David:     A short verse in Luke chapter 19 has been in my mind all this week, Karen. The context is the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and the Jewish religious leaders are upset by what’s going on.

Karen:     Now the general population in Jerusalem and its surroundings was chattering excitedly about their Messiah having come at last to deliver them, and were they pumped.

David:     But both are blind to the big picture reality that’s unfolding. The Creator of the universe has stepped into His creation and is going to make everything well for the world if they will follow Him.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     Let me go to the scriptures Karen. This is actually what it says in the account that Luke gives us.

The Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Rebuke your disciples.” That’s because these people are yelling out. “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord.” And Jesus responds to them, “I tell you if they keep quiet the stones will cry out.”

Then you have this picture that’s sad because Jesus is weeping. And he’s weeping because they don’t understand really what’s going on. And he says, “The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and him you went on every side and they’ll dash you to the ground you and the children within your walls. They’ll not leave one stone on another.       Why? Because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

That really bothers me because I think of myself, you know, I’m very busy in the Lord’s work supposedly and I have a sense of what He’s wanting me to do and all that. Yet maybe sometimes I’m that way. I’m blind. The biggest event in the history of the world was God stepping into it in the person of His Son. And they missed that.

Karen:     They saw part of it. But they missed the broader meaning and had to, not only Jerusalem and the Judeo countries, and so, there was something else happening that they had not grappled with. They were not able to step out of the context of their place in time and grapple with what the potential of this could be for the entire world and for all of history going forward.

David:     That’s what in my mind I’m saying. Am I so involved in my burdens and my belief in what God wants me to do that I’m missing the bigger picture that is happening in relationships of the world? And I found as I listened to the news this week and saw some of the events that are happening, in terms of the world, is like all of a sudden, I was saying, “Maybe I’m blind. Maybe I’m blind. Maybe.”

Karen:     This is the end of time. So, the end of days that the scripture talks about. Is that what you’re saying?

David:     Yeah, Jesus talks of it all the time. I’m so actively involved in what I’m doing and excited about it and you know and praying about it. That I’m missing the bigger picture that is going on.

Karen:     I think a lot of us feel unsettled by all the things that are happening. Let’s name some of those things that everyone knows about. And one is this extraordinary climate change that we’re experiencing. Now, climatologists are saying that there’s a point when there’s a climate change that we can’t go back to what we had before.

David:     Yeah, so you get this excessive heat and all the fires in Europe and the United States.

Karen:     And all over the world.

David:     What causes that doesn’t matter to me at the time. It’s just that this is happening.

Karen:     Right.

David:     And it’s one of the things that Jesus talked about in relationship to the scriptures. He’s saying, “These are going to be signs of the end times and people’s hearts are going to be afraid.” You know, he says, “There will be wars, rumors of war.”

There’ll be famines, you know, talking about that in the news today. So many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are going to go hungry. All these kinds of things. And I’m saying, “Now wait a minute here. What’s going on?”

Karen:     Well, and I think one of the remarkable things about this discussion that Jesus raises when he walked the earth here is, how does a young man at that time of life, 33 years of age when he was crucified in that history, that little place in the Middle East, that little country, how does he foresee that there’ll be seas rising or any of the other things that he identifies here? So, that’s always been an indicator to me that he was more than just a prophet or one of those remarkable leaders that hits history and shifts it for a while. He shifted history for all time going forward after that. But these prophecies that he makes are certainly significant for us to look at and then think about do they have anything to say about these remarkable events that are happening in our time today?

David:     This is one such example, okay? This is Jesus’ signs of the end of the age. This is coming from Luke chapter 21. He said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom.”

Well, that’s been the history of the world. “There will be great earthquakes, famines,” and then he uses the word pestilences. So, these are unusual diseases that come. You could put in pandemics, things that people can’t solve that are dire as far as what’s going on.

Karen:     And that’s different than the pandemic of the virus that we’re experiencing right now. It’s all over the world because of our globalization process. So, I’m not sure.

David:     There have been pandemics before, I would say.

Karen:     Always pestilences, you know. But this one has more weight and freight to it because of the globalization. Everyone around the world has experienced this COVID virus, pandemic or epidemic.

David:     I think we got it solved and then…

Karen:     There’s another strain. Yeah, another variant.

