Bible Lesson 192
SIGNS OF THE END TIMES
But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.
Troubled soul, the much tribulation will soon be over, and as you enter the “Kingdom of God” you shall then see, no longer through a glass darkly but in the unshadowed sunlight of the Divine presence, that all things did work together for your personal and eternal good.
A. W. Pink
In this lesson we will look into the signs of the end of the age. This is not a popular theme, but it is critical for us today since the signs that the Lord God laid down for the coming judgment of the people of this world and the destruction of the heavens and the earth that we know and God’s New Creation’a new heaven and a new earth. There are definite signs that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, laid down for our information and that is what we will be dealing with in the rest of this lesson. It is obvious that not many of us today are concerned with the end, after all, we have been waiting for a long time and nothing has happened, so we put the Judgment of God out of our minds and we are constantly dealing with business as usual.
In fact, I see a lot of people today, who by their actions deny that there will ever be a Judgment of God. That did not escape our Lord and Saviors mind because He said that “as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be”. In other words, when the trumpet sounds and the world burns up, trapping all who have not submitted themselves to God through the work and person of Christ, they will ignore the Bible, just as the people in Noah’s time ignored the approaching flood, (walked past his big building project and his preaching of righteousness). And that is pretty much what people are doing today. How many of us have watched a beloved wife or friend who was pregnant and it was so apparent that they were just before having their baby’ There is no stopping a birth once it begins, and there will be no stopping of God’s coming Judgment and the end of the world.
If your wife was about to deliver a child, you would want to get her to the hospital as quickly as possible. It’s a little different with God calling an end to time and coming judgment. We have signs that alert us and that gives us time to seek forgiveness by casting ourselves on Jesus Christ and His work and person on the cross. I would caution you that the time is short; however I would never try to put a date and time on the end of the world, Jesus who was God in the flesh, self-limited Himself and said ‘Only the Father knows. That does not change the fact that we are given signs that will precede the culmination of our age. Are we ready to look at these signs and conduct ourselves accordingly’
Jesus gave his disciples and us today, in His Inspired Word the Bible, the way to know if the signs that are always around us are signs of the end time, and He told them first that one of the signs would be to: “Take heed that no one deceives you, For many will come in My name, and will deceive many.” In that statement, Jesus was warning us about false prophets (Men who sound like a Christian, act like a Christian, and appear to us as a brother; however their preaching is false, and they lead people away from the truth of the Word of God. Our Savior Jesus Christ gives us many warnings about these who have come from Satan to corrupt God’s truth. (See Matthew 7:15; Jeremiah 23:16; Jeremiah 14:14; Matthew 16:11; Philippians 3:2-3; Colossians 2:8; 2nd Peter 3:10-18) . In spite of all these warnings and many more in the Bible, we have fallen for the devils lie in so many places that it boggles the mind. We have gathered to ourselves preachers who like to tickle ears and we love to have our ears tickled (2nd Timothy 4:1-5).
So many today do not care what the truth is, they are interested only in having someone speak ‘smooth’ things to them. That is the reason you can have a man who preaches a gospel that requires nothing, means nothing, changes nothing and will be worth nothing in the Judgment. Most people who attend churches today don’t want to hear the truth that sets us free, they would much prefer to have some orator rub their backs and pat their heads and tell them that they are fine and they don’t have to do anything. That is the very lie that Satan told Adam and Eve’.you should remember, what Satan did was to take the words of God and jumble them and change them to convince Eve that God didn’t say what God had clearly said, and if He did it was to withhold something from them’.why he even told them that if they disobeyed God, that they would become like God. Remember He closed his little sermonette by saying, “You shall not surely die.” That was all it took to convince the first woman, that God created, to bite the forbidden fruit and then all it took for God’s first man to eat of it was for the woman to tempt him with it. God told Adam in Genesis 3:17, Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree that I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life”. Then in verse 19 of Chapter 3 of Genesis God said to Adam’..”In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
Because they readily disobeyed God in order to obey the devil, Adam a creature who could have and would have lived forever in a paradise, now has brought down death and the grave upon himself and all of his progeny. That is where so many people are today in our society. We are not interested in the long term, just give us a crumb for today. That guarantees us that we have passed the first sign that Christ laid down over 2000 years ago. We accept anyone who preaches anything as long as we do not have to do anything. Now for the second sign that Christ mentioned in Matthew chapter 24:6, where we find that the second sign for the end of the age is that we will hear of wars and rumors of wars, and then Christ said ‘don’t be troubled because all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines, pestilences, earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. We certainly cannot take any solace in those signs (Unless we know the Lord in the forgiveness of our sin), because these have passed and we are further down the path toward the end Those of us who live today have experienced war after war. I was not alive for World War 1, but I was for World War 11, and the Korean War, and the War in Iraq and other little wars, or police actions all over the world. The world has been racked with war in our lives and we stand today on the brink of an Atomic war, which will be like no other we have known.
The next sign was that nation would rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and hardly a day passes when there is not some strife with one nation against another, and now Syria is in Civil war with itself. God’s chosen nation (Israel) is like a bone in the middle of dogs all around it. Iran, seems to be pushing America to act or be labeled a coward, and Lord knows what else. The world at one time, before supersonic jets, Atomic and Neutron bombs, and instant news from T.V., radio, and internet and numerous other sources, drove us all to constantly be concerned about places and people we know nothing about. I can remember a time when we did not have all of these (I don’t know whether to call them advancements, or disadvantages); and at that time we were much more concerned about morality and family life, love and good neighbors than we are now. The world that we live in is a dangerous place, and we are not better simply because we have access to the constant bombardment of news or opinions and brain-washing that we presently receive from every direction. So now we can see that the first two signs that Christ gave us concerning the end time, have come and gone past to a great degree. We have become a people who delight in being deceived, especially about the Word and the Will of God. We know that Jesus Christ warned us often about false prophets and we see that there are now more false prophets than there has ever been.
