Everywhere Jesus went, He left some people in awe and others in violent opposition to Him, based entirely on the signs that He was given. He was dividing the people into categories.

There were some who were predestined for destruction and some that were set apart for salvation, and He did that by using signs as a tool for His sifting. Nowhere is this more clear than in the book of John, where Jesus gives seven intentional and very explicit signs that actually use the word sign in the Greek language.

These are signs of warning for that generation, signs of disaster that are coming and also signs of salvation for His people. For instance, in the book of John, the first sign is at the wedding of Cana in Galilee, where Jesus turned water into wine, John 2, 1 -11.

Jesus wasn't merely rescuing a poorly executed party or trying to help out the party planning committee who didn't order enough wine. He was symbolizing the beginning of the Messianic age, a new covenant of spiritual riches and joy that were gonna be breaking into the world because of His reign and His reign had come.

That was the salvation that was coming to His people, but there was also judgment that was embedded into this sign. Because immediately after this joyful event of celebration, He goes to Jerusalem and the Jews there at the temple in Jerusalem are enraged because He cleansed the temple and they even demanded Him, you show us a sign of your authority for doing these things, John 2, 18.

So it was at this point, Jesus gave them a sign. And what was the sign? He gave them the sign that was above all signs. He gave them the sign in which all the other signs were pointing to. He said that His resurrection after three days in the grave was the sign.