Creeping
ZEPHANIAH 1:14-18, 2:1-3
MATTHEW 24: 30-31, 36-44
Are any of you like me in that every year certain events seem to creep up on you, and you find that you are not quite ready, and so you go running around making preparations at the last minute? Some events that come to mind for me are my anniversary, birthdays, vacation, and, oh yes, the big one: Christmas! Do you find yourself asking “Is it that time again already?”
Christmas is that magical time of year when mundane life, even for the unbeliever, is somehow miraculously transformed into the season of joy and hope. Christmas can be a time of joy for unbelievers because it is the only time that they can get a little taste of the joy that belongs to those who know Jesus Christ.
Christmas can also become a mad frenzy as everyone rushes around making all the preparations, buying lots of gifts, sending cards, decorating, cooking, etc.
Every year, after Christmas is over, I find myself saying the same thing; “Next year I am going to start preparing early. I will start early, buy a few gifts here and there. I will start writing some Christmas cards for people that I want to touch base with. I will be ready. I won’t get caught out at the malls at the last minute, fighting the crowds, and the traffic.”
Every year I say that, and every year I don’t follow through. I wrote the book on last minute shopping. “Last Minute Wal Mart for Dummies.” Every year I wind up being one of those chronic last minute shoppers who makes a mad dash to the mall a week before Christmas, and as much as I hate crowds, I always wind up in those long lines thinking, “Won’t this woman in front of me with the check book please hurry up? Don’t she realize I am in a hurry?”
Christmas creeps up on me unexpectedly every year, and all the previous years plans are shot again.
Like Christmas, there are many things in life that creep up on us, and seem to catch us off guard. I remember thinking the day that I graduated from high school, that I couldn’t believe that it was all over with. To be honest, I was sad and depressed. As much as I said that I was so ready to be out of school, the real truth is that I liked it. It gave me a purpose. It kept me busy. Once it was over, I just felt empty. It was fun to be a senior, because that was like being the top dog in school. It seemed like it would last forever, then graduation night came, and it was over.
I remember when our second child was born. As I sat holding him in my arms, it suddenly dawned on me that our daughter, our first born, was no longer a “baby.” She would never be my “baby” girl again. That stage of our lives was over. Now, I certainly don’t desire for my children to never grow up. That would be weird. God does not create us to stay little, we grow up. Puppies and kittens are only puppies and kittens for a short period of time, then they start looking strangely like dogs and cats. Likewise, my precious little angel was starting to look a lot like a little girl! That revelation, like my graduation experience, filled with me with a kind of sadness. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be able to just freeze certain periods in time, and just hold onto them for a little while longer. But real life does not work like that. Time rolls on, and we have to be ready.
I have talked to many men and women in hospitals and nursing homes who say that they cannot believe that their lives have went by so fast. It just seemed like yesterday that they met and married their sweetheart, and now they are lying on the hospital bed in failing health as the grandchildren visit. I remember one man who made the observation that when he was a young man, the passing of the years seemed like mile markers on the highway. As he grew older, the passing of years seemed more like telephone poles on the corners of each street. Lastly, he said now, as an old man, they seem more like posts in a picket fence.
There is another day that is creeping up on each one of us. Many of us will not be ready for that day. That day is referred to in Scripture as the “day of the Lord”. Not “The Lord’s Day” meaning, in the Old Testament, the Sabbath day, and in the New Testament, Sunday, the Day of worship, but the day when God will judge the world, and the hearts of men will be exposed. God, in His sovereignty, has appointed a day in which he will judge the secrets of men through Jesus Christ. All of us know this day is coming. The prophets foretold it long ago. Jesus and the Apostles spoke of it often.
All of God’s creation as we know it will be in an upheaval on that great and dreadful day. Jesus said that the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. On that day God will bring judgment on this world, and that day is fast approaching. We see the signs around us. Even secular thinkers, who do not base their ideas on the Bible, can see that something cataclysmic is soon to happen on this earth that will radically change the way we exist on this earth.
As with Christmas, we see the early warning signs. When November rolls around, about halfway through the month, we begin to notice the telltale signs that Christmas is approaching. The colored lights and other decorations begin to spring up about town. Our mail boxes begin to get cluttered with the sales papers. We know it is time to start getting ready. We know the signs.
Just as we know the “signs” that remind us that Christmas, and other important dates are approaching, we should also know how to read the “signs” that point to that other great day. Jesus put it this way:
“Learn this lesson from the fig tree; as soon as its twigs get tender, and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door!” He goes on to say:
“When evening comes, you say that it will be fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but can you not interpret the signs of the times”?
