Tatham, Ernest: The World's Grim Outlook ~ Luke 21:29

Outlook. The grim future. And I want to turn with you to the gospel by Luke again, already read with us, and look at verse twenty nine. Will you open your gospel of Luke, please? And look with me at chapter twenty one and verse twenty nine. uh Our Lord is the speaker. And he said unto them, he spake unto them a parable, or he told them a story. Behold the fig tree and all the trees, when they now shoot forth, you see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, or when ye see these things coming to pass, then know that the kingdom of God is near at hand. Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled. I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say this morning that by any set of criteria or standards, we are living in breathtaking days of revolution and change. We find ourselves this morning in a world, in a society that's caught up in an unprecedented revolution, a revolution that is political, a revolution that is social, a revolution that is economic, a revolution that is religious, and above all, scientific. Everywhere we look, we are aware that there have never in the history of humankind been so many changes in so short a time affecting so many people. Seventy-two years this morning. We emerged from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, It was only a few months before that not only were the months of the calendar changed and the years, but the century. Seventy-two years ago this morning, no one had ever flown in an airplane. No one had ever listened to a radio, to say nothing of television. No one had ever slept in a motel. No one had ever ridden on the, a New York subway. No one had ever seen a newsreel. And, hold your breath, no one had ever washed with hard water soap. At that time, seventy two years ago this morning, the earth was placid and quiet. Queen Victoria was finishing her long peaceful reign. Queen Victoria came to the throne in eighteen thirty seven, and she died, I believe, in nineteen oh one. She was just finishing her long Hellenic reign. Enormous segments of Earth's population live under the Union Jack. The mighty British Empire, the greatest empire of all history, belted the globe. The empire upon which proud Britishers would like to remind us that the sun, on which the sun never sat. Enormous segments of the earth comprised that great empire. Of course, there were other empires as well, smaller, but empires nevertheless. There was the German Empire, there was the Dutch Empire, oh yes, there was the French Empire and the Spanish Empire, and the Belgians hold or held certain pieces of real estate in Africa and other parts of the earth. But the British Empire was the colossus, the greatest of them all, and Britannia's navy, the invincible navy, ruled the seas. Oh, there was a brush fire war down in South Africa called the Boer War, but it was a very small and insignificant war indeed. The earth, for the most part, was quiet, stable, and settled. And people got around in railroads, they were here, but by horse and carriage. And then an enterprising young American who had never finished high school, whose name was Ford, his first name, of course, Henry, invented a strange contraption that was known as the horseless carriage. And Henry Ford chugged his way on this horseless carriage into the twentieth century, and America caught the vision and began to roll on wheels. And society that had been so very, very quiet and slow began to move. Not very fast at first. As a matter of fact, I was reading the other day of the cop in New York who flagged down and fired a driver for driving at the breakneck speed of twelve miles an hour. He was the first to be fined for speeding. And you know, things began to move, but they moved. Even at that time, wars were won by cavalry charges, on which soldiers booted and spurred, mounted, charged into the battle. Things were slow indeed. Colonialism was the order of the day. Africa was all carved up and divided among the ascendant colonial power. But then things began to move, and in the space of seventy two years, in less than seventy two years, we've moved from wars that were won by cavalry charges to thermonuclear bombs. We've moved from the chugging slow speed of the horseless carriage of nineteen hundred and nineteen hundred and one. We've moved to land speeds of over six hundred miles an hour, and we've gone from there to outer space, and we put men on the moon in less than seventy two years. Even as far back or as recently as nineteen forty one, there were only four independent countries in all Africa. I said in nineteen forty one there were only four independent countries on all the vast continent of Africa. Today, there are forty, ten times as many, forty. and the vestiges of colonialism are almost completely gone. Two great world wars brought gigantic changes. Do you know that of all the drugs that are used in, uh, and put out by the pharmaceutical societies and, uh, houses today, over seventy percent were unknown before the Second World War. They've come into practice and into use since the Second World War. Great changes have been introduced everywhere. As a matter of fact, there have been more changes in the scientific and in the social and in the economic. There have been more changes introduced to the world society in the last two-thirds of this century than in all the centuries since the birth of Christ. I repeat that statement. In the last sixty or seventy years, there have been more revolutionary changes introduced than in all the centuries since the birth of Jesus Christ. Things and society are moving at such an acceleration today. In the area of economics and scientific inventions, speed or distance has been annihilated by modern technocracy and modern streamlined communication. We're caught up in a revolution that causes us to stop for a moment, to catch our breath and say, hey, wait a minute, where are we going? To what destiny are we heading? What does tomorrow hold? Now, in search for some of our answers, we want to turn to this inspired book and to the utterances of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his apostles. Our