Here He Comes, Ready or Not, Part 1

Today, from Chuck Swindoll. The issue in eternity will be, what did you do in your life with Christ? Did you trust Him as your Savior, or did you reject Him? If you trusted Him, you're standing before the Lord in the full assurance that it's the blood of Christ that was given for you on the cross that forgave you of your sins and opened the door to heaven for you, all by His grace, which you do not deserve.

It drives us to make a decision. He's teaching from Matthew chapter 24. In this passage, we see Jesus teaching His disciples about the last days, and His instruction has serious implications for our times. Chuck titled today's message, and He often gathered His 12 disciples for a few moments of quietness, and He took advantage of those moments by teaching them, giving them insight they would otherwise never have.

And He chose unusual moments for that. As we go through this Gospel by Matthew, we find Him where we are today, and we find Him in the 24th chapter of all places, sitting down on the easy-flowing slope of a mountain called the Mount of Olives. When you travel to Israel, you will visit the Mount of Olives. There's a western slope, and after the crest, the eastern, and He is moving from Jerusalem, which is on the western side of the Mount.

He's on His way to the little village of Bethany, which is on the eastern side. And along the way, a conversation arises spontaneously as the disciples ask about something regarding the future. This moment, knowing His arrest, trials, and death will soon come.

This is the moment He needs to tell them about things in the future. So He sat down, and He taught them. It's called a discourse. Theologians called Matthew 24 and 25 the Olivet. It's a discourse on the Mount of Olives. He taught them. Matthew covers it in two chapters, and then it's over.

When you read it, it's intriguing, it's captivating, because it has to do with the future, but it's brief, very brief. And He doesn't answer all of our questions. He's simply like a good teacher.

The teacher lays out the facts and lets you wrestle with them. Think about them. We're in the middle of that in chapter 24. We're in the latter half of the chapter. It's a long chapter, 51 verses.

So we'll only take a couple of excerpts for the sake of time. Be sure you listen carefully to what Jesus said. to His disciples about the future. I'll be reading from the New Living Translation because it is easier to understand for those who are not well acquainted with their Bibles.

My desire is always to interest those who don't know a lot about the Bible, even though I'm surrounded by many of you who know a great deal. But we're going to be reading excerpts from Matthew 24. If your Bible is open, I'll begin reading in verse 29.

Then we'll skip a little section and read another few verses. Chapter 24, verse 29. And then at last, the sign that the Son of Man is coming will appear in the heavens. And there will be deep mourning among all the peoples of the earth, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. with power and great glory. And He will send out His angels with the mighty blast of a trumpet, and they will gather the chosen ones from all over the world, from the farthest ends of the earth and heaven. Verse 37. When the Son of Man returns, it will be like it was in Noah's day. In those days before the flood, the people were enjoying banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat.

People didn't realize what was going to happen until the flood came and swept them all away. That is the way it will be when the Son of Man comes. Two men will be working together in the field. One will be taken, the other left.

Two women will be grinding flour at the mill. One will be taken, and the other left. So you too must keep watch, for you don't know what day your Lord is coming. You're listening to Insight for Living.

To study the book of Matthew with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. And now the message from Chuck titled, Here He Comes, Ready or Not. The return of Christ never fails to create mixed emotions. For those of us who anticipated, there is great comfort and relief in the thought. Finally, the promises will be fulfilled. At last, we'll be able to see the one we have believed in by faith, and we will know him as he is, just as he has always known us. However, to those who are not ready for his return, the spectrum is as broad as one extreme to the other. Those who fight against the thought and are skeptical to the core, with even the idea that there will one day be an end of the world and a return of Jesus, all the way to the sort of a passive indifference that that might occur.

What difference will it make anyway? I have a friend who was a skeptic before he was a believer. And during his years of skepticism, he he sort of kept all religious things at a distance. Nice, safe distance.

He either didn't think about them or if they surfaced, he would have a quick comeback and then would pass it off with little thought any further. He was hitchhiking across America a number of years ago and clouds were forming and night was falling. And he really did need a ride, not only to get to where he wanted to go ultimately, but to get in out of the rain. Just as the sprinkles began to fall, a car pulled over and a door flew open and the driver yelled, hop in!

And my friend was delighted to get in before the rain. As soon as he got in the rain, started pounding on the car, he said, so he just sort of settled into the seat and then was shocked to look in front of him and to see a small card that had been taped to the glove box right in front of him. It read, warning, in the event of Christ's return, this driver will suddenly disappear and this car will self-destruct.

