Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Narrator: The final judgment is a topic that's not often discussed. Yet many people have questions about the prophecies Jesus shared regarding this important subject. Turn to the Gospel of Luke and listen in as we discuss the prophecies of Christ regarding the last judgment and how they affect you.

Mark Johnston: Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken, teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. For the next several minutes, we’ll try to understand the signs that pointed to the destruction of Jerusalem, then we'll get a glimpse of when Jesus will return. Phil, how can we believe the promises of God when we can't really see their outcome?

Dr. Philip Ryken: You know, that's a great question that I think every believer has to live with every day. There are lots of things that God has promised but have not arrived yet. How can we believe those promises? Well, I think one thing that encourages us to believe the promises of God is to look at all the things in the Bible that were promised and then were fulfilled, particularly the things that were promised about Christ and the way that He fulfilled them. I think that gives us a lot of encouragement to believe all the promises that God has made for us for the future, and that's what it means to live by faith, trusting God for things that you have not yet seen.

Mark Johnston: Well, one thing Jesus promised was a final judgment. Why does there have to be a final judgment?

Dr. Philip Ryken: You know, that's a good question too. We’ve been looking at teaching that Jesus gave about the end of the world and then after that, as we’ll see today, the final judgment. You know, the reason there needs to be a final judgment is to set everything right. God is a holy God; He is a just God. There are so many things that are wrong with our world that can only be settled at a final judgment. We can praise God that there will be a final judgment and praise Him even more that we are safe for that final judgment because of the saving work of Jesus.

Mark Johnston: Okay, thank you, Phil. Let’s turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 21 verses 20 through 28 and listen together to Dr. Ryken.

Dr. Philip Ryken: I wonder if any city has ever endured a more crushing defeat or witnessed more terrible suffering than Jerusalem. That ancient city fell in the year AD 70, when the Roman general Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, besieged the city. After a long famine which wasted everyone very nearly to the bone, the city finally fell.

The temple was burned to the ground. Every last man, woman, and child in Jerusalem was either killed or taken captive. The unspeakable horrors of those dreadful days are recorded by Josephus in his *Wars of the Jews*. Many of the stories that that famous historian tells in such vivid detail can scarcely be repeated. Human sacrifice, cannibalism, crucifixion—I'm not sure I can tell you the stories in church, although they would make your hair stand on end.

But I can tell you that by the end, the living envied the dead who were lying unburied in the streets. As Josephus told this terrible tale of woe, of which he himself was an eyewitness, he offered a lament for the city he loved and lost. "O most wretched city, what misery so great as you endured from the Romans when they came to purify you from your intense hatred."

And then the historian became a theologian as he offered this explanation for Jerusalem's devastation: it was, he said, because of the anger of that God who is the author of thy destruction. I think Josephus was right that Jerusalem fell to the Romans because it was under the judgment of almighty God. All of it happened just the way that Jesus prophesied.

You can see this if you turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 21, where we consider verses 20 through 28. Decades before Titus besieged Jerusalem, Jesus said that the city would fall and the temple would be torn to the ground—a prophecy He did not make with joy, but with great sorrow, for He knew what terrible suffering it would bring.

He begins His lament in verse 20 with a warning. He says, "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near." For these, He says in verse 22, are "days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written. Alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days! For there will be great distress upon the earth and wrath against this people. They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled."

And all of these prophecies came true. Forty years after Jesus spoke these words, Titus marched on Jerusalem. Enemy armies laid siege to the city, and they surrounded it for almost half a year. By the end of that Roman onslaught, famine had reduced the citizens to such absolute desperation that they were eating the very dust of the ground.

What a terrible time to be pregnant or to be the mother of young children. Jesus knew that this would be the case—nursing mothers having no milk to give their suckling children, some babies left to die, others even put to death. And when finally the Romans marched into Jerusalem, they met with little resistance. They burned the temple right to the ground.

So many men and women and children were killed that Josephus said as many as a million Jews were put to death, with an additional hundred thousand taken prisoner. The Roman historian Tacitus estimated it at about half that number, but either way, the loss of life was staggering. Truly, after the survivors were led away in chains, not one single Jew was left alive in the entire city. Has any city ever endured a more crushing defeat or witnessed more terrible suffering?

