Warned (Part A)

Put me in front of somebody to preach the gospel. It seems to me that less and less folks are coming to Christ. I mean, maybe they are and I'm just not hearing about it. It's not like I get a newsletter from heaven. Hey Rick, here's the tally for this week. But this is something that every born-again believer should be concerned with because we are not saying, Lord, rapture us and too bad for them. We are saying Lord, let us take with us as many of them as we can get.

But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the Gospel of Mark chapter 13 for a brand new study called, Warned. For you do not know when the time is. It is like a man going to a far country who left his house and gave authority to his servants and to each his work and commanded the doorkeeper to watch, watch therefore. For you do not know when the master of the house is coming in the evening, at midnight, at the crowing of the rooster, or in the morning, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say to you, I say to all, watch.

Warned, that's the title of this message. We are finishing up our end times consideration in the Gospel of Mark. No word of Jesus is casual.

Everything he says means something and is important. And he had pinpointed for us, beginning in verse 28 through 31, some of the signs that would be signaling the nearing of the Great Tribulation period. And he did this through the fig tree, which we identified as Israel.

Israel is the time clock, or it's the clock to watch, the calendar, Israel. But here in verses 32 through 37, he is warning believers to be ready since they know the season. This has to do with the rapture of the church because he had already made clear that once the abomination of desolation takes place, there's 1290 days after that before the end comes, so there would be really no need to warn as he is warning in this section.

This has everything to do with the church. Strong delusion, including madness or insanity, awaits those that are disinterested in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we're seeing this, we're seeing some of this insanity in our time.

I mean, let's get rid of the police. A criminal mind came up with that one, and it is just, it's insane. The whole, you know, the transgender thing, it's a total insanity. There's a warning that comes with this statement to Christians. There are times when a Christian has a family member that is engaged in some sin and feels that they should be the advocate for that family member when the pastor targets that sin.

Don't you do that. You know, we love the sinner, but we're not going to sweep under the rugs the things that God tells us to bring out into the light and to deal with. And Romans 2 talks about that. Watch out that you're not an advocate for sinners regardless of how much you love them. We see, we see a Christian may have a great, be standing, stand against homosexuality until their child says that they're struggling with this.

And sometimes that, those parents will switch teams and become advocates. And this is Satan. And this is madness.

And it should not be. This insanity that we are experiencing, of course, is authored by Satan, but it is allowed by God and controlled by him. God said, you're free to be nuts, but not out of my control. Deuteronomy 28, verse 28, Yahweh will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart.

That's pretty thorough. And what that tells us, God speaking to the Jews, you want to mess, he's saying you want to mess around with your relationship with me, the outcome's going to be insanity. Well, if he can do that with the Jews, he can do it with anybody. This is a characteristic of his sovereignty.

In 1 Kings, there was that prophet Micaiah, and you can't help but love this prophet. And the wicked king Ahab, who had married Satan's daughter Jezebel, Ahab decided that when Jehoshaphat, the good king, came to visit him, that he was going to use this good king and his army as a duo to go against the enemies of the people and take back land. And Jehoshaphat was a good king, but he just had no ability. He lacked discernment. He would buddy up with the wrong people, and he'd pay for it.

And the Lord would have to come down and help him. But anyway, when the false prophets came out and paraded themselves before Ahab and said, yes, king, go take back the land for Israel, God is with you, Yahweh is with you, they weren't even the prophets of Yahweh. And Jehoshaphat said, well, isn't there a true prophet in Israel? And Ahab says, yeah, there's one, and I hate him, because he never says anything good about me.

You see the insanity? Well, do something good. Earn it. You're not entitled to the blessings of God's prophets. You have to be worthy of such accolades or such good prophecies in his case. Anyway, they summon the prophet, Micaiah, and they tell him, listen, don't say anything bad. And he says, I'm going to say what God gives me. And he gets there, and they say, well, Micaiah, what does the Lord have to say? And it has to have been in a sarcastic tone. The prophet says, oh, yeah, fine, go ahead. You're going to win.

Oh, yeah, it's going to be great. Because how else would the king have detected that he was being sarcastic when he said, go, God is with you? It had to be in the inflection, the tone. Well, of course, he says, see what I mean? The king says he never says anything good. But then Micaiah the prophet said, okay, I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm going to illustrate it for you in a parable. Now, the events that he then depicts for the king are not to be taken literal, but they are dramatized to make his point. And he said the Lord wanted to send Ahab to war so that he could judge him and have him killed. And he asked, you know, his messengers, he said, how are we going to do this? And one came up with this idea, and one came up with that idea, and another came up, and this is what he said. Well, he said, I will be a lying spirit to him. I will tell him what he wants to hear even though it's not true. And the Lord in the prophet's parable granted this permission, and that is exactly what happened.

