151. The Parables of Destruction

The PRODCAST

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Do not be pessimistic and do not fall into the trap of believing that evil is somehow stronger than Christ.

00:07

The gates of hell cannot win, will not win, will not prevail, and his church will move forward.

00:13

The future is not dark. The future is as bright as the promises of God, and his promises are always true.

00:25

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 151,

00:31

The Parables of Destruction. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

00:57

My name is Kendall, and I'm so excited to continue our series on the Olivet Discourse, which we are using as our introduction to the book of Revelation.

01:07

But before we jump in and before we jump back into our series, I wanna tell you about two awesome updates that have been happening on this show.

01:16

This week, we launched our brand new merch store at www .prodthesheep .com.

01:23

That's a brand new website for us, and that's a brand new merch store, and it's our mission in that merch store to prod

01:30

God's sheep, to beat down the enemies, wolves, with post -millennial, snarky,

01:36

Reformed Christian merchandise. On the store, you can find podcast -branded gear, you can find shirts that will mark you safe from the

01:45

Derby Invented Rapture, and so much more stuff than that, that not only looks great and is not only made out of the best quality materials in print -on -demand that I could find, but when you purchase things from the

01:59

Prod Ducks store, ha -ha, you help us get the word out about this channel, and you get to help us spread the message that Jesus wins.

02:10

And that, of course, is the entire point for why this channel exists.

02:15

That's the reason that we plunder the scriptures to see how Jesus will have dominion.

02:21

That's the reason why we viciously and unapologetically attack any system of thinking that buys into a loser mindset, and that is the reason why we spend every ounce of our energy and our effort building.

02:35

That's why we build this store, that's why we built this channel, because I wanna get the message out to more people.

02:41

One podcast episode at a time, one coffee cup at a time, one t -shirt at a time, you get the point.

02:49

So, if you wanna rep Postmillennial Hope, and if you wanna help support this great channel, then go check out the store, www .prodthesheep

02:58

.com, and let me know what you think in the comments section below. I would love your feedback. Now, also, for our second update,

03:06

I'm gonna be beginning a members -only after -hours show called For What It's Worth, where I'm gonna be responding to some of the best and the craziest comments that I receive on the

03:18

YouTube channel each and every week. Comments like the one that I recently received that I was told that I was both simultaneously a witch and a warlock for believing the

03:27

Postmillennial message, so we'll talk about comments like that. Also, I will address things like how there was a woman in the comments recently who truly believes that Donald Trump is the

03:39

Antichrist. So, I wanna look at things like that. Now, another aspect of this show that we're gonna do every single week is

03:45

I wanna look at some of the goofy end times predictions that have been made all throughout church history and also ones that are being made in the modern day.

03:53

Listen, there are tens of thousands of failed eschatological end time predictions, so there's plenty of material, but I wanna look at them, and I wanna show how, over and over and over again, they're funny, but they point out the fact that this brand of eschatological doom and gloom, this we're -living -in -the -last -generation kind of mindset is just wrong, and it is something that we should laugh about, it is something that we should mock, it is something that we should inform people about, and it's gonna be a ton of fun.

04:26

This show is gonna be so much fun. It's not gonna be like the main show where I'm gonna have the lights and the microphones and the cameras and all the fancy tech equipment.

04:36

It's gonna be kind of a behind -the -scenes kind of show where I let my proverbial hair down, where we can laugh together, where maybe we even cry together, where we can continue our goal of making eschatology joyful again, and you can only gain access to that if you join as a member, which

04:55

I'll explain now, because if you're not aware, and we've had a lot of new subscribers since we began the membership tab, we have three levels of membership on this show.

05:06

Then, now, obviously you can support this show by liking it, by sharing it, by subscribing, by all the normal ways, but if you wanna go above and beyond and you wanna help us in a deeper way to keep this show going, to get it out to more people, and all of that, we have three tiers of membership.

05:23

The first is called the Insider's Level, where you get a priority badge on the side of your name so that I can make sure that when you ask questions, you're gonna get an answer, because basically,

05:35

I get a lot of comments, and if you're reading through them, some of them are a little wild, and my goal is actually to give a detailed answer to everyone's question in the comments section, to anyone who wants to learn and has a genuine interest in these topics, but as the channel has grown, and as the channel continues to grow, and as the demands on me as a pastor in a wonderful Christian church in New England called the

06:02

Shepherd's Church, I'm not gonna be able to keep up with the demand, so for literally less than a cup of coffee per month, just $2 .99

06:10

per month, you get my attention. You can ask me anything you want about eschatology, theology, my views on literally anything, and I will prioritize you.

06:20

I will give you a thoughtful answer to your question, even if I don't have time to answer everyone.

06:25

I'm gonna answer you, so that's the first tier, and it's called the Insider's Tier. Now, the second tier of membership is called the

06:32

Defender's Tier, which is $6 .99 a month, still less than a cup of coffee if you go to Starbucks.

06:39

In this tier, you get everything that I just mentioned in the Insider's Level, but you also get access to my new after -hour show called

06:48

For What It's Worth, which as I said before, is gonna be a lot of fun, it's gonna be super informative, it's gonna be wildly entertaining, to say the least.

06:56

So, just for clarity, let me say that once more. If you are a Defender's Level member or higher, you get access to the new show, and to be honest, why wouldn't you want to?

07:06

Because it's gonna be great. So, that's the second tier. Then, if you wanna reach for the eschatological sun and the moon and the stars, and you wanna literally ascend the pinnacle of YouTube membership classes, then join the

07:21

Prod Squad, which is our third -level membership. In addition to the perks that I've mentioned and the access to the new after -hour show

07:27

For What It's Worth, you're also gonna get a 10 % discount on the product's merch store, which means any new and any current gear that we have available in the store, you're gonna get it at a discounted rate.

07:40

Plus, you're also gonna get the ability to ask me directly for special designs.

07:47

Maybe you want to see something in the store that's not there, great, ask me. Like, take for instance, let's say that I have a t -shirt that you like, but it's winter and you'd rather have it in a hoodie.

07:57

If you're in the Prod Squad, you ask, I deliver, bingo -bango, I will design it, make it, and ship it, and it's good to go.

08:05

Or, let's say that you have a particular funny quote from Martin Luther, or you wanna see something designed that you have an idea for it, or maybe you've drawn something up.

08:16

If you have a cool idea of a new design that we can put on the product store, if you're in the

08:21

Prod Squad, you get to help me bring those new concepts to life so that everyone can enjoy them.

08:27

And as an added benefit, if you're the one who has the idea, if you're responsible for giving me a design or giving me an idea that I put on a shirt or a coffee cup or a hoodie or whatever,

08:38

I'm gonna give it to you at cost. That means whatever it cost me to make it, that's what you're gonna get it for.

08:45

The show is not gonna benefit from that at all. We're not gonna make any resources off of that.

08:50

You're gonna get it at an incredibly discounted rate, which is what it cost me to make it. And that means that there is a lot of power that you hold as a

08:58

Prod Squad member, and I pray that you steward it well. Now, if that were not enough, you're also gonna get mentioned in every single episode at the beginning and at the end of every episode as being one of the coolest humans on planet

09:12

Earth, and you get mentioned every week. You also get the unique pleasure and satisfaction of knowing that you are helping this message and this channel reach more people at the highest level.

09:23

So every week, I wanna encourage you to all the members and all the ones who support this show and everyone who watches and everything in between.

09:31

Every week, I get emails, text messages, and comments that people are being convinced of post -millennialism from this show.

09:41

They're being convinced that futurism is not the proper hermeneutic for biblical eschatology from this show, which

09:47

I think is absolutely incredible. I get messages all the time saying, thank you so much for putting out this content.

09:55

This has helped me see the Bible in a new way. This is opening up my eyes to the truth. I've never seen this before.

10:01

I don't feel afraid anymore. I have conversations all the time. So I am thankful for you and thankful for your support, and I wanna do everything that I can to keep this momentum going.

10:12

That's why every dollar that comes into the show, into the store, or even through the memberships or whatever else, every dollar that comes in goes right back into advertising and paying the bills for this channel because I don't care about the money.

10:29

I don't do this for the money. If I did, then I would not have chosen to do post -millennial eschatology on YouTube.

10:37

I would have probably filmed myself getting hurt like on Jackass videos, or I would have done something else that tickled the ears of the world like the rest of the crap that you see on this platform.

10:48

But what I'm doing, I'm doing it because I want to see this message get out to more people.

10:54

I wanna see the church invigorated with joy. I wanna see the kingdom of Jesus advance in New England and United States of America and beyond.

11:03

I want to see that. So I'm doing this to change the world. I'm doing this.

11:09

I'm putting forth my effort and all of us have to figure out how to do that in our own life. But I'm doing this to defeat eschatological defeatism.

11:16

I'm doing this to bring hope and joy back into the Christian life and to reinvigorate once more a

11:21

Protestant work ethic that builds Christendom again, that rips it back out of the hands of the

11:28

Joe Bidens and the AOCs and the Chuck Schumers and the deep state swamp rats who've been in charge for far too long.

11:35

Now is the time for this country. Now's the time for Christians to take this country back, to implement biblical law, biblical morality again, to get rid of the insanity that we've been seeing in our country.

11:48

So with that, every dollar that's spent on the store, which is prodthesheep .com, and every dollar spent on memberships are going to be used to make the glorious gospel of Jesus more famous, to increase the reach of this channel, to help make more men and women post -millennial in this country, and to retake

12:07

America and the world with a hopeful, glorious vision of Jesus's kingdom. So with that, check out the store, join as a member to get those added benefits, and to be subscribed to my new after -hour show.

12:21

Also, continue to like, subscribe, comment, share, and send this out via carrier pigeon or whatever else.

12:28

And now, with all of that, let's dive into today's show by giving a little bit of a

12:34

Olivet recap. An Olivet recap.

12:40

Now, if you've been with us throughout this entire series, then congratulations, because you've received the kind of eschatological training that should be mandatory for every pastor and seminary professor and Christian who's wanting to not be duped by the end times grift that's been running amok for 100 years.

13:00

You now have the tools to see what Jesus was actually saying in the text in order to dismantle the lies of dispensationalism and to shatter the eschatological defeatism, and to walk in the victorious confidence that Christ is reigning now, that his kingdom is actually advancing, that his enemies are being crushed beneath his feet,

13:20

Psalm 110 .1, 1 Corinthians 15 .25. But before we move forward in the series, we need to take a step back.

13:29

We need to see the whole battlefield before we can land the kill shot. And that means that if we're gonna properly understand

13:36

Matthew 24, then we need to understand where it fits inside of Matthew's gospel as a whole, how it functions within the final days of Jesus's earthly ministry, and how it indisputably fulfilled the events in the first century leading up to 80, 70.

13:55

Now, as we've seen from the previous weeks, Matthew's gospel is not just a random collection of Jesus's stories and little events that happened in his life.

14:05

It's not a diary. It is a theological masterpiece. It is structured, it is intentional, it is eschatologically loaded, and it demonstrates how

14:15

Jesus is the true Israel, the true son of God, the true king, the true prophet, the true priest, the true sacrifice, the one who will bring judgment on the old covenant world and establish his unshakable kingdom forever.