At the bottom in bright red handwritten letters, you better get ready, GIT, you better get ready. Well, I asked him how he felt, rain falling, now pretty close to nightfall, and he's in the car with his fanatic, as he would call him, a guy about to exit while he's driving. How did that feel, I asked? And he said, well, I didn't know whether to write my will, pray or jump.

I really didn't know. So I said, well, what did you do? He said, you're going to laugh. But so the first thing I did was unlock my door. So I don't know why.

How would that help if suddenly the whole thing went up in flames? But he said, the other thing I remember is I engaged him in constant conversation because I thought Jesus won't interrupt our conversation while we're talking back. And he said, we talked about everything you could imagine. The guy kept wanting to bring it back to Jesus. And I kept wanting to stay away from Jesus. But at least he said we were able to talk.

We were we were discussing nonsensical things just to keep talking. Isn't it funny how superstitious people can be as the spectrum runs from one extreme to the other? Here sits a guy who couldn't wait for Jesus to come back. Sitting next to him is a man who doesn't have time to even think about it until he reads about it from a card written in front of him.

They're in that car. While I was going through these chapters in Matthew 24 and 25, I began to think back over a number of years that I've spent in passages like this that deal with future things and climax with the return of Christ. And I remember being taught carefully by professors at a seminary that took these words seriously as they took all the words of the Bible seriously. And I remember having explained to me how the Lord would come in the clouds to receive us from the earth as believers would be taken, leaving on the earth, only unbelievers to go through a terrible time of anguish and tribulation that would reach greater intensity toward the latter half of that time and ultimately would wind up with Jesus returning to the earth. There is a difference between his coming in the clouds, often referred to as the rapture of the church, which is the next event in the future, and his coming to earth to judge the earth and to set up his kingdom where he fulfills his promises to Israel and carries out the events that are set forth in prophetic passages like the one we're dealing with.

I also have lived long enough to have heard a lot of foolish predictions, as many of you have. I've heard people literally put dates when Christ would return. I remember back in 1974, I was preaching and I had a pastor a number of miles away from where we lived and where I was ministering who had made an announcement that on a certain date Jesus would come. We'll say May 20, 1975, and I remember waiting until May 21, 1975, and I wrote him and I asked, how you doing? Because he had predicted Jesus would come on the 20th and obviously he didn't, and I wanted to know his reaction.

I never heard back from him. And there are others I could have written and you could have who have made predictions. In fact, I did some research and I came up with two pages of predictions where people determined Jesus would come all the way back to AD 500 to January 1, 1000 to the year 1415.

Pope Innocent III in the Middle Ages took the number 618, which is the year Islam was founded, and he added the number 666, which is the number of the beast. And that came up with 1284, as he claimed would be the year Jesus would return. He didn't. And then February 14, 1835, Joseph Smith made his prediction. He was wrong. William Miller made a prediction between 1843, 1844. He was wrong. Another guy, I thought this one was interesting.

Where is this? Yeah, here it is. In 1998, which was a good year for prophecies, since the number 666 times three equals 1998, a psychic named Edgar Cayce taught that a secret underground chamber would be discovered between the paws of the great Sphinx in Egypt. Within the chamber would be documents about the history of the lost city of Atlantis, and this new revelation would activate the second coming of Jesus. It didn't. There was also no document. Then the year 2000, remember Y2K?

Oh, my. How many people predicted Jesus would come? He didn't even foul up the computers.

We went right on. And then Harold Camping made his comments in 1994 and on and on and on and on and on and on. It's like you've never read Matthew 24, 36. Look, you read English, all of you. You're able to read verse 36.

Just the first few verses. However, no one knows the day or the hour when these things will happen, not even the angels. Look at the words.

No one knows. I give you a tip that kind of insults the intelligence of any thinking person. If you're under the teaching of someone setting dates, you're following a false teacher. Get out.

Get away from that teacher. He or she is dangerous. They'll tell you other things that are fallacious. No one knows. No one will ever know. That's what God says in his word.

Let's believe it. And there are details here that are debatable. And if you study as I've studied it and I continue to study it, I keep coming across the debatable issues. And I decided not only do I not want to do any kind of prophesying, which would be ridiculous.

And wrong. I don't want to get into the into any of the debatable stuff. Because I'm honest with you, when Christ has a stand before him, hear this. No one will have to pass the theology, a theology exam. No one will have to go through a Bible quiz.

