How to Think and Act in Evil Days, Part 1

The Word of God opens the soul. It penetrates. It breaks up the heart. It reveals.

It is sufficient. One Christian commentator recently said that by any measure, the moral values in the United States are changing faster than at any other time in history. Unbiblical lifestyles that were almost universally condemned just a decade or two ago are now celebrated. So in today's culture, where godly values are mocked and Christians face growing hostility, what does God expect from you? John MacArthur starts answering that question today on Grace to You as he launches a study titled How to Think and Act in Evil Days.

Now, John, these messages on the Christian response to an evil culture, and I think it's significant that these were recorded during chapel services at the Masters University. Is that a reflection on where the intensity of the spiritual battle is the greatest in the lives of people on the younger side of their Christian experience? Yeah, you know, I think it's a very provocative question to ask, but I think maybe in my lifetime this generation has more fear, more anxiety, more dread than any previous generation. And the reasons for that, of course, have to do with the breakdown of marriage, the breakdown of the family, the literal drowning in a sea of filth and immorality and garbage being pumped at them in every technical form that it can be. So this is a very, very disturbed, distressed generation of young people, and they don't have a lot of hope for the future. They feel almost overwhelmed by certain issues that they'll never be able to tackle, higher rates of suicide as part of the opioid crisis and the drug-induced stupor that young people put themselves into. So, yeah, I think young people need help in navigating the days in which we live. The apostle Paul said it is a crooked and perverse generation, and that is exactly right. So we're going to do a study on how to think and act in evil days.

That's the title of it. And these messages I gave at the Masters University because I want these young people to know what the Word of God says about living in this particular era. While I delivered these messages really to students, they certainly are for every believer or any unbeliever to hear what the Bible says about living in the face of what feels like almost terminal wickedness. Christians are accused of being intolerant, so they at times soften up their stand against evil and against sin, and those kinds of compromises can lead them into making immoral judgments and acting in immoral ways because they've softened up their position because it's not popular. There are so many things that come at believers, particularly young believers in these days. They need to know how to think and act in these evil days. So for the next four days, we're going to look at that in the Word of God.

Stay with us. Yes, friend, this series is filled with bedrock principles for living a life that honors Christ and draws others to Him no matter how dark our world gets. Now with his look at how to think and act in evil days, here's John MacArthur. I want to talk to you today from the thirteenth chapter of Luke, so if you have your Bible handy, you might want to open to that chapter.

I've been thinking about this, always wanting to provide something for you that will be useful, something that will help you to not only clarify your Christian worldview, but will help you to talk to the people that you're going to intersect with as you go through the world and have the opportunity to honor Christ in every situation. It was 9-11 all the way back when the terrorists flew the planes into the Twin Towers in New York City that sort of catapulted me into a new world. I had pretty much been confined to the Christian world until 9-11 happened, and then through a series of circumstances, all of a sudden within a couple of days, I wound up in the national media. I wound up in the international media, and I remember sitting down on CNN for the first time in an international broadcast with talk show host Larry King, and I really didn't know what the questions were going to be.

I never did for all the many times that I was with him and other programs. You never know what they're going to ask, but the first question out of his mouth was, What does it mean? What is the lesson?

What do we take away from the devastation of the collapse of the Twin Towers under the terrorists and three thousand some-odd people dying? What's the message? And I just said off the cuff, not knowing the question before, I said, Well, the takeaway is this, you're going to die and you're not in control of when. Everybody's going to die.

And it was kind of a stunning answer, and as a result of that, it launched a lot more opportunities for me to communicate that conviction. That is the message. In fact, that's the message of life in all the catastrophes and calamities that we see around the world. We live in a society unlike any in the past. We live in a world of electronic media, mass communication, relentless visual images and enhancements. We see everything. We see everything that happens in the world of any significance, and we see it again and again and again and again. We're not isolated from anything, every catastrophe, every calamity, every cataclysm, every disaster, every tragedy. Everything is paraded before our eyes and becomes a vicarious experience for all of us, earthquakes in Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, tsunamis in Japan, famine in Africa, volcanic eruptions on various islands, hurricanes in Asia, plagues in India, avalanches in Europe, wars in Iraq, Sudan, Syria, suicide terrorists, wherever they show up in the Middle East or anywhere else, we see it all.