Lord was not only the Savior and Redeemer of men, but he was God's great prophet. And when he spoke, he spoke with a finality and an authority, friends, of which no other prophet was capable. And our Savior pulled back the curtain, and over and over again, just before he went to the cross and died, he revealed something of the hideous and something of the glorious future that waits mankind. Now, there is a very significant text in the New Testament, First Corinthians chapter ten and verse thirty- thirty-two, that reads like this: Give none offense, neither to the Jew, number one, nor the Gentile, number two, nor to the church of God, number three. Now, some of us believe that the Bible divides or classifies all of mankind into three great ethnic divisions. Number one, the Jews. Number two, the Gentiles. And number three, the church. Now wait a minute. What do I mean by this? So far as heaven is concerned, God, I repeat, classifies men in these three great areas or segments. The Jew. The Jew is not to be thought of in the narrow sense of the seed of Judah, but the Jew here is a synonym for Israel, or if you like, the natural posterity of Abraham. Abraham, as I've often said, was the George Washington of the nation of Israel. And so Israelite's history begins with the call of Abraham, the record of which is furnished in our Bibles in Genesis chapter twelve. All right, God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, out of an idolatrous background, and he gave to him certain unconditional and guaranteed promises. He said, Abraham, I'm going to make your name great. I'm going to bless you. I'm going to bless your family. And not only that, but I'm going to give you a seed. I'm going to give you a pros- prosperity through which and by means of whom the whole of the world will be blessed. To put it in the language of scripture, and I'm quoting now Genesis chapter twelve, I guess it's verse three: I will bless thee and make thy name great, and I will bless thy seed, and in thee and in thy seed all the nations will be blessed. All right, here is a selection, a selected instrument through whom blessing is to come ultimately to all the fo- the fallen sons of Adam. Now, to Abraham, God gave Isaac, and to Isaac God gave a son by the name of Jacob, and to Jacob he gave twelve sons. So when I'm talking about the Jews this morning, when I'm talking about Israel this morning, I'm thinking of not all the seed of Abraham, for Abraham begat Ishmael, who's the progenitor of the Arabs. I'm thinking of the seed of Abraham through Isaac and through Jacob and through the twelve sons of Jacob who became the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel. Now then, we find the story chronicled for us in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, beginning with chapter twelve. Now, when you thumb through the book of Genesis and come to the last chapter of Genesis, you find old Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, the father of the twelve sons, migrating from the land of Canaan down to the land of Egypt because of the pressures of an empty cupboard, because of the pressures of famine. And the curtain goes down on the end of Genesis with Jacob and his sons in the land of Egypt. When the curtain rises on the book of Exodus, we find these people, the covenant people, the heirs of the promise to Abraham, down in the land of Egypt, under the tyrannical oppression of a brutal overlord whose name was Pharaoh. You know the story of the early chapters of Exodus, how the Lord God of Israel intervened powerfully in behalf of those oppressed slave people, and the next great epoch in their history is the Exodus, and under the leadership of Moses, the nation of Israel, having been in bondage for so long and now multiplied into a healthy ethnic group, they emerged from the land of Egypt through the Red Sea and into the wilderness, where the living God who had redeemed them now became their guide and their great faithful provider. He led them for forty years through that torturous route, uh, through the desert, until finally they crossed the River Jordan and they peopled the land of Canaan. And we find this story brings us to the book of Joshua, the sixth book in the Old Testament. Here they emerge under the leadership of a new name, Joshua, the successor of Moses, who is now dead. Joshua leads them triumphantly through the Jordan into the land of Canaan, and they possess that land by a divine mandate. They settle down in that land, each tribe having his own allotted real estate. And then arose, following the death of Joshua, a new leader, his, uh, a new leader. In fact, I should have said a new succession of leaders, a proliferation of leaders. These were known as the judges. These judges were reformers. These judges were patriots. These judges were men of God, and they gave solidarity and leadership to the people in the land, and that brings us to the book of Judges in the Old Testament. And out of the judges emerged the monarchy, and for the first time, at the insistence of the nation, God gave them a king. And the first king of Israel was a crown, was crowned amidst the enthusiastic acclamations of the nation. His name, of course, was King Saul. King Saul reigned forty years. He was succeeded by David, who also in turn reigned for forty years, and he in turn was succeeded to the throne by his son Solomon, who again in turn, uh, reigned for forty years. And then following that, we have the tragedy of the division of the kingdom. Ten tribes broke away from the two tribes in the north in rebellion against their brethren, in rebellion against God, and each of these 2, uh, segments of Israel flow through to the captivity. Spiritual life undergo that succession of kings, I'm sorry to report, deteriorated. It became worse and worse. As a matter of fact, the northern kingdom didn't have one good king. The southern kingdom was blessed by some good kings, but in spite of the godly men that came to the throne of the South, and in spite of the fact that the Northern Kingdom had the law and the prophets, there was a continuous erosion of spiritual life, and the people who had originally known the living and the