No one. He'll not ask you how you handled Matthew 24 and 25. That won't be the issue in eternity. The issue in eternity will be what did you do in your life with Christ? Did you trust him as your savior or did you reject him? What did you do with Jesus? If you trusted him, you're standing before the Lord. Comfortable, confident in the full assurance that it's the blood of Christ.

That was given for you on the cross that forgave you of your sins and opened the door to heaven for you. All by his grace, which you do not deserve and will never be able to repay. That's why you're there. You're without Christ. As we will emphasize today, your future is dreadful beyond imagination. No one is gifted enough to describe how dreadful your future is. And you are a fool to live your life and die in unbelief. I'll tell you to your face or if you're not here, to your ears. I tell you, the most intelligent thing you can do is to act by faith and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior. And then live a life that honors him. And I'll tell you, you have before you the most marvelous future, not without its problems, not without its surprises, not without the unexpected things that happen to people regularly. But you will have the inner assurance that if you died that night, you would stand completely safe before your God.

Now, in light of that, I've decided to take a whole different tack. What I want to do is simply provide you with six or seven facts based on these two chapters, just several facts. Someone once wrote, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but no one is entitled to his or her own facts. Facts are true, whether you believe them or accept them or not. They're facts. If we believe God's word is God's word, there are several things set forth here that you can count on as fact.

That's what to me is the most important thing we can take from a message like this. Since he is coming, ready or not, he is coming. We just don't know when.

So let me give you the facts as I see them, and they will not be based on superstition or opinion. They will be drawn from the scriptures. We can kind of click them off one, two, three, right down through seven. I gave you an outline. I completed mine this morning. You may want to go through yours as well to complete it.

It's up to you. Fact number one, his delay will be lengthy. I rarely hear people talk about that, but I find that that is set forth in this in these chapters. And I think the lesson we learn from that with each fact, I'm going to give you a lesson that we can take with us. The lesson we learn is let's wait with patient anticipation. Let's wait because his delay will be quite some time between when he said it and when it would occur. In fact, we know now it would be centuries from the time Jesus spoke these words in Matthew 24, 25, until he returns for his own will be centuries. Now, we believe it's closer than ever, of course. We believe it's imminent. It could be at any moment he could come for us and take us to be with him, leading unbelievers on this earth.

Look at 24, 36 again. No one knows the day or hour when these things will happen, not even the angels. Look at 24, verse 30. And then at last, the sign that the Son of Man is coming will appear. At last. Sounds like time, doesn't it? When I read that, I think of it when we say to someone, you're here at last, meaning you've waited a while. Sometime a long time. You're home from the war at last.

You made it home safely at last. There will be a delay. And the delay will be lengthy.

But don't let the length of the delay make you think it won't happen. Peter writes about this. Check it out for yourself. Second Peter three and verse eight. God's timing is totally different from our timing. One day is as a thousand years with the Lord. So the Lord's plan is just when he's ready to send his son, he'll send him.

Not until. Well, we're halfway through a message from Chuck Swindoll titled, Here He Comes, Ready or Not. It's just one portion of our comprehensive study through the entire book of Matthew. Let me urge you to join us again next time to hear more about the return of Jesus Christ, right here on Insight for Living. To learn more about Chuck and this ministry, please visit us online at insightworld.org. In the meantime, we're pleased to remind you Chuck Swindoll writes a daily devotional that's sent via email, and there's no cost to receive it.

His practical writings cover a variety of issues that will help you merge biblical truth with the realities of your life. To receive this devotional email from Insight for Living, just follow the simple instructions at insight.org slash devotional. Now to receive a physical devotional book, one you can hold in your hands, we'll direct you to another resource from Chuck. It's a daily devotional called God's Word for You. About this book, Chuck said, It's easy to spend our days seeking to be entertained, but there's something that satisfies the soul much more fully when we think deeply and nourish our souls with spiritual truth. To purchase a copy of this 30-day devotional, go to insight.org slash offer. And then let me add that when you give a donation to Insight for Living, your gift empowers us to provide Chuck's Bible teaching and to provide the free resources we send out as well. I just saw a note that said, Chuck, you have no idea how much I needed to read your devotional today.

It was as if you wrote it straight to me. Thank you. Thank you. Well, to support Insight for Living Ministries with a gift, here's the number to call. If you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888 or give a donation online when you go to insight.org. Join us again tomorrow to hear the Bible teaching of Chuck Swindoll on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Here He Comes, Ready or Not, was copyrighted in 2017 and 2021, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2021 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.