And then we pick up this part. Therefore, the prophet says to the king, look, Yahweh has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets of yours, and Yahweh has declared disaster against you. God is in control. And God, as the prophet was saying to the king, you are following lies, and there's going to be a deadly consequence for you because you follow these lies.

And this is our message to the world. And of course, the king goes off and he is killed in battle, or as a result of battle, and the prophet's word comes true. And much of earth's population will resent God for behaving as God, as they do now. Anybody else can be God.

Any false God has the right to be God, but the only true God cannot be God according to the response of many people through the ages. Well, God is going to give the people who reject him the person behind the lies that they cherish and love so much. The lying spirit. They're going to gobble up the lie because they have no love for the truth, as was the case with Ahab the king. The prophet told him right out, a lying spirit. You believe the lying spirit, but here a prophet of God speaks to you because you don't care for what he is saying.

He has to be rejected. Well, at the time of the great tribulation period, when God gives those living at that time the person that they want, Satan, not all of them, there will be converts, but most of them it seems, will be following the lie. We pick it up in Revelation 6 how these people think. The madness, the craziness. Revelation 6 verse 15, and the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains and said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb. And what the prophet is saying, he's saying I'm revealing this to you that when the judgment of God falls on this earth in this great tribulation age, there are going to be those that would rather hide from the creator than repent, then turn to him. They will have no excuse because the word is here and it will be going forth. This is the madness. It's very serious business.

And so as we talk about the coming of the rapture, the removal, the evacuation of the church, we have to do so as those who are sober-minded, who are telling the world, listen, there isn't an insanity available to you that can make you a functioning kook. That's what they become. They can stay in their lane on the roadways. They can still go to work and function and build things. They can work in hospitals. You know the tremendous care that is available today in the hospitals. They can do all these things.

They can function even though they are spiritually insane. Well, who's going to do something about this? That's what we're here for. And we Christians should be praying, Lord, put me in front of somebody to preach the gospel. It seems to me that less and less folks are coming to Christ.

I mean, maybe they are and I'm just not hearing about it. Not like I get a newsletter from heaven, hey Rick, here's the tally for this week. But this is something that every born-again believer should be concerned with. Because we are not saying, Lord, rapture us and too bad for them. We are saying, Lord, let us take with us as many of them as we can get.

And, you know, if God puts you into a bank vault and said you've got five minutes to bring out as much cash as you can, you'd be going crazy in there. And God is saying, I've put you in a loony bin, this planet, and I want you to grab out of it as many people as you can. You say, well, I can't. I can't. I try sharing the gospel.

I don't want to hear it. And the Lord says, just pray to me. And that's what we're going to get. And we just stood and read that. Heed, watch, pray.

Pray for what? They would be able to escape the hell that is taught by God that awaits those who flat out reject Him. And so, with that brief introduction, we've got about two minutes left. I could probably pack this church if I cut the sermons down to ten minutes. But anyway, verse 32, but of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Now again, this is the rapture, which we know to be the miraculous removal of the church.

And the Lord doesn't, of course, get into that. The existence of the church at the time He spoke these words was still not here yet. There was no such thing as a New Testament church as we know it when He spoke these words.

He will leave it after Pentecost for His apostles to begin its teachings and then future disciples to develop it. But the church as we know it has emerged from Judaism. And had it not been for Gentiles joining the church, because it started again with mostly all Jews, it likely would have been lost to realignment to Judaism. And Judaism didn't give up. It kept trying to bring the Christians back in. This is part of the problem in Galatia when Peter and Barnabas reacted to those who came from Jerusalem sent by James, and all of a sudden they didn't want to be with the Gentiles, they stayed with the Jews. And Paul, he went right to guns on this.

This is not little. You're killing the church. You're going to make it just like Judaism.

And of course he says, I rebuke Peter to his face because he needed to be rebuked and Peter received that rebuke. And so what I'm discussing here is the church, the New Testament church, what it is. We know what the times are going to be because Christ has told us. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, 1 Thessalonians, the first four verses.

We're concerning the times and the seasons. Brethren, you have no need that I should write to you, for you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. For when they say peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them. Pause there. Well Christ said, when you see the abomination of desolation, you better get out of Jerusalem.

And this is how many days you have. There's no peace and safety there. So the point I'm making is what Paul is talking about here is the rapture of the church. And that's when he says, well when they say peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them, that would be the great tribulation period, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman and they shall not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness so that this day should not overtake you as a thief. So Christians are supposed to know, okay, we're getting close.

We've got to ramp it up now. And this is, of course, what the preceding verses were all about, Jesus laying out this end times scenario. Earthlings will be shocked when Christians are extracted.

But they will have their hands filled with a lot of other things and there will be power plays and wars and natural disasters and these things will keep going and escalate and it will be a time, as Jesus said, such as the world has never known. He says here, not even the angels in heaven. It's classified, the day of the Lord, that ignites the tribulation period. Once that rapture comes, it starts.