And then Christ goes on to show us the signs of the coming of that great day:
“Many will come in my name declaring, ‘I am the Christ’ and will deceive many.”
We need to understand something here. The word “Christ” in the Greek means “The Anointed of God”. A false teacher or false religious leader does not have to specifically claim to be “Jesus Christ” (although there have been many who have). All an “antichrist” or false Christ has to do is to lay claim to being the one who bridges the gap between God and man. There is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. He alone bridged the gap. The rest who make this claim for themselves are liars.
Have you ever seen a time when so many different groups were all claiming to the one true way to God? That is why “religion” can get so confusing to those who are searching. There are too many different options available!
Next, Jesus goes on to talk about wars and famines. In many places in the world, war is just a way of life. Lands in the Middle East, and in many areas of Africa have been battlegrounds for so long, that many of the people in those regions know no other way of life. With the United States current efforts to route out terrorists networks around the world, our own involvement in a long term world wide war seems inevitable. I believe that in the years to come we are going to see the worst famines that the world has ever known on a wide scale basis. We already see this happening in many areas of the world such as Somalia, Ethiopia, South America, and now Afghanistan. Many of the bombs that have been dropped on areas of Afghanistan in our war on terrorism, routing out the Taliban, will make much of the land incapable of bearing any crop life for a long time.
Many families in the United States who have made their living farming can no longer afford to try to live this way. They give up farming, and sell their land to developers. Urban sprawl has caused many areas in our country that were once thriving forests and farmland, to now give way to subdivisions and shopping malls. Many times, in the rush to make lots of money, and provide housing in areas that have grown overcrowded rapidly, developers take no consideration of the topographical layout of the land, and develop in such a manner that will ultimately prove detrimental to the eco-structure. The conditions of the land get worse with overproduction of farmlands depleting the topsoil. We are tending to have longer periods of drought. When the rain comes, many times it over rains and floods, making the conditions for growing crops worse.
On top of these conditions, it seems that our seasons are becoming progressively more out of balance. Unseasonably warm weather in winter has become the norm in areas that once had cold winters. Periods of unseasonably warm winter weather in areas where orchards grow confuses the plants, and causes them to bloom out of season, causing the seasonal crops to be poor. Orange, Apple, Pear, Peach, and other orchard type fruit trees that blossom out of season also cause great financial hardship on the farmers who depend on these crops for their livelihood, as the out of season blooming hampers the trees ability to produce bumper crops during the proper season. Unseasonably warm weather also prolongs the reproductive cycles of insects that damage these crops. These trends increase the likelihood of orchard farmers selling their land to developers.
We are pouring so much pollution and chemicals into the environment that, even if some do continue to farm, soon the land will be useless. The chemical pesticides that crop growers have to use to keep the insects from destroying their crops have to be made stronger and stronger with each consecutive generation because the insects build up immunities to the existing pesticides.
The average life span of a human has risen drastically within the last hundred years, with the advent of new medicines and treatments. This means that the elderly population is increasing at an astronomical rate. We see the generation gap widening. We live in a society that places no value on the elderly. The irony that we see in human reason is that, while we witness the growth in our population of the elderly because of better medicine and health care, we also see the increase in the popularity of the ideas of euthanasia, or “mercy killing.” “Death with dignity” is the nice sounding name that humanists give to this atrocity.
Another of the signs that Jesus mentions is pestilent, or plagues. The amount of people who have become infected with the AIDS virus has risen to astronomical amounts in the last couple of decades. Many other experts in the medical field foresee other diseases that we once thought we had virtually gotten rid of, such as smallpox, tuberculosis, etc., becoming problems once again. Bioterrorism seems to be a very real possibility for this current generation, as terrorists groups intentionally manufacture biological agents and infect large pockets of the population.
Another of the signs Jesus gives us is that the Gospel must be preached in all the world as a testimony to all the nations, then the end will come. Our generation has witness a phenomenon occur with the advent of the Internet such as has never been imagined in previous generations. Adam Scott puts it this way in his book God’s Debris:
“As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems… Rationality can’t explain our obsession with the Internet. The need to build the Internet comes from something inside us, something programmed, something we can’t resist…Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is know by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.”
(Please understand, if you are familiar with this book that I do not adhere to the ideology upon which this book is based. The basic world view of the main character is Hinduism, of which I am strongly opposed, but the author does an excellent job of articulating some profound truth about some issues.)
