I invite you again, this morning, to open your Bible, if you will, to the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew. We are again this week going back to what is becoming for us a familiar text, this great sermon of our Lord Jesus Christ on His own Second Coming that occupies chapter 24 and 25 of Matthew’s gospel. We have come now to the section in verse 36 through 51. We began in our last time together to look at these verses and we’ll conclude that look this morning.
We sang this morning a hymn that indicated that we were looking for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And all of us as Christians so live in anticipation of His coming. One theologian, I believe it was Oscar Cullmann said, “The Christian exists in a tension between what is already and what is not yet.” We have already experienced salvation, we have not yet experienced the fullness of salvation, that is the redemption of our bodies. We have already received the power of the Holy Spirit, we have not yet seen the fullness of that power in bringing us to full glory. We have already received life eternal, we have not yet participated in the resurrection.
And so, we are in a sense caught between the already and the not yet and we live in that tension. Looking back to the cross, looking forward to the Second Coming, living already in the last days and not yet in the last of the last days. Every believer, then, lives with a sense of what is already true and what is not yet come to pass. We live with that excitement, that thrill, that joy of looking for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, the writer of the Hebrews puts it in these words, “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many, and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation,” Hebrews 9:28.
Yes, already He has borne our sins but we look for Him because not yet has He come the second time unto full and glorious salvation. Peter puts it this way: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to the abundant mercy hath already begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for us.” Yes, already have we been begotten again but not yet have we entered fully into our inheritance. And 1 John 3 says, “Beloved, it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Yes, we have received Jesus Christ, yet we are not yet like Christ in all ways.
And so, we live between the already and the not yet. And our hearts are filled with anticipation for the Second Coming. It is not so, frankly, with those who do not know Christ. Those who would look and hear the message of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and who are not ready for that event should live in fear. Paul says, “Knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.” The writer of Hebrews says it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God. He says our God is a consuming fire. To think of the coming of Jesus Christ is either to think in hope and anticipation of glory, or to think in fear and dread of eternal doom. And so, we look to the coming of Christ. For those of us who know the Savior, we love His appearing. For those who do not, they fear His appearing.
In all of us, there is that question: when is it going to happen? When is Jesus going to come? That isn’t a new question. If you’ll remember, as we begin…as we began the study of chapter 24, we noted verse 3, “The disciples gathered around Jesus on the Mount of Olives and they said, When shall these things be and what shall be the signs of the end of the age and of Thy coming?” They wanted to know when also. When is it going to happen? When are You going to come in glory and reward the righteous and judge the wicked? When are You going to come and establish Your Kingdom? When is it going to happen? And what are the signs?
Well, in verses 4 through 35, our Lord gave the signs, didn’t He? He told them the signs. Now beginning in verse 36, He answers the when question. The what question, He already answered, gave them the signs. Now it’s the when question. When shall these things be?, they said. His answer comes in verse 36, look at it. “But of that hour, but of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, nor the Son but My Father only.”
His answer about the when is nobody knows but God alone, nobody knows. You mean, nobody knows when Jesus is going to come? Yes, that’s what He says, but would you notice that He says the day and the hour? In verse 42 He says it again, “You know not what hour.” In verse 44 He says it again, “For in such an hour as you think not.” In verse 50, at the end, “In an hour that He is not aware of.” Yes, it is possible to know the era or the age or the period of time in general. It is possible to know that. We already know that. The time period when our Lord’s coming will occur has already been revealed to us in great detail.
We are living in the church age. It comes to an end with the Rapture of the church. And that is the beginning of the end. That is the beginning of the day of the Lord, if you will. The church is taken out. The restrainer, the Holy Spirit, lets loose of the restraint of evil. There’s the rise of Antichrist. He looks like the savior of Israel, but half way through a period of seven years, immediately after the Rapture, he desecrates the Holy of Holies, he sets up an idol, calls the whole world to worship himself and that triggers the great Tribulation.
The Scripture’s clear about this. The Rapture of the church, the rise of Antichrist, the abomination of desolation, the great Tribulation, it’s called so in verse 21 of this chapter. And in that great Tribulation all kinds of terrorizing events take place. They are called in this chapter the birth pains of the Kingdom. They are the rapid fire successive pains that come upon the earth that issue in the birth of the Kingdom of Christ. They come at the very end, as birth pains come at the end of a pregnancy. And so, there is coming a time when the church is raptured, the rise of Antichrist takes place. Half way through the seven-year period in which he rises to prominence, he sets himself up for the whole world to worship. He then begins to persecute Israel and worldwide slaughter takes place.
The judgment of God falls as described in Revelation 6 through 18. And the end of that time, there is the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. We see in verses 29 to 31. The sky falls. The heavenly bodies fall. Everything in orbit loses its orbit. The powers of the heavens are shaken. And in the blackness that occurs in space, Christ appears and that’s the sign of His coming.
So, He has said in this marvelous message, these are the signs. But now He says, “Of the exact day and exact hour, no one knows.” The time period we know. It is immediately after, it says in verse 29, the Tribulation. The Tribulation is that period of time in which there’s a rise of Antichrist in which there are events described in Revelation 6 to 18 as well as here. That time can be seen clearly. It is a time beginning with the Rapture of the church.
Then appears at the end of the Tribulation, immediately after, the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. But how long from that sign of the Son of Man in heaven to the actual establishing of the Kingdom and judgment we don’t know. No one knows. And there is an interval there. In the book of Daniel, it’s at least a 75 day interval we see, but it might even be more than that. We don’t really know because we don’t know specifically to what Daniel refers. But there’s a time period in there that is undefined. And somewhere in that time period after the Tribulation, Christ is going to come in full final glory and judgment. But the exact moment, the exact day is not known. And so the Lord says no one knows, not men or angels, at that point in His incarnation and humiliation, He Himself did not know because the Father had not revealed that to Him and He in His incarnation humility restricted His omniscience to that which the Father revealed to Him. And so, it is an unknown time.
Now that’s very important, people. Jesus Christ’s Second Coming will occur at an unknown time. We do not know when it will happen. It could happen in any generation. Before it happens there will be the Rapture of the church, there will be the time of Tribulation, there will be the rise of Antichrist, there will be all the signs, the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then sometime following that, Jesus Christ will come.
But remember this. All of those things, from the Rapture of the church to the Second Coming, will happen very rapidly, won’t they? The Tribulation itself is seven years and the Second Coming comes immediately after that. So in about a seven-year period, the end of human history will occur. And in the twenty– pardon me,in the thirty-second to the thirty-fifth verse of this chapter, we read that the generation that is alive when the signs begin will be there when Jesus comes. In other words, it’s going to happen so fast that it will happen all in one generation, in fact in one very brief period of time. Once it starts, it will be over very rapidly. It could come on this generation, for if the Rapture of the church were to occur immediately, and it could, there’s nothing that has to precede the Rapture, if it were to occur right now, then this generation would live through all of these signs to the Second Coming of Christ…provided they survived. A third of them will be massacred, a fourth of them will be massacred in another holocaust. Wars and so forth will slaughter others. The Antichrist will massacre all that he can. If a person lives to see the end, it will happen that fast that if they saw the start and survived the events, they’ll be around to see the end. So it could come at any time on any generation.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
