Sermon from December 9, 2001
I don't think anyone expected the success of the Left Behind series. Those eight or nine volumes by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have sold millions of copies in places as diverse as Border's Book Stores and truck stops in central Iowa. I know that many of you have read every one of them and presumably can't wait until the next volume comes out.

The volumes offer a fictionalized version of the New Tesatment Book of Revelation. Those who know will tell you that behind the stories is an explicit and deeply held theological interpretation of Revelation. Because of its commercial success and because it deals with themes you don't expect to hear about anywhere except in church, quite a few people have wanted to know my opinion about the series. I have expressed my opinion in private, and today I would like to say more to you about it.

First, I am glad that people are reading them. I can't tell you how many stories I have heard about people, who are reading them who otherwise show very little interest in religious topics. Left Behind has gotten more people talking about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ than all the sermons that were preached on it last year. It is a marvelous conversation piece that opens up chances to talk about Jesus Christ, if we have the patience to take the conversation in that direction.

Second, people want to know if the Book of Revelation says what the Left Behind series says that it says. In one way I would say, yes, it is faithful to Revelation in that it turns people to thinking about God and the Second Coming and Judgment. On the other hand, even though a serious interpretation of Revelation lies behind it, the series professes to be fiction and not a commentary on the book.

So, if we come away thinking that Left Behind tells you what the future is going to be, we are making a mistake. What we have in this series is not a blueprint for the future but an imaginative picture of the future that is designed to get people now to think about God. You might say, "If it is just a piece of fiction, why pat attention to it at all?" Maybe I can explain that a bit more, if you will indulge me a story about one of my granddaughters.

Kacey is four years old and quite loquacious, thank you, and never met a conversation she did not want to be part of. Last summer, Carole was visiting with our daughter in Fort Worth. Somehow the conversation got around to brushing teeth, and Kacey said to Carole, "Gam, do you brush your teeth?"

Carole said she did, and Kacey said, "It is really important to brush your teeth, because if you don't, green bugs will start crawling all over your teeth."

Carole expressed some surprise at this diagnosis, and Kacey explained further by saying, "If you don't brush your teeth, the green bugs will start eating them. It is important to brush your teeth twice a day."

It might be difficult to verify in a laboratory what that four-year-old imagines is happening in her mouth, but do you know what? She brushes her teeth twice every day. The knowledge the child has is imprecise, but it would be irresponsible to make fun of what she says. The practical results of her imprecise knowledge are exactly what a parent and the dentist would want.

The same thing is true of our understanding of the Book of Revelation and of the Left Behind series. When Christ comes again, and the world as we know it gives way to a new heaven and a new earth, it will look quite different from the images in these writings. However, if these writings encourage us to hope more keenly for Christ's return and to live more godly lives, the practical results of our imprecise knowledge are good.

I still want to understand the biblical language as well as possible, and I think I can offer you an understanding of it better than what you will in Left Behind. But so long as you don't get dogmatic about what you read in Left Behind, I see a lot of spiritual good that comes from reading it. In fact, if my alleged, better understanding of the Biblical language does not help me to lead a more godly life than someone who takes Left Behind quite literally, I am quite sure that person is more pleasing to God than I am.

I have introduced this sermon like this, because these ideas are pertinent to the next chapter in Mark. Chapter 13 reads somewhat like a miniature Book of Revelation. Several of the same ideas appear in each, and both have to do with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. My goal is to help us to understand Jesus' language in this chapter as well as possible and to apply it to our experience in a meaningful and powerful way.

Here is how I would like to do it. It will take two sermons to do it. Today, I want to place before you the principles that govern my interpretation of this chapter. In the second sermon I want to apply these principles to Mark 13 so that you have a better idea of what I believe Jesus meant by what He said. I hope also to show you how this understanding can help us to apply Jesus' words to our world. Let's start with the opening two verses of Mark 13.

As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!"

"Do you see all these great buildings?" replied Jesus. "Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down."

How did you feel when you saw the World Trade Center towers collapse? How would you have felt, if the terrorists had crashed into the U.S. Capitol Building, and not one stone had been left standing on another? Imagining those horrors helps us to grasp the emotional impact of Jesus' words on His disciples.

Shock and disbelief would be the mild responses. As ever Jew remembered, such a thing had happened 600 years earlier when the armies of King Nebuchadnezzar came against Jerusalem and destroyed it and had destroyed and burned the temple. Even to talk about another destruction seemed incredible and irresponsible, and implied in the destruction of the temple was also another destruction of Jerusalem and another scattering of the Jewish people to who knows what dark corners of the earth.

All this goes far beyond Jesus' already inflammatory actions in the Jerusalem temple. He had driven out the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons for the temple sacrifices. He had not allowed anyone that day to buy and sell in the temple. He not only brought commercial life in the temple to a halt, but He also brought religious life in the temple to a halt. The central religious acts of Judaism came to a screeching halt. Try to put yourselves in the shoes of Jesus' enemies. They could make a case that He was the enemy.