He says, nor the Son. Well, this actually is a very easy answer. You may be saying, how could Jesus not know when the day of the rapture is, if he is God the Son?

And the answer is quite simple. When he spoke these words, these are the days of his self-imposed limitation. His humanity, he restricted himself in many ways and we certainly, well, for instance, they crucified him. You see, that was a restriction that he placed upon himself. I can call 12 legions of angels.

In fact, I don't even need the angels. He could have done it that way, but he did not. And what he is saying to us, I am submitting myself so that I can save those who will come to me. His deity was never put on hold. He was always God, from the time in Mary to always God. But his sovereignty, sort of like God tied his hands behind his back sort of thing. For example, Christ was not ubiquitous.

He was not everywhere at the same time. But if he wanted to find something out, all he had to do was ask his father. In fact, when he says the Son doesn't know, if these disciples knew what we knew, if I was standing in that group knowing what I know now, I would have said, well, can you ask the Father? Because he is going to tell you and then tell us.

But of course, it didn't play out that way because I wasn't there. So, the Son does not know in his humanity. He would suffer in his humanity. Luke's Gospel, chapter 17, verse 25, but first, speaking of himself, he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. And so, in his humanity, he suffered, but never in his glory. After the resurrection, there's no more getting to Christ, Hebrews 9, 28. So, Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. So much for those who think that he is repeatedly suffering. That is a lie. It is unbiblical.

It is against what is clearly taught. He continues in Hebrews 9, to those who eagerly wait for him, he will appear a second time apart from sin for salvation. So, he humbled himself in the form of a servant.

Paul writes to the Philippians. And there was a progression. It was a development in Christ. As Luke tells us, he grew in stature with men.

You know, had you not known I was about my father's business? And there was this development. And as you travel through the New Testament, you begin to discover the difference between the days of his humanity and the days of his glory. And I like to think that I stayed on this a bit when we went through the Gospel of Luke. And so, these disciples are going to ask him this question again after his resurrection. And then, of course, he is now in his glorified form.

He is not limited. And Acts chapter 1, verse 6, Therefore, when they had come together, they asked him, saying, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel? Sort of asking the same question a different way. Maybe to like, you know, catch him off guard a bit.

Of course, I'm not sure that's what happened, but I like to see it that way. Anyway, and he said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons which the father has put in his own authority. He could have said, I told you, I don't know.

But he does know at this point because this self-imposed limitation is gone now. He is not admitting here to being ignorant, but subject to the father. And having dawned humanity on him. That humanity of Christ was dismissed at Calvary. Father, into your hands I commend you.

That was the end of it. Now he is the Christ that walked with them. As Paul said, we knew him according to the flesh, we know him no more. The Christ Jesus that they walked with through Galilee was in his glorified state much more. And this is why when he appears to John in the Revelation, John says, I fell down dead before him.

And he touched me and told me to fear not. And so there you have another picture of this changed relationship, which he eased into those disciples. So that after his resurrection he sort of appeared to them and they were like, who is this guy? You know, they weren't sure.

It's the Lord, you know, and the development is clear. Mary Magdalene didn't really care about the development. She just loved him.

John and the others hesitated a little bit. Mary Magdalene grabbed hold of him. And of course we know, don't cling to me. Don't get used to me being here, Mary.

I'm not staying. But these are pictures of our Lord and how he conducted business when he was here. And he insisted that his followers cultivate an attitude of alertness concerning his return.

Now again, as they're listening to this, they're not putting it all together. But they're going to be grabbing hold of the things he said once he ascends into heaven. And they've gone through the crucifixion resurrection with him as far as witnesses of it all. Daniel, and Christ dealt with this in verse 14 when he talks about the desolation, quoting Daniel 12. And from the time that the daily sacrifice is taken away and the abomination of desolation is set up, there shall be 1290 days, a three and a half year period of the great tribulation of Jacob's trouble. So the world will be going through tribulation and then at the three and a half year mark, Israel will really go through it. The day of the Lord that does not include his church, starts at the rapture and lasts for over a thousand years. Even when Christ returns, that is still under the umbrella of that prophecy, the day of the Lord. It's a very broad prophecy. The prophets, they neither spoke nor wrote about the church.

It was that foreign of a concept. It was held back and rightfully so because it was hard enough for the Jewish Christians to begin to depart from Judaism. That's why we have Paul's letter to the Hebrews saying, stop it. You're no longer Jewish as far as religion goes. You're Christians now and if you continue this, the cross of Christ won't profit you. It is obsolete and he goes into Melchizedek and Abraham before Levi was even born and it's just quite remarkable how he shuts down this having an idea of this hybrid religion called Judaism, which makes the Judaizers sorry, not Judaism.

Judaizers were trying to merge Christianity with Judaism. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You can search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark right here on Cross Reference Radio.