This does not mean that God plans to use the Internet as the primary form of media to convey the Gospel message. Many people in the world still do not have access to the technology and materials that make use of computers possible. The primary and most effective method of communicating the Gospel message is person to person. What it does mean is that because of the Internet, we are knit together as a people in a manner that up until now, was not possible, and this fact will facilitate the spreading of the gospel as societies and people groups are more able to effectively communicate.
The Internet is knitting us together into a sort of “global community.” In the book of Revelations from the Bible, we read about “the Beast”. The Beast represents “man’s system of things”. The Beast also represents a form of government that will rule the entire world. A world government. This could be a governmental party of body, or it could be a coalition of governments that all adhere to specific laws that govern the entire planet. This will more than likely lead to a common currency that will be used over the entire world also. The “world government will have the ability to track down virtually anyone, anywhere on the planet.
All this will come to pass before the time of the Great Tribulation, a time of trouble and anguish that will come upon the world, such as has never been before. Many recent political events, such as the United States war on terrorism, which is a justifiable war, will serve as stepping stones in the establishing of a world government. A day will come in the near future when all the nations of the world will surrender their sovereign rights to rule themselves as independent entities. An Alliance will be formed, and indeed is already being formulated, that will give full control of the economic, political, and military affairs of all nations to one governmental body.
Ezekiel, the prophet, spoke these words:
“They lead my people astray saying ‘peace’ when there is on peace, and because when a flimsy wall is built, they cover it with whitewash. Therefore tell those who cover it with whitewash that it is going to fall.”
Man’s efforts to rule the world himself without God will always fail, now matter how great the plans sound in the beginning.
Most of us have heard these Scriptures at some point in our lives. To a lot of people reading this, all of what I have stated is nothing new. We have heard all this before. We have pondered the questions of our lives, and the plight of the world. We have seen the signs of the times, and underneath it all, we know where things are going eventually. But most of us are like I am at Christmas. We see the warning signs of the approaching day, and we put off doing anything about it until the last minute, or we put it off too long, and we lose the opportunity to act. We like to say, “Just a little while longer… Tomorrow I will do what I know I must.” Then tomorrow becomes today, and still we procrastinate.
I used to have a foolish idea when I was a teen-ager. I used to smoke cigarettes. I knew that cigarette smoking was very dangerous and bad for my health. I have seen all the movies in health class about people with lung disease, and the graphic photos of what a cancer infested lung looks like. I was not “misinformed” about the dangers of smoking. I did not need more and better information. I had all the information that I needed, and I voluntarily chose to disregard it. In my foolish way of reasoning, I decided that if I was going to smoke, I would only smoke until I was twenty years old, then I would stop and give my lungs plenty of time to heal. On my twentieth birthday, I modified my plan, and decided that I may as well go ahead and give it another five years, and quit when I was twenty-five. After all, what is five years right? And I loved to smoke. Why deprive myself of something that I enjoyed so much? Oh, the joy of bronchitis! The truth of the matter is, that if the Lord Jesus Christ had not gotten hold of my life when I was twenty-three years old, I would still be smoking, and I would probably be dead before turning sixty.
That is the nature of our sinful hearts. Jeremiah the prophet puts it this way:
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Our sinful hearts deceive us into thinking that we have time to put off doing what we know we must. For the sinner, there is no tomorrow. All those imaginary tomorrow’s never come.
There is an old hymn, the words of which are as follows:
“Almost persuaded, now to believe. Almost persuaded, Christ to receive. Seems now some soul to say, ‘Go Spirit, go thy way. Some more convenient day on thee I’ll call.’. Almost persuaded, come now today. Almost persuaded, turn not away. Jesus invites you here, angels are lingering near, prayers rise from hearts so dear. Oh wanderer, come! Almost persuaded, harvest is past. Almost persuaded, doom comes at last. Almost cannot avail, almost is but to fail. Sad, sad, that bitter wail! Almost, but lost!”
“Today”, the scripture says, “If you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” .Repent, and turn to the Lord. He will make that day a day of joy and not a day of dread.
There is a flaw in the analogy that I have made. No matter how much I procrastinate, I always know when Christmas is coming, and I always know when my anniversary is coming, even if I don’t prepare adequately. The other day will come “as a thief in the night. As in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the day of the Son of Man. They shall be eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day of destruction comes and takes them away.”
I am not trying to scare anybody or put you in a bad mood. But we all need to think about where we stand. The day of the Lord can be a time when “the sun of righteousness will arise with healing in His wings, and you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.”
Are you ready for that day? It is creeping up on us! Now is the time to get ready. Today is the day of salvation, don’t let it slip away. Amen.
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Danny's Stump 