We've seen it all. We've seen massacres of children in schools in Russia, massacres of children in a school here in the United States. We've seen massacres in theaters, and we've seen it again and again and again and again.

There's a steady parade of these people, their families, their personalities. We see plane crashes, train disasters, sinking ferry boats, and on and on and on it goes. We're not isolated from anything.

In fact, we're overloaded with absolutely everything for the first time in the history of the world. Most of these things have nothing to do with us. We're not there.

We're not involved. We regularly do not experience these cataclysms and these catastrophes. But all of it becomes ours vicariously. We end up having to process the emotion of all of these things.

And I think some of the reality is that after you've seen them over and over and over again, so many of them, it begins to become kind of the same thing, replayed again and again, and our emotions aren't moved at all. Mass murders, we sort of take in stride, gruesome killings of innocent children, gang murders of innocent bystanders, including little babies, are so familiar to us. Catastrophic automobile accidents with families wiping them out, house fires that burn up families in the middle of the night.

We would normally never experience any of this, never. We might occasionally experience some tragedy. But we have to bear the weight of the whole world now.

And I guess part of the coping mechanism is you eventually become a little bit insensitive to all of that and we forget that life is dangerous on this planet, very, very dangerous and life is very, very brief. How do we as Christians absorb that, take that in, turn that into motivation to be effective for Christ in the world in which we live? Now we know everyone dies. It's appointed unto men once to die and after this the judgment.

We know that, the Bible says that, Hebrews 9, we get that. Everybody's headed for death and everybody's headed for heaven or hell. That ought to be enough motive for us to be serious about using the time and opportunity God gives us to bring the gospel to people. Realizing everyone dies, everyone lives forever in heaven or hell, and the only way to get to heaven is through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Should be enough compulsion for us. But, of course, we're caught up in a strange kind of paradox where, on the one hand, we're overexposed to these massive calamities that catapult large groups of people into death. And on the other hand, we live in a very self-conscious, self-satisfying, personally fulfilling world of people who are trying to suck everything they can out of this life and live temporal life to its max and elevate themselves to the highest level of comfort and prosperity they can.

It's a strange paradox. But as believers, we need to understand the world the way the Lord wants us to understand it. We need a biblical view. So that takes me to the thirteenth chapter of Luke for just a little while with you. And this is a very notable portion of Scripture. Let me read the opening few verses, one through five.

Now on the same occasion, there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus said to them, Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem?

I tell you no, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. This is a very, very important and very foundational way to view the world. This is information that would have been in the Jerusalem Gazette, or the Jerusalem Times, or whatever they called it. Some Galileans were in the temple and they were offering sacrifices, and Pilate's soldiers came in and slaughtered them so that their blood was mingled with the blood of the sacrifice.

Very dramatic scene. And some other Jews, eighteen of them to be exact, were minding their own business and walking in a construction zone and a tower fell on them and crushed them to death. Now the question that is on the mind of these people who are in the presence of our Lord is, Did this happen to these people because they were worse sinners than everybody else?

That's the point. Verse 2, Do you suppose these Galileans were greater sinners? Verse 4, Do you suppose those eighteen on whom the tower fell were worse culprits? That is the question.

Why is this the question in their mind? Because this was Jewish theology. If you go back to the book of Job, Job's friends come to him in the middle of his calamity and they say, There must be sin in your life, Job, because God is punishing you.

This is the only way they would have defined that. You remember they were silent for a long time, and then when they opened their mouths, all wisdom left, and they gave that same ridiculous viewpoint that when you have a calamity in your life, this is the direct personal judgment of God. That's what the Jews believed in Job's time way back in Pentateuchal times. You go all the way to the time of Christ, John 9, a blind man, and what do the leaders say to Jesus? Who sinned, this man or his parents? He's blind because somebody sinned because if something's wrong with you, that's a judgment of God on your personal sin. On the other hand, you're doing fine and you're well and you survive.

You must be the good people. Is that how we are to understand calamity? Well, let's look a little closer at this passage because it's very, very instructive for us. Verse 1, now on the same occasion, that is the same occasion as a long, long sermon in chapter 12, a sermon that our Lord is preaching, an evangelistic sermon to be sure, which ends in verses 58 and 59, while you're going with your opponent to appear before the magistrate on your way, there make an effort to settle with him so that he may not drag you before the judge, and the judge turn you over to the officer and the officer throw you in prison.

