Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

So Christmas Day is three weeks from Wednesday—who’s ready?

Isn’t it remarkable how Christmas seems to “sneak up on us?” Christmas Day is on December 25th every year, right?

How do we miss it?

I mean, it’s not like the advertisers haven’t been reminding us about it since October, right?

And if that weren’t enough, we even have calendars that are specifically designed to count down the days to Christmas Day! How many of you have Advent Calendars in your house?

Each day has a little flap or door you can open (sometimes with a piece of candy inside) to count down the days until Christmas.

The word “advent” comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning

“Advent” (Latin, adventus) - To come or arrive

So an Advent calendar is a calendar that counts down to the “arrival” of Jesus Christ into the world, which we celebrate on December 25th.

In some ways, I think having a date on the calendar to count down to might actually work against us in terms of being ready for Christmas.

“Oh, Christmas is two months away, we’ve got plenty of time…” And then, “Oh, it’s not until the end of the month—we can get our shopping done later...” And then, “It’s NEXT WEEK!! Aaacckk!”

And then we rush around in a mad dash for the last 72 hours.

But what if we didn’t have any calendars to tell us what day Christmas was coming on?

What if we knew Christmas was coming, but didn’t know the exact day?

We wouldn’t be able to procrastinate, would we?

We would have to be always ready for Christmas to appear!

(I don’t have any Coast Guard vets here, do I? Anybody know the Coast Guard motto?

Semper paratus—always prepared!)

I want us to think deeply about this today, because that is the point of today’s passage.

You see,

Our celebration of Jesus’ first coming should remind us to be ready for His second coming.

If you are not ready for Christmas, the worst that can happen is someone goes without a present or two, or you have to buy a pie at Walmart because you ran out of time to bake one.

But beloved, Jesus warns us here in this passage that if you are not ready for His Second Coming, you will be lost for all eternity in Hell.

So as you are in the midst of busying yourself to be ready for Christmas Day (as indeed you should be!), listen to what God’s Word says here in Matthew about being ready for the Day on which Jesus returns to judge the world:

These verses appear here in Matthew towards the end of what Bible scholars call “The Olivet Discourse”—Jesus revealed these things to His disciples as He sat on the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem.

At the beginning of the chapter Jesus was walking out of the Temple, and the disciples had been “oohing” and “ahhing” (like the small-town tourists they were) at all the massive and imposing buildings of the Temple complex that King Herod had spent forty years building.

Which threw the disciples for a loop, for sure.

(Imagine, in our day, hearing someone tell you that by the year 2060 the US Capitol Building will be utterly leveled!)

So when they crossed the Kidron and were sitting together on the Mount of Olives overlooking the city, they came and asked Him what He meant by that comment.

So from verse 4 all the way through our text this morning, Jesus is answering their questions of when this judgment is coming, what signs will signal His return, and about the end of human history.

In His answer Jesus addresses two different issues: The destruction of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus in A.D. 70 (about 40 years after His death), and His Second Coming at the end of human history when He returns to judge the earth.

Now, most every Bible-believing scholar agrees that those two events—the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the Second Coming at the end of human history—are what Jesus is foretelling here in Matthew 24.

What they don’t all agree on (and what we are not going to try to sort out this morning!) is which verses are talking about which event!

Some read particular verses one way and some another, leading to different conclusions about the timing of these events.

But everyone who takes the Bible seriously—whether they’re premillennial dispensationalists or amillennial covenant theologians, pre-trib rapture or historical preterist or some odd shade of eschatological jiggery-pokery in between—all Bible-believing Christians agree that that Day is coming!

And the greatest tragedy of all would be to spend so much time arguing over when Judgment Day is coming that you never prepare for it, and you are not ready when it comes.

Don’t you ever forget that these things weren’t written so that you could be right about Judgment Day—they were written so that you would be ready!

Jesus says it over and over again here in our verses—be ready!

In verse 39, He warns us not to be unaware.

Verse 42 He says

And in verse 44:

Jesus warns us to be ready for that Day.

And so He shows us three things about that Judgment Day—three things that will enable us to be ready when He appears:

First of all, Jesus tells us in verse 36 that it is

I.

A Secret Day (v.

36)

This is one of the best reasons to stop wrangling over being “right” about the timing of the last days--

We cannot know it!