everlasting and the glorious and the only God, they began to commit spiritual whoredom with the nations around them, and they hugged to their national bosom false gods. And in spite of all the repeated warnings of the living God, things became worse and worse until finally, until finally the living God raised up the cruel Gentile to chastise his willfully disobedient people. And the Northern Kingdom was overthrown in the year seven twenty BC, and they were taken captive by Assyria, and that was fini, that was finished for the Northern Kingdom, seven twenty BC. The Southern Kingdom survived about one hundred and fifty years longer, but in five eighty six BC, the Babylonians came, and they pulverized the city of Jerusalem, and they carried them away in irons to captive Bab- as captives to Babylon. And for seventy years, Judah and Benjamin were down by the rivers of Babylon. They forgot the song in the strange land. They did plenty of sobbing and crying there. They were homesick there, but friends, there was no singing, there was no rejoicing in Babylon. You know, judgment always begins at the house of God, and Peter says, if it begins with us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel? Do you get the point? Get the point? If God will not tolerate sin in his own professing people, don't you think for a single moment, Christless heart here this morning, that you're going to get away with it. There's a yawning hell awaits the Christless soul. Hell is the end of every Christless life. And the Savior who says to the sinner this morning, come unto me, will in that day say, depart from me, ye curses, into everlasting fire. I never knew you. Take a lesson from the captivity. Seventy years in Babylon. Ah, but I'm glad to say that at the end of the seventy years, there was a returning on the part of the men to God, and God brought about fifty thousand of them back to the decimated city of Jerusalem, where, under the leadership of Zerubbabel and Nehemiah and Ezra, the city was rebuilt, the temple was restored, the priesthood was reestablished, the sacrifices were reinstated, and the walls went up, and they settled down, that remnant in their land, oh, not as a free and independent people, as a dependent tributary people, but having a good measure of liberty, they settled down in their land, and God sent them prophets again. And we get those prophets in the closing minor prophets of the Old Testament, namely Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, with the three post-exilic prophets. And the curtain goes down on Malachi. And that's a capsule summary of the entire Old Testament history. When the curtain rises in the New Testament, four hundred years later, we find the people settled down under a new government, Rome this time. A free people? Oh no, not a free people, not a free people. We noticed that in our Bible class this morning, that they had to pay taxes to the hated overlord, the Gentile, the Roman authorities, but they settled down, and it was then glorious news, the Messiah was born. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, came in, and he came to his own people, and he came to Israel, authenticated by all the prophecies of the Old Testament that identified him without question as the Son of the living God, the Messiah of Israel. He appeared, made his vow, presented his claims. Alas, those claims, friends, first became the object of suspicion, and then became the object of ridicule, and then became the object of outright rejection. And they took the holy, harmless Son of God, and they nailed him to a cross amidst robbers. They spat on him. They kneeled into a cross and jeered his dying throws of agony, and our Lord Jesus Christ died. He was despised and rejected of men. What happened? He rose again the third day, and the apostles filled with the Holy Ghost went out into the streets of Jerusalem with the glad news of salvation, full, free, and eternal on the ground of grace. All man had to do to get it is to recognize his need, that's repentance, and by faith receive the gift of salvation. But you know, so far as the nation of Israel is concerned, instead of bowing to that new message, they flogged the preachers, and they jailed the preachers, and they beheaded the preachers, they killed the preachers. And they sent the message back to God, we will not have this man to reign over us. You know what happened? My friends, exactly what Jesus Christ had told them the night before he died. Looking on the city of Jerusalem, Israel's proud capital, he wept, and he said, Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together under, as a hen gathers a brood under her wings, but you would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. Ye shall not see me henceforth until ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. Goodbye. And he turned his back on the temple and the whole religious system, and he he wrote desolate over the whole thing. And he said, the days come when thine enemy shall cast a trench about thee and bring your battering rams, and not one stone will be left upon another. And they laughed in his face. You know what happened? My friends, less than forty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord, the Roman armies under Titus came with their battering rams, and they pulverized the city of Jerusalem, and in eighteen seventy, the capital city of Jerusalem was in absolute ashes. One million Jews were butchered, and the rest were taken away captive, in exact accord with what our Lord said. If your Bible is open to J- Luke twenty one, look at verse twenty four. Luke twenty one and twenty four: and they shall fall by the edge of the sword, Luke twenty one twenty four: they shall fall by the edge of the sword and shall be led away captive into all nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. It is pertinent for Jerusalem in AD seventy, forty years or less after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And Israel was scattered to the ends of the earth, and for two thousand years almost, Israel has been the people of the wandering foot and the weary breath, without a flag, without a country, without an air force, without any