We see here, in these words of Jesus, an explanation for why this happened. It's clear from the perspective of Jesus that this was God's judgment against Jerusalem's sin. Jesus indicated this by the words that He used to describe the city's destruction. "These are days of vengeance," He says in verse 22. They fulfill all that is written: the prophecies of judgment.

"There will be," He says in verse 23, "wrath against this people." Here is the vocabulary of divine judgment. Vengeance is the unique prerogative of almighty God, who alone has the right to judge people for their sins. His wrath is His holy hatred of sin, His settled determination to bring it to justice.

If we ask what this city had done to deserve such a disaster, we could simply look in the Gospels at all of the things that Jesus said about the sins of that day. Or we could also consider this: they had rejected the Christ by killing Him on the cross. Now, of course, there were many believers in Jerusalem. God gave the people who lived there many years to repent—four decades between the crucifixion of Jesus and the fall of Jerusalem.

Yet so many people in that community, really the whole religious tenor of the city itself, did not receive Jesus as the Christ. In the end, that whole old system of worship had to be destroyed. Jesus Christ had come and He had offered the one and only, once and for all sacrifice for all the sins of all His people.

Then His body was raised on the third day, in effect, as the eternal resurrection temple of the Holy Spirit. Once Jesus died and rose again, the old temple in Jerusalem was no longer the dwelling place of God. God did not allow it to stand over against the true temple of Christ. The whole thing was torn down by the Romans, of all people, serving as instruments of divine justice.

We are reminded by these things of what our own sins truly deserve—that as a matter of justice, we all deserve the wrath and the curse of God. Recently, I was speaking to a friend who described what it was like upon first hearing that kind of testimony—that sin really deserves the wrath and curse of God—and how angry he was about it.

Yet in time, in searching the scriptures, he came to believe that that was the perspective the Bible takes about sin. At the same time, what happened to Jerusalem is also a warning to take seriously what Jesus says about the coming judgment. When it comes to prophecies of judgment, Jesus has a perfect track record. He is the omniscient Son of God with full foreknowledge of the future.

Up until now, all of His words have come true, including the words of judgment that He spoke against Jerusalem here. Should we not, therefore, believe what Jesus says about the Day of Judgment and about the torment that sinners will suffer forever if they die without faith in Christ? People scoffed at Jesus when He said the temple would be torn to the ground.

I doubt whether anyone was laughing when it actually happened. So will it be at the final judgment. Most people are inclined to dismiss what the Bible says about the end of the world. They just don't take it seriously as something that would really happen. They are like the scoffers that the Apostle Peter wrote about—people who say, "Where is the promise of His coming?"

As Peter went on to say, they deliberately overlook this fact: that the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by the means of these, the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. Peter is speaking about the times of Noah.

But by the same word, he said, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. These are the words of Peter in 2 Peter chapter 3. They are the words of Scripture. They are the testimony of the Holy Spirit—that it was by the word of God that the world was first made, that it was later destroyed with a flood, and one day by the word of the very same God, the whole world will be destroyed with fire.

Do you believe this? And if you do, then what have you done to get ready for that great and terrible day when you and I and every other person who has ever lived will stand before God for judgment? The only safety is for us to believe the words of Jesus—not just His words about judgment, although He certainly spoke about that as much as anyone else in Scripture, but also His words of saving grace.

He told us that everyone who believes the promise of Christ for the forgiveness of sins will be saved from this wrath to come. We get a kind of example of that or a picture of it in the saving promise of Jesus Christ in this very prophecy. Because right here in the middle of telling how the city would be destroyed, Jesus also gave some life-giving instructions.

We see them in verse 21. "Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it." Jesus said this so that His own people would know what to do when the time came for judgment. These were words of protection for His disciples, protecting them from destruction, preserving the church that Jesus had died to save.

It was with this goal of their preservation that Jesus gave them a sign that would lead to their salvation. I think it's a picture of what will happen at the end of the world. Cities were places of safety and security. Ordinarily, in those days, when there was some military assault, the thing to do was to run from the surrounding countryside to the defense of the city.

Yet here, Jesus is telling His disciples to do exactly the opposite in their time of danger. He knew that Jerusalem was doomed to destruction, and so as soon as they saw the first sign of warning of this coming desolation, they were supposed to head for the hills. Do you know that this warning saved the early church?

Because three years before Titus sacked Jerusalem, another Roman general marched against the city sometime around the end of AD 66 or the beginning of AD 67. Cestius Gallus attempted to attack Jerusalem, and happily, the city was able to defend against that initial attack and the Romans withdrew.

