11
THE DAYS OF THE SON OF MAN.
Luke 17: 26 - 30
New Year’s Eve Sermon by:
Rev. C. Pronk
PUBLISHED BY THE
PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
OF THE
FREE REFORMED CHURCHES OF NORTH AMERICA.
(December 2005)
LITURGY:
Votum
Psalter 274
Scripture Reading: Luke 17: 20 – 37
Text: Luke 17: 26 – 30
Psalter 164: 1, 2
Congregational Prayer
Offerings
Psalter 245
Sermon
Psalter 204: 2, 3
Thanksgiving Prayer
Psalter 446: 1, 2, 4
Doxology: Psalter 76: 1, 4
Introduction
Once again we have reached the end of another year. In a few hours 2005 will belong to the ages. For most of us it has been a "good" year,” in the sense that we have enjoyed material prosperity. The economy was good in Canada, certainly compared with the rest of the world. But for many people in the world, it has been a very difficult year. Think of countries like Iraq, where there has been so much violence and bloodshed. Think of the Sudan, where warring factions, including many Christians, have killed thousands! And of course, the many hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes that have devastated large areas in the USA, Central America and Asia, leaving thousands dead, injured and homeless.
But also in our personal lives there have been problems. Some of us have had to cope with sicknesses--some very serious. There have been deaths of loved ones, financial setbacks, difficulties at work, and tensions in family relationships. And then there is the problem of sin, un-confessed sin, un-forsaken sin, and therefore un-forgiven sin. Although the Lord gave us many opportunities to seek His face and turn from sin, have we made the best use of these opportunities? How have we spent all those days, weeks and months?
It is the custom in our Reformed churches to reflect on the year that has gone by and to take stock of what is going on in the world, in society, in our own nation as well as in the church, and especially in our own lives. We will do so tonight from the perspective of the Gospel of Luke, chapter 17, where the Lord Jesus Christ gives His prediction of what life will be like in the last days and how God will judge the world and its inhabitants.
Our theme is “The Days of the Son of Man”
We will see that those days will be:
1. materialistic
2. hedonistic
3. cataclysmic.
1. Materialistic
When Jesus was on earth many Jews were asking when the Messiah would come to establish the kingdom of God. In Luke 17 we read that the Pharisees put this question to Jesus: “When will the kingdom come?” Jesus answered: “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, See here! or see there! For indeed the kingdom of God is within you.” The kingdom of God, Jesus means, has already come in the Person of Himself as a saving and judging force in the life of the Jewish nation—saving in the lives of those who recognize and obey Him as the Messiah, but judging, in the lives of those who reject Him. The final and complete manifestation of the kingdom, however, will come suddenly and unexpectedly so that everyone will be surprised and—and in the case of the unsaved—shocked!
Turning to His disciples, the Lord Jesus explains to them what society will be like at the time of His return. The Saviour does this by way of a comparison. He draws two lines from the past and projects them to the future. The days of the Son of man will be like the days of Noah and Lot. The days of Noah are described this way: “they ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage.” And of the days of Lot Christ says: “they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built.”
You may ask, what is so unusual about those days? They ate and drank, got married and did business--isn't that what people have always done from the beginning of time? Exactly. This is the point Jesus is making here. The days of the Son of man will be like the days of Noah and Lot in that they will be common, ordinary days. “Don't look for anything too unusual or strange,” Jesus says. The day of my return will be a day when people will be going about their business as usual.
But what's wrong with eating and drinking, you ask? Getting married and doing business is not sinful, is it? Of course not! These things are good and even required. Eating, marrying and working belong to the most elementary functions of man. God Himself commanded Adam and Eve to engage in these activities when He said:
· the herbs and fruits shall be to you for food;
· be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth;
· subdue the earth and have dominion over it.
To engage in these activities is simply to obey the creation order. They are necessary activities, for what would happen if man would stop doing these things? The human race would die out! Yet, what Christ says here amounts to a most severe condemnation of humanity. Why? Not because eating, drinking, marrying and working are wrong, but because this is all you can say about the people in the last days. They eat, they drink, they marry, and they work--period. That sums it up. That's all they do; that's all they live for. But this can be said of animals too. Animals eat and drink and multiply, and in a sense, they work too.
Do you see now what Jesus intends to say with this seemingly innocent catalogue of human activities? Man, the crown of God's creation, has lowered himself to the level of the animal. Man, created in the image of God lives only to eat and drink, to marry and work--that is all he lives for. The days of the Son of Man are days when man lives without God.
Man has made much progress. There is even an upward trend from Noah's days to Lot's time; culturally speaking. In Noah's days life was still very primitive. People ate, drank and got married. Most seemed to have lived a rather nomadic life, raising cattle and living off the land. But by Lot's time society has developed to the point where they also build, plant, buy and sell. It has become an agricultural as well as commercial society.
And what about the progress made since the days of Lot? Isn't it amazing how far man has climbed the ladder of science and technology-all the way to the moon and beyond?