I say to you, you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last cent. This is an analogy, and at the end of our Lord's sermon, He's saying, you better make your peace with the judge before you show up in court. That's an analogy with a spiritual point. You better get right with God before you show up in His courtroom, before you show up in His presence. So He has preached this long evangelistic sermon. It has been interrupted a couple of times. It was interrupted in verse 13. Someone in the crowd interrupted Him. And then it was interrupted again in verse 41 when Peter interrupted Him. And I love that fact that Jesus is so intimate in His preaching that people feel like they can stop Him in the middle of His message and talk back to Him, and even strangers did that as well as Peter.

And then down in chapter 13, verse 1, He's interrupted again. There were some present who report to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate shed. He's talking about judgment.

He's talking about being ready to meet God. And that introduces into the minds of these people the question about death and judgment and what happens, what is God doing in the midst of a calamity? So they tell Jesus about this incident where the Galileans were offering sacrifices. Pilate's men came in and massacred them. Obviously a very fresh event that surfaced and it brought up their traditional idea that God punishes bad people and if you escape the punishment or the calamity, then you're the good people.

Let me give you a little background. This is a mass execution. We don't know how many people, but this is a slaughter of Jews at worship, a bloody slaughter in the most protected and sacred place in the temple. The temple is the only place where sacrifices are offered in Israel, so this is in the temple. The gory details say that the blood flowing down the altar from the sacrifices mingled with the blood of the offerors. That means that it probably happened at Passover because Passover is the only time people actually participated in the slaughter of their own sacrifices. So there they are, these people from Galilee offering their sacrifice at Passover, a surprise attack by Pilate's men slaughters them. There had been other slaughters. There was a slaughter by Archelaus killing 3,000 Judean Jews in 4 B.C., according to Josephus. There have been these kinds of slaughters before. Many Pharisees had been crucified on an earlier occasion historically.

Some have even suggested that these Galileans were thought of as insurrectionists, that they had somehow done some rebellious acts and had irritated the Romans, and this was retaliation. And when they knew the Romans were coming after them, they ran to the altar and they grabbed the horns of the altar. You remember that's what Adonijah did back in 1 Kings chapter 1. He said, you know, this is like King's X. I'm hanging on to the horns of the altar.

You can't hurt me. And Solomon did not kill him on that occasion. Pilate was not so gracious, however, and did not spare them. He was a brutal man. He was a man marked by bribery, atrocity.

He was implacable, inflexible, self-willed, wicked man. And it was this kind of conflict that eventually led the Jews to rebel and brought the Romans down in 70 A.D. to destroy them. So this is an incident that would have touched everybody's life. They all would have known about it. Pilate would have been in Jerusalem at the Passover, over from his place in Caesarea where he usually was. They mentioned this and Jesus presumes to know the question that's on their minds.

They just make a report. They just report to him about this recent incident and he says, Do you suppose? And that means he's going into their minds, and according to John 2, 23 to 25, he knew what people thought. No man needs to tell him what was in the heart of man. He knew what was there. He reads thoughts. He read Nicodemus' thoughts in John 3. He knows. So he knows the question and he answers the question.

It's a question that's in their minds. And the question is that simple question, What about calamities? It's not about death in general. What about calamity?

Is this singled out for the worst of people? Is God doing something that we could actually call judgment? Actually call judgment. Well let me back off of that question for a minute and just say, God would have a right to kill us anytime, any of us anytime, right? The wages of sin is what?

Death. The soul that sins, it shall die. Certainly God would have the right to kill every sinner anytime He wanted, and that would be a just act on God's part.

That would be a just act. That's why way back in Joshua when Achan was told to confess his sin and give glory to God, he was setting himself up for the judgment that would fall, being a just judgment by God, not an unjust one. God is just to judge sinners. We are worthy of that judgment. But God is merciful.

God extends grace to us and sinners live and they get used to living and they get used to not being judged. So when something happens like some calamity, then the question arises, why is this happening? Why is this happening? The better question is, why is this not happening?

Why is there not more of this? Because God is patient and kind and gracious and merciful. The sinner may be storing up wrath against the day of wrath, but he has the opportunity during that time to come to God and to be forgiven.