David:     So, that’s part of what he talks about, and he continues to give other illustrations. So, do I then look at these and kind of rethink where am I in all this? Because if it is true that the biggest event in the whole of the world is the incarnation, the coming to earth of the Godman, the second biggest event in all the world is going to be what?

Karen:     Well, the end of days and the end of time or Christ coming again.

David:     The return.

Karen:     Yeah.

David:     The return of this one who is coming back. There are all kinds of ideas people have, Karen, as to how that will unfold.

Karen:     Theological differences.

David:     Yeah, and it doesn’t really matter how it unfolds if it’s going to happen.

Karen:     You and I are concentrating on the fact that the Scripture tells us it will happen.

David:     Yeah, and in some ways I’m kind of pumped by that myself because I’m saying, “Wouldn’t that be something?” I remember my grandma Myers years ago at Sunset Home in Quincy, Illinois. And she was an old woman at that time. Her saying to me, “Oh, David, I would be so pleased if I would still be here when Jesus returned.”

Karen:     Oh, wonderful.

David:     No, I’m in that situation where I say, “Wow, I haven’t thought about it that much,” but it would be wonderful as we watch some of these things happening in our day if I could be here. And then I think, well, a lot of what Jesus talked about the end of times would be persecution. And I’m hearing more about persecutions in just general talk with other believers. In fact, in my prayer group, Karen, as we get together to pray, that word has come up a number of times. Lord Jesus, I know there are persecutions going on around the world. New believers would have to give their lives because of their belief and do it gladly.

I’m listening to prayers like this. I think would I be willing to do that? And I think I would but help me to be faithful even in the simple persecutions I’m going through. But persecutions, that’s coming up more and more in that group and in conversations that I have with other believers. Something’s unusual regarding that. I’m saying again, I’m just talking to myself, “Is this coming together in a rapid way that’s beyond what I’ve ever thought?”

Karen:     Or ever experienced before.

David:     So that I have to say, a lot of the plans that I’ve made, not just in terms of ministry, but plans I’ve made, whether it’s a car, I need to think these more carefully. I need to think about it more carefully because this could be the most incredible time that anyone could ever imagine since the first coming of Christ to the world.

Karen:     So, I think what we’re saying to ourselves and positioning ourselves to say to our listening audience is that if you’re going through these unusual times and you’re not struggling with the meaning of them, but particularly the meaning of how then should I live, given the nature of the days, then you’re missing out on the missing a big picture that is occurring and needs to be affecting your thinking in ways that perhaps you haven’t thought before. Now we’re not asking for people to be fearful or to become anxious or to be distressed, but we want them to begin to do the kind of thinking that says, “How then shall I live if these days are those days or the forerunners to those days?”

David:     I put it in a sentence.

Today’s Christians would do well to think through their response to what the scriptures say regarding the end times.

That phrase end times is not going to be there in the Bible, but it’s a common thing that church people use.

Karen:     So, how do we do that practically? So, I wrote a list of things that I think are practical responses to our dialogue here.

You begin to talk about it with other fellow believers or with your family and maybe invite some of them to go to the scriptures. You’ve given them one out of Luke, but there are other scriptures and study them and then have a discussion group that is just really centered around how do we live then if these are the days that are going to lead to the end of time.

And I would make a point of reading all of the relevant scriptures because there’s several passages other than the Luke passage that, so it’s a Bible study that you’re going to enter into. And then you ask the question, “What really is going on in our world?” And I think because of our news saturation, it’s hard to miss that we have worldwide scenarios that we’ve never had in the past that are being featured. And one is all of these fires in Europe and Britain sweeping across lands, our own country all over that we’ve never ever had before in addition to the pandemic.

David:     Whole weather change.

Karen:     Yeah, right. What is going on in our world? And then what I do because we write because we podcast is I create a file. And so, I take tear sheets out of magazines and experts of various kinds give various sorts of statistics. And I take tear sheets and put them in a file. And then I have a body of literature that I’m collecting that informs my thinking. And sometimes there are a variety of opinions on many things and often they’re contradicting. That’s OK, because that contradiction as frustrating as it may be to us increases our intellectual capacity to think more broadly to consider someone else’s opinion.

So, I keep a file and I would suggest that in these very crucial times other people should do the same thing. So then when you’re discussing these things, you’re not just saying they said he said something I read. You have the actual documents in front of you that you can refer to and say these experts are saying this sort of thing. It makes for much more educated conversations.

