Transcription
[Music] You know, when Jesus ascended to heaven from the Mount of Olives, two men, who are angels, tell the disciples, “Um, this same Jesus who was taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” So the return of Christ is a very clear teaching of scripture. Uh, we talk, uh, in our doctrinal statement and in our fellowship about the imminent return of Christ. What does that mean to you? When we use “imminence,” not “eminence,” but imminence, what does that mean to you, to me? Uh, it means it could happen at any moment. I think that Matthew 24:44, “Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” And those are commands or statements that happen periodically through the teachings about the end time. So “urgency” was a word that came to my mind. When I… So you don’t see any standing in the way of Christ coming today? Boy, I don’t. I, in fact, I… if you look at the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, there are signs that reflect the second coming that are… that indicate for the second coming. So I… I do believe that the rapture of the church could happen at any time. I really do believe that.
Why do you think it is that, uh, there has been such a diminished focus upon the return of Christ? I know when I was growing up, you could count on… one Sunday night would be, uh… would be salvation; one Sunday night would be baptism of the Holy Spirit; one Sunday night would be… you may have committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and, uh, or be demon-possessed; and the fourth Sunday night would be the return of the Lord. And, uh, the whole focus upon the return of Christ has been pretty much diluted in today’s church world and even in our own, uh, circles. Why do… why do you think that’s the case? Why… why is there not the emphasis upon things like the return of Christ, heaven, afterlife? I’ll take the first step, and it may prove to be ignorant. Could… could it actually be the work of the enemy that somehow is keeping, uh, that message and that value… of perpetuating and/or, um, other themes, other threads that seem to… to have more popularity? And so it’s almost as if the, uh… there is a spiritual force, because I… I agree with you; we… we no longer have the movies—“What is it?”—“Distant Thunder,” “Thief in the Night,” and… and those type of things. And, uh… so but it could have been an emphasis on… it’s, you know, “it’s all about me.” I mean, we’ve… we have developed a pretty much of a message that says that salvation or coming to Christ will improve your lifestyle; you can get this benefit, this benefit, and all of that may be true, but, as one… you’ll hear it said sometime, “I’m not interested so much in the sweet bye and bye as I am the nasty now and now.” And so I just wonder if those kinds of philosophical, uh, leanings have not mitigated against this, you know, the Lord’s coming. And… did “Kingdom Now” theology dampen, uh, our ability to want to come back out with urgency lest we be tagged as “Kingdom Now” people?
Well, let me play the devil’s advocate and really risk being misunderstood, but, um, sometimes the constant emphasis on the second coming started to feel escapist to us and somehow didn’t seem to reflect the holistic sense in which Jesus’ spirit is interacting with us right now, with his church. And we’ve got a mission to do. And the whole dimension of… I remember, really young, growing up, you sort of got preached at about these things, but you heard… you heard very little discipleship teaching; you heard very little about… about how to live life. And, you know, sort of like if it did get a little imbalanced, and that maybe was an imbalance… maybe the way it was was right, but I think, you know, the pendulum might have overswung, because I think definitely we hear far too little about it now, but I… I just wonder if we weren’t rightfully branded as escapist sometimes, and… and the pendulum righted itself, just swung too far. Yeah, I wonder, too, if it… if the teaching of the return of the Lord didn’t get diminished because there were so many predictions that produced…
Yeah, that… that didn’t come true. That’s right. You know, I… I can remember when, in Southern California, there was pretty much the date of 1981 being the date for the rapture of the church, because “this generation will not pass,” and the generation was 40 years, and the… and… and so that clock started ticking in 1948 when Israel was declared a nation, and that generation would not pass. So ’88 would be the end of the tribulation; therefore, you back off seven years, you get to the rapture. And there was a huge… the Jesus movement, and I… I won’t name names or churches or people that advocated this, but they’re well known. And, uh… and, uh… and then you had the book, “88 Reasons Why Jesus Will Come.” To venture against… is what church he attended? Yours? Are you serious? Well, not the guy that did the 88 exactly; he was from Little Rock, but he did not attend my church faithfully, only when I was teaching on eschatology, and he would show up, and then… Oh, he would be there. Do you have an autographed copy of that? I… I have some of his commentaries, and… and… well, then he changed it to 89 reasons when he didn’t come in. Well… well, he brought me two of his handwritten commentaries because he had a new date; he kept readjusting. And he really… I, you know, I was kind… kind to him, but I said, you know, I said, “Edgar, you have missed it so many times, you know, at some point I think your credibility…” He said, “I never said I was a prophet.” He said, “I’m a mathematician,” and he really was. And he would try to