[Note: Delivered 11 October 1981, Montreal. The opening context refers to recent developments in the Middle East, including the assassination of Egyptian President Sadat on 6 October 1981, five days earlier. Part B continues directly.]
We continue our study of the Lord's teaching in Matthew 24 and parallel passages concerning the last things — eschatology, the things which come immediately before the return of our Lord Jesus. When we look at the events in the Middle East, we begin to realize that things are often moving far faster than we expect. In North America, when a president is killed the major outlook of the nation does not change that drastically; there is a new president, but life goes on. But in the Middle East, when these things happen, all kinds of unforeseen and unpredictable developments begin to follow, and the news becomes almost stunning.
Matthew 24 tells us that as we approach the end, events gather speed and move faster and faster. When I was studying in Israel in my student days in the 1960s, Jerusalem's old city was still in Arab hands. I stayed at St. Andrew's Hospice on a hill overlooking Mount Zion, and having studied the scriptures I already knew that the next thing that would happen was that the old city of Jerusalem would fall into Jewish hands. How that was possible without the whole city being demolished in the fighting was very hard to understand, yet four years later a six-day war settled the matter — the old city was taken with lightning speed and virtually no damage. I had expected it, though I must say I had not expected it quite so soon. As we approach the end, events will go faster and faster, so that the coming of the Lord Jesus will take everyone by surprise.
Today I want to study one particular concept from the end of the Lord's farewell discourse. Let us read Mark chapter 13 verses 33 to 37: "Take heed, watch — for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey when he leaves his home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Watch therefore, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: watch." By this point you will have noticed how frequently the word watch comes back again and again.
Ealing asked me just after I returned from Calgary: what are you going to preach about this Sunday? I said, watching. She said, watching for what? That is exactly a very good question. If we are going to meet somebody at the airport and he says "I arrive at three o'clock on flight number such-and-such," it is easy to watch — we check the screen, then watch the exit. But the Lord has just told us that his coming will be unexpected, like a thief in the night. How do you watch for something when you don't even know what you are watching for? How can we watch since we don't know what time?
To watch for a thief when you don't know when he will come, you add bolts and chains to your door, install an alarm system, perhaps get a German shepherd. Our sister Peggy in Vancouver has had her home broken into several times lately and has now done all of these things — bolted the front door, installed the alarm, and put a German shepherd in the back. Of course, to a professional crook, none of this is very impressive. They know how to take care of German shepherds and alarm systems alike; precisely such skilled people are the hardest to watch for. This is the problem the Lord puts before us: watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming — Matthew 24:42. It is repeated in Matthew 25:13 and again in Matthew 24:44: "You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect."
Why does the Lord compare his coming to a thief breaking in at night? He knows that the church as a whole will be very badly prepared — Luke 18:8: "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith upon the earth?" is a rhetorical question expecting a negative answer. As the Lord himself predicted, there will be apostasy and a decline of spiritual commitment in the last days. His coming will have the effect of a break-in: if he catches you unprepared, you will suffer loss, just as a thief walks off with your watch, your television, your passport, everything of value. That is why I say our survival depends on understanding what this watch means.
Why must his coming be unannounced and sudden? One reason is that the time is fluid — the Lord is not willing for any to perish, and therefore he gives as much time to repent as possible. If he fixed a date, our time would end there regardless. Peter says: "Count the patience of the Lord as your salvation." But the deeper reason is that the Lord knows our hypocrisy. If we knew he was coming on the 25th of October, we would read our Bible all day on the 24th, comb our hair, brush our teeth, and say "Lord, see, I am reading my Bible." The Lord does not care whether you combed your hair well that morning. He is going to look into your heart at that moment, and you cannot get the sin out in a hurry. You will be caught as you really are, and that is exactly the point.
There are two different Greek words in this passage, both translated as "watch." The first is agrupneo — from a-privative (without) and hypnos (sleep) — literally meaning without sleep, to be so intent upon something that you stay awake. This word occurs in Mark 13:33, Luke 21:36, Ephesians 6:18, and Hebrews 13:17, where it describes the shepherd staying awake to guard his flock lest a wolf come and scatter them. Paul uses it of himself in 2 Corinthians 11:27, speaking of sleepless nights spent in prayer for the church. The second word is gregoreo — probably giving us the English name Gregory — which comes from the perfect tense of egeiro, meaning to wake up or stir up, and also means to be alert and awake; it occurs in Matthew 25:13.
The crucial point about both words is this: sleep has long taken on the symbolic significance of death in ancient Greek literature and in the Bible alike. The psalmist already prays "lest I sleep the sleep of death." Therefore, to be awake takes on the significance of being spiritually alive. Ephesians 5:14 makes this unmistakably clear: "Therefore it is said, awake O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light." There are only two kinds of people: those spiritually alive and those spiritually dead, those awake and those asleep. The preaching of the gospel is compared to the blowing of a trumpet that wakes an army from sleep, because the gospel calls us out of death into life. And notice: the responsibility of coming awake, of responding to the gospel, rests with us. God has done his part in the blowing of the trumpet of the gospel; we can hear it and silence it again.