His parable of the vineyard tenants told in a transparent way the story of how the custodians of Jerusalem's religious life were going to be removed and replaced by others. That earned Him, understandably, the animosity of Jewish religious leaders, although the people in the street seemed to have taken it all in stride and even to have enjoyed it.

But to say that the Jerusalem temple would once again be destroyed seems to go beyond the pale. His disciples, no doubt, were glad He said this to them in private. But as we will learn later in Mark, word about what He thought about the temple leaked to unfriendly sources, who brought it up in Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin, a Jewish court. I wonder if Judas was the leak. In any case, the disciples had questions they wanted Jesus to answer. Verses 3-4 frame those questions.

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, "Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?"

With that question we come to the first principle that guides our interpretation of Mark 13. Here it is. Everything in verses 5-37 answer the disciples' question in verse 4. "That is obvious," you say. If you could read everything I have read on Mark 13, you might not say that. It is easy to read this chapter and begin immediately to speculate on what it tells us about the end of the world. This is the first principle that guides our interpretation of Mark 13: Everything in verses 5-37 answers the disciples' question in verse 4.

Now, we have to admit that Jesus gave a long and strange answer to their question. Three other principles will help us to make sense of the strangeness (G.B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, 256-271). Here is the next principle. "The biblical writers believed literally that the world had had a beginning in the past and would have an end in the future," (ibid., 256). Here are two statements that illustrate that, one from the Old Testatment and one from the New Testatment. Psalm 102:25-26 includes both ideas.

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
     and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain;
     they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
     and they will be discarded.

Now from 2 Peter 3:10-11 we hear this same conviction from a Christian apostle. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare ... everything will be destroyed in this way.

So far, so good. The next principle is crucial to understanding the language of Mark 13 and all other biblical language that is like it. This principle might seems strange at first, but I think you are such good students of the Bible that you will grasp it quickly. This principle says that the biblical writers "regularly used end-of-the-world language ... to refer to (an event) which they well knew was not the end of the world," (ibid.).

Another reason why I am confident that you will understand this principle is that you and I do the same kind of thing in English. Have you never heard a teenage girl say after breaking up with a boy, "My life is over!"? She is using language that properly applies to death to express the emotional trauma of breaking up.

Or how about this one? "The sky fell on the stock market yesterday." That uses catastrophic, astronomical language to express a painful down-turn on Wall Street. Here are a few other examples. A divorced man says, "I thought it was the end of the world." The politician says, "The lights went out all over Europe." The rescue worker in New York City says, "This is hell." You can probably add dozens of your own.

The biblical writers do this often. An example is the phrase the day of the Lord. We find it eighteen times in the Bible. The 2 Peter passage that we read uses this phrase to refer literally to the end of the world. But look at another passage in Isaiah 13:6-7.

Wait, for the day of the LORD is near;
     it will come like destruction from the Almighty.
Because of this, all hands will go limp,
     every man's heart will melt.

That sounds like the end of the world, but look up at verse one. An oracle concerning Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw. He was writing about God's judment on the Babylonians. He was using language appropriate to the end of the world to describe the coming destruction of Babylon as a world power.

While we are in Isaiah 13, look also at verse ten.

The stars of heaven and their constellations
     will not show their light.
The rising sun will be darkened
     and the moon will not give its light.

That really sounds like the end of the world, doesn't it? Once again, Isaiah was using language appropriate to the end of the world to describe the end of an era, viz., the coming destruction of Babylon as a world power. We will find this identical, end-of-the-world language in Mark 13, and Jesus uses it the same way Isaiah did, to describe the end of an era, viz., the destruction of the temple.

There is one final principle that should guide us as we seek to understand the end-of-the-world language of the Bible. We have to allow for the possibility that someone will say this language means literally the end of the world, when the biblical writer was using such language to convey the gravity of current events in the life of God's people.

So what? The worst that can happen is that somebody will start announcing that the end of the world will take place on November 19, 2002. There are plenty of us around now to caution people about such predictions, and most of the world dismisses such predictions as nonsense.

On the other hand, this brings us back to where this sermon started. Even a mistaken literal understanding of the biblical language may help people renew their hope in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and to pursue more godly lives.

I hope these four principles will shape the way we view this important biblical language. We do not want to lose it through misuse or lack of use. We should do all we can to understand the language of scripture properly, and we should be tolerant of different understandings of that language, so long as they keep us looking up, hoping for the return of Christ and keep us pursuing a life worthy of the Lord we love. Let love guide understanding, and let us worship with joy and hope:

"And the angels will cry, 'Hail the Lamb who was slain for the world! Rule in Power!' And the earth will reply, 'You shall reign as the King of all Kings and the Lord of all Lords.'"