figure it out, despite… no one knows the day or the hour. And so… but I… yeah, yeah, he was… well, there was… there was a leading, uh, charismatic woman pastor in Manila took out a full-page ad in the Manila newspaper a number of years ago that announced the date the Lord was going to return. And the… the newspaper came out to interview her the next day and said, you know, “You made this big prediction,” and of course people were scared, and they were fleeing, and all this sort of stuff. “Why didn’t the Lord return?” And her… her deadpan answer was, “Well, have you seen the traffic in [Laughter] Manila?” As… as though the Lord would have been… by Manila traffic. I think… I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, that is another whole part to the answer to your question; there’s been a lot to discredit, and so we just want to distance ourselves as far as possible. But even short of predicting Jesus’ return, um, you know, I grew up… there were very well-meaning people, you know, and… and there was… you could sort of put two and two together reading the scripture, but that, you know, the, uh, ten-horned, uh, beast was the, uh, European 10-nation economic… I remember when… being in Brussels when there were nine flagpoles up, and they were waiting for the 10th flag, and that was going to be then the… the flags, I think. But anyway, yeah, and there was, uh… there was a… a big building with, uh… at least a 30-year-ago version of a supercomputer in… in Brussels, and that Russia was the great bear of the north going to come down, but then the… you know, the… the iron curtain fell, and… and there’s, uh… the, you know, the… the old European commonwealth is now radically restructured. And so you… we just… I think a lot of people just backed off and… and tried to figure out like, you know, “We got to be careful connecting too many dots.” With… and yet… and yet, you know, we have really thrown the baby out with the bathwater. How can we re… how can we restore a proper biblical view of the Lord’s return? And… and it’s… it’s the blessed hope of the church. So how can we help make sure that, through our ministry, that is a fundamental focus for us?
George, in my pastorate, I was always afraid to approach this subject because I felt like it had to be in the context of fear, but then as you began to study in scripture, it’s always been used as a context of hope and courage. And you’re right, and… and so it helped me to go, “Wait a minute, this really is a message of hope; I don’t have to change personality and… and try to scare people as much as… encourage people to look for the coming of the Lord.” And so I would say, in a practical sense, this is as much hope… is the promise of… this is the promise of the infilling of the Spirit. Well, you know, cognitively, even the old prophecy preachers would preach it; I mean, they knew to the end, but functionally they only got to the mark of the beast and quit, you know. So that’s about as far as we can get, you know, you know. And I mean, just scare you to death, you know. So I think Doug’s right; if you study and… reading the Book of Revelation talks about the blessings that are… that are accompanying just the understanding and the reading of that book, you know. So absolutely, I… I… I do think that right now the potential of, uh, environmental catastrophe, of course, of a nuclear holocaust, um… I think it’s a very compelling statement; it’s a very compelling truth to be able to say what really is going to put the period on human history, when we’re so aware and our culture is so fearful of all the things that realistically we now scientifically know could put the period on… on human history, and to be able to say that, um, Jesus Christ, the God, the creator, has personally taken the prerogative to put the period on human history. I… I think that could be a compelling statement right into the very heart of the fears of our culture right now. He is the Omega as well as the Alpha… as well as the Alpha. Absolutely. You know, I… I think back… I’m older than all of you, so, uh… I can remember back in the… when Israel was declared a nation in 1948, my dad being so excited that… and really, when you look at it, Israel, uh… is the only ancient nation ever returned to its homeland with its language—two modern miracles: the revival of the Hebrew language, the revival of the… the Jewish state. And there’s been no… they… the, you know, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Jebusites, all the other “ites” of the… of the Bible, you know, they’re basically amalgamated into other ethnic strains or whatever, but there’s been a keeping of the… of the Jewish identity. And, you know, my dad would preach, “You know, the desert will blossom like a rose,” which, of course, we… we’ve seen happen. Um… I look… I look at that, you know. We talk about signs of the times, uh… and how in just, uh, 50 years, uh… things have changed. What… what… what conditions are present today that, uh… that would augur, uh, more of a sense of expectancy in our heart that the coming of the Lord is near than, let’s say, even 50 years ago? The potential for a one-world currency, you know, or a one-world government; the agendas of the antichrist that… and in our theology, he establishes his leadership three and a half years after the tribulation—a one-world government, a one-world currency, and a one-world religion. Boy, I think we’re… that… that stage has already been set for, uh… for his placement and leadership, and we’ve got the communication tools, uh, to do it. We can Twitter; we can… we can go anywhere in the world right there… right there.