14:29

Matthew builds his case from the very first chapter of the book. For instance, Matthew 1, we see how

14:35

Jesus is the true king, the true and greater David who's gonna rule over all the nations. We see how he's the true

14:41

Moses who's delivered from the homicidal maniac emperor who tried to kill him as an infant,

14:47

Matthew 2. How like Moses, he passed through the waters in Matthew 3. How like Moses and the wilderness people, he succeeded in the wilderness where they failed,

14:56

Matthew 4. And we saw how he stood upon a new mountain and taught God's people the new law like Moses in Matthew 5.

15:06

We've seen how he's the new temple in Matthew 12 and he's replacing the old covenant world with a new covenant blessings in Matthew 21 through 23.

15:14

Everything in Matthew's gospel is pointing to a transition that is happening. All of the old types and shadows are waning and the new, the glorious, the better, the true, the good, all of it is coming.

15:26

The end of one world is happening right before our very eyes in the book of Matthew and the dawning of a new world is coming.

15:34

A new world with a new kingdom built on better promises, Hebrew 8 .6, governed by a better king,

15:40

Hebrews 8 .13, ruled by a better ruler, Revelation 19 .16. And one of the ways

15:46

Jesus will accomplish this is by making war with the old covenant world and giving it the final blow.

15:54

So, if he's gonna usher in a new covenant world, a new temple, a better sacrifice, a new

16:01

Jerusalem, a new priesthood, then he's going to have to resoundingly draw the old covenant world to a complete and total close.

16:13

And nowhere is that more apparent in Matthew's gospel than in Matthew 21 through 23.

16:20

And it is, of course, apparent all throughout the gospel, but it really drives the point home in Matthew 21 through 23 and it's that context that we need before we get started today.

16:31

And it is to that context that we now turn. Matthew 21 through 24, the final showdown in Jerusalem.

16:42

Now, when we get to Matthew 21, things have changed. The streets of Jerusalem were now choked out with pilgrims, thousands upon thousands of people who had traveled to the city who are now pressing into the city for the

16:56

Passover feast. And thinking that this year was just like any other year.

17:01

The hopes were high, there was jubilation in the air. The air was also, however, thick with tension because, number one,

17:09

Rome's presence was suffocating. There was armed soldiers lurking on every rooftop. There were standing guards in strategic points throughout the city and the streets.

17:16

The Pharisees and the Sadducees, who were those self -righteous wolves, were prowling around the city with their long -flowing robes and fancy tassels and phylacteries.

17:27

And they were also whispering conspiracies and looking in every direction, ready in a moment to find

17:34

Jesus so that they could destroy him. So there was tension in the air. You had Rome and you had the

17:39

Pharisees on a war path to destroy the Lord of Glory. So it was in some ways like every other

17:45

Passover, but in many other ways, it was completely different. Now, just at that moment, when the tension seemed to be rising,

17:56

Jesus came riding into the city on a donkey, which is not a small thing because that's exactly how

18:01

Solomon rode into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey with people celebrating and singing and praising

18:08

God. That's how Jesus rode into the city. He came like Solomon riding. Why?

18:13

Because he's a king who was coming into the city to take dominion over his kingdom.

18:19

And the people at that point erupted. They were singing, Hosanna, Hosanna to the son of David.

18:25

They threw their cloaks in the street. They tore off branches from local trees. They were waving them like victory banners.

18:33

Their voices were thundering throughout the Kidron Valley. They were shaking the very foundations of the city.

18:38

And in their minds, a Messiah had arrived, one who was going to lead them to throw off the shackles of Roman oppression, imperialism, and lead them into national autonomy and local dominion.

18:54

But very soon, they probably noticed that Jesus didn't have any trumpets.

19:02

He didn't have any armies. He didn't have any drawn swords. He was just a carpenter, a rabbi, a king, yes, but a prophet riding humbly into the city that was notorious for killing the prophets.

19:18

The Sanhedrin, as they were watching these events occur, they felt the power dynamic shifting.

19:23

They felt the crowds abandoning them and turning to Jesus. And the priests and the scribes, they knew it.

19:30

They sensed it too. They knew that this was not just some man on a donkey.

19:36

This was an invasion. They knew that if they didn't squash this, that if they didn't get this under control, that Rome was gonna come in and they were gonna look at this and view this as a revolution, and they were going to squash it and they were gonna eliminate whatever national sovereignty that Judah had left.

19:52

John 11, 48 is their confession. Now, during the spectacle,

19:58

Jesus made it abundantly clear where the war was actually aimed at.

20:04

He didn't go to Herod's palace to take on the Itamian king. He didn't go to Antonia's fortress to challenge

20:10

Caesar and his local governors, no. And he also didn't assemble a brigade of revolutionaries to reclaim the city from occupation, no.

20:21

Jesus brought the war straight to the city and specifically straight to the temple.

20:28

And he demonstrated to everyone in that city who the real enemies were.

20:36

You see, at that time, according to the thoroughgoing Jew of the day, the enemy would have been the

20:44

Gentile vermin. It would have been Rome. It would have been those who were holding their nation captive, taking and taxing the life out of them and polluting their sacred spaces with their

20:55

Gentile filth. And yet, when God himself came in the flesh, he didn't condemn the

21:03

Romans and he didn't condemn the Gentiles. He ate with them, Luke 7, 36.

21:09

He healed their sick children, Matthew 8, 5 -13. He saved their entire city, like those in Samaria in John 4, 39 -42.

21:17

And it was crystal clear what God was communicating here. The enemies of God were not the pagans.

21:27

It wasn't the Romans, wasn't the Samaritans. It was the Jews. The Jewish leadership was the ones who were breaking covenant with God.

21:38

The Jewish aristocracy, the ones who were leading the city and its temple to become a fruitless institution.

21:45

And from the moment God in human flesh stepped inside the temple, he brought war and he brought chaos.

21:56

Tables began overturning, coins began scattering, greedy merchants were driven out with a hand -braided whip.

22:04

The stinging of the crack of the leather against the flesh, the cries of the protest, the thundering of Jesus's voice in Matthew 21, 12 -13.

22:14

Calling out to the people saying, it is written. My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.

22:24

Of course, Jesus running them out of the temple like this, messing up their entire industry like that, left the leaders furious.

22:36

Their faces were burning with rage. They could not believe that he had the gall to do such a thing.

22:43

Even after they were already wanting to kill him. Now, on the other side of the equation, the people loved it.

22:52

The people cheered. The blind and the lame, they came to Jesus. They rushed at him and he healed them right there in the temple precinct.

23:02

What is he doing? He's showing them, the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes, what the temple was supposed to be all along.

23:09

It was supposed to be a place where the people could come and get healed. And yet they had weaponized it.

23:15

They had used it to extract money from people through their wicked currency exchange program that they had there.

23:24

They had used it to ostracize the Gentiles, stuffing so many animals in the court of the Gentiles that the

23:29

Gentiles couldn't even come in and pray. So Jesus welcomed them and he healed them right then and there in front of the priest, which was a direct slap in their faces and a direct challenge to their authority and a direct statement from Christ saying, you have not done your job.

23:48

Now, I'm gonna be the true priest and I'm gonna heal God's people right here at the steps of the temple.

23:54

And naturally, as you might assume, that didn't go over well for the Pharisees.

23:59

But for the rest of the city, the entire night was vivid. It was lively.

24:05

Jerusalem was buzzing with speculation of who was this man? Like, why are the priests angry at him?

24:12

He's sitting here at this temple, he's healing us. He's caring for us, he's loving us. Why would the priest be trying to arrest him?

24:19

Was this man really the Messiah or had everybody fallen for some sort of clever trick?

24:26

There was all sorts of speculation that would have been swirling around the city as the sun went down that night.

24:32

Now, the next morning, they would have gotten even more clarity on the question because early in the morning,

24:38

Jesus rose and he was at Lazarus' house. So he rose up and he heads right for the city again.

24:44

And he comes back with a bang. On his way to the city, the disciples saw him stopped by a local fig tree where the branches were thick with leaves, lush and promising.

24:55

But as Jesus went closer, he noticed that there was no fruit on its branches.

25:01

And what does Jesus do? Well, just like the city of Jerusalem and its temple the night before that gave him no fruit, with the same rage and intensity and righteous anger that caused him to chase the rebels out of the courts of the

25:18

Gentiles, now he turned to the rebellious plant and he said this, may no one ever eat fruit from you again.

25:27

Now, at that point, the tree withered right before their very eyes. The disciples were stunned. They had no idea at the time that Jesus was talking about more than the tree.

25:37

They didn't understand that he was talking about the city of Jerusalem, a city that on the outside had all of this glory and outward splendor, but on the inside was like dead men's bones.

25:48

It was a town, Jerusalem, that had promised to bear fruit for God. But when

25:53

God came in the flesh, but when God came walking into the city and looking, it had nothing to give him but a few songs and leaves.

26:02

Jerusalem was a city that was just as withered as that fig tree. And it would likewise be just as cut down and thrown into the fire a mere 40 years later as that tree would in Jesus's day.

26:18

The disciples, they're not gonna understand this till later, but the sign had been given and it pointed to AD 70.

26:27

Now, back inside the temple, the air was thick with hostility. Jesus walks from the fig tree back into the city and he goes right back to the temple and he goes right back to the chief priest and the

26:36

Pharisees who are still angry over what happened the night before. And he comes ready to engage.

26:44

And by the way, over the night, I guess the Pharisees and the elders and the scribes and all of them had put their heads together in a little think tank of sorts to try to trap

26:52

Jesus in their questioning. This is what they said to try to trap the King of Kings and the

26:57

Lord of Lords. They said, by what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority?

27:03

They protested. Now, the crowd fell silent because they're waiting to hear what Jesus was gonna say.

27:09

No one had ever challenged the Pharisees like this before. And because of that, the tension was sharp. It was so sharp and so thick that you could cut it with a knife.

27:18

But Jesus, calm as ever, turned the trap right back on them saying this,

27:24

I will ask you one question. And if you tell me the answer, then

27:29

I will tell you by what authority I do these things. John's baptism, was it from heaven or from men?

27:36

Now the Sadducees stood there frozen and no one ever wanted to challenge the status of John.

27:44

Because if they said his baptism was from heaven, then they were gonna condemn themselves for rejecting John. But if they said that it was for men, then the people were gonna turn on them because the people believed that John was a prophet and that he was.

27:58

So they had a little huddle. And in their wicked cloister, they whispered, they probably argued among themselves, they stalled for time.

28:07

And then out of cowardice, realizing that they had to give an answer, they simply said, we do not know.

28:15

And I think, I don't know, I wasn't there, obviously, neither were you. But I think at that point,

28:21

Jesus might have smiled his last smile, that he smiled for a while. And he looked right at them and he said, well, then neither will

28:30

I tell you by what authority I do these things. The crowd must have roared with laughter.

28:37

The Pharisees, the Sadducees, those smug, self -righteous know -it -alls who look down their nose at everyone, who were constantly weaponizing the

28:46

Mosaic covenant to wound the common man, were now standing humiliated. Jesus had done it, but he wasn't finished.

28:56

Because with the gathered crowds hanging on his every word, Jesus unleashed now, because they refused to answer him, three scathing parables that tell us precisely what he meant.

29:10

The first parable that he tells them is about two sons. There's a father, and the father says to the sons, go and do such and such.

29:18

And the one son said that he would obey the father, but he didn't. And then the other son said that he was not going to obey the father, but he ended up obeying him.

