When believers in the early church were scattered as a result of persecution, James wrote to assure them that the Lord's return was certain even though the timing remained a mystery.
Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn four facts about the day of Christ's return to encourage patient perseverance while we wait. Alistair Begg is teaching from James chapter 5. We're looking at verses 7 through 11.
Three examples, they're there in the text. Number one, the farmer. And then secondly, the prophets. The prophets, verse 10. Brothers, as an example of patience, particularly in the face of suffering, take the prophets.
What did they do? We're told, who spoke in the name of the Lord. There were, of course, false prophets who did not speak in the name of the Lord. They healed the people's sins lightly, or at least they tried to. People liked them. They would ask them to come and speak. And sing to them, and so on.
Tell us more of this material. But the prophets, the true prophets of God, who spoke in the name of the Lord, they were not popular. They were not raising the huge crowds. They were saying what God told them to say. And as a result of that, they are a classic example of the suffering which comes from such obedience and of the patience that James calls for. In their experience.
I won't turn to these passages, but if you're making a brief note, let me just give you, for example, for your homework, Elijah in 1 Kings chapter 18, Jeremiah in that classic story, remember, of him being put down into the cistern, into the dry cistern, in Jeremiah 38, the response of people to Amos in chapter 7, and so on. And once again, the echo of the world. And then the third example is the example of Job. We've all grown up, haven't we, knowing about Job? That was the thing that's usually said at weddings.
I haven't heard it said here, but in the UK, if somebody's offering a blessing, as it were, to the couple, they say to them, And as you step out into life together, we wish you the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the children of Israel. Well, it's the patience of Job which is our example here. And when you read the story of Job, you can't but marvel at his patience and his perseverance, especially when he couldn't understand, especially when his friends weren't making much of a job of helping him out either.
But if you go to the book of Job and you just dip into it, you will find with relative ease that jumping out at you are all kinds of sound bites that will reinforce the reason for James employing Job as an illustration of patience. For example, Job chapter 1, and Job tore his robe and shaved his head and fell to the ground in worship. And he said, Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall depart. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. May the name of the LORD be praised. And in all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing. What a wonderful example of patience.
Chapter 2, and in verse 10, well, look at 9. His wife said to him, Are you still holding onto your integrity? Curse God and die! Well, that's what you want in a wife, isn't it? And here's the only response for such a foolish idea.
He replied, You're talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God and not trouble? God is a sovereign God. Are we only going to accept good from him and not trouble from him?
And in all this—again, notice the summary statement at the end of verse 10, sorry—in all this, Job did not sin in what he said. And then you can go on through. Thirteen, though he slay me, yet I will trust him. And right at the very end, my ears had heard you, but now my eyes have seen you. I had heard all about you.
I knew all about these truths. But when I started to lose things, when I started to lose my stuff, when I started to lose my health, when I started to lose my business, when I lost the affection and the companionship of my children, then what I had heard with my ears became what I now saw through my eyes. And so, he says, I repent in dust and in ashes.
Well, we need to finish, don't we? Those, then, are the three examples for us to follow, and then finally just two truths that undergird all of this for us, two truths of which we need to be reminded. Truth number one, the Lord is coming.
The Lord is coming. He mentions this with frequency in the space of these few verses. And in his emphasis, he ties in with the rest of the Bible, particularly the rest of the New Testament, because nothing is stated more frequently nor more emphatically than the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the New Testament alone, it is mentioned some three hundred times—more, actually, than any other aspect of Christ himself. The return of Jesus, then, we need to acknowledge, his second coming, is without doubt a main thing and a plain thing. The return of Jesus is absolutely foundational to the gospel. The good news of the gospel concerns the birth and the life and the death and the resurrection and the ascension and the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in power and in great glory. The return of Jesus Christ is an integral part of the faith once delivered to the saints, for which we are, says Jude, to contend. In light of the fact that it is so central, it is a matter of concern to all of us who think that that which is central should so easily and quickly become peripheral on account of a tampering with the essential truth in a way that creates a disinterest in the absolute factuality of it. Now, what I mean by that is this. There are all kinds of views concerning the timing of the return of Jesus, concerning the territory that is involved in that return—enough views, enough views to create confusion and, indeed, to induce conflict amongst those who are equally convinced of the integral nature of the fact of the return of Jesus itself.
You don't need me to rehearse this. Many of you are the same vintage as myself. You grew up devouring the late, great planet earth. Some of you were doubtless in an airport in America and saw it on one of your earlier travels in the sixties or the early seventies.
