This morning it’s our wonderful privilege to return to the twenty-first chapter of the gospel of Luke. You can take your Bible, or one near you there in the pew and turn to Luke chapter 21.
As you well know because we’ve been working our way through the gospel of Luke, we find ourselves in the twenty-first chapter of Luke on a Wednesday, unlike any other Wednesday. This is Wednesday of Passion Week, the final week of our Lord’s life. On Thursday there will be preparations and a Passover meal held with Jesus and His disciples and He will give them His great spiritual legacy in the upper room teaching. He will be betrayed and on Friday He will be crucified. On Sunday He will rise again. But this is Wednesday. It is twilight on that Wednesday and Jesus is with His disciples now. He has left the hateful rulers behind, after numerous confrontations with them in which they had endeavored to discredit Him publicly so they could have cause for the Romans to execute Him. All unsuccessful and so in order to execute Him they had to fabricate and lie, come up with false accusations. He has left them behind. He has left behind the crowd still indifferent, still uncommitted even after all that Jesus had said and done, leaving the temple with only His disciples.
From now on He will speak only to them. It is twilight then on that Wednesday. They are gathered around Him on the Mount of Olives. And from a human viewpoint, it looked as if all their hopes and ambitions and desires for Him had been smashed and crushed. In a combination of very evident and obvious hatred and hostility from the leaders and at best indifference from the crowd, it was a far cry from their expectation that Jesus would come and be hailed and received as the true Messiah, as it seemed He might be on that very Monday when He came in to Jerusalem. But the crowd was growing colder and colder toward Him and eventually they would cry, “Crucify Him, crucify Him,” and commiserate with the leaders in His own execution.
This wasn’t the way they expected it to turn out. And as they leave the temple, we pick up the story in verse 5. Some were talking about the temple, that it was adorned with beautiful stones and votive gifts. He said, “As for these things which you’re looking at, the days will come in which there will not be left one stone upon another which will not be torn down.” Walking away from the temple, looking back at that magnificent facility, Jesus says, “It’s all coming down.” The temple, the city, the people, the nation, and, by the way, it is a long-term judgment. He had said this before that Jerusalem would be judged by God and that it would remain under that judgment and the desolation of that judgment until the Jewish people embraced their Messiah. He said, “Your nation is desolate and it will be desolate until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’” And so, the desolation that was pronounced upon that temple and that city remains to this day. It is not the city of God, it is still a city under divine judgment, it has no temple, it has no faith in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and so it remains in desolation.
They didn’t expect that. There was no way that they would have expected that any judgment on that temple, any judgment on that city or nation would last this long. They knew the Lord was displeased because on Tuesday, the day before this, He had cleansed the temple. He had run out the buyers and the sellers who had turned His Father’s house, which is a house of prayer, into a den of thieves, cave of robbers. They knew He was displeased. They knew the populous and the leaders had rejected Him. But their assumption was that whatever judgment is going to come, is going to come and immediately be relieved by a restoration and a revival and an establishment of the reign of Messiah. It all is going to come together. They had no idea of this great interval of several millennia. And so, when they hear about the coming destruction which began in 70 A.D., forty years after this, when the Romans destroyed the temple and the city and the nation. They questioned Him, saying, “Teacher when therefore will these things be? And what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?” And Matthew’s account of this same conversation adds, “What will be the sign of Your coming and the end of the age?” They thought the judgment and the signs of judgment and the coming of Christ in glory and the end of the age and the establishment of the messianic age was all going to happen at the same time, certainly in Jesus’ lifetime because He was the Messiah and therefore in their own lifetime as well. And that’s why even after His resurrection, when they were meeting with Him, they said, “Will You at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel? Is it now? Is it now?” They expected it all to happen then. And if there was going to be judgment, the judgment would come. And it would then be relieved and Christ would be present to establish His Kingdom of righteousness as promised in the Old Testament.
But Jesus says in verse 8, and I just want us to look at this, this morning, and we’ll expand it a lot, “See to it that you be not misled.” You are in a very vulnerable position. You have an intense hope for all fulfillment of messianic promise. You can therefore be verily easy misled. You can be deceived. Your enthusiasm for this, your expectation of this puts you in a very vulnerable place. “Do not be misled, for many will come in My name, claiming to be Me and represent Me saying, ‘I am He.’ And saying, ‘The time is at hand. Do not go after them.’”
Here is a hint that His coming is a long way off. It has to be a long way off because in the meantime they’re in a danger of being deceived because they have so much anticipation and eagerness and in that anticipation and eagerness, there will be many who come and make false claims to be the Messiah, false claims that this is the time of His coming and establishing His Kingdom. He says, “Do not go after them.” In verse 9, He says, “When you hear of wars and disturbances, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end does not follow immediately.” And here He says whatever you expect, it isn’t coming soon. They’re going to be wars, disturbances, terrifying things. There are going to be many, many false claimants to be Messiah, many saying the time is now, the time is now. Don’t be misled, the end does not follow immediately, it’s a long way off.
Is He coming at all? Look at verse 27, “You will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” Yes, He is coming. You will see Him coming. “But before that, many things must take place.” Starting in verse 9 and running all the way to verse 27, He describes the preliminaries to His coming. Then he describes His coming and then He describes how to prepare for His coming. This then is a sermon by Jesus about His own return in which He warns us to realize it’s a long way off, there are many preliminary things that are going to happen before He comes. He will come and then says, “Here’s how to prepare for His coming.” We’re going to work our way through all of this. And by the way, Mark 13 has a parallel account to this and an even more full account of this is found in Matthew chapter 24 and 25, the largest record of our Lord’s conversation with the disciples about His return. This is so important, the timing of this is absolutely critical because it looks to the disciples and I’m sure it looked to everybody else as if the last chapter on Jesus was about to be written in two days. He would die on a cross and that is the end of that. The people had not responded to Him. The leaders had not received Him. In fact, just the opposite. They resented and despised Him. This is not the scenario that everybody expected, even those who were true believers anticipating the coming of Messiah. It wasn’t going in the right direction. He leaves the temple alone with only His disciples following Him. That’s all He has after this full ministry of three years, after this tremendously intense week and this wild reception on Monday, there’s just the disciples, a few left.
On the side of the Mount of Olives in the twilight and Jesus says, “This is not the last chapter.” This is not the last chapter. I’ll come, I will return when the desolation is over, I will return. When Israel looks on the one they pierced and mourns for Him as an only Son, as Zechariah put it, when they say, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” I will return and I will fulfill all the promise.
It is said that future predictive prophecy occupies one fifth of Scripture, not a small amount. Of that one fifth of Scripture which is predictive prophecy, one third of that speaks of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to judge sinners and to reward and reign with the righteous. So one third of the one fifth is focused on the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. There are about 660 general prophecies in the Bible, half of them are about Jesus Christ. Of the 330 that are about Christ, well 110 of them are about His first coming and 220 of them are about His Second Coming. So there is a huge amount of Scripture that focuses on the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Another sort of statistical way to look at the importance of this subject is, out of the 46 Old Testament prophets, ten of them spoke of matters related to His first coming, 36 of them spoke of matters related to His Second Coming. Someone has estimated that over 1500 verses in the Old Testament looked to the return of the Messiah in glory and judgment. One out of every 25 verses in the New Testament relates to Christ’s return. For every time Christ mentions His first coming, He mentions His second coming eight times. That is every time the New Testament mentions His first coming, it mentions His second coming eight times. Our Lord referred to it 20 times and there are over 50 times in the New Testament we are warned that He’s coming. He’s coming.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