Yet the first church in Jerusalem remembered the words of Jesus in those days. When they saw that advance of the Roman army, they knew that their city's desolation was drawing near. The historian Eusebius tells us that they recognized the signal that Jesus had prophesied. They gathered their belongings and they fled across the Jordan River to find refuge in the city of Pella.

Therefore, nearly all of the Christians who lived in Jerusalem escaped before the city fell three years later. This was the prophecy of Jesus Christ. It was the providence of God that their lives were spared so that they could carry on with the work of global evangelism. In fact, some of them later returned to the very city of Jerusalem with the Gospel.

It all happened because they believed what Jesus said about the day of destruction and about the way of escape. I think we see many examples of this in history—the people of God finding safety in the promises of God. God told Noah to build an ark so that he would be saved from the great flood.

God told Lot to flee from the city of Sodom so that he would be saved from the fire and brimstone that fell upon it. God told Jeremiah that his life would be spared with the life of his servant when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. These were all men who were saved by the grace of God whose promises they believed.

That kind of salvation isn't just for people in the Bible; it is for anyone who trusts in Jesus Christ. I can't help but thinking of one further historical example, an example indirectly related to Luke chapter 21 and more directly related to me and my own family. When my own Dutch-reformed ancestors escaped religious persecution in Holland and came to this New World, they called their community Pella.

They knew the story of the early church and its escape from Jerusalem, that city across the Jordan where they had fled for refuge, and they believed that they too had come to a place of safety where they were secure in the worship of their God. That's just one example of something that is true for every believer in Christ.

In the dangers of life, whether great or small, our only hope of refuge is to be found in the promises of our God. To the weak, He promises strength. To the troubled, He promises peace. To the tempted, He promises a way of escape. And to every penitent sinner, He promises full deliverance from everything that our sins deserve.

Yet there is one exception. There was once a godly man who trusted in all of the promises of God and yet still suffered the full weight of God's wrath against sin. For on the night that He was betrayed, our Lord Jesus Himself asked if there was any way that He could avoid the cross, the cross where He suffered God's curse against our sin.

But there was no other way. No other way for us to be saved except through the precious, the infinitely worthy blood of the Son of God, the blood that He shed for our sins. So for Jesus, there was no way of escape from the judgment of God. He suffered what we deserved so that we could find our safety in Him.

Now all of the promises of safety are true for us in Christ. All of the promises of God for salvation. There is a way of escape for us through the cross where Jesus died for sinners. Now whoever believes in Him will not perish, the Bible says, but will have everlasting life. This is the promise of God.

The promises of Scripture say that the righteous person runs to the Savior and is safe. If He is at our right hand, we will not be shaken. In fact, looking ahead to the very end, the Bible promises that Jesus will deliver us from the wrath to come. That's the promise of 1 Thessalonians chapter 1.

All of those promises are true and they will all remain true for the people of God until that very day when Jesus comes again. Here, as He was making predictions about the coming desolation, Jesus lifted His gaze from Jerusalem, from the temple where He was then standing, to the end of the world.

He said these words, as we read them beginning in verse 25: "There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory."

Here, Jesus speaks about signs in the heavens and the glorious coming of the Son of Man. He's talking about the end of human history and the beginning of His everlasting kingdom. This is apocalyptic language. Apocalyptic language—that means language that reveals the end of the world and the life to come.

It's the kind of language we find in so many of the Old Testament prophets. Think of Joel, who said there will be wonders in the heavens and on the earth—blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

Or Haggai, who said that God would shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. Or Daniel, who said that the Son of Man would come on the clouds of heaven to gain dominion over all nations and to establish His everlasting kingdom. This is the language of the Old Testament prophets. It's apocalyptic language looking ahead to the end of the world.

I think here, as we look at Luke 21, it helps to understand how apocalyptic literature works—that as the prophet speaks to the people of his own day, he also looks ahead to the future. He sees a time of judgment coming, a righteous disaster that will strike his own people if they do not repent.

But this coming disaster is set against the backdrop of the last of all days, when God Himself will come to judge the world. I think it's a little like looking at mountains on the distant horizon. From a distance, it is hard to distinguish the mountains from the foothills; they all seem to blend together.

