Every Last Word

Mark: There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the end times and the second coming of Christ. But what does the Bible really say about Jesus returning? Jesus himself spoke about his second coming in the Gospel of Luke, and that's where we turn today.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. Today we’re back in Luke investigating what the Bible says about Jesus’ second coming.

Mark: Well, Phil, here we are at the end of the year, and there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the end times. So how do we know when Jesus will come back?

Dr. Philip Ryken: Well, we don’t know, do we, Mark? That’s the truth of it. Jesus said as much himself. People asked him about the end times, and he said, "I don't know the day or the hour; that's really only given over to the Father." What we do know is this, though: that we should be ready for the second coming of Jesus Christ at any time.

Mark: Well, how can we then get ready for his second coming?

Dr. Philip Ryken: Well, that's always the key question, Mark. People like to speculate about the end times and when it will be and what will happen exactly. But the practical application in almost all of the New Testament passages that talk about the second coming of Jesus Christ is the same: we need to be ready at any time.

The way to be ready is to put our trust in Jesus. We should be busy today for Jesus. Any day is a good day for him to return. If I'm serving him and trusting him, I'm ready any day. Mark, as we come to the end of this year, my prayer for you and for me and for our listeners is that we will be ready through faith in Christ.

Mark: Okay, thank you, Phil. Let’s turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 17, verses 20 through 27, and listen together to Dr. Ryken.

Dr. Philip Ryken: Please turn in your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke chapter 17, where we consider verses 20 through the end of the chapter at verse 37. In this passage, the Lord Jesus Christ gives some of the most serious, most sober teaching that he gives anywhere in the Gospels concerning the kingdom of God, the end of the world, and the judgment to come.

So we consider, first of all, the question that the Pharisees asked in verses 20 and 21 with the answer that Jesus gave. After that, we'll look at the teaching that he gave to his disciples about the coming of the Son of Man, and in particular, two examples he gives from the Old Testament.

The question the Pharisees asked is one that perhaps you have been tempted to ask from time to time: When will the kingdom come? That is to say, when will God make everything right in the world? We sense somehow that we were destined for something better than life as we know it on this earth. Deep down, we know that there is a place for us free from pain and sorrow and death. Perhaps we know the promises of Scripture that the kingdom is coming, and in our longing for that place in a world so often characterized by death and decay and disappointment, we find ourselves wondering when will the kingdom come.

Pharisees were wondering about this as well. Many people were wondering in those days. Israel was then under Roman rule, and people were longing for their deliverance. They wanted to know when God would come and restore the fortunes of his people. Some people thought the kingdom would come in the form of some new Israeli government. Others thought more in spiritual terms. But everyone was looking for God to make everything right with their world. When would the kingdom come? That’s what they wanted to know.

Here's the answer that Jesus gave. The kingdom of God is not coming, he said in verse 20, with signs to be observed, nor will they say, "Look, here it is," or "There," for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you. So like many of the things that God does, maybe most of them, the kingdom would not come the way that people expected.

The Pharisees thought the kingdom would come with special signs. They were looking for the kind of fanfare that usually accompanies the kingdoms of this world, all of the pomp and the circumstance. Or they were looking for supernatural signs that they could read in the sky, some way of predicting God's future. Or they were expecting someone with some secret knowledge to tell them where the kingdom was, to point to it by some particular prophecy.

Many people even in the church are looking for the same things today. They see a culture in spiritual chaos, and they seek a political solution, the kingdom of God established through human government. Or they speculate about the end times prophecies in the Bible and develop a timetable for the second coming. Or they claim to have some secret and very specific knowledge about the end of the world.

We should be careful when people are seeking such things or if we are tempted to seek them ourselves, because that is what the Pharisees were looking for as well. But it is not what Jesus promised. How foolish people always look when they have their own ideas about the kingdom of God and then are proven wrong. Think of the man who predicted wrongly, as it turned out, that the world would end in 1994, and who later in more recent days has told people to leave the church of Jesus Christ because the end is upon us.

Jesus said the kingdom wouldn't come with any signs, not the kind of signs that people were looking for. He said people wouldn't be able to predict when it was coming. They wouldn't be able to point to it by their own wisdom. No, no one sees the kingdom of God by this kind of outward observation. The way to enter is by faith.

In fact, the kingdom was already right there in front of the Pharisees if only they would believe in Jesus as the Son of God and the savior of the world. Scholars have long puzzled over the precise meaning of the end of verse 21. "The kingdom of God," in a way, that's easy enough. That's the rule of God. That is his sovereign authority and its manifestation.

But what did Jesus mean when he said that the kingdom of God is "within you," as the Scripture literally says, or "among you" or "in the midst of you," as it is sometimes translated? Some have seen this as a sign that the kingdom is a spiritual reality. It's something inward, and in a way, that's true. The first place God needs to rule is in the kingdom of your own heart.

But the kingdom of God always is something more than merely a spiritual reality. It comes to some powerful public manifestation in the world. This phrase "within you" is perhaps better translated as it is here, "in the midst of you." That is to say, it is right here among you. You are in the very presence of the kingdom because you are in the presence of the king. Where the king is, there is the kingdom.

The kingdom was coming in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He had been preaching the kingdom wherever he went, and Luke has shown this on a number of occasions. Jesus was proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The kingdom was also present in his miracles. Anytime that Jesus healed the sick or cast out a demon, it was a sign of the power of the kingdom of God.