We saw that Christ warned us about ‘Wars and Rumors of wars’ and we have been in and out of wars and heard rumors of wars almost daily, so the second sign that Jesus Christ our Lord, the Son of God, God in the flesh, gave us is also past. That does not mean that we won’t keep hearing about wars and being involved in wars, but we know that we are two giant steps further toward the end of time, than we have ever been. Our Lord, Jesus Christ gave us another sign of the end time, and that was that there would be famines (plural), and pestilences and earthquakes in various places. We have had and are having famines in many places, (Chad, Somalia, The Horn of Africa, China, Russia, Ireland, and on and on). Pestilences like HIV is rampant all over the world, and other water-born, or pest caused diseases, take a large toll on people around the world ‘then earthquakes, in various places. There are hundreds dead or injured in Bangladesh as I write, and hardly a day passes that there is not a few somewhere in the world.
After giving us this warning about famines, pestilence and earthquakes, Christ reminds us that all of these are the beginning of sorrows. Deceptions, wars and rumors of wars, Nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places’..and that is just the beginning of sorrows. Then Jesus Christ, the only Savior of mankind, reminds us that those who are true Christians, those who live and walk and act and speak like Jesus will be delivered up and mistreated and even killed; because they will be hated by all nations for the Lord’s sake; that means that they hated Jesus Christ when He walked the earth, and they haven’t changed their minds about Him or anyone who believes enough to obey Him. Listen people, this is happening as you read this. Just in the past couple of days, we have heard about our Military, driven by the liberal mindset and our current leaders are beginning to persecute or at least threaten to persecute Christians.
America’s schools and colleges, her politicians and leaders seem to have opted for something less than Christianity. We are warned by the Savior, Jesus Christ, that as these things continue to happen, the love of many will grow cold, and I understand that to mean that, the pseudo-Christians, those who never were truly saved will not be able to stand the trials and tribulations that will be cast on those in the church and they will desert the church like rats from a sinking ship. Many in our day ride the rolls of the visible church for one reason or another, perhaps to appear as godly, or to make business connections or because their mothers and fathers attended a certain church. These are the chaff of the church, that are welcomed there in most churches because most churches in our time are interested in numbers. We should be ashamed of ourselves for prostituting our churches, which are suppose to be the Bride of Christ, but instead it has become a hiding place for people who want nothing to do with the God, or the Bible or with righteousness.
Christ continues in the 24th Chapter of Matthew to tells us that the end times and it’s birth pangs will be tough; but the ones who endure to the end will be saved. That means those who came to God on God’s terms, dying to self and all of self’s desires, ready and willing to obey all that God commands will be saved and not a one will be lost. Those who are to be saved from the consequences of sin, will be those whom God has ‘quickened’ and regenerated, rebirthed, and indwelled with the Holy Spirit, and who obey in the power of God, the will of God. The compromising church and it’s members will be a thing of disgust for God and God will not only send trouble and tribulation, God will cast them into the fires of hell. Now, it becomes obvious that Christ was not speaking to these disciples, but to that generation that lives when the end of the world comes.
All of us will see, and are seeing some of the signs that Christ laid out here in Matthew chapter 24; however, the disciples who sat and heard Him speak these signs, are long dead and the Lord said that one of the signs would be that the gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come. (verse 14, of Matthew chapter 24). That means it may be nearer than we think because the gospel is being carried to most of the world in some form today. Right today, I am preaching or writing the gospel to Preachers in Kenya, Pakistan, and Liberia, plus my website churchofthetrueway.org, goes out to all of the world. I take no credit for that, it is the work of God, and He is to be praised for it.
What do we mean when we speak of the end of the world’ We mean that is the time that God draws the line of man and evil in his world, and sends His Son Jesus Christ back in His Wrath (Revelation 6:16-17; 1st Peter 4:5.), to judge the quick and the dead, and the old heaven and the old earth will be utterly destroyed and a new heaven and a new earth will be established (Revelation 21:1). These signs that we have been writing about are indicators to us to get our house in order and begin to do all that we can to preach and teach the Word of God to the whole world.
We have had some of the signs of the end times manifested since the Cross of Christ and we see them more and more every day, but the world won’t end until there has been a time of Jacob’s Trouble’..a great Tribulation and the consummation of all that God had the Apostle John write down for us in the Revelation. Gladly, we who have bowed and submitted our lives to God through Christ will not be troubled by the Tribulation, because we will be glorious caught-away or raptured, to be with Jesus Christ forever before that time. The Bible speaks of this Tribulation period which is said to last for seven (7) years as a time when the world will accept a leader that we call the antichrist. This will be a time when the dream of the liberals of our day will come true.
There will be a One-World government with the antichrist as it’s head. There will be one religion and that religion will worship the Antichrist. There will be one mind-set for the most part, and one means of doing business. Everyone who lives will accept the mark of the beast and that will have something to do with man worshiping man. Every nation will fall for this trap of the devil and we have already proven ourselves willing to go along to get along. Some of the Presidents and Senators and Congressmen, that we elected prove our proclivity to follow the money and the false light of the devil.
All nations will finally agree to attempt to destroy Israel and a great battle (Armageddon) will be fought and Christ will defeat all His foes in that battle. Then comes the judgments and then the destruction of the sin stained world and it’s environment and a new heaven and a new earth will come down where we will live and serve our Lord, Jesus Christ. Only those who are born again by God through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ will escape this unbelievable time, and only those who are saved will escape the fires of hell ‘so in closing I invite you to read Matthew chapter 24, and consider what I have written to you, Begin to knock on heavens door and repent and cry out to God for His Grace and Mercy!
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob