43. The Heart of Eschatology (End-Times Series Part 23)

Welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 43, the heart of eschatology.

As the murky shadow of evil grew like kudzu in the forests of Mirkwood, Gandalf passionately addressed the

White Council. His suggestion was to swiftly attack the rising Dark Lord Sauron while he could still be easily defeated.

Yet, his guidance was rejected because a nefarious little fox named Saruman had worked his way in the

Middle Earth's hen house. Had the council banded together under Gandalf's advice, the entire saga of the

Lord of the Rings would have never occurred, at least not with as much panache.

And while the books in the movies are markedly better due to the treachery of Saruman, we can see the simplest of points emerging.

Doing nothing in the face of rising evil almost always makes things worse.

This brings us to the very heart and center of biblical eschatology. How so? While Mordor's shadow darkens daily across the waning empire of America, our goal mustn't be to hide all knobby need in evangelicals' helms deep.

We must not bury our heads like a herd of anxious ostriches, wet our pants like terrified turtles or blend in like chameleons until the danger has subsided.

As the end draws near, no matter how long that drawing draws on, we are called to take up our weapons of warfare and to do four things while we wait on our

Savior to return. These four things are the heart of eschatology and they're going to show up in our passage today.

So let us examine Matthew 24, 45 through 51. This will close out

Matthew 24 as a chapter. Who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom the master has put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time?

Blessed is that slave whom the master finds so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you that he will be put in charge of all his possessions.

But if that evil slave says in his heart, my master has not come for a long time and begins to beat his fellow slaves and eat and drink with the drunkards, the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him at an hour which he does not know and he will cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites.

In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Number one, be faithful where you're at. No matter which eschatological position you hold, these words could not be any clearer from Christ.

Instead of wasting our time trying to identify the next candidate for the Antichrist or which shade of red the next blood moon's going to be, or instead of living in total ignorance as if eschatology doesn't matter one iota when it comes to our life, we are called to be faithful.

Scripture tells us not to look back while we're plowing, Luke 9, 62, but also tells us not to look up doing nothing when we're supposed to be working,

Acts 1, 11. Instead what we're to do is to look forward with the hope of Christ as we labor faithfully where we're at.

And where are we? Let's ask the question. Where are we right now? Well, we're in the household of the

King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, Matthew 28, 18. He, Jesus, is the one who's purchased this down and out dilapidated mess that we call earth.

So it belongs to him. He bought it with his precious and holy blood. All of it is now his, which means that now we are living in his property and through his church whom he has left in charge of the renovation plans.

That is the slave that the parable at the end of Matthew 24 is referring to. We have now been tasked with the reshaping of earth according to the vision of Jesus Christ.

We are the slaves that he put in charge of his household and his household just so happens to be planet earth.

While our master's away, our behavior must be conformed to his desires. We must be faithful slaves.

This means learning how to obey everything that he told us to obey, Matthew 28, 19. It means learning to love the

Lord, our God, with all of our heart and with all of our soul and with all of our mind, with all of our strength, Matthew 22, 37 through 38.

It means understanding how to better care for our neighbors with the same vigor in which we love ourselves,

Matthew 22, 39. It means announcing his royal reign has come to the nations,

Acts 1, 8. It means knocking down every one of hell's rusted out gates as we advance to the ends of the earth, Matthew 16, 18.

The timing of his return, again, no matter which eschatological position that you hold, the timing of his return doesn't matter.

The real question that all of us are going to have to face at the end of our lives is were we faithful where we're at?

That's the first thing. The true heart of eschatology is are you faithful where you're at?

Number two, we must serve sensibly while we wait. Again, this makes good sense no matter which position that you take on the end times.

We are not only called to be faithful, but we're called to direct our faithfulness in very sensible ways.

Why? Because whether it seems obvious or not, it is possible for us to be faithful without being sensible.

It is possible for us to be faithful and yet sense less. Again, let me give you an example here.

Let's say that you are an emergency room surgeon and you get a patient in and you perform an emergency open heart surgery with all the faithfulness and all of the precision of your and all of the techniques that you learned in grad school and you perform it successfully.

But let's say that the man on the gurney didn't have a heart problem, he had a liver problem. So now that great heart that you just gave him is not going to do much good because his blood is still septic.

Sensibility requires not only doing faithful work, but it requires doing the right kind of work with the right kind of tools at the right time in order to have the right effect.

You can be faithful and insensible simultaneously, so doing both well is absolutely necessary.

So now that leads to the question, how then may we, the church, be sensible in days like these?

Well, for starters, I think the church needs to wake up and smell the proverbial roses.

We need to recognize that we're not in Kansas anymore. The ship of culture has started to sail and the reason that all of this happened is because we were too busy sleeping on the dock.

If we have any hope at all of seeing this land that we live in bow the knee to Jesus Christ, we need to stop using 50 -year -old techniques.

We need to stop being silent. We need to stop hiding from culture in plain sight.

We need to stop cowering over every gentle breeze that wobbles us. We need to stop apologizing for obedience as if obedience is somehow anti -biblical.

We need to start living publicly, dynamically, and ardently for Christ.

Remember, when salt gets removed from the carcass, the carcass rots. When the light gets put under a bushel, the darkness gets thicker.

Knowing that, I believe it's high time that the church, the faithful and sensible

Christians should stand up. I believe it's high time for us to grab the megaphone and to start hollering over the racket and riotous noise that we hear in the streets and simply herald our

God reigns. We must be sensible in times like these.

We must do the right work at the right time in order to have the right effect.

Faithfulness is not enough. We also must be sensible. Number three, we need to begin talking like Jesus owns this place.

Since everything belongs to Christ and he has put us in charge of everything that he owns, we need to stop acting like we're not in charge here.

I know that's a provocative thing to say that we grew up in a time period where the separation of church and state and all of that, but if Jesus owns the world and we're his bride, then this is our stuff.

This world belongs to our bridegroom. It's his. We need to stop apologizing for our very existence and start acting like Jesus owns the place.

For instance, if a boss were to put you in charge over his project, then we would take great ownership of that until we handed it back to him.

If a friend asks us to watch over his home while he's away, we're not going to let prostitutes and pimps come in and turn it into a brothel, are we?

No. If we're appointed as the police chief over our city for a week because, you know,

God forbid our police chief has some debilitating disease or something that limits him and he can't, we're not going to let criminals run rampant in the streets, are we?

No, of course not. So why are we, the church, the ones that he put in charge while he's gone, sitting back and watching the world trample all over Jesus's stuff?

That makes no sense. That's not faithful. That's not sensible. And that, to me, is more in line with the wicked slave than with the righteous.

To be fair, the most faithful and sensible labor that we could ever engage in is to make the trespassers aware of what our master said.

We should declare to the world, the ones who are trespassing on Jesus's property, that their actions violate the edicts of the great and mighty king.

We should alert them that this king has appointed a day for judgment to deal with their rebellion.

And if they do not petition this great king that he would forgive them and welcome them to his citizenry, then they're going to face eternal judgments that are awaiting them in perdition.

Either way, doing nothing is not an option. The church has got to get past this sacred, winsome, nice guy persona where it tries to coddle everyone in culture and offend no one.

Does a SWAT team enter a building to sip tea and crumpets with the terrorist? Absolutely not.

Does the king's army cast out the rebels with silly stories and anecdotes? Would a wise doctor prescribe sugar water to treat an aggressive form of cancer?

Never. So why is the church doing that? Why is the church trying to win the world with watered down expressions of the gospel, if they even share it at all, and with truism, silly stories, anecdotes, and references to pop culture and movies?

Like, why are we doing that? This land belongs to Christ. They're the outsiders.

We have to warn them of the judgment that's coming if they don't repent and turn to him. The church needs to do a deep clean, a scrubbing, to get down past this toxic veneer of modern cultural niceness, past the dermal layer of winsomeness, and to get to the meat of the gospel.

That's the hope of the world. That's the power of God is the gospel. This world lies in rebellion against God.

We can't play footsie with the world so that they would be saved. They're trespassing on the king's property.

And if we don't warn them to join his kingdom and start talking like he actually owns this place and that they own absolutely nothing, that they're squatters at best, if we don't start talking like this, then that kingdom, the kingdom of darkness, is gonna be filled with a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The time for mush -mouthed evangelicalism is over. We need to bring them the truth.

We need to talk like Jesus owns the place. That's the third thing. The fourth and final thing that I learned from this passage, the heart of eschatology, is we need to be found working when he comes.

Sadly, the church, especially in the realm of eschatology, has heeded Wonderland Rabbit screaming, don't just do something, stand there.

For far too long, the church has been standing around like a gaggle of state -paid road workers watching one or two of us wield a shovel while the rest do nothing.

We've been far too docile and lethargic and have spent way too much time trying to stay out of everybody's way.

That needs to stop. Jesus said that the faithful slave will be found working when he returns.

She will not be in a drunken stupor. She will not have cucumbers on her eyelids being pampered at the local spa.

And she will not be passive, hoping that no one will notice her tiptoeing through Vanity Fair en route to the celestial city.

Instead, she will be found working. She will be so focused on everything that her master told her to do, she won't even entertain the question of when will

Jesus return. I'm sorry, we'll talk about that later. Right now, we've got work to do.

We've got work to do. We've got faithfulness and diligence and sensibility to win the nations to Christ, to build up his kingdom until he returns.

Why are we talking about, why are we talking about the job being finished when we've not been faithful with what he's given us today?

See, the heart, my friends of eschatology is it doesn't produce apathy.

Rightly understood, it doesn't produce slothfulness. Rightly understood, it does not produce terror and fear.

Rightly understood, it produces faithful workers. It produces faithful workers because we know that our king will return one day and we know that not everyone will be counted as faithful.

So we wanna work and preach and share the gospel with as many people as we can to disciple the nations.

Eschatology must never engender trivial, endless debates on Facebook and it must also not engender a culture of cultural laziness.

My prayer is that the church would be the kind of people who would be found faithful by Christ, sensible, speaking with authority and working up until the very moment that Jesus returns.

We've gotta get our head out of the clouds. And get our hand on the plow and start working.