David:     I would say don’t get into any arguments as to the eschatology.

Karen:     Yeah, no, don’t worry about that.

David:     Yeah, you just listen to what they say. Maybe they say, “I don’t see the intensity of these as much as you do. But thank you for sharing.” Don’t get into whether Christ will come pre-trib, post-trib, that kind of thing. Just again try to understand this huge, big picture. It was the Son of God who came to earth. That was a massive thing, and the Son of God is coming back but it looks like we are getting indications that it could be before we thought.

Karen:     Right. So, what we want to do with one another is to increase our capacity to consider. So, we’re not just living in these days and saying, “Oh my goodness, look what’s going on.” We are being relevant, relevant in our conversations, relevant in their intellectual response to it and relevant in the way we’re seeking out what scripture says about it. And then applying it to our living each individually.

David:     We are not like the scripture says it’s going to be like the times of Noah. And times of Noah was that this guy preached. He said what God had told him to say. All these years Noah did, and people paid no attention to him whatsoever.

Karen:     I think they stopped him, didn’t they?

David:     They did probably. I don’t know if that’s in the scriptures, but it does say that everything went on as usual. There were marriages, there were business things. It was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Until the day that Noah and his family went into the ark, they closed the door and then guess what?

Karen:     The rain started.

David:     And then it was too late. Yeah. And you have this feeling that when Jesus returns, there will be the unexpected and it’ll be too late at a given point. But we will not be that way. We’ll be the people. And I say we, the fellow Christians who have this in mind and they’re saying, yeah, Jesus said that was going to happen. And it would intensify as we come to the last times.

Karen:     Well, I think it’s remarkable to me that this young man.

David:     Yeah, it’s unbelievable. Young is, he’s in his early 30s yet.

Karen:     He had the capacity to look for it. And of course, that indicates who he was. He was who he said he was, the Son of God. But it was a record for us who may be living through those days. Many people thought they were in the end of time. But that’s okay. That’s okay because it makes us, as we’ve said, crucial in our thinking. And then I think it turns us Godward. It turns us toward him, one to recognize how remarkable it was for him to foresee these things.

And then secondly, because he cared that his words would be passed down through history for those people who loved him and followed him. I think we’ll have crucial roles as people of faith that we must play in these times, even if persecution rises. I mean, the martyrdom of the saints is one of the things through the centuries that has been the greatest witness as Christians face their death at the hands of their opposers.

So, if that begins to rise for us, then we know that Jesus was considering those things and loving us in the future as he was present at that time in that part of history.

David:     Thank you. Thank you just for talking with me about this. You know, I was raised where I heard this a lot and because you heard it a lot and it didn’t happen, you tend to put it out of your mind. But for those people, they did for their generation what they needed to, and it was right for them to preach what they did and say, “Maybe this is the time and I feel the same thing.” No, maybe this is the time, but I need to put it in my mind more than I have. I need to bring it to the forefront, and I need to, when I watch the news, compare that to what Jesus said in terms of scripture to go to that. They call it the Olivet discourse and they also call it Jesus’ message about signs of the end times.

So, it’s in Matthew, Mark and Luke and you can compare the passages, but it just gives you this sense of, wow.

Karen:     Immediacy.

David:     Yeah, it does. And I’m glad for that. What I don’t want is for people to become so caught up in this that…

Karen:     It’s an obsession,

David:     An obsession. Yeah.

Karen:     Or to become afraid and fearful

David:     Or to become offensive in the way they talk to other people about it. But it is time for all of us to take stock of where we are and to say what are those signs? There are some signs that haven’t happened yet. Jesus said there would be signs in the heavens. I don’t know what that is. I know that people interpret it in different ways. It’s not as though, yeah, this could happen tomorrow afternoon, but it is as the way Jesus presented it. It could be that it’s very immediate and how all those events unfold may differ the way some people go with the scripture.

It’s there. We’re dealing with it and we’re saying, “Okay, make me wise to the time so that I’m not like the foolish virgins who only had so much and then they weren’t ready.”

Karen:     So much oil in their lamps.

David:     When the bridegroom came, yeah.

Karen:     Good.

David:     Do you want to go through that special sentence again?

Karen:     Yes, let’s remind our listeners what you have reduced this to, our theme sentence.

David:     Today’s Christians would do well to think through their response to what the scriptures say regarding the end times. Okay.

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