29:27

Jesus told the Pharisees. He explained it to them. He told them what he meant. He said that they were the children who promised obedience to God, and yet in fact spat in the face of God by never doing it.

29:40

And the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the real vermin of the earth that the

29:46

Pharisees hated so much, the ones who had made their living out of sinning, they were going to be the ones who initially refused obedience to God, but who had entered the kingdom before the

29:59

Pharisees, the scribes, and the Sadducees. I can't imagine. I can't imagine how much more of an infuriating story that you could tell, but Jesus does it.

30:09

He goes now to a second parable, and it was even more scathing, because when comparing the

30:15

Jewish leaders to the wicked men who killed the vineyard's owner's son,

30:20

Jesus told them that they were the ones who were going to kill God's son, and they were the ones who were going to have the kingdom of God taken away from them and given to a people who bear fruit for God.

30:32

Did you see it? Did you see it? The city that offered him no fruit when he rode in on a donkey, the temple that offered him no fruit when he drove out the money changers, the fig tree that offered him no fruit when he came to it that morning, and now he's telling them that because of all that fruitlessness, they are going to be destroyed, and the kingdom is going to be taken away from them and given to a people who would bear fruit for God.

31:01

This is not random, angry Jesus. This is covenant indictment. This is covenant woe.

31:08

This is longstanding. You have not done what you said you were going to do. You've not fulfilled the obligations of the covenant.

31:14

The covenant was that you would obey God and you would bear fruit for God, and you would become utterly, totally fruitless, and the

31:23

Pharisees were picking up on the fact that he was talking about them, but the last parable is the most scathing of them all, and that parable,

31:35

Jesus compares them to people who refuse to go to a wedding feast, but it wasn't just any old wedding feast.

31:43

It was a wedding feast for the marriage of the king, his crown prince, the crown prince of heaven,

31:49

Jesus, and Jesus told them that the king, who was God, invited them to celebrate in the marriage of his son, which is

31:56

Jesus, and they refused to come, but even more than that, they were the ones who were going to kill the heralds that God sent out to invite them.

32:05

They were the ones who were going to kill the disciples who were sent out to invite them, and because of that, because they killed the prophets in the

32:12

Old Testament, because they killed Jesus' disciples in the New Testament, and because they refused to come to the marriage supper of the lamb, where Christ and his church would be married forever, because of that, the king was going to send his armies and set their city on fire until no one was left among them, which is

32:32

Jesus' way of saying, you are the ones who are about to be destroyed by God when

32:39

God brings his armies from Rome and brings them into the city and sets your city on fire.

32:45

How much more obvious could Jesus have been? And while many today fail to see the connection

32:52

Jesus is making, they think it's a good story, that if Jesus gives you an invitation, you ought to come, because if you don't come, then you will go to hell where there's fire, and if you do come, then you'll enter into the marriage feast, and that's heaven, but could it be that we've actually missed the primary point?

33:13

Yeah, of course, there's a spiritual point there, there's an application there, but could it be that we've missed the primary point that Jesus is talking to the

33:20

Jews, the ones who actually killed the prophets? You and I haven't killed the prophets. The ones who actually stoned, murdered, and martyred the disciples?

33:32

You and I haven't done that, and while there's a spiritual application, the actual application that the

33:39

Pharisees would have gotten there was that, wait a minute, he's saying we killed the prophets, and our ancestors killed the prophets, he's saying that we're going to kill the disciples, he's saying that God is going to send his armies and set our city on fire, and that is precisely what he was saying, and they seem to understand that they knew that Jesus was talking about them, because in Matthew 21, 45, it says that they understood he was talking about them, so if you're reading these parables, and you think that, oh, this is about me, this is about I need to respond to Jesus, I need to make sure that I attend the wedding feast, and all of that is future, that's heaven, that's me with Jesus in eternity, you've missed it, because the

34:20

Pharisees said, no, he's not talking about you, he's talking about us, that's why we killed him, because he was talking about us, because he was embarrassing us in front of our people, in front of our city, in front of our town, we're the power brokers, we're the ones who are in control, we're the religious leaders, not this messianic upstart, and because of that, they knew that he was talking about them, they weren't dim -witted dispensational types who accuse everyone of spiritualizing the text, they saw it loud and clear,

34:50

Jesus believed that they were in the covenantal crosshairs, and they were about to die, and if that were all that we had to prove the point, then it would certainly be enough,

35:02

I mean, all of 21 and all of 22 proves the point, but when you get to 23, where Jesus pronounces seven covenant woes upon the city, he curses the city, and he announces that his temple's gonna be left desolate,

35:16

Matthew 23, 38, and then privately, with his disciples on the

35:21

Mount of Olives, he lays out the timeline for all of these things, and he tells them when it's gonna happen, what's gonna be the signs at the end of the age, and all of that, and he tells them that false messiahs are gonna come,

35:32

Matthew 24, 5, which we've seen has happened, earthquakes and famines are gonna come, Matthew 24, 7, wars and rumors of wars are gonna happen,

35:39

Matthew 24, 6, lawlessness is gonna break out in Judah, Matthew 24, 12, tribulations are gonna come upon the church,

35:45

Matthew 24, 9, great tribulations are gonna come upon the Judeans, Matthew 24, 21, the abomination of desolation is gonna happen in the temple courtyard,

35:54

Matthew 24, 15, and all of that is gonna plague the Jews for 40 years until their covenant era is over,

36:03

Matthew 24, 34. And while we've explained in all of these things so far, and we've explored each of those aspects in great detail, we've shown how all of this proves a first century fulfillment upon the

36:17

Jews, what we've not yet done is what our passage today is doing, and that's talk about how the genre of parable and how

36:26

Jesus uses parables to actually leave the city condemned.

36:32

And just as an aside, before we move on, I find it incredible that Jesus in Matthew 24 uses three different genres in order to get his point across.

36:41

He begins with the genre of dialogical conversation, the kind of language that you would use between you and your friend, and he does that in Matthew 24, verses three through 26, but in verse 27, all the way to 31, he switches to the

36:55

Old Testament apocalyptic style because he wants his Jewish disciples to understand that he's quoting

37:02

Jewish Old Testament scriptures to talk about a Jewish calamity that's gonna come upon the

37:08

Jews. And now in our passage today, he switches to another genre type.

37:16

This is the third switch, and he switches to the genre of parable, and he tells simple stories, and he gives a lived -out message, and he uses this genre not to tell a sweet little nursery rhyme or bedtime story.

37:36

He uses the genre of parable to tighten the noose around their neck until they die.

37:43

And that brings us to our passage today, which we're gonna read, then we're gonna discuss.

37:49

That passage is Matthew 24, 32 through 33. This is what it says.

37:55

Now learn the parable from the fig tree. When its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that the summer is near.

38:05

So you too, when you see all these things, recognize that he is near right at the door.

38:12

Matthew 24, 32 through 33. And that leads us to part one.

38:19

Parables and dual -purpose comings. Now, when it comes to the comings of Christ, we've talked about this, the parable shed much light on why the

38:30

Son of God came. Contrary to the popular evangelical notion, Jesus came for much more than simply to save sinners.

38:39

You ask an average person, why did Jesus come? We came to save sinners. Yes and amen. But he also came to a specific people at a specific time at a specific context and for a specific dual -functioning purpose that often gets overlooked.

38:55

That purpose was yes to bring salvation to his people, but the only way that he was gonna bring salvation in a new covenant way was to bring destruction to the old covenant.

39:06

So therefore, his second purpose in coming was to bring judgment upon his enemies.

39:12

Judgment upon his enemies, salvation to his covenant friends which can be demonstrated in many ways, in many genres, but let's focus in on the parables of Christ because the parables show us this very clearly.

39:25

For instance, when Christ comes, he will identify two groups of people. Those who are gonna be judged and those who are gonna be saved.

39:32

Those who are gonna be damned and those who are gonna be redeemed. And these two themes show up in the vast majority of the parables.

39:39

And they give us insight into Jesus's conception of what his incarnation was and what it was meant to accomplish.

39:46

And the genre of parables demonstrates this perfectly. For instance, in one parable, a righteous man builds his house upon the rock where the wicked man in his hubris builds his house upon the sand,

39:59

Luke 6, 46 through 49. Now in that story, the righteous man survives the near -term calamity and experiences ongoing blessings because he was wise in where he built his house.

40:11

And the wicked man who built his house upon the sand undergoes sudden calamitous destruction when the storm comes.

40:20

And this leads us to a very important point. Truth from parables like these can be and even should be applied in spiritual and universal ways.

40:29

Since everyone who builds their life on Jesus Christ will ultimately and eternally be spared from the storm, the eternal storm that is to come.

40:39

Whereas building your life on anything else is gonna warrant eternal calamity and hell forever. Yes and amen.

40:45

So in a way, we all should apply this passage in our life and see it that way.

40:51

But as I said before, spiritualized interpretations often miss the most poignant reality that this would have conveyed to the original audience because Jesus warned that a first century storm was coming and that those who were going to survive would need to build their life upon him, which gained terrifying clarity in the lead up to 80, 70.

41:16

For instance, Jesus warned that a first century storm was coming, that it was looming upon the horizon. And only those who built their life upon him, the true rock of ages, was actually going to survive it.

41:29

But those who did not, the Jews who didn't root their life in or on the rock of Christ were going to be destroyed like that little shanty sitting on the beach.

41:39

That's what Jesus is saying. So I wanna make this very clear here. The near term application to the first century audience could not have been more clear that in a very short amount of time, a storm was gonna come that was gonna test the foundation of your life.

41:57

If your life was built on the rock of Christ, you would survive. If your life was built on the sand of Judaism, you would be destroyed.

42:05

That's the near term fulfillment. Now, again, I'm not saying that these parables don't have application to our life as well.

42:14

And we can understand the same meaning behind it that the first century audience would have understood that if I build my life on Christ, I'm going to have life.

42:24

If I build my life on the stock market, if I build my life on my family, if I build my life on my job, if I build my life on whatever else, all of that is equivalent to the first century sands of Judaism.

42:39

It will not save you in the same way that it did not save them. That's the application.

42:46

And that kind of dualism between the imminent doom of the wicked and the near blessing of the righteous is too overt for us to ignore.

42:53

Yes, it has a universal meaning, but it also has a near term meaning to the people that actually heard the parable in the first place.

43:00

Here's another example. The sheep are going to be brought into blessing while the goats are going to be set apart for destruction,

43:07

Matthew 25, 31 through 36. That's talking in a near term way about the wheat of Jesus's early church being set apart for life and the goats, the

43:18

Jews who thought that they were sheep, but they were actually goats are going to be set apart for destruction.

43:23

Here's another one. The wheat is going to be stored in Christ's heavenly barns and the tares are going to be thrown into the flames,

43:29

Matthew 13, 24 through 30. The branches that bear fruit will be pruned for greater yield while all of those who are fruitless are going to be burned for their worthlessness,

43:38

John 15, one through 11. The king is going to bring his new guest into the joy of his wedding while sending his armies to destroy those who are found unworthy,

43:46

Matthew 22, one through 14. On and on we can go. The parables tell us something about how

43:52

Jesus viewed his first century world, that there was two groups of people. There was one who was going to enter life.

43:58

There was one who was going to be reserved for death. There was one who was going to have blessings. There was one who was going to have deep abiding curses.