Some of us do exactly that — we hear the alarm, knock it off, and go back to sleep. When I was in Calgary, a friend drove me up through Banff to Lake Louise and then on to the Columbia Icefields, a great glacier whose waters drain to three different oceans. Getting there late and finding the hotel closed for the season, we drove on through the dark all the way to Jasper and went to sleep exhausted. Next morning I was awakened by the neighbor's alarm coming right through the wall. It woke me at the first ring, but apparently it did not wake him up — it was one of those electric alarms that repeats itself, going off again and again if you don't get up. Even with the help of his wife, apparently, he still could not be awakened.
[Continues in Part B]
# Watch Therefore — Mark 13:33–37 (Part B) — 1 Thessalonians 5 Five Contrasts; Faithful and Unfaithful Servant; Cares of This Life
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Mark 13:33–37, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 11 October 1981, Montreal.]
I thought, wife and alarm clock combined could not wake him up — and every few minutes the thing was still buzzing next door. That made me think of so many people who hear the gospel. You hear it once, even with someone beside you insisting you wake up, and still you don't respond. Many people have a very effective way of shutting out all external disturbance. And in the same way, when the gospel disturbs us, we can shut it off and go back to sleep. Not only the non-Christian does this — many Christians also switch off, and the result is very disastrous.
Let us read 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, verses 5 to 10, which stresses this very meaning clearly. "For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then, let us not sleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him." It seems to me that when Paul wrote this passage he had the Lord's own teaching on waking and sleeping directly in mind, and was here underlining and expounding it.
Notice the contrasts Paul builds up in these verses. There is the sleeping and the waking in verses 6 and 7; the night and day in verses 5 to 7; the darkness and the light in verses 4 to 5; the contrast between death and life in verse 10; the drunk and the sober in verses 7 to 8; and finally the contrast between wrath and salvation — which is why I say our salvation depends on being awake, being spiritually alive, at the coming of the Lord. And Paul also tells us what it means to be spiritually awake: it means a certain quality of conduct, living as someone who conducts himself in the light, in righteousness and truth. Being a Christian is not just to believe certain facts about what Jesus did two thousand years ago — though all of that is true and very important. That truth has no saving value until it wakes us up out of sleep, removes us from darkness to light, produces a fundamental change in our attitude and conduct.
This change of conduct is what the Lord himself stresses. Let us return to Matthew 24 verses 45 to 51, which closes chapter 24. The word "then" in verse 45 — Greek ara — is a logical particle meaning "in consequence of what has just been said." So Jesus asks: who then is the faithful and wise servant whom his master has set over his household to give them food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find so doing. But if that wicked servant says "my master is delayed" and begins to beat his fellow servants and eats and drinks with the drunken, the master of that servant will come on a day he does not expect and will punish him and put him with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. To watch therefore means not to sit staring at a television screen or calculating which year Jesus will come, but to live a life that is consistently faithful — wide awake, living in the light, doing the very thing he has called us to do. When he comes and finds you faithful without the last-minute preparation, he sees you as you really are, and he will put you in charge of all his possessions.
But what causes the Christian to fall asleep? Luke 21:34-36 gives us a very specific answer: "Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a snare." Remember how the disciples' eyes grew heavy in Gethsemane when they were trying to pray, despite their best efforts to stay awake. When you are watching television your eyelids never bother you — your mouth may even hang open in excitement. But when you kneel to pray, something strange happens: the eyelids suddenly grow very heavy, then your head begins to sink, and the next thing you know you have completely dozed off. The word translated "dissipation" in the RSV — kraipale — literally refers to the dizziness and swaying that comes from having had too much to drink: your steps go in different directions, you lose your balance. The next word, methe, is drunkenness proper, intoxication that finally knocks you out.
But then the Lord goes on to explain what actually produces this spiritual drunkenness: it is the cares of this life — biotikos, from bios, the same root as our word biology — the ordinary affairs of everyday life. Ordinary affairs have a remarkable power to hypnotize us, to absorb our attention so completely that they lull us into spiritual sleep. I say this particularly to those who are graduating soon and leaving. When you graduate, you meet a person who attracts you and you think about them constantly. Then comes marriage, and with marriage comes a home, and a home requires money, and money requires a job, and the job is demanding, and soon there are children and schools and bosses and bills, and the cares of this life pile up one by one with a slow, relentless power. I have seen this thing send many Christians to sleep. Those who in college were full of fire — "I will serve the Lord, I will do this, I will do that" — gradually become so practical, so tied up with the car and the house and the children and the job, that the vision disappears entirely. It takes a person of great spiritual stature to say: I am married, I have children, I have a job — but my vision remains the same. I refuse to fall asleep.
There was a preacher who once watched a farmer leading a whole group of pigs straight into the slaughterhouse, with every pig trotting along obediently behind him. He asked the farmer: how did you get all these pigs to follow you so faithfully? Oh, said the farmer, very simple — as I walked along, I threw a few beans to this side and a few to that side, and the pigs were so busy gobbling the beans that they never noticed where they were going, until they walked straight in. I find many Christians are exactly like this. The world throws out its little beans — this nice bean, that tasty bean — and we gobble them down and follow along without noticing where we are heading, until suddenly we find ourselves in a place we did not mean to go. Beware of the cares, the problems, the occupations, the attractions of this world. They will bring you to sleep. Let us be quiet before God. Prayer.