national identity. The footfall of the Gentiles everywhere among the Gentiles until nineteen forty eight, within the embrace of your lifetime, many of you. And in nineteen forty eight, something happened. In nineteen forty eight, to the amazement of the world, Palestine was del- delivered during the First World War from the boot heel of the Turk. The Ottoman Empire disappeared in World War Number one. And then, because of the heavy, heavy lash of anti-Semitism, because of the utter diabolical, damnable hatred of Hitler and his malicious gang and his concentration camps, Israel began to return to their land. And we're living today, my friends, in the days of the budding fig tree, and for the first time since five eighty BC. How long is that? twenty five hundred years? For the first time in twenty five hundred years, Israel is an, an independent state. You say, weren't they that in the days of Jesus? No, they were not independent. They were there by Gentile sufferance. But in nineteen forty eight, the flag of Israel went up. A little later, Jerusalem became the capital, and you know the story of Israel today. For the first time since eighty BC, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city and dispersed the Jews, and until nineteen forty eight, the month of May nineteen forty eight, they have never had a national identity. They had no army, they had no air force, they had no common language. They have nothing. Today, Israel is an independent, burgeoning state with over two millions of Jews there. The only country, one of the few countries in the world that provides its own foodstuff, grows it right on its own soil. A, a growing state today with their own army that have given a fairly good account of themselves, if you've been reading the papers, and it's own Navy and its own Air Force and its own stamps and its own postage and its own language, the Hebrew language, a dead language for centuries, revived, and the kids in the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem all speak pure Hebrew, and as we've been reminded recently, it's the only country in the world where children teach their parents how to speak their mother tongue, because the parents have come from seventy-odd odd countries all over Europe and all over the world, and they speak the nationality of their original country. They come back and they learn Hebrew, and the children teach their parents how to speak it, but they speak Hebrew there. So you have a unified nation today. What did the Lord say? He said, behold the fig tree and all the trees. Verse twenty nine, behold the fig tree. Now the fig tree is God's symbol of the nation of Israel, and the Lord said, when the fig tree begins to shoot, when it begins to bud, watch out! The kingdom of God is nigh at hand. But you say, but in verse twenty nine, sir, it says in all the trees. How does that fit in with your interpretation? You've been telling us that Israel is a fig tree. What about all the trees? No problem there at all, my friend. All the trees refer to those nations around Israel, those other nations that are not Israel. All the trees. My dear friends, you and I are blind if we have missed the budding of all the trees today. Those somnolent nations, Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, all those nations around there that had, that were so sleepy and so unimportant and never made the headlines. What's happening? They're sprouting everywhere, everywhere. All the trees are breaking into leaves. The Lord says, don't miss it. The fig tree, the fig tree's coming out, all the trees are shooting. That's a sign that summer is nigh. Then he says, and when you see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. The what? The kingdom of God is nigh at hand. The Lord gives us here a very sure sign of the nearness of his return, when he, the Lord Jesus, who was crucified, is going to reenter this field and come back in judgment and wrath, in blessing and glory, depending on to which class you belong. All the trees. We're living in days of a shedding and disappearing colonialism. I said at the beginning of my address this morning that colonialism seventy years ago was the order of the day. There were very, very few, uh, subordinate backward countries that were independent. Today, very few countries in Africa that are not independent, but all around the fig tree there, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, you name them, they're all going concerns today. The Lord says this is a sure sign. Now, the Gentile sign concerns Europe particularly. Do you know this morning, beloved friends? Now, wait a minute. In nineteen forty five, how long ago is that? Twenty five, thirty years? Twenty seven years? Twenty seven years ago today, at the end of World War II, Europe was in absolute shambles. Its cities were battered, broken, and bleeding. Rotterdam. What terrorizing punishment Rotterdam took for the Nazi brutal onslaught in the spring of nineteen forty. Rotterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin. Backward, bleeding, broken, and the prophet said it would take a hundred years for Europe to make a, a comeback. Prophets are not always right, human prophets. In the last twenty five years, friends or less, Europe has come back like the sink out of the overthrown the ashes, and Europe today is dotted by great prosperous cities. Now, according to Daniel chapter two and Daniel chapter seven and Revelation thirteen and Revelation seventeen, in the last days, the prophets of God foretold that Europe would finally be formed into a ten kingdom confederation. That's right, there'd be ten kings, and they would be ultimately dominated by a supreme brutal overlord, who is called the Beast of Revelation thirteen one to thirteen. The Beast, the supreme arbiter in the last days, would be boss of Europe, and Europe would be politically and economically federated into a galvanized whole. The dream of the late Charles de Gaulle was to create a United States of Europe that would form a third world power between the giant America and the giant USSR, and it would be a third force. This was his dream. Today, friends, we're living in days when Europe is beginning to.