44:06

The parables tell us that Jesus believed that a reckoning was coming, that a separation event was coming where one group was going to be separated out from another group and that group was going to be set apart for destruction.

44:22

Now, before we apply this to the parable that we see in Matthew 24, we need to understand another aspect of what a parable is and that's the timeframe aspect of a parable because the timeframe aspect is really actually critical for us understanding what a parable is.

44:40

So with that, let's go to part two, clarifying parabolic time.

44:47

Now, while you may be thinking that I'm stretching the genre of parable to fit my preterist agenda,

44:53

I would point out that a lot of these parables actually add clarifying elements of time embedded in them, which lets us know more about what's going to be going on in the first century than a hyper -spiritualized application can account for.

45:08

For instance, in the all too common spiritualized way of viewing the parables, we act like these stories were written for us, that they were included in the

45:18

New Testament canon for our benefit, for our edification, for our little quiet time before driving off to work in the morning.

45:26

We functionally pretend that Jesus was telling this story to a real audience while ignoring his real audience who were listening to these stories and who were trying to figure out what they meant for them.

45:37

Ah, that doesn't matter. It concerns things that are going on in my life, in my world, in my circumstances.

45:44

That's the way we treat the parables. And while it is true that all people at all times can glean meaning from these classic tales,

45:53

Jesus' parables also very clearly address events that he believes apply to his first century audience and events that were going to happen in their world and in their lifetime.

46:03

And the more we understand this principle and we read the Bible in this way, the more we'll actually understand what the

46:09

Bible is saying so that we can rightly apply it to our lives. For instance, Christ tells a story about himself being the master.

46:19

He's a master and he portrays himself as a nobleman who departs for a long journey and he entrusts his servants with responsibilities while he's gone.

46:28

Well, when he returns, he rewards the faithful servants and the wise servants and the ones who remain diligent and obedient and steadfast in all of their duties by giving them even greater responsibility and favor,

46:40

Luke 12, 35 through 44. But to the wicked, lazy servant, to the rebellious servant who said, oh, my master's gone for a long time and his delay is now an opportunity for my lawlessness.

46:54

Well, to that one who abused his fellow servants and indulged himself in drunkenness and neglected his charge, the master will return in judgment.

47:02

And the parable says that he will come back and cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers and will bring upon him the full measure of his wrath,

47:13

Luke 12, 45 through 48. Now, this isn't an abstract parable about some distant event that's gonna happen at the end of time.

47:23

This was a prophecy. This is a parabolic prophecy that was fulfilled in 8070 when

47:28

Christ returned in judgment against Jerusalem. The wicked and unfaithful servants in this context are the

47:35

Jewish leaders, the ones who rejected the Messiah, the ones who persecuted his followers, the ones who were literally getting drunk and who were robbing and who were doing all sorts of violence, who were defying their stewardship of God's covenant house.

47:47

They were the ones who were destroyed by Rome, which became the rod of God's covenant fury, raising their city, slaughtering the faithless, actually cutting them in pieces and leaving the once glorious temple a heap of ruins, just as Christ foretold.

48:01

Meanwhile, the faithful servants in the parable, the church, those who heeded his warning and remained steadfast in their allegiance to him, they escaped the destruction and were preserved and were given authority in the new world, the new covenant world of his kingdom, where they were given cities and properties and their sacrifices were multiplied 10, 100, even a thousandfold.

48:25

This parable marks the transition from the old covenant world to the fullness of Jesus's kingdom with this 40 year window of time that is communicated as a long journey.

48:35

And the temptation for us today is to read a multiple thousand year gap into texts like these, supposing that the contents apply to us or some future generation in some very general way.

48:49

Beyond breaking the most basic rules of biblical hermeneutics, that is not how the story of a parable works.

48:55

In a parable, a human master goes on a human journey that seems especially long to his human servants.

49:04

And when he returned, those same servants were still alive, which means that it wouldn't have been possible for him to go on a 2000 year journey.

49:14

Had the master in the story left with the intention of a multi -millennia expedition, both he and his slaves would have been dead before the turn of the century.

49:25

That's because a parable operates in real world logic and real world rules.

49:32

Humans are humans, birds are birds, trees are trees. We're not talking about things that are outside of the rules of common ordinary experience.

49:42

A human going on a very long journey could be gone for 10 years, could be gone for 20, and a very long journey could be counted as a 40 year journey.

49:51

But if he were gone for 2000 years, the logic of the entire story would break down. That is also why

49:57

Jesus doesn't tell any parables of teleportation or men flying like birds, because that's not how a parable works and that's not how the world works.

50:07

A parable is a story that is grounded in the rules of reality and it is contextually applicable to the audience and their time period with which they live.

50:18

That's why Jesus tells stories about fishermen. Maybe you live in Nebraska. Well, odds are you're not fishing in a great big vessel on the sea, because you don't have one.

50:29

That's why he tells all kinds of stories about farming. Maybe you live in Newfoundland and you don't have a farm.

50:35

Does the story not apply to you? Of course it applies to you, but Jesus is creating stories that fit within the context of the first century world to give meaning that is especially pertinent to the people who are listening to it.

50:51

In this way, it seems like Jesus was preparing his disciples for a long period of time between his first incarnation and his judgment return when he comes back and literally cuts up the rebels in pieces.

51:07

It seems like that he's preparing them for a long time away, where he was gonna reward those who were faithful to him and he was gonna cut in pieces those who rejected him.

51:15

All of this makes good sense if it's a 40 year window of time that we're talking about and none of it makes sense if it's a 2000 plus year journey.

51:26

And while so many haven't actually stopped and taken the time to read the real world first century context into the parables, doing so at a bare minimum, it enriches our understanding of what

51:40

Jesus was telling us and it also sheds light on what parables are actually for, which is to communicate a purpose to a particular audience.

51:50

And with that, now we need to also consider part three, clarifying parabolic purpose.

51:59

Now, parables at first glance seem like playful, engaging little stories, they capture the imagination, they stir the curiosity, they invite contemplation.

52:10

You've probably seen a pastor before who is really good at storytelling and he stands up and he puts one hand in his pocket and he says, let me tell you a story.

52:18

And then all of a sudden your nerves kind of calm down, you relax and you're like, oh, this is gonna be good.

52:24

That's not what parables are. In scripture, parables are not just benign, comforting illustrations, they are stories of judgment.

52:37

Parables are always on the cusp of imminent judgment and there's really two kinds of parables.

52:44

There's parables that are for those who are in the covenant blessed category and there's parables for those who are in the covenant judgment category, but parables themselves always show up in the

52:55

Bible just before judgment. So when do parables show up? Well, they show up in the prophets just before the exile.

53:02

They show up in the gospels just before AD 70. Parabolic language is language that shows up immediately before God is getting ready to send judgment on a people.

53:14

Their presence signals the fact that God's patience has ran out and they appear when the covenant people have stiffened their necks so long and ignored the prophetic warnings for so long and they've made themselves so ripe for destruction that God is now going to talk to them like they're two year olds.

53:33

At such times, God in his mercy speaks to them in parables in the simplest possible terms, like a father reducing complex truths down to a baby.

53:46

And yet, when that clarity comes, greater accountability comes with it because when divine truth has been reduced down to the elementary level and it is still rejected even then, then the rebellion is no longer one of ignorance, it's one of outright defiance.

54:03

Because if you understand the parable and you still disobey, think about the judgment.

54:10

It is given more is required kind of thing. And for that, when the parables come and then they still reject the parables, that's when judgment is coming.

54:21

That's when judgment is certain. That's why I say that God is merciful because before he brings judgment, he brings the language down to the lowest level possible to make sure that people understand it so that they are culpable so that judgment will come.

54:37

That is sort of the principle of parables. So the biblical pattern of this is unmistakable.

54:44

Wherever parabolic language emerges, judgment's looming on the horizon. That's not coincidental, it's covenantal.

54:49

For instance, in Isaiah 6, 9 through 10, God commands the prophet saying this, go and tell this people, keep on listening, but do not perceive.

54:58

Keep on looking, but do not understand. Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dulls and their eyes dim.

55:07

Otherwise, they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and return and be healed.

55:16

God was not merely predicting their rejection of his word. He was ensuring it.

55:22

This is the second aspect of parables. Number one, the parables, the purpose of them is that they're brought down so low that when people reject them, judgment's coming.

55:31

Now, you see a second aspect of it through Isaiah that God brings it down so low and instead of allowing them to understand it, he ensures that they don't, why?

55:42

Because after years and years and years of covenant rebellion, God is gracious to bring the truth down to the level of a baby, but he's also just because their crimes demand punishment.

55:54

He's just to stop up their ears. He's just to confuse their minds. He's just to blind their eyes.

56:01

He is bringing it down so that they have no excuse and in that, he is ensuring they don't understand so that he can bring the judgment he has prophesied.

56:12

The people who spurned God's clear commands for so long, now

56:17

God is not even giving them the ability to understand, the ability to repent. God was not sending

56:23

Isaiah to bring repentance. He was sending Isaiah to confirm their judgment. So fast forward to Jesus' ministry and we see the exact same pattern at work in Matthew 13 when the disciples asked

56:36

Jesus, Jesus, why do you speak to us in parables? Jesus does not say, well,

56:42

I speak in parables to make things easier to understand or I speak in parables, I speak in these stories like a megachurch pastor might say so that everyone can understand the truth.

56:53

That's not what he says. Jesus says, to you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them, it has not been granted.

57:03

Therefore, I speak to them in parables because while seeing they do not see and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

57:10

Matthew 13, 11 and 13. Do you see what Jesus is saying? Just like in Isaiah's day, the parables of Jesus were not pedagogical tools so that they would understand.

57:21

They were judicial decrees of their doom. They clarified the truth for the elect, praise

57:27

God for that, but while simultaneously confounding the reprobate. They were not just little invitations to understand some nice little story, but they were acts of God's retribution upon covenant lawbreakers, bringing the story down so low that they're culpable that they don't understand it, but God in his fury because of their sin, confounding their mind, ensuring that they don't understand it, ensuring that those who had rejected the clear teaching of the law and the prophets would now be blinded to the truth entirely and that they would most definitely meet their end.

58:04

Understanding that aspect now, we have to see Jesus's parables in their covenant and eschatological context because if this is true and Jesus said that it was, he's not offering timeless moral lessons disconnected from historical realities.

58:19

He is telling stories to the first century Jews to make sure that they underwent their covenant fate.

58:28

He is sealing the fate of that generation that defied the covenant, that murdered the prophets, and now was preparing to crucify the son of God himself and was preparing to kill his disciples.

58:39

He is telling these parables to crush them. That's the purpose of parables.

58:46

Now, consider another example, the parable of the sower, Matthew 13, three through nine. It's often treated like a general lesson on different responses to the gospel.

58:54

You know, you've got these four different places and the seed falls in these four different places, but if you understand the immediate context, it gives us a much more pressing purpose.

59:04

The hardened path represents the religious elite who had already rejected Christ and they were soon gonna be crucifying him.

59:12

The rocky soil are those who were swept away by the upheaval of the coming tribulation. The thorny soil represented those who were distracted by the cares of the world, particularly those who were entangled within the doom system of first century

59:25

Jerusalem and the good soil. The good soil was the remnant, the elect, the church, the foundation of Jesus's new coming kingdom who would endure the coming judgment and who would bear fruit 30, 60, and 100 fold.