But once you reach the foothills, it's easy to see that there are still higher mountains to climb. So it is with apocalyptic literature. The prophet is seeing beyond the foothills to the far mountains of the final judgment, and all of that is presented before you—both the foothills and the mountain. Sometimes it's somewhat difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Maybe that's why it always seems like the prophets are talking about the end of the world. It's because they are talking about the end of the world. They're looking at that whole mountain range of divine judgment and they're viewing the events of their own times in the context of that final judgment.

I think that analogy helps us understand what's happening here in Luke 21. If you go back to verses 8 and 9, you can see that Jesus had already told His disciples not to expect the end of the world to come just yet; it wouldn't come right away. So when He goes on and prophesies the fall of Jerusalem, He is describing the foothills of divine judgment.

What a great disaster it was, and yet even the desolation of that great city was only a nearer and smaller destruction than the one that all mankind will see at the end of history. Jesus didn't just stop at the foothills with the fall of Jerusalem; He wanted us to see that in the context of the final judgment.

So here, following in verse 25 and following, He mounts the high and distant peaks to the summit of God's judgment. Now, how is it clear to us that Jesus is talking here about the end of the world? Well, I think we know it from the way this conversation began—with the disciples asking for a sign as to when the temple would be destroyed and with Jesus telling them that the end would not come yet.

I think we know it from the parallel account in the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus speaks explicitly about heaven and earth passing away. We know it because the signs that Jesus describes here in Luke are cosmic cataclysms: the shaking of the earth, the shaking of the very heavens with unnatural signs and wonders.

But I think the main reason we know that Jesus was talking about the end of the world is from the way He describes the coming of the Son of Man in verse 27—coming in a cloud with power, with great glory. Here describing His own second advent, when He will come to the earth again the same way that He departed the first time, riding in on the clouds of glory.

It's interesting Jesus never told us when this would happen. According to Mark, He didn't even know what day it would be. We can't use the prophecies here in Luke 21 or really any other part of the Bible to draw up some kind of calendar for the second coming. But we do know for certain that when all of the signs have been fulfilled, Jesus will come again. And what a great day that will be.

Think of all the things in Scripture that are said about it—that the Lord Jesus Christ will return visibly, that every eye will see His radiant return. That He will come universally, that every knee will bow before Him. That He will return majestically, wearing the crowns of His everlasting kingdom.

He will return gloriously; His resurrection body will shine like the sun with the full brightness of His Father's glory. Oh, we can hardly imagine what glories will be revealed on the day when Jesus comes again. Charles Wesley tried to put this glory into song, and maybe that's all that we can do until we see the awesome day.

As his hymn went from one glory to another, it ended like this: "Yea, amen! Let all adore Thee, High on Thine eternal throne; Savior, take the power and glory; Claim the kingdom for Thine own: O come quickly! O come quickly! Alleluia! Come, Lord, come!" I wonder, has Wesley's petition, as he expressed it in song, become the prayer of your own soul?

Are you crying to Jesus for His salvation, and all the more so when you see the warning signs of the coming judgment? Are you waiting and hoping and eagerly praying for the second coming of Jesus Christ? Basically, there are two ways to respond when we see the signs of God's judgment in our own world today.

These two ways of responding reveal the spiritual condition of our own souls. One of them is simply to be afraid. That's the way that most people respond. In fact, Jesus said that's the way people would respond right in these verses. When they witness the fall of a great city or see terrors in the heavens or watch the raging sea wipe out entire communities, many people faint with fear.

Jesus speaks here of the international turmoil that follows. Even people who say that they don't believe in God, when they see the signs of the coming judgment, have a deep sense of foreboding. They're afraid of the future, afraid of death, afraid of what will come after that. It happens every time there is a disaster; we've seen it so often in recent years.

Anytime there's any kind of disaster like the fall of Jerusalem, some people think it is the end of the world. I think that's what we're supposed to think. Every terrifying disaster is a portent of the final judgment. Every earthquake, every tsunami, every hurricane, every terrorist attack, every military conquest is another foothill in the mountain range of the justice of God.

But even in this, there is grace. God does not withhold all of His wrath until the very end, but is giving in His judgment many merciful warnings in advance of the final day. How often the world has a cause to reflect and to see the judgment that is coming and to take concern for spiritual things.

God is doing this so that we will run to Jesus and find safety in His cross—that cross where He Himself suffered for us God's judgment against our sin. We must come to that cross while there is still time. Are you trusting Jesus for the final judgment?