Yeah, that’s… that’s amaz… I can… again, this is age, but I can remember when the comic strips talked about, uh, Dick Tracy’s watch being a means of communication, and now we’ve got this kind of… you know, it’s a remarkable age, you know. There’s always been anti-Semitism, and of course the Holocaust, but we… we live right now in a time when, uh… if Israel is a part of… of the plan, and we know that Israel is, and if they kind of help set the time clock… I mean, I don’t know that we’ve seen, uh, a higher level of a degree of vitriolic statements of trying to wipe them off the map. I mean, I don’t know if Israel’s been more threatened. I think there are some who are doubting even their allies as to whether… how committed they are, you know. And yet we… we believe what the scripture says. I think that kind of… us… you know, I mean, we… we live… your statement was pretty intriguing to me; I just kind of took back… you know, “put the period on human history,” you know, whether we have the capability almost of doing that ourselves. I think that’s, uh… those signs are there. Of course, you read… you know, I don’t… I… I don’t have any data; I just… what I think I’ve read, but, you know, when it talks about just the… this… the signs that he talks about in Matthew 24:25—the… the earthquakes and the wars and the rumors of wars and the fear… I was just reading in a paper this morning… I mean, baby boomers, uh… have never… I mean, what they thought was retirement is gone, you know, or at least it’s been greatly changed and altered. They… one lady said, “I got to work till I… till I drop; I can’t… I… I can’t.” So their expectations… there’s a… there’s an kind of a fatalism that’s crept down over us that… when they first exploded an atomic bomb or nuclear, you know, that was there, but boy, it seems like our youth today are even more fatalistic about the future; they live for the now, and, uh… that’s about it. When… when you look at the fundamental morphing of… of our world right now and the forces… you know, if you’re honest, you have to say they are actually pushing us towards what the Bible describes as a scenario… it all… it all sort of fits, and, uh… there… there… there’s a… there’s a great… there’s a great kind of comp… you know, sometimes we get hung up in the details; sometimes, you know, pro… well-meaning prophecy teachers have tried to take a verse and… and… and… and match it up with a headline in the newspaper that week, but when you just back up a little bit and look at the bigger picture of… of… of the forces that are retransforming our world right now, um… they… they are in every case consistent. I mean, even the idea that… between 2 and 3,000 years ago, you know, they predicted before the end, um… the Middle East will… will be the, uh, catalytic caterpillar point of global catastrophe, and, uh… you know, some of us have stood on the Temple Mount, and that little piece of real estate could, with no trouble at all, imagining this could catalyze World War III; it could happen so easily. And it’s… it’s everything is still just like they were saying two or three thousand years ago.
Yeah, you know, I’ve sat and stood so many times on the Mount of Olives where Jesus gave the Olivet Address; it’s found in Matthew 24:25, Mark 13, and Luke 21. And it’s very interesting as he looks across at the temple, and… and then he predicts the course of the age. Um… you know, it’s hard to… it’s hard to predict the future. Uh… I think of, for example, the liberal Protestant magazine, “Christian Century,” founded in 1900, which was… which was given that name because the 20th century was going to be finally, uh… the Christian century. Well, it was anything but Christian; I mean, they were off by a mile, by 10 miles, 100 miles, 1,000 miles. But Jesus says there’s going to be… and you’ve referred to it, but I… I would outline: there’s going to be trouble in nature—earthquakes, famines, pestilences; there’s going to be, uh, trouble, um… in… in so… in society—wars, rumors of wars, ethnos against ethnos, which ethnic group against nation, and basileia, kingdom or political alliance against kingdom. So you got that; then there’s… then there is, um… trouble with religion; there will be false Christs, false Messiahs. In other words, Jesus does not see his… when he’s gone that he is going to unify all world religions; there’s going to still continue to be a plethora and a division of world… of world religions, and even division with… with those who claim his name. And… fourth, trouble for disciples. And… and then it’s all caught up in this rubric of: “These are but the beginning of birth pangs.” And we all… you know, obviously none of us men have ever been through… through birth pangs, but from what I understand is that as you get nearer to the time of birth, the birth pangs become faster and harder. And that certainly describes in… in our society today. Yeah, it seems to me where we’re at in terms of events that are clustering and coming fast and… and… and… and harder. Obviously, the… the very positive