59:40

Likewise, the parable of the wheat and the tares, Matthew 13, 24 through 30, is more than just an allegory for salvation.

59:49

It's a direct warning to the Jews of Jesus's day that they're the tares, that they're the ones that the enemy came and sowed in his field,

59:59

Jesus's field, the wheat field. The wheat field is the faithful remnant, it's the church that was gonna be gathered into Christ's barns, his kingdom, whereas the tares, the false sons of the kingdom, the ones who clung to their temple and their sacrifices and their feast and their law and all of that, they were gonna be the ones who were thrown into the fire in the coming inferno of AD 70.

01:00:20

Think about the parable of the dragnet, Matthew 13, 47 through 50. It's functioning in the exact same way.

01:00:27

The nets of the gospel are gonna pull in all kinds of people, but at the moment of reckoning, when it arrives, the wicked were gonna be separated out and cast out and the righteous were gonna be kept and brought into Jesus's home.

01:00:41

Jesus was not talking about events in the distant future, he was not even talking about heaven or hell primarily, although that's a great application of this passage.

01:00:49

He was speaking to us and to his contemporaries about the great dividing that was gonna be happening in the first century.

01:00:57

That is why the parables are not just small little innocent stories, they are tests of accountability, they are divine retribution against the covenant lawbreakers when

01:01:06

God reduces his message down to the simplest possible term, when he's speaking in the most elementary words and level, using basic stories even a child can understand, he's removing the possibility of excuse.

01:01:20

If a person rebels against such clarity with that in mind, then their condemnation is fully deserved.

01:01:26

For instance, in John 9, 39 through 41, Jesus tells the Pharisees, for judgment I came into this world so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.

01:01:39

If you were blind, you would have no sin, but since you say we see your sin remains.

01:01:45

The more light that is given, the greater the accountability is. This is why the Jews of Jesus's day would be judged more severely than Sodom and Gomorrah, and that wicked and adulterous generation will be judged more violently than Tyre and Sidon, and the

01:02:00

Queen of Sheba will rise up against them in the end. That's why, because more light was given to them.

01:02:05

The parables exposed the light of the gospel, exposed the light of the kingdom to them, and when they threw a middle finger to Jesus in his parables, judgment was heaped upon them.

01:02:17

The Sodomites had rebelled against God through general revelation. The Jews had rejected God in the flesh.

01:02:23

They rejected a God who spoke to them in elementary terms, and because of that, it was a sign of their doom.

01:02:31

It meant that Judah had reached the point of such mental blindness, such hatred of God, that their ears were deafened, their eyes were darkened, their hearts were hardened, and that their destruction was absolutely and totally certain.

01:02:48

Now, that takes us to another aspect of what a parable is, and we've talked about a few so far.

01:02:55

Parable is a story that connects to its world, and it uses real world rules so that you don't live 2 ,000 years in the real world, so you don't live 2 ,000 years in a parable.

01:03:05

That's the first aspect of it. Another aspect is that parabolic time, it communicates things that are gonna happen in the first century, and the third aspect is what we just talked about, that parables are always preceding events of judgment, so that's what we've talked about so far.

01:03:19

Now, let's go to part four, lived out parables of judgment.

01:03:25

Now, the prophets didn't just speak God's messages or speak parables as verbal stories.

01:03:32

They actually lived out parables as well. Their lives weren't separate from their sermons.

01:03:37

They actually, their lives were the sermon in a lot of ways. Every word of judgment that they preached was also backed up by something real or something visible or something shocking that they were doing with their bodies, so in this way, we don't wanna think about parables just as stories that you tell with your lips, but parables can also be stories that you do with your entire body.

01:04:01

This is why we need to understand how they became walking warnings to their people.

01:04:08

Their pain, their shame, and their bizarre and sometimes often humiliating behavior was all a part of the message that God was bringing judgment.

01:04:17

For instance, Isaiah was a man of dignity. He was a prophet of elegance. He was a statesman before kings.

01:04:24

If you wanna talk about any of the prophets being a well -to -do prophet, Isaiah was one of them. He was a prophet that served in the court of the kings, and he wore the nicest clothing.

01:04:34

He was a prophet to the upper echelons of the Jewish society, but when

01:04:40

God called him to act out a living parable of Jerusalem's destruction, his dignity was stripped away from him.

01:04:49

God called Isaiah for three years to take off his fancy clothes, to take off his fancy shoes, and to walk about the streets of Judah barefoot and naked, which at that time, and it would be the same today, would be a public scandal.

01:05:09

It was a sign of shame. It was a sign of humiliation, and every time you saw Isaiah the prophet, he would've been naked.

01:05:15

He would've been walking around prophesying without clothes on. It would've been the strangest thing that any of them have seen.

01:05:20

This is a lived out parable. He wasn't just in a fuke state, or he wasn't doing some eccentric stunt.

01:05:29

No, this was a prophecy in motion that would foreshadow the destruction that was coming upon Judah through Assyria and the

01:05:40

Babylonians, because when the Assyrian armies came, Israel was decimated, and they were led away like Isaiah, stripped naked, humiliated, and they were marched into exile as slaves.

01:05:54

While Isaiah was alive, the people whispered about him. They snickered about him. They scoffed. They jeered. They turned their faces away from him.

01:06:00

Little children probably pointed at him and laughed. The sight of their once respected prophet now a nude disgrace, wandering around the streets and babbling about his prophecy, but their mockery of Isaiah would be turned into his situation.

01:06:15

His shame would become their shame. His dramatic action of being stripped of everything would lead to their stripping of everything, because he wasn't just dramatizing something.

01:06:26

He was foreshadowing what was going to happen to them. His whole body was being used as a story of what was getting ready to occur to them.

01:06:37

That's the first one in the Old Testament, and we're not going to cover them all, but I'll give you a highlight reel of a couple of them.

01:06:42

And if people thought Isaiah's little prophetic demonstration was uncomfortable,

01:06:48

Ezekiel's would have made them absolutely mad, because he wasn't just a prophet. He was a living, breathing, apocalyptic vision, like we're talking about.

01:06:57

He was a living parable. He was a one -man catastrophe unfolding before their very eyes.

01:07:03

For instance, God called Ezekiel, this is one of the craziest things, God called Ezekiel to build a miniature replica of the city of Jerusalem.

01:07:13

You think about like a Lego model city, a tiny little version of the city, and then after it was completed, you imagine all the passersby who are walking by saying, what is

01:07:23

Ezekiel doing? Oh, I'm building a model city of Jerusalem. Okay, and he continued on.

01:07:30

Well, when he was finished, God commanded him to lay siege to it. God called him to attack the model city that he had just made, just like the

01:07:38

Babylonians were going to attack it later. So Ezekiel set up siege ramps, and he cast battering rams against the structures, and he reenact or he enacted for his people the destruction that was getting ready to happen.

01:07:52

And they watched him, and I'm sure they were fascinated and both horrified. I'm sure they were hoping, gosh,

01:07:57

I really hope Ezekiel's lost his marbles. Like he spent too many hours being a prophet, and now he's kind of gone cuckoo land.

01:08:05

But I'm sure a part of them was pretty nervous and was thinking that, what if God actually did to the city of Jerusalem what

01:08:13

Ezekiel was doing to his model city? And that's exactly the point. God was going to do to the city exactly what

01:08:20

Ezekiel was doing. Ezekiel was living out a parable. He wasn't speaking. He wasn't using his mouth.

01:08:28

What he was doing was using his body, and it was a devastating parable of their destruction.

01:08:35

Now, after he did this, after he destroyed his little model city, then he laid on his side for 390 days.

01:08:44

He didn't get up. He laid on his side for 390 days. And you might ask yourself, well, how did he go to the bathroom?

01:08:51

Well, he just went right there. And you might ask yourself, well, how did he eat? Well, the text actually tells us that he cooked bread while he was laying there, and he cooked it out of dried pieces of feces, apparently his or maybe animal or something, but I'm serious.

01:09:07

He baked his bread on the dried pieces of feces, and he ate the bread for 390 days.

01:09:16

The symbol was grotesque. The symbol would have been nauseating to the smell.

01:09:22

If you would have walked up to it, you would have probably gagged. That was the point, because Israel's defilement was getting ready to be judged.

01:09:33

Ezekiel was becoming a living picture of how defiled and disrespectful and disgraceful the

01:09:42

Jewish people had become. And because of that, the nation of Israel was actually destroyed in 722

01:09:50

BC. They were destroyed by the Assyrians never to rise again.

01:09:56

Then after that, he turns over onto his right side, and for another 40 days, he symbolically bore the sin of Judah.

01:10:06

He did the exact same thing, baking his bread in the exact same way, showing that Jerusalem and Judah were the same as their forefathers and as their older sister

01:10:17

Israel, and that they needed to be judged with the same amount of fury that God was going to judge

01:10:24

Israel. He is giving them an object lesson. He's giving them a lived out parable. He's giving them a divine foretaste of the noxious suffering that they deserve for their odious rebellion to God.

01:10:37

And when he finally got up, when he finally got up from that position of laying down in that diet,

01:10:45

I mean, there's all sorts of diets in the world. There's the paleo, there's the carnivore, and then there's the poop bread. Well, when he finished that diet, and he finally stood up, the first thing that he did was

01:10:58

God commanded him to shave his head and shave his beard, which automatically, not the head part, but the beard part is a sign of shame and humility.

01:11:09

But God tells him to take his beard and to divide it into three categories, three different buckets, if you will.

01:11:17

The first one, he burned in the fire. The second one, he hacked to pieces with his sword.

01:11:24

And then the third portion, he scattered it to the wind. And you can imagine if you're watching this, after over 400 days,

01:11:32

Ezekiel finally stands up, he cuts off his beard, he burns a third of it, he cuts it up into fine beard particles in one third, and then he throws the other third to the wind.

01:11:45

And then, as if to leave no room for confusion at all, he takes a few strands of his wiry beard hair and he tucks them into his robe, which signified a very powerful meaning that maybe they didn't understand at the time, but it came through loud and clear from the eyes of God.

01:12:03

A third of the people were gonna be burned alive in the city's destruction. A third of the people were gonna be hacked to death with Babylonian swords.

01:12:10

And a third of them were gonna be scattered to the nations in exile. And only a very small remnant of them were going to be spared.

01:12:18

The people didn't have to ask what it meant, they got the point that he was doing a lived out parable in front of their very eyes.

01:12:27

He wasn't speaking, he was play acting what was getting ready to happen, and they got it loud and clear.

01:12:34

Here's another one, Hosea. Hosea's mission is a heartbreaking mission. His calling was not to build a siege, which kind of sounds cool.

01:12:42

His job was not to run around the city naked, which would have been humiliating. His job though, his entire life was to be a parable, a prophecy of the betrayal and the whoredom that Israel had done to God.

01:12:57

God commanded Hosea to go and marry a prostitute, a prostitute who embodied

01:13:03

Israel's unfaithfulness. He was commanded to love her and to be kind to her and to be like God had been to Israel and Judah.

01:13:10

And he was commanded to love her and be kind to her like God had loved him and kind to the prostitute

01:13:16

Israel. Now, Hosea did it. He listened to what the Lord said. He took

01:13:21

Gomer the prostitute to be his wife, knowing that she was going to cheat on him, knowing that she was going to sell herself to other men, knowing that she was going to break his heart over and over and over again.