I can't remember when it was. But it was the best-selling, fastest-selling book in all of the US airports at the time that it came out—the late, great planet earth. And we devoured it, didn't we? I did as a young person.
I said, Wow! Now somebody explains all this to me. Now I know what these locusts are. I never knew that the locusts in Revelation were Russian helicopters. I had never known that.
And that was a tremendous help to me then, and it has secured me in many a rough day since. And of course it has not. Of course it has not. My first immediate encounter with it since moving here in 1983 was in 1988. Those of you who were alive and thinking at the time will remember this. A man by the name of Edgar Huysnant—Huysnant, I think it is, I'm not sure you pronounce it correctly—from Little Rock, Arkansas, produced a book listing eighty-eight reasons why Jesus Christ must return in 1988.
People immediately brought this in to me in the office when it was down on Storm Center Road, and I tried as graciously as I could to thank them for it and file it. But I did pay attention to it. I thought I would look at some of the reasons. I looked for the book tonight, I thought I could read some of them to you, but really, what's the point? Because he said that Jesus was definitely coming back either, interestingly, on the eleventh of September 1988, or the twelfth of September or the thirteenth of September. He's not alone. The Roman Catholic priest in the nineteenth century wrote a book detailing the end of the world, which was going to come in 1847.
He was given permission to publish the book, and it was published in 1848. But before you all get so smug, remember Y2K. Remember some of the things you told me about and those letters you wrote to me, agonizing for my well-being and my safety.
All the suggestions about how I had to buy out Walmart and toilet rolls and generators and all manners of things. Nobody made a worse job of that kind of stuff than the Branch Davidian sect. And surely one of the sorriest emblems of the kind of confusion and conflict to which I refer was represented in that weird and wonderful siege of that compound in Waco, Texas, and the tragic death of eighty-two people who had bought into the dictatorial leadership of that character who was wrong and who was bad. But you see, we cannot allow that kind of stuff to take us away from the centrality and the reality of the return of Jesus. What we need to do is make sure that we don't speak to excitable people, simple people, about the day without emphasizing again and again the utter impossibility of the prediction. I know that it is perplexing and frustrating to some of you when I finally give to you what I'm about to give to you again now—my great summary view on the return of Jesus Christ. And I want to affirm four things for you. I'll just give you the words you know. I've added a word. It used to be three.
I've now gone to four. What can we say with absolute certainty about the return of Jesus? Number one, that it is a day that is secret.
It is a day that is secret. Mark chapter 13 and verse 32, Jesus makes it clear that no one knows this day or the hour or the time or so on. Therefore, you may not care to join me, but I have no interest in listening to anyone who claims to know the exact timing of Christ's return. I regard all such speculation as groundless and foolish and unhelpful, and I only have limited time left in my life to read books.
Those will not be part of my reading. Secondly, the return of Jesus Christ will be sudden—will be sudden—as lightning comes out of the sky, Matthew 24, like a burglar who comes in the night watches, Matthew 24. It will be just another day at the office for people, just another day in the fields, just a routine getting up and going to work. People will be having their weddings that day. People will have surgery for that day. People will be planning a visit for a root canal that day.
People will be dropping their children off at school on that day, in the way that they did the previous day and the way they expect to do on the following day, but there will be no following day. Because it will be just as sudden as that. Mary McShane, in preaching in St. Peter's, when he was only in his twenties, had a Bible study, and he would ask his Bible study every so often, you know, do you think the Lord Jesus will return tonight?
He went around and asked them individually, and every one of them said, No, no, no, no, no, no. And then McShane loved to say, In such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man will come. Secret, sudden.
Incidentally, it's precisely because we cannot know the exact moment of his return that we need to be ready every moment for his return. Third word, spectacular. That's my new word. Spectacular.
I added that, because no one is going to be in any doubt. It won't be like his first coming, where people were going around inquiring, where the shepherds had seen some kind of manifestation of God's glory, but they had to go and check. Let's go and see what this is. The wise men had made these journeys and had arrived at the palace of Herod and so on. Is there somebody here called the King of the Jews? We've heard some things.
We've seen some things. It won't be like that at all. Then it was ignominious.
Then it was inconspicuous. When Christ returns, it will be conspicuous, it will be universal, and it will be instantaneous. The coming of the Lord Jesus Christ will transcend all the events of space and time that have ever taken place in all of space and time. That is surely the only way we can understand the drama as it is given to us in apocalyptic language in the book of Revelation and so on. And fourthly, the return of the Lord is a day that will bring separation. Separation.