Yet, in spite of man's tremendous advances in knowledge, he is still ignorant. He does not know God. Man may have progressed by leaps and bounds scientifically, but he has made no progress spiritually and morally. Life in the third millennium is thoroughly materialistic--certainly here in the West. People live for this world and this life only. Life today is secular, that is, non-spiritual in character. Only things that can be seen and touched are important. Materialism has become the reigning philosophy in our time; and let no one think that the church has escaped this philosophy. We too, are children of our time. That means we are being influenced by popular views about life and what
constitutes happiness. Materialism has all of us in its grip too--more than we realize.
2. Hedonistic
But the days of the Son of man will not just be materialistic. They will also be hedonistic. That word means, living for pleasure only. Hedonism is the ancient Greek philosophy, which taught that the ideal life is one that is filled with a minimum of pain and a maximum of pleasure. Hedonism always includes immorality and decadence. Jesus does not say this in so many words, but you can read it between the lines.
I said that there was cultural progress from Noah's days to Lot's time. But there was also a regression. For while we read that in Noah's days the people married and were given in marriage, this is not mentioned in the list of human activities in Lot's days. Here we see that cultural progress often goes hand in hand with moral decline.
Life in Noah's days was bad enough. So bad, in fact that God said, every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart is only evil continually. But at least they still got married. By Lot's time the human race has degenerated so far that the divinely instituted ordinance of marriage is simply brushed aside by the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. In those proverbially wicked cities, marriage has made way for the most shameful homosexual and other unnatural relationships.
Do I need to draw the line to Canada 2005? No, because the Lord Jesus does it for us in our text. "Even so will it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed” (v.30). Jesus means: at the time of my return, society will resemble that of Sodom and Gomorrah again.
Historians will tell you that it has always been a mark of a decaying civilization that people become obsessed with sex. Well, our Western civilization has become so obsessed with it that it is seeping from all the pores of our national life, like the drippings from a broken sewer. And to think that while the highest court of our land cannot agree on a definition of pornography and obscenity it has no problem coming up with a new definition of marriage, namely the union of two persons, regardless of gender. As if God has not laid down His definition way back in the Garden of Eden when He said, “a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).
That's what happens when you set aside the Law of the Creator. Billy Graham said a few years ago that if we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick. Indeed, we have lost our moral yardstick: The Ten Commandments. Once a nation or a society has lost this divine moral standard, the result can only be moral chaos.
3. Cataclysmic
We have seen that our days are like those of Noah and Lot, because they are materialistic and hedonistic. Let us now see why such days are also cataclysmic. History shows that whenever a society or civilization is materialistic and hedonistic, the end of that society is not far away. It is imminent. That was true of the generation living in Noah's time. As our Lord says: “The people ate, they drank, they married wives and were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.” The same thing happened to the people living in the days of Lot. As the Saviour continues: …They ate; they drank; they bought; they sold; they planted and they built; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.” Even so, Jesus concludes, “will it be in the days when the Son of man is revealed.”
When our society will have made itself ripe for the judgment, God will come again-for the last time and sweep the wicked off the face of the earth. That judgment will be terrible! It will be a universal judgment upon all men.
What we have witnessed this past year was terrible too. In just a few minutes hundreds of thousands of men, women and children perished in the earthquake in Pakistan. Watching the news reports and hearing the sound bites of wailing survivors reminded me of Noah's flood and of what the Saviour says here, in Luke 17, especially that it came so suddenly upon them. The same was true of many who perished in Guatemala in hurricane Katrina. No one expected it. People were going about their daily business working, resting or sleeping. Suddenly the end came! Many were buried alive under the rubble of collapsing buildings or huge mudslides. Worst of all, I'm afraid that most of the victims died without Christ, having no hope for eternity. But we must leave the judgment to the Lord.
Congregation, these catastrophes mean something. They send a message. It is not just a matter of mother nature acting strangely. Also here God controls all things. We read in Amos 9 that when the Lord of hosts touches the land “it shall melt so that all who dwell therein shall mourn. It shall rise up wholly like a flood and shall be drowned as by the flood of Egypt. It is he who builds His stories [layers] in the heaven and has founded His troop [strata] in the earth; he calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth: The Lord is His name” (vv.5-6). In chapter 3:6 of the book of Amos, the prophet says, “Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?”
And not only does God control all things, including natural disasters, He also uses them to demonstrate His holiness and His determination to punish sin wherever it is found. In Psalm 90 we read, “Thou turnest man to destruction; Thou carriest them away like a flood… for we are consumed by thine anger and by thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”
Why were these people destroyed and not we? Why those people in relatively poor countries, living in huts that are easily swept away by floods or collapse when the earth moves violently? Let us never think that we are better than those poor people who perished. Always remember what the Lord Jesus said in Luke 13 about those Jews who were killed by Pilate in a blood bath and those who died when that tower collapsed and fell on top of them. “Except you repent, the Saviour warned, you will all likewise perish.”
Judgment Day will be terrible; it will be universal and worldwide. Everybody will be judged; not just the world of unbelievers, but also the outwardly religious. Certainly, God's people will have nothing to fear. For all who were judged and acquitted in this life, the day of judgment will not mean their destruction but their salvation. Only for the unconverted will it be a day of terror. Then unbelieving church-going people will be sent into everlasting perdition along with unbelievers from the world. Let us never think that we will escape, just because we are members of a conservative, Bible-believing church. If the life of grace is not in us, we will even receive a heavier condemnation than those who have never heard of the way of salvation.