01:13:32

And when she finally abandoned him and fell into slavery, like she fell into the hands of ancient pimps,

01:13:40

God commanded that he would go back, that he would find her, that he would buy her back, and that he would love her even though she didn't deserve it.

01:13:50

Even though at that time she deserved to be stoned to death for her crimes, God didn't command that because he had a flair for the dramatic.

01:13:58

God used Hosea to give a vivid picture of what

01:14:03

God's people were doing to him. Hosea's life played out before the people. It was a love story that was twisted with pain, and it was communicating a parabolic truth that God himself had been faithful to them while they had played the whore with every foreign

01:14:17

God. Now, we can say the same thing for Jeremiah, and also the same thing for Jesus.

01:14:23

Both of them didn't just tell parables with their lips, they acted out parables with their bodies. For instance,

01:14:30

Jeremiah's entire life was a kind of slow, agonizing parable. He was a man who was weeping over a doomed city.

01:14:37

He's a man who wrote an entire book called Lamentations because he's weeping over the coming destruction of his people.

01:14:44

At one point, he smashes a clay jar in the city to symbolize its destruction. Another point, he wears this yoke upon his neck, which is supposed to foretell of its coming bondage.

01:14:54

Then a false prophet comes up and breaks the yoke, and then determines that it's a prophecy of succeeding, that the people of Judah are going to succeed.

01:15:03

They're not going to have the yoke of slavery. So what does Jeremiah do? Jeremiah goes and he puts on a heavier yoke, this time of iron, and he warns the people that their captivity was going to be unbreakable.

01:15:16

And the people, of course, hated him for it. They threw him into a pit, but his warning stood, and the outcome was the same.

01:15:27

Babylon came and destroyed them and put them under the yoke of slavery. God sends these kinds of prophets, and they're not popular.

01:15:37

People hate them because they are looking right into the eyes of the people and saying, your

01:15:42

God is going to destroy you. And the reason he is going to destroy you is because you, you used his kindness as a weakness.

01:15:54

You used his mercy as a crutch. You played the whore with all these foreign gods and foreign affections and everything else.

01:16:04

You've done this for hundreds of years now. And now the day of reckoning has come.

01:16:10

And this kind of prophetic lived out parable is precisely what

01:16:15

Jesus is doing in the Gospels. Jesus is the final prophet, the ultimate prophet, the one, the prophet to which all other prophets point.

01:16:24

And he didn't just say his parables, he acted out some of his parables. He was the parable.

01:16:31

For instance, when he rode into the city on a donkey, he was showing them a lived out parable of the fact that the king had come and the king was going to have dominion.

01:16:41

He overturned tables in the temple as a judgment on its corrupt priesthood and its corrupt religious established.

01:16:49

He cursed the fig tree, which is almost certainly a lived out parable. He speaks to the fig tree.

01:16:56

The fig tree withers right in front of their eyes. And the parabolic meaning was clear. The city of Jerusalem was going to wither like that tree.

01:17:05

And we'll get into that more in just a moment. But Jesus lived out his parables right in front of his disciples eyes, right in front of the city of Jerusalem's eyes.

01:17:13

And just as he foretold, the judgment came. In 8070, the

01:17:18

Romans surrounded the city of Jerusalem, madness consumed the city, blood filled the streets of the temple.

01:17:24

The temple itself was reduced to ashes and the fig tree was uprooted. The mountain that he says was actually cast into the sea.

01:17:32

And now all of this brings us to the particular parable that Jesus mentions in Matthew 24, which is what we're wanting to actually look at in this episode, which says this.

01:17:46

Now learn the parable from the fig tree. When its branch has already become tender and put forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

01:17:55

So you too, when you see all these things, recognize that he is near right at the door.

01:18:02

Matthew 24, 32 through 33. The reason that we've talked about parables so much before we got to our text today is because you need to understand what a parable is.

01:18:14

You need to understand what the timing of the parable is. You need to understand what the purpose of a parable is, which is judgment.

01:18:19

And you need to understand that a lived out parable is another way of a prophet doing a judgment omen upon a city.

01:18:27

Now that we have that foundation in place, we need to remember that Jesus doesn't mention the fig tree for the first time in Matthew 24.

01:18:34

He and his disciples just hours earlier had seen him curse a fig tree all the way back in Matthew chapter 21, which means that if we're gonna understand this parable in Matthew 24 and what it means, then we also need to go back to chapter 21 and very briefly talk about what it means.

01:18:54

So with that, let us look at part five, the Jerusalem fig tree of Matthew 21.

01:19:01

Now, most of the fireworks that happen in Jesus's ministry occurred in Matthew 21 through 23.

01:19:08

This was the public showdown of all showdowns. This was the moment when the

01:19:13

Pharisees who were never challenged, never disregarded, never disrespected were scathingly rebuked by Christ.

01:19:20

And it would have been an incredible spectacle to see. If we were standing in the crowds on that day, we would have seen Jesus triumphantly riding into the withered city as its king that offered him only leaves, no fruit.

01:19:32

By afternoon, we would have witnessed him overthrowing the tables outside of the rotten temple and chasing out the rebels with hand braided whips, no fruit.

01:19:40

The next day, we would have seen him pronouncing some of the sharpest parables that he had ever uttered, denouncing them for bearing, guess what, no fruit.

01:19:49

And in the midst of all of that fruitlessness, he curses a local fig tree for bearing him no fruit, which would, of course, shown his disciples the exact point he was getting at.

01:20:02

But for our purposes, let us read the passage once more. This is what it says. Now, in the morning when he was returning to the city, he became hungry, seeing a long fig tree by the road.

01:20:14

He came to it and found nothing on it except leaves only. And he said to it, no longer shall there ever be any fruit from you.

01:20:23

And at once, the fig tree withered. Seeing this, the disciples were amazed and they asked, how did the fig tree wither all at once?

01:20:30

And Jesus said to them, truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, be taken up and cast into the sea, it will happen.

01:20:44

And all things you ask in prayer, believing you will receive, Matthew 21, 18 through 22.

01:20:52

Now, for most of us, we've read that parable and say, okay, now, if I can just have big faith, then

01:20:57

I can move mountains in my life. And what's my mountain? My mountain is my mortgage. It's mortgage mountain.

01:21:02

And if I could just have big faith and I could ask God, then checks are gonna show up in my mailbox and I had faith that moved mountains.

01:21:08

Or maybe I've got this relationship in my life where someone is mean to me and they're a bully in my life.

01:21:14

And if I have faith as big as mountains, then I can move that bully over there out of my life.

01:21:20

And like all of this, we do this all the time. If I have enough faith, then my basketball team, I actually probably was guilty of this in high school.

01:21:28

I went to a Presbyterian school. Oddly enough, I didn't become Presbyterian in doctrine until later in life, but that's a different story.

01:21:35

I went to a Presbyterian school and our biggest rival was Sacred Heart Catholic Church. And I remember praying that we can do all things through Christ who strengthened us.

01:21:44

We can beat the Catholics. We have faith like mountains. We can win this basketball game. That is not at all what

01:21:50

Jesus is talking about. And by the way, he's also not talking about actually moving mountains.

01:21:55

Like I'm gonna go to Mount Washington in New Hampshire, which is like two hours away from me. It's the biggest mountain in our region.

01:22:02

And I'm gonna go and I'm gonna focus. I'm gonna say, Lord, I just have faith and I'm gonna watch that mountain lift up and then be cast into the sea.

01:22:10

That is not what Jesus is saying. No matter what charlatans and faith healers and idiots on YouTube have to say, that's not what that means.

01:22:20

And we also shouldn't assume that Jesus was just hangry because he didn't get his morning egg

01:22:27

McMuffin. Jesus is telling us this parable, talking about the cursing of the fig tree and talking about the mountain being ripped up as a pronouncement of judgment on a city and on a temple that offered him no fruit.

01:22:42

They were dead in their trespasses and sins. They had been covenantally unfaithful. They were withered and they were fruitless.

01:22:47

They were branches on the vine that needed to be cut out and thrown into the fire, destined for removal.

01:22:54

John 15, six, along with that, we would be right to remember that Jerusalem in the

01:22:59

Old Testament is compared to a fig tree in passages like Jeremiah eight, one through 13, chapter 24, one through 11, chapter 29, verses 16 through 18, and also

01:23:11

Hosea nine, verse 10. So here you have Jesus cursing a fig tree.

01:23:16

In the Old Testament, Jerusalem is compared to a fig tree. And then on top of that, you have Malachi's prophecy that this same people were gonna be left fruitless with neither root nor branch,

01:23:27

Malachi four, three. Knowing all this stuff, it's easy to see what Jesus is talking about. He's not withering a fig tree because he was hungry and it didn't give him food.

01:23:36

And he's not lifting up any old mountain, he's lifting up that mountain, this mountain, the one right in front of him.

01:23:43

What was the mountain that was right in front of him? The mountain of Jerusalem. Remember, Jesus was with Lazarus.

01:23:50

He was staying in Lazarus's home in Bethany. So he's traveling towards Jerusalem.

01:23:56

He curses a fig tree. The fig tree is right in front of Jesus. And then right beyond Jesus's vision is the mountain on top of which the city of Jerusalem was sitting.

01:24:08

It's the looming visible city that's hanging over the landscape as he's cursing this fig tree.

01:24:17

So that when he says, I tell you the truth, if you have enough faith, you not only say to this fig tree be cursed, but you can say to this mountain, be lifted up and ripped up and thrown into the sea.

01:24:25

And it happened. How did it happen? What do I mean? Well, Jesus is looking at the mountain city of Jerusalem.

01:24:34

He's looking at the city that sat on top of a mountain. Literally the highest mountain in that region was where Jerusalem was sitting.

01:24:43

And he's saying that he was going to rip it up and cast it into the sea.

01:24:49

And he did. How did he do that? Well, when the Romans came, the Romans encircled the city and they starved it to death.

01:24:59

And they watched the infighting and the civil wars and the blood running down the streets. And they came in and they mopped it up.

01:25:05

And then they took every piece of gold, every piece of silver, every artwork, every thing of value.

01:25:13

And they caused the entire city of Jerusalem to be left in utter rubble.

01:25:19

And they took everything of value. They cast up the mountain. They put it on their boats and they cast it into the sea.

01:25:27

How do you think Rome got back to Rome from Jerusalem? They went straight to the sea, the Mediterranean Sea.

01:25:33

They put all the treasures of Jerusalem on their boats and they went back to Rome and they had a great parade to celebrate their victory in destroying

01:25:41

Jerusalem. Jesus said that mountain would be cast up and thrown into the sea.

01:25:47

And it did. The Romans leveled it, cast it up, put it in their boats and cast it off into the sea.

01:25:53

That's what Jesus was talking about. He is not telling you to go conquer some mountain, metaphorically speaking, in your life.

01:26:02

He's definitely not telling you to travel to the Rocky Mountains or to the Himalayas and try to do some mountain lifting for your workout that morning.

01:26:09

He's telling us that He is the one who had enough faith to say to that mountain, be lifted up.

01:26:15

And that mountain was lifted up. That old covenant was lifted up. That old temple was lifted up.

01:26:20

That sacrificial system was lifted up. All of the old types and shadows was lifted up and it was thrown into the sea.