Matthew 24, you can read it again. And they were working in the field, and one was taken and another one was left. And some were in the house, and one was gone and one was left. Again, the sixties—remember Larry Norman?
Some of you? He had that song. They used to play it at youth meetings all the time to encourage us.
Yeah, that's it. Life was filled with guns and war, and everyone got trampled on the floor. I wish we'd all been ready. Children died, the days grew cold, a piece of bread could buy a bag of gold.
I wish we'd all been ready. Well, that will be the cry of some, won't it? It's the cry of the five foolish virgins in the parable Jesus told. A shout of joy, a cry of anguish. When Christ returns in every knee, bows low. What then of this day of his return?
A secret day, a sudden day, a spectacular day, a day of separation. So what about it? Well, there's two fundamental implications of that. One is moral purity, and the other is zealous evangelism. Everyone who has this hope within him, says John, purifies himself even as Christ is pure. The way that you can tell if somebody is really interested in the return of Jesus is by their life. If someone's living an immoral life and they want to give you a book about all the drama of the return of Jesus, they don't even believe in the return of Jesus. Because if they believed in the return of Jesus, they would never live the way they live. And you can also tell that someone is concerned about the return of Jesus by their commitment to evangelism, the kind of passion that goes with purity, the passion that says, I beseech you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God, that sits your uncle down or sits your son down or sits whoever it is down, and not in a way that is dictatorial or unkind, but seizes the opportunity to sit down and say, As best I understand my Bible, and in case I never have an opportunity to say this to you again, there is a day coming, and the judge's feet are at the door. And when he comes through that door, it is over.
When he walks on the stage, the play is done. And we have lived separated in time, but I do not want to live separated from you in eternity. That's the final element of the instruction, and it's the final sentence in verse 11, isn't it? The Lord is full of compassion and mercy. Why would we speak to people that way?
Why would we be concerned about them? Because God is concerned about them. Romans chapter 2, verse 4, do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you towards repentance?
His kindness, his tolerance, and his patience. God is slow to anger and abounding in love. And he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.
Well, we must stop, so let me just give you the total quote from which I've been referencing C. S. Lewis today. I wonder, writes Lewis, whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when he does. God's going to invade, all right, and when that happens, it's the end of the world.
When the author walks on stage, the play is over. For this time, it will be so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late, then, to choose your sides.
It will be a time when we discover which side we have really chosen, whether we realize it or not. You're listening to Truth for Life. That is, Alistair Begg urging us to be ready every moment for Christ's return.
Keep listening. Alistair will be back to close today's program in just a minute. We teach the Bible every day here at Truth for Life. In fact, our singular mission is to open Scripture daily to help you better understand what God's Word says and how it relates to everyday life. We do this, of course, with God's help. We trust his Spirit will work to convert unbelievers or to deeply establish those who already believe in their faith and to encourage pastors to faithfully teach from Scripture. As Alistair explained, a believer's response to tribulation should be guided by our understanding of God's sovereignty. And if you'd like to read an extraordinary book about God's providential care, be sure to download a free copy of Alistair's ebook titled The Hand of God. This is a book that explores the life of Joseph, his trials in the book of Genesis, and he faced many. As you read, you'll learn how even in the most desperate circumstances of your life, God is at work behind the scenes for your good and his glory. If you've ever wondered if God is still in control, make sure you download the ebook The Hand of God.
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Now here's Alistair with prayer. Well Father, we offer up our study of the Bible to you as a sacrifice of praise. We want to honor you in our thinking and in our reading and our studying and in our praising of your name. I ask that you will bring to yourself those who as yet remain in their unbelief, that they will throw down the arms of their rebellion and bow before you, embracing Jesus as Lord and Savior. And for those of us who profess to follow Christ, we want you to stir us up by way of pure remembrance. We want to remind ourselves that we've been born again to a living whole, that our posture is a posture of watching and waiting and hoping and praying and looking forward to your return. And in that anticipation, we're known not by our ability to articulate our view but by our willingness to keep short accounts with sin and to honor you in our lives, in the secret place of our lives, where no one knows what we are but you do. And then that we might honor you by bringing the very compassion which you have shown to us to bear upon the lives of those who as yet do not trust Christ, so that your kindness shown to them, even perhaps through us in some measure, may be a means of their repentance and faith. Help us. Fulfill your purposes in us and through us, great God, we pray. Amen. Amen.
I'm Bob Lapine. Deception isn't just telling a blatant lie. Tomorrow we'll see what Jesus meant when he called for his followers to be truth tellers. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