None of the books, articles, websites or TV shows claiming to pinpoint the return of Christ will ever get it right.

And I think that this is for our own good, isn’t it?

I mean, just look at the way we procrastinate around getting ready for Christmas, right?

If we had the date marked on a calendar: “This is the day that Jesus Christ is returning to judge the earth”, everyone would be saying the same thing about that Second Advent that we say about Christmas: “Oh, we’ve got plenty of time...” But there is no room to be complacent, no room to put off the holiness and obedience that God calls us to, because that day is secret—we cannot know when He is coming back!

But there is something else Jesus says about that day—we cannot know it, and this verse says that

Jesus did not know it!

Now this catches us off guard here a bit, doesn’t it?

If, as we affirm, Jesus Christ is God Himself in human flesh then how can there be anything He does not know?

How can he have such an astonishing ability to predict the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and yet not be able to know the time and day of His own return?

These questions are answered by the Bible’s teaching on what we call the incarnation of Christ:

Incarnation - The act of God the Son being made flesh (John 1:14)

As we celebrate Advent, we are celebrating the “enfleshment” of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God.

So what does Matthew 24:36 teach us about the Incarnation?

When Jesus Christ became a human being at His birth, he remained completely God while becoming completely human.

His divine nature took on human nature, and both of those natures were united together without being mixed, confused, separated or divided (Council of Chalcedon, 451 AD).

And so this is why we see that Jesus, in His human nature, could become tired, hungry and susceptible to physical pain.

We see in Luke 2:52, for instance that He could learn things He didn’t know, He could grow.

On the other hand, there were times when Jesus knew things that no human being could ever know (cp.

John 4:29), and He could perform miracles that no human being could possibly perform.

But throughout His life, both Jesus’ divine nature and His human nature were both under submission to His Heavenly Father.

So if we understand this, then Jesus’ ignorance of the timing of His return is easily explained, isn’t it?

Why didn’t Jesus know when He would return?

Because His Father hadn’t told Him, and He submitted to Him!

He didn’t need to know when Judgment Day was coming, because He could trust His Father for when that day was coming!

So Jesus tells us to be ready for that Day of Judgment because it is a secret day.

But he goes on in verses 37-39 to say that it will also be

II.

A Surprising Day (vv.

37-39)

Jesus compares the great flood of Noah’s day (which, clearly, He believed was an historical event, and not a myth!) with the Day of Judgment that is coming when He returns.

And he refers to the Flood because the Day of His return will be just like the day of the Flood—it will come as a complete surprise

For those who ignore God’s warnings.

He says that people in Noah’s day were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage”—in other words, they were just living their lives.

There was no indication that anything was going to happen; no terrible premonitions, no dark portents in the sky or rumblings of nature.

There was nothing to indicate that maybe they should put off that wedding or alter their daily lives in any way—except for the fact that Noah had been warning them about the coming of the Flood for one hundred years!

The Apostle Peter calls Noah “a herald of righteousness” in 2 Peter 2:5, meaning that he had been proclaiming God’s righteousness and the coming judgment for the whole time that he was building the Ark—but that judgment still came as a complete surprise to them, and they were swept away by the destruction of the Flood.

The Day of Jesus’ Second Advent will come as a surprise to those who ignore His warnings, but at the end of Chapter 24 Jesus warns that His Second Coming will come as a surprise

For those who deny Him by their lives (cp.

Matt.

24:48-51)

Jesus is warning people who claim to be His servants—people who say they are Christians, who make a show of their religious fervor, but whose hearts are full of wickedness—that they will be taken by surprise on that day.

The Old Testament prophet Amos issued a similar warning centuries before Jesus:

Jesus says be ready for that Day, so that it does not take you by surprise.

The Day of Jesus’ Second Advent is a secret day, it is a surprising day, and it is

III.

A Separating Day (vv.

40-41)

Jesus says that when He returns to judge the earth, He will once and for all separate His people from the wicked—they will be

Separated from judgment (Matt.

24:31)

Jesus’ Second Advent will be the day when He comes for His people, to gather them out of this sorry, broken world once and for all!

It doesn’t matter where they are or what they are doing, He will find them and gather them to Himself:

And they will be with Him forever, and they will escape the judgment that is coming on that day.

But for others, they will not be separated from judgment on that day—they will be

Separated from their false hope (cp.