01:26:28

That's what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 21. That's the lived out parable that's communicating

01:26:36

Jerusalem's destruction. Now, we need to turn to Matthew 24. Part six, the

01:26:44

Olivet fig tree. Now, just a few chapters later, Jesus uses another fig tree parable to tell a tale of blessings.

01:26:53

He's not using the same kind of fig tree that He used in Matthew 21, which was a fig tree that was destined for destruction, just like Jerusalem.

01:27:02

No, no, no. In Matthew 24, He's using a different kind of fig tree to describe a different kind of outcome altogether.

01:27:10

The fig tree in Matthew 21 was cursed by Jesus, thrown into the fire, never to be revived again.

01:27:17

But the fig tree of Matthew 24 is a fig tree of blessing.

01:27:23

It is a fig tree that represents the church. And here's the point Jesus is making. He is giving hope to His disciples who are going to walk through the hardest 40 years in church history, who are gonna deal with some of the worst and most horrific persecution ever recorded.

01:27:40

And He is telling them that after all these things, there's hope.

01:27:46

You're going to be like a fig tree that's planted and that brings its fruit to the nations.

01:27:52

This is what Jesus says. Now learn the parable from the fig tree. When its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

01:28:03

So you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door.

01:28:09

Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

01:28:14

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, Matthew 24, 32 through 35.

01:28:22

We have to remember here who Jesus is speaking to. These are the men that Jesus warned not to follow after the false

01:28:30

Christ and the counterfeit Messiah is in Matthew 24, three. These are the men who are gonna see and experience the wars and the rumors of wars in an era of unparalleled peace,

01:28:38

Matthew 24, six. These are the ones who would see the increase in the uptick of famines and earthquakes as signs of Jerusalem's fate in Matthew 24, seven through eight.

01:28:47

These are the men who would be delivered over to the Jews, who would terrorize them, persecute them, and kill them in one city after another just for the simple fact that they followed

01:28:57

Jesus, Matthew 24, nine. These are the men who were gonna lead churches during an era where many were gonna abandon their faith because of the gospel and because of the white -hot nature of the persecution that was happening,

01:29:09

Matthew 24, 10. These are the men who were gonna see Judah descend into moral lawlessness, absolute disorder, factions, and tyranny and chaos,

01:29:18

Matthew 24, 12. And these are the men who were gonna fill the world full of the gospel message, the Roman world, the oikomene world, before the end of the

01:29:26

Jewish age, Matthew 24, 14. Some of them were actually gonna be alive in order to see the abomination of desolation like John, which

01:29:34

Luke describes as Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, Matthew 24, 15, and Luke 21, 20.

01:29:40

Some would be fleeing to the Judean mountains as soon as they saw the Roman armies approaching,

01:29:46

Matthew 24, 16. Perhaps some of them even remained in the city, and they saw some of the signs that Josephus records.

01:29:52

They saw some of the things, but as Eusebius tells us, most of them, if they were in the city of Jerusalem around AD 68 when the siege began, there was a moment where God, through supernatural, providential means, it's one of the coolest things that I can think of in church history or in the history of the world even.

01:30:12

The Christians who were left in the city who were discipling, who were evangelizing, who had already sold all their property in Acts 2 so that they could be on mission to the city to tell them about the king that had come in Jesus, those

01:30:24

Christians, when they saw the Romans coming, there was this moment in history where the

01:30:30

Romans backed away and the Christians escaped the city, and by the time the

01:30:36

Romans came back and sieged it, it was over. So that they didn't see the walls come tumbling down.

01:30:43

They didn't see the poverty in the streets. They didn't see the depravity in the hearts of their people descend into absolute lawlessness.

01:30:50

They didn't see mothers eating their children. They didn't see tribalism rising up in the city as different factions were warring for control.

01:30:58

They didn't see the idolatrous sacrifice of the Romans right where the bodies were piled up on top of each other.

01:31:04

Matthew 24, 21 through 28. But these men, these disciples are the ones who were gonna understand

01:31:10

Jesus' sign in the earth and in the heavens. Jesus, or they came to Jesus on the

01:31:16

Mount of Olives and said, Jesus, tell us when these things are gonna be. Tell us a sign of when the end of the age is gonna happen.

01:31:23

And Jesus gave them sign after sign after sign. Signs that were gonna occur on the earth, signs that were gonna be seen in the heavens.

01:31:29

They saw him raised from the dead. They saw him ascended into the clouds of heaven. They saw him sitting at the right hand of God.

01:31:36

Stephen actually himself looks up and sees Jesus standing at the right hand of God, ready to come in judgment against the

01:31:44

Jews who were persecuting his people. These are the men who wrote that Jesus was gonna be the one who was gonna put all of his enemies under his feet.

01:31:52

First Corinthians 15, 25, Ephesians 1, 22, Hebrews 2, 8. They were the ones who were beginning to see

01:31:58

Jerusalem and Judah destroyed and descending into lawlessness. James 5, one through eight.

01:32:03

To these men, Jesus was promising a different outcome than what was gonna happen to the

01:32:08

Jews. Because you can imagine what they're thinking. They're saying, Jesus, you've told us all of this bad that's gonna happen, that the

01:32:15

Jews are gonna be destroyed, the temple's gonna be destroyed, the sacrificial system's gonna be ended. I and my family are probably gonna be murdered.

01:32:21

Or if not, we're gonna be beaten with an inch of our life and we're gonna carry with us scars after scars, broken bones and broken limbs all over the place because of what was gonna happen.

01:32:31

You're asking us to walk through the 40 hardest years of church history by far.

01:32:37

Jesus, give us hope. What is on the other side of this? And to them, Jesus told them that they were not like the cursed fig tree of Matthew 21.

01:32:47

They were not like the one that was gonna be chopped down for their withered, non -bearing fruit nature.

01:32:53

They're not like the ones that's gonna be thrown into the fire because they refused to bear the fruit of God. The church is going to live longer than AD 70.

01:33:01

Outside of AD 70, when that former fig tree was cut down, a new fig tree is gonna be planted.

01:33:08

And even it was planted before that. The church was planted when Jesus rose from the dead.

01:33:13

And Jesus is telling them that when it was planted, it was just a tiny little sprout. But over that 40 years, it grew.

01:33:20

So to where in AD 70, it was in its summertime season. It had leaves all over it, and it was ready to produce.

01:33:27

The church would be blessed, and they would be a blessing. The Jews who had borne no fruit for God were gonna be cursed by God.

01:33:34

The church was gonna become like a fig tree in summer, ready at any moment to burst forth with its fruit so that it could feed the nations with its luxurious, fruitful gospel.

01:33:44

The Jews of that first century, all who rejected Christ would be thrown into the fire, but the church in that very generation would be purified by the fire.

01:33:53

They would be the ones who would see all these things happen and they would see the kingdom of God coming, and they would lay the foundation for the church that has been built for the last 2 ,000 years.

01:34:03

Today, you and I are a part of that fruitful legacy. Today, we're not a part of the withered fruit of Judaism, the withered fig tree of Judaism.

01:34:12

Today, we're a part of the faithful, fruitful vine that is feeding and nourishing the nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

01:34:19

And the Lord prunes us, and the Lord shapes us, and the Lord continues to cut away the dead parts of us so that we would be even more fruitful.

01:34:28

And he's been doing that over the last 2 ,000 years. The church has continued to grow under the faithful care of our gardener,

01:34:36

God, Jesus Christ, and we will continue to grow until the entire world is filled with the fruit of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

01:34:44

Jesus uses the tale of these two fig trees, the fig tree in Matthew 21, the fig tree in Matthew 24, to tell us the entire story.

01:34:53

The old world of Judaism is going away. The new world of the church is coming.

01:34:58

That one's gonna be tossed into the fires of 80, 70. This one is gonna last forever. This one is gonna be like a mustard seed that fills the entire world.

01:35:06

This one's gonna be like the leaven that leavens the entire lump. This one's gonna be like the little pebble that grows into a mountain that fills the entire world.

01:35:13

This one is gonna watch and see and work and build until all the world is filled with the glory of God as the water covers the sea.

01:35:21

The Jews of that century were cursed. The church was gonna be blessed. Now that we understand that, before we end our time on this episode,

01:35:32

I wanna compare what we're seeing here in Matthew 24 to what we see in the book of Revelation because we now understand

01:35:41

Matthew 24, at least this part. Next week, I said this last week, but I had to cover this passage. Next week, we're gonna look at the rapture and that episode is gonna be lit.

01:35:52

But before we go, I do want us to look at how Revelation talks about the church as a tree as well.

01:35:59

The book of Revelation doesn't talk about the Jews as a tree because in Revelation, the Jews are destroyed in 80, 70.

01:36:06

Chapters 19 and 20 are the destruction event of Jerusalem. And they're replaced by a new

01:36:11

Jerusalem, the church. And they're replaced by a new bride, the church. And they're replaced, the old tree is replaced by a new tree, the church.

01:36:19

These images in Revelation 21 and 22 are the church. So with that, let us go to our final section now, which is part seven,

01:36:28

Revelation and the church as a tree. Now, like I said before, the story of trees does not end with the

01:36:37

Olivet Discourse, but it climaxes in the final chapters of the Bible. Just like the Bible begins with a tree, it ends with a tree and that is very important.

01:36:48

And that tree stretches its roots deep into the soil of Revelation where the full weight of Jesus's prophetic words come crashing down in judgment upon the

01:36:56

Jews and blessing upon his church. A church that is going to fill the world with the fruit of God and that fruit is going to heal the nations.

01:37:05

Now, the cursed fig tree of Jerusalem is not mentioned in Revelation 22 because John doesn't use that metaphor.

01:37:16

He uses the metaphor of a whore. He uses the metaphor of a beast. He uses the metaphor of Sodom and Gomorrah.

01:37:24

He used the metaphor of Babylon. He uses a lot of metaphors to describe the destruction event of the

01:37:31

Jews. But he does pick up this idea of a tree for the church.

01:37:37

In Revelation 22, the vision shifts from the failed disaster project of the old world, the old covenant in 19 and 20, and now it shifts to a church in 21 and in 22.

01:37:53

No longer do we see a city in flames, but we don't see a tree that's been withered by judgment. Instead, what we see is a river of life that's flowing out of the throne room of God.

01:38:06

And beside this river stands a tree, one that is unlike any tree that has ever came before and will ever come after it.

01:38:14

It is a tree that never fails to bear its fruit. It's not like the

01:38:19

Jews that when God came looking, there was no fruit on its branches.

01:38:24

This tree not only bears fruit in its season, it bears fruit in every season.

01:38:30

It doesn't stand on the brink of destruction. It never displeases its master. It flourishes.

01:38:36

It stretches out its branches. It's strong and it's full of life. And it bears 12 kinds of fruit for every month of the year, producing in every season, never ceasing, never failing.

01:38:47

It is not just a small remnant. It is actually a new tree that is going to fill the world with the fruit of God.

01:38:56

That's the church. That's the bride of Christ. That's the new Jerusalem, not built on the crumbling foundation of the old world, but on Christ himself.

01:39:05

And by the way, I don't have time to prove this right now, but just look in Matthew 21, where it says that the new

01:39:14

Jerusalem comes down from God. This is not heaven, by the way. I don't have time to prove this really, but I'm gonna do this quickly.