sign that Jesus gives is that the gospel will be preached to every people group before the end comes. And, you know, it struck me… it was just a few years ago; it struck me that if you’re under 50 years old right now, you… you could… you could… there’s a high probability you could live to see the Great Commission fulfilled. We now have the technology; we… we now have enough Christians, and we probably have the financial firepower to… to finish the Great Commission. We’re serious about it in our generation, and I’m not sure someone in the 1500s could have said that, but we are probably the first generation for whom it is not hard to believe, because just because of the resources and the technology at our disposal, that… that could actually happen in our lifetimes. When you mention that, uh… that Jesus never said the gospel… he preached to every person; he says to every ethnos or every ethnic group… our friend Peter Ksmich—all of us know Peter—is a leader in Eastern Europe. And when his dad only had the benefit of a third-grade education, was a Pentecostal pastor in Serbia, and Peter, when he was in public school, became very caught up in the Marxist, uh… you know, philosophy, and in fact became president of his, uh… high school Communist Party youth league. He’d go home, and Peter’s brilliant; he’d go home and argue with his father, and his father would finally say, “Peter, you know, you’re… you’re smarter than I; I cannot argue you.” He said, “But… but I… I… I… I can tell you that I have a friend, Jesus, who’s never told a lie.” And he said, “This gospel will be proclaimed in all the world as a witness to all nations, and then the end will come.” And he said, “Peter, I don’t know if this will be in your lifetime or in mine or even later,” but he said, “There will come a day when all over the Soviet Union the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached.” Well, we’ve lived to see that day, and we are going to… if Jesus withholds his coming for a few more years, we’re going to see that in other strongholds of the non-Christian world—the Islamic world, the Hindu world, the Buddhist world—because there is… the strong… people are realizing the emptiness and the bankruptcy of a religion that does not, uh… bring a personal relationship with God, uh… the bankruptcy of a… of a religion, uh… that holds to reincarnation, or the bankruptcy of a religion that says you will never know until you stand before God whether you’re in the sight of the saved or the damned; you have no… can have no confidence in your faith; or… or a religion that simply imposes by the force of culture and persu… and… and persecution and… and the gun their faith. That’s… that’s emptiness. And the gospel, uh… I… I, you know, I think your analysis of this… “This gospel will be preached,” and those under 50, if the Lord carries… live to see that to all… to all nations… yeah, this just struck me that not many generations in Christian history could realistically say that except this one.
Let me switch for just a moment and ask a question that always bugged me as a… as a kid growing up, because I… I again, there was a lot of my theology as a kid that was warped, and, uh… I don’t want to blame it on my dad’s preaching, but, uh… uh, you know, I… I thought… you know, I knew that I was saved by grace through faith, okay? But when it came to the return of the Lord, uh… the… the idea was: if you’re doing one wrong thing at the return of the Lord, you’re going to be left on the ground. Um… how… so… so how do you… how do you relate the doctrine of justification by faith with the doctrine of being ready for the Lord to return? Tell us, oh wise one; I know you got it figured out, because I must say it kept some of us living straight, but somehow there’s got to be something better than eternal insecurity. I think… I think we had a… we had a rapture by works and a… and a salvation by grace. We did. We did. Those were two separate waters. I think you have to juxtapose that event with all of the other scriptures that we know. Yeah, you know, when we talk about right… you know, those who practice sin are in danger of losing… I… I think you can’t just extract that one moment. I think, you know, God’s grace, God’s mercy, um… because I don’t think anybody can preach sinless perfection and… and not… not this side of… of glory. So I think you have to put that in context. And the purpose of heaven is to be in the presence of the Lord, and I think the Lord wants his people to be with him, you know. So, uh… I… I do… I think it’s a matter of extending grace all the way, you know; it’s not just salvation, but the… the… the whole plan of God for man is a… is a plan of grace, you know. Man chooses to not accept God’s grace, but God’s will and plan for man is that we be in right relationship with him, that we live in the here and the now and the then and the there with… with him and his presence. What, uh… what distinctive does the belief in the return of the Lord have upon our conduct as Christians today? Does it have any… any impact?