Because if you are, the safety that you have in Him enables you to respond to each new disaster in faith rather than in fear. If we have the free gift of eternal life, the future need not fill us with foreboding. No, Jesus gives a very different kind of explanation of how we should respond in verse 28.

Here is what the believer is to do when these things begin to take place: straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. Even when it seems like it's the end of the world, we can stand tall in our faith because we know that God is actually at work to bring His saving plan to completion.

I think the exact way that Jesus said this is significant: "When these things begin to take place." You see, our hope of redemption begins right now, right away. We don't have to wait until the very end comes, but as soon as we see any sign of the coming judgment, from the fall of Jerusalem right up to the disasters of our own day, we are to remember that our redemption is near.

It's always tempting when terrible things happen, whether they are happening in the world or perhaps in our own experience in our own personal lives. It's always tempting to be slumped over in discouragement, to be filled with dismay, to be downcast in our despair. But Jesus here is lifting us up.

He's telling us that by His grace, we can stand tall in the hope of our redemption and look forward with a lifted head to the things that God will do. Properly speaking, if you think about redemption in one sense, our redemption has already taken place. Even though Jesus speaks of it here as drawing near, there is a sense in which we have already been redeemed.

Redemption is simply the procuring of a release through the payment of a price, and in one sense, we already have that. Jesus has offered His infinitely worthy blood on the cross; He's paid the price to release us from our bondage to sin and to death. We are the redeemed. But we have not yet received all of the benefits of our redemption.

Not the way that we will when Jesus comes again. It's in this sense that our redemption is drawing near. Jesus is talking about the full blessings of God that He will have for us on the last of all days when He will come again to judge the world and to give us every blessing that the Father has ever promised us.

And that day is coming soon. Truly, our spirits should brighten every time we think about the second coming of the Son of Man. Every time we're tempted to be discouraged, we should think about that, and we should be lifted up as Jesus said that we should be. For soon there will be no more death or crying or pain.

Soon we will see Jesus Himself in all of His beauty. We will receive our own perfect resurrection bodies. Soon we will be united to the saints that we love, the saints who have gone before us, and we will join with them in the worship of heaven. Soon we will be free from sin, both our own sin and the sin that others sin against us.

Soon we will enter the glory that can never end. And Jesus is telling us that that's drawing near. It's ever closer; it's nearer today than it was yesterday. It's nearer at the end of this sermon than it was at the beginning. It's nearer at the end of this sentence than it was at the beginning of it.

As we wait for that great day, Jesus tells us to stand tall in the promise of His grace, lifting our heads to the coming redemption. One man who did that, I think, in a remarkable way is a man called Daylan Sanders. He's the founder and director of the Samaritan Children's Home in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

In an interview televised on CNN, Mr. Sanders described what happened to him and to his children in that orphanage the day after Christmas 2004, when a powerful tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, as you well remember. When Sanders saw the waves rushing towards his seaside orphanage, he immediately gathered all 28 of his children into a boat.

He said, "It was a 30-foot wall of sea bearing down on us like an angry monster and it was coming at us at such speed. I knew there was no place on the ground where we could be safe. And so I knew there was something that told me instantly: we've got to get on top of this wave to stay safe." The children reached the boat only seconds before the wave hit.

"And when we got into the boat," Sanders said, "we were eyeball to eyeball with the wave. And immediately a scripture popped into my mind. And from there, I got the courage. I just stood up in the small boat, lifted my hands, and said, 'I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to stand still.'"

"And I thought I was imagining at the time that the massive wall of water stood still as if something were holding it back, some invisible force or hand." But Sanders was not imagining things. Strangely, the water did stop and swirl past the orphanage, as survivors who climbed to the top of nearby trees later testified.

You see, in the roaring of the sea and the waves, Daylan Sanders did not faint with fear. But he stood up in the courage of his faith and he prayed for God to keep his children safe. And when the day of disaster comes for you, whether it is local or global, whether it is personal or something sweeping across the world, you can stand tall and lift your head, because Jesus said your redemption is drawing near.

Our Father, we give you praise for the nearness of that redemption. And we pray for the gracious work of Jesus Christ to help us face the troubles of this world with courage and with full confidence in the promises of your saving grace. For Jesus' sake, amen.

Narrator: You are listening to Every Last Word with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance exists to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformed theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide Christian teaching that will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

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