01:39:21

When the new Jerusalem comes down, John says that that new Jerusalem city is the bride. Look at it. It's in Revelation 21.

01:39:27

The bride is the church. So if the new Jerusalem is the bride and the bride is the church, the new Jerusalem is the church.

01:39:33

New Jerusalem also is where God himself dwells with his people, and he dwells with them in their hearts.

01:39:39

That's true now. Because of Jesus' sacrifice, God lives in our hearts. So everything that's going on in Revelation 21 is the church.

01:39:48

It is the Jerusalem that replaced the old one. It is the temple of the living God that replaced the old one.

01:39:55

It is the bride that replaced the whore. The church in 21 is the people of God who in 22 will fill the world full of the fruit of God.

01:40:04

And what is the fruit of God? The gospel of Jesus Christ. Us, the church, our job is to spread out our branches into every tribe and every tongue and every nation and give them this fruit that never spoils, that actually is good in all 12 months of the year, that never is out of season, that we're supposed to spread our branches to the nations, healing them, renewing them, transforming them, not in our power, but in the power of the gospel.

01:40:35

And that contrast could not be more striking. The fig tree of Jerusalem was cut down and it was left for dead.

01:40:45

But the tree of life, the church, the tree that now stands in the new Jerusalem is eternal.

01:40:52

The temple of stone was burned to the ground, but now a new temple has been built with living stones built out of the body of believers that will never be destroyed.

01:41:02

That's what first Peter is talking about. The judgment that fell upon the old world was complete and the blessings that have come about in the new are just beginning.

01:41:12

We have a new temple built out of the body of believers with Christ as its cornerstone. We have a new sacrifice with Jesus as our perfect sacrifice that will never, ever, ever be overturned or repeated.

01:41:25

We're not going to see another temple come in the future where new sacrifices are offered because that will blaspheme the living

01:41:32

Christ. He is the one sin for all sacrifice that put away all sacrifices. He's the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true, and he's made us into a true city.

01:41:42

That's why, and a tree, that's why. We don't tremble at the visions of revelation, the visions of judgment in the book of Revelation because we know that those visions of judgment have already fallen upon the ones with whom it was meant.

01:41:59

The curse in Revelation is not for us. The curse is for the barren fig tree of the

01:42:05

Jews. The curse is for the whore that was the Jews. The curse is for the old

01:42:10

Jerusalem that was the Jews. The curse is for the city that had filled, that had filled up to the brim violence against the covenant of God that it looked more like Babylon than Jerusalem.

01:42:24

That's who the curses are for, not for us. We're the church. We're not waiting for Jesus's victory at some point in the future.

01:42:34

We're living in it. I need you to have a paradigm shift here. We're not waiting for Jesus to win.

01:42:41

We're in the victory now. The kingdom of God, which started as 12 people, 12 disciples, then 70, then 3 ,000, then 10 ,000, then 100 ,000, then a million.

01:42:54

Now we're at 2 .5 billion people who confess Christ. And there's so many snarky Calvinists who will say, yeah, but are those 2 .5

01:43:02

billion truly the elect? I don't care. I mean, I care if they're elect or not, absolutely.

01:43:09

But from 12 people to 2 .5 billion, and you're going to quibble over the numbers?

01:43:16

Like from 0 .00000000001 % of world population, and maybe that number is not even right, or maybe it's too big.

01:43:27

From that until now, a third of the living population on earth now at least professes

01:43:35

Jesus as Lord? From a no -name person in a backwood corner of Galilee, of all places, to the most famous person on earth?

01:43:47

That's what's happened. We are not waiting on victory. We are living in it. And the trees tell the story.

01:43:57

One tree was a tree of judgment, and one tree was a tree of blessing. One tree was a tree of death.

01:44:04

One tree was a tree of life. One tree was planted and was cut down and was never going to be replanted again.

01:44:13

Judaism is never coming back. Mosaic Judaism is never coming back. Temples are never coming back.

01:44:20

Sacrificial system never coming back. God violently put that away because the true and better has come.

01:44:28

And in that tree, the tree that will bear fruit and will stretch out across the entire earth and fill the earth with the glory of Christ, that tree will keep growing, its roots will keep deepening, its fruit will keep sweetening until every tribe, every tongue, and every people and every family on earth confesses that Jesus Christ is

01:44:48

Lord. That is the story of history. That is the story that we're living in. And the best part is that we get to be the branches on that tree.

01:44:58

The church is never going to wither. There's going to be some who are false sons among our midst who Jesus said, he will cut them off of the tree and he will let them wither.

01:45:07

And Paul tells us not to be prideful that the Jews were cut down because we could be cut out just like they were, but the tree is here and it will never be uprooted.

01:45:17

It might be pruned, but it will never be uprooted. The church will continue to bear fruit until all the world is feasting on the good things of God.

01:45:26

And then eternity comes. The tree of life in Revelation 22 is the church and it will remain and it will continue nourishing the nations until the end comes.

01:45:36

And maybe you say to yourself, I don't know. Revelation 22 sounds a lot like heaven.

01:45:41

It doesn't sound like anything that happens on earth. Well, let me ask you this question. If the nations have to come to this tree in order to be nourished, that means that they're not already nourished yet.

01:45:52

That means that they're deficient. That means that they're not healed yet. If they have to come to the tree to be nourished, then they're not already nourished.

01:46:01

How can you say Revelation 22 is heaven if they have some lack inside of them that they have to come to the tree in order to satisfy it?

01:46:11

If we're in heaven, all things have been made new. There's no limitations. Everyone is perfectly satisfied in Christ.

01:46:19

And we believe that. We believe that when heaven and earth are reunited together again, and we are living in a new heaven and a new earth together with Christ, we believe that there will be no more curse.

01:46:31

There will be no more lacking. There will be no more tears or no more crying. Every part of the curse will be completed.

01:46:37

Revelation 22 doesn't talk like that. Revelation 22 talks about the church feeding the people who need to hear the gospel, nourishing them in the gospel, and healing them in the gospel.

01:46:49

You can't be healed if you're already healed. This is not heaven. This is the kingdom of heaven on earth.

01:46:56

That's what it means. That's what we're living in. And that's why Revelation should not be scary to us.

01:47:02

And with that, let us go to our conclusion. As I've said it before, we are not losing.

01:47:13

I wanna just, I wanna yell this out. We're not losing. We're not the ones who should be retreating.

01:47:18

We're not the ones who should be cowering in the shadows of a crumbling world. We're the ones who are advancing.

01:47:24

We're the ones who are taking ground. We're the ones who are pushing back the darkness. We're the ones who are bringing the glorious light of Christ to every inch of the earth until the whole world resounds with the praise of Almighty God.

01:47:36

Jesus is on his throne, brothers and sisters. He is reigning. His enemies are going to be crushed, and they are being crushed beneath his feet, just like he promised in Psalm 110 and in 1

01:47:48

Corinthians 15, 25. The world is not spiraling ultimately into oblivion.

01:47:53

Yeah, we live in a time period where the world looks like it's been getting worse, and we also live in a time period where in just two weeks,

01:48:01

President Trump has done some pretty incredible things, but we don't count our days like that. We don't put all of our hope in Trump, and we certainly don't crumble under a idiot like Joe Biden.

01:48:11

The world is not spiraling into oblivion like that. It's being redeemed day by day, moment by moment, and the kingdom is expanding like leaven in the lump,

01:48:21

Matthew 13, 33, and sometimes that goes like this, and sometimes it looks like a

01:48:27

Bitcoin chart, and it goes like this, and it goes like this. History is not always up and to the right, but history is always ultimately up and to the right.

01:48:37

We are the kingdom of God. We are in a moment in our history where things are not so great, but that's just every more opportunity for us to work, for us to see the truths of these things, to see what the parables are talking about, to see what

01:48:54

Revelation is talking about, and to unpack our eschatological suitcases, and to stop looking at the heavens and waiting for a rapture, and to actually get to work and build and do things that will advance

01:49:05

Jesus's kingdom, because we know that if we advance, the gates of hell will not stand against us.

01:49:11

The gates of hell will fall down. Don't buy into the defeatist lie that we're doomed, and that we're outnumbered, and that the world is far too worse.

01:49:21

I can't imagine why so many people are so bought into this system that we lose down here.

01:49:27

I can't imagine why it's so important to people to think that we must lose.

01:49:33

What kind of virtue is in that? What kind of gospel is that? What kind of story is that? Jesus doesn't lose.

01:49:39

The world's not gonna collapse into calamity. That's nonsense. That's absolute ridiculous nonsense.

01:49:47

Christ will be victorious. He will have dominion from sea to shining sea, from the river to the ends of the earth.

01:49:54

He will, and he already has taken over a kingdom where he will have all dominion, Matthew, or sorry,

01:49:59

Daniel seven and Daniel two, and his church will march forward, and we, his people, have been called to labor, to build, to laugh, to fight, to feast, and to reclaim what is rightfully his.

01:50:12

Yes, we will celebrate the wins of the new Trump administration, and yes, we will stand against the insanity that has plagued our nation for far too long, and yes, we will overturn every foul and wicked doctrine of demons that has enslaved our people and our land, but our victory is so much greater than a political party and a political change and a political figure and so much bigger than that.

01:50:34

Our victory is cosmic. Our victory is eternal. Our victory is total. Our victory is absolute, and we've got to, metaphorically speaking, and I mean this with all love, pull our heads out of our rear ends and get to work.

01:50:49

We've got one life that God has given us to live and to do things for the kingdom of God. Let's not waste our life either thinking, both are wrong, that the world is so bad we should just give up.

01:51:02

That's wrong, and I see many Christians believing that during the Biden years, but we also can't be like, oh, great, now we've got

01:51:10

Trump. Now we don't have to do anything. To hell with that. It is our time to rise up.

01:51:17

It is our time to work. It is our time to build. It is our time to labor for the glory of Christ, and it is our time to do this with hope and not with discouragement.

01:51:26

So brothers and sisters, do not lose hope and do not be discouraged. Do not be pessimistic and do not fall into the trap of believing that evil is somehow stronger than Christ.

01:51:38

The gates of hell cannot win, will not win, will not prevail, and his church will move forward.

01:51:44

The future is not dark. The future is as bright as the promises of God, and his promises are always true.

01:51:52

Every knee is going to bow. Every tongue is going to confess. Every nation is gonna stream to the throne of Jesus and to his church for healing at the tree of life, and the knowledge of the

01:52:03

Lord is gonna cover the earth as the water covers the sea, Habakkuk 2 .14. That's the promises of God, and we can believe them.

01:52:12

You and I are not called to sit back and watch. We're called to participate. We're called to labor.

01:52:18

We're called to build in our homes, in our families, in our churches, in our communities, in our states, in our nations, and in our world.

01:52:26

You are called to be a soldier of Jesus Christ and an ambassador of his kingdom.

01:52:35

And with that, I'll see you again next time on the podcast. But before we go, check out our membership tiers because I'd love for you to get access to our after -hour show where it's gonna be a lot of fun.

01:52:48

And also check out the new website, prodthesheep .com, where you can get literally a shirt that says

01:52:54

Jesus wins, literally a shirt that says he shall have dominion, and also literally a shirt that says dispensationalism will eat your joy, because it will.

01:53:02

So with that, until next time, God bless you richly. We'll see you again next time on the podcast.