I think it does redefine our conception of hope. Doug had mentioned hope earlier; I think that’s really at the center of this. And I… I talk to a lot of believers, and they… you know, you ask them, you know, “What… what do you hope for?” And inevitably they’ll… they’ll say something; they’ll talk about things this side of death or this side of the Lord’s coming, like, “I hope my kids turn out; I hope I find the right person to marry; I hope my career is successful.” But really, biblically, the whole idea of hope being rooted in something beyond even death, and the fact that Jesus is going to come back and address the evil and the chaos and wrongness of our world… I… I… I think… I think it gives us the kind of perspective to be able to hang on and endure and… and trust and not be so… quite so self-serving in my walk with God, because… because I… I live with this little bit broader perspective, and… and I’m not living for what will work out for me, but I’m working… I’m living for a hope that’s rooted in an event outside of the mechanisms of this world itself. And… and yeah, maybe it’s still hard to… to connect the dot between that and practically how I… how I live today, but I… I do know the issue of hope for me is a… is a big one, because I… I need to have an anchor point for hope that it’s not going to shift or not dependent on what turns out or what doesn’t turn out, even though I’m actively trusting God in my life. You know, I think sometimes we have discarded some of our thought process, maybe even our teaching, because we were accused of being legalistic, but we are all… not just as Pentecostals, the entire evangelical world is struggling with trying to reconcile this behavior with belief, you know. Maybe it’s not just a second-coming issue, but there was a time, as you said a moment ago, Jim, when that was kind of an… an impetus, but there was also other discipleship issues and holiness issues and that we are… that we’re struggling with. And as we… as we just go pell-mell toward this… looks like we’re rushing toward the end time; it looks like it should be a wake-up call and not… not get over into the legalism part, but, you know, we should be…
Different. We, we and and so maybe you know, maybe a resurgence of uh, dedication to every doctrine that we've discussed is necessary. You know, and I think it should reflect it; it should impact our priorities. Now, not to be a date setter, but if we really did believe that the Lord was going to come back the second week in August, would we do things differently? Would we spend money differently? Would our priorities? So, so that urgency, that that that drives us to say, you know, we have got to reach one more for Christ. And so I would hope that it would impact sort of our our our missional focus and our priorities. Occupy till I come. That that's sort of the genius. The word occupy means do business. Do business. Yeah, do business. Yeah. Well, that's sort of the genius of imminence, isn't it? That um, if we did know, obviously we'd be our need to control; we'd be negotiating things and pandering out. And part of this hope is is also the reality that Jesus coming back again is equated to accountability for every one of us personally, that we've got to give accountability. Because we've not really discussed the bema judgment, but everybody talks about the great white throne or the judgment of the wicked, but uh, sure, there's nobody around this table that's going to be exempt from having to—Yeah, exactly—pony up.
You know, as I look at the ET discourse, it seems to me that Jesus uh, gives us three perspectives to live in the present. One is to be prepared to go at any moment. Another is that we could be experiencing difficulties. Certainly, there are believers all over the world. I think of some of our pastors that have recently been martyred in other countries uh, from members of a hostile religion. Be prepared to suffer. And the third is the parable of the talents, which is be prepared to live a a normal lifetime in the event that he doesn't come. I I had an experience when I said this is kind of a crazy illustration, but my dad was killing chickens one day out in the courtyard up in northwest China where he was missionary. And his way of killing a chicken was to grab it by its leg and twirl it around and stretch its head out on a chopping block, take the axe, and off its head would roll. I noticed that uh, you know, the chicken's leg would jerk and all that, but I also noticed when he cut the chicken open, then to my seven-year-old mind I was just astounded because there was today's egg that was just about to be laid, but there was also tomorrow's egg which wasn't yet fully encrusted, and there was the egg beyond that, and and there was like a an egg track within that hen all the way back to a very small embryionic stage. And and I was amazed at that because I just, you know, little kid, I think, and just an egg comes out all at once, you know. And it was years later when I was in seminary and trying to balance this whole aspect of, because there were people told me, you know, don't go to don't go to seminary because the Lord is coming soon. And and I didn't have a good answer for that. I just figured, well, if Jesus could wait till he was 30 to begin his ministry, I could wait till I was 24, you know. But but then that this whole image of the of the hen came back to me, and you know, that hen's life was not in its own hands; it was in the hands of another. And and so it was like the Lord said to me, uh, George, when you're opened up, will I find tomorrow's plans there? Wow. Will I find tomorrow after tomorrow there? You know, but the time is in my hands, not yours. Yeah, but that doesn't mean I want you to just sit around and and and speculate about when I'm going to come. There's work to be done, so get going. You know, prepare to live a lifetime. We we have ministers um, every uh, every day practically that go to be with the Lord. And I always send a letter of condolence. You send a letter of condolence. I think out of your office. And one of the things I note in my letter is that in Revelation 21 and 22, uh, John talks about the seven things that are no more. And the first thing he mentions is no more death. And I have just been amazed at that because it's not what I was not what I would have written. But John was inspired by the spirit. And the reason is, he's on the island of Patmos and his beloved church Ephesus is across the water, and he can't get to them. And so he looks forward to that day when there's no more any separation. That's awesome. And if there's anything that describes heaven to me beyond the first, the presence of the Lord, but secondly, the end of separation, um, u one theologian said we're separated from ourselves, we're separated from our environment, we're separated from one another, we're separated from God. Ecological separation, psychological separation, sociological separation, theological separation. But Christ is going to unite all things in himself, and the day of separation will one day be over, and Christ will come and take us home. This world is not our home; we're just passing through. Be in his presence. Absolutely.