So here is the simple principle. God has a right to kill every sinner instantaneously and it's a just act. He doesn't do that, so sinners get used to being favored by God in the sense of common grace. In the Old Testament occasionally when God opened up the ground and swallowed somebody or sent bears out of the woods to tear up young men for saying bald head, bald head, mocking a prophet, people say, why would God do that?

That's not the question. The question is, why did God let people live? Why does He allow the sinner to live? Why does He extend common grace? The rain falls on the just and the unjust. Why is God so patient and so gracious?

And we'll see in particular the answer to that at the end of our discussion. The real punishment for sin comes in the next life. God giving sinners gospel opportunity we can say in this life. So the question then, go to verse 2, do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? And the Lord says in verse 3, I tell you no...I tell you no. They're not greater sinners than anybody else or everybody else. Go to verse 4. Now Jesus introduces another incident. Do you suppose that those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who lived in Jerusalem?

We don't have any other details on this. This is the only place that this is ever referred to. Siloam is an area of Jerusalem where the southern and eastern wall of the lower city come together. A pool is there, it's referred to in John 9. Fed by the Gihon spring outside the wall in the area of Hezekiah's tunnel. Apparently this disaster happened in that area. Now we know that Pilate built an aqueduct in that area and either the tower was perhaps part of the construction scaffolding for the aqueduct or some kind of a permanent tower, maybe as a guard station or whatever.

But it collapsed and it collapsed and snuffed out the life of 18 people. That also would be headline stuff in the Jerusalem Gazette. In the first case, what's interesting is they were worshipers doing what the Old Testament prescribed for them to do. They were doing righteous deeds. They were acting obediently. In the second, they were just innocent bystanders.

They weren't doing anything in particular, but walking down the way when it crushed them. And again, Jesus understands the conventional wisdom. And so He says, do you suppose those were worse culprits, ophiletes, worse debtors to God, worse violators of God's law than any other people?

And He says, I tell you, no...no. Which is to say, the fact that you're alive and you're wondering this and you're posing this question in your mind does not mean that you're better. It doesn't mean that you're any better at all. This is eliminating this long-standing wrong idea that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. Calamity happens to good and bad people. Calamity happens to people doing the right thing. It happens to people doing nothing in particular. It happens. And that's why in verses 3 and 5, the answer to the question, do bad things happen only to bad people, is no...no.

Emphatic, ukied, no, I tell you. Just because you're alive doesn't mean you have escaped judgment, doesn't mean you are good. The true calamity is that you will die and you will experience the terrible judgment of God. And you better, going back to verse 58 and 59 of the previous chapter, you better get before the judge and make a right relationship with the judge.

Find out what the judge requires for forgiveness and deliverance and salvation. The issue is not how you die. The issue is not from what you die. Real calamity is that you die without repenting.

Then you will face divine judgment and perish in hell. So that simple statement that I made on CNN that day, what is the lesson of the terrorists flying into the towers and three thousand people dying? The lesson is this, you're going to die, you better be ready because you're not in control of when.

That's the lesson. And again I go back to what I said earlier, life in this world is a very dangerous thing. And there's only one group of people who have any truth that can deliver people from the danger of being alive, and that's Christians. There is no other message. There is no other truth. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for tuning in today. John's current study, How to Think and Act in Evil Days, looks at how God can use you to honor Christ and draw people to Him in a world that seems to grow more wicked every day. Keep in mind, you can own this series in a two-CD album, or download it for free at our website.

The title again, How to Think and Act in Evil Days. Get your copy today. Call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or go to GTY.org. If you'd like the CD album, it costs $12 and shipping is free. Again, to order, call 800-55-GRACE, or visit our website GTY.org.

You can also download both messages from How to Think and Act in Evil Days free of charge at GTY.org. Now, let me mention a letter we recently received from Jacob in Singapore. He told us that since 2013 he has listened to Grace to You every day, and that John's teaching has been pivotal to his spiritual growth, so now he uses Grace to You's material to lead Bible studies at his own church and in prisons. And friend, that is the kind of personal ministry you help make possible when you support Grace to You through your prayers and by your giving. To let us know that you're praying, or to make a donation, you can write to us at Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be here when John continues to show you how to think and act in evil days. Don't miss the next 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on tomorrow's Grace to You.