Jesus said this to the Pharisees. He said, "Look, the kingdom has come upon you if you see a demon cast out like this. It is the kingdom of God." So the Pharisees didn't need any more signs. They didn't need someone to come and tell them where the kingdom was. They just needed to listen to Jesus and to what he was saying.

How ironic this was and how tragic. Here the Pharisees were looking for the kingdom—at least that’s what they said they were looking for—and it was already there. Jesus may have looked like he was wearing peasant clothing, but he was really the king. Unless people acknowledge his royal person, they will miss out on the kingdom of God.

Even the clearest sign from heaven would not help you if you were to refuse to see Jesus and trust him by faith. So often people say, "If only God would show me some kind of sign." But God has given the sign. It’s here in the Gospel. It’s here in the person and work of Jesus Christ. If you’re wise, you’ll avoid making the same mistake the Pharisees made. What kind of kingdom are you looking for? What are you looking for that will make everything right with your world? Listen, the only hope is in Jesus Christ, the king of the kingdom of God.

Having warned the Pharisees about that, telling them what to look for and maybe more importantly what not to look for, Jesus then turned his attention to his disciples because they needed to know about the kingdom, too. Not because they didn't know the king, but because they were not yet ready for his kingdom to come.

Right from the outset, we learn something very important about the kingdom of God, and that is that it does not come once and all at once, but once and again, and little by little until finally the king is seen in all of his glory. Perhaps you'll remember the parables that Jesus told back in chapter 13. He compared the kingdom of God to a little seed that is planted and then grows to become a tree, or to a pinch of yeast that's put in the dough and eventually rises to make a whole loaf.

That's how the kingdom grows. It has a beginning, but then it comes into its fullness. Jesus was saying here in these verses that that process had already started. Jesus was the king, and so his first coming to earth was the advent of his kingdom. What he said was true: the kingdom of God was in their midst.

But another day was coming, a day when the king would reign in the fullness of his majesty, when Jesus would reign in all of the glory of his risen body and be revealed to the full extent as the king of heaven and earth. He was already the king, but his kingdom had not yet fully come, not the way it would come when he returned in all of his glory. The kingdom that came in Christ would come again at his second coming.

So as theologians have often said, we're living somewhere between the "already" and the "not yet." Jesus has come already, but he has not yet come again. That explains why we are still praying for the kingdom to come and why sometimes we may wonder whether our prayers will ever be answered.

The Pharisees weren't ready to understand all of that. They didn't even know who the king was. But the disciples were ready to begin to take that in. So Jesus took this as a teachable moment. He was teaching them about the kingdom to come. He said, beginning in verse 22, "The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it."

And they will say to you, "Look there," or "Look here." Do not go out or follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. And so it was that Jesus began to speak about his second coming and the end of the world and the final judgment.

When he said "the days are coming," he was looking ahead to that future kingdom. When the Bible uses this kind of language, "the day of the Son of Man" or "the days of the Son of Man," it's generally talking about the last day on earth when Jesus will come again to judge the world. Everyone needs to get ready for that eventuality.

And yet so many people have so many crazy ideas about the end times that it's easy to be led astray. That's why we need to come back to what Jesus said about his second coming and about the end of the world. He says here that the time will come when his disciples will wonder whether his kingdom will ever come. He said that people would come claiming to have some kind of inside information that would tell us where the Messiah was, that he was here or there.

They would tempt us to believe that we had it all wrong, that we were missing out on something secret that we needed to know for salvation. But Jesus knew that all of those rumors and speculations would only lead us away from the truth, and he wanted to protect us and guard us and keep us. So he said very firmly, "Do not go out or follow them."

Because you see, when the Son of Man does return, it will be so totally and universally obvious that you won't need anyone to tell you where it is. Any sign at that point will be superfluous. Jesus says here it will be like a bolt of lightning coming across the sky, sudden in its appearance, obvious in its shining brightness, powerful in its majestic display of the glory of God.

As I was thinking about lightning, I couldn't help but think of a time when I witnessed the power of lightning pretty close to firsthand. We had been canoeing down the Wisconsin River with a group of junior high youth group students, and we heard a distant rumble of thunder. We saw a very distant flash of lightning, and we did the prudent thing: we got out of the river and scrambled onto the banks.

I had a co-leader who was interested in science and took this as an opportunity for a lesson in the relative speed of light and sound and was doing a little demonstration for some of the boys who were interested in that kind of thing. He had out his stopwatch and he finally concluded very knowingly, "Well, it's coming this way, but it's not moving very fast."

Of course, within seconds there was a tremendous clap of thunder and an instantaneous bolt of lightning that ripped right overhead of our clearing. In fact, you could see the brown cloud of nitrous oxide that it left in its wake. Everyone was flat on the ground, terrified. When I had recovered sufficiently to realize that we were all still alive, I said, "So how far away do you think that one was?"

You see, that's the way lightning is. Nobody needs to tell you where or when it is. I mean, when you see it, it's there in all of its power. Jesus is saying that's the way it will be at the end of the world. Jesus Christ, God the Son and Son of Man, will come like lightning from the sky. This is the way Cyril of Alexandria said it many centuries ago. He said at the end time of the world, he will not descend from heaven obscurely or secretly, but with godlike glory.

On that great day, no one will need any signs to tell them what is happening. Jesus Christ will be unmistakably, instantaneously, and universally revealed in all of his majesty. This is how the kingdom will come, with the triumphant and glorious return of the Son of Man.

But of course, something else had to happen first. Jesus was sure to mention it. Notice what he says in verse 25: "But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation." Once again, as he has done a number of times in this Gospel, Jesus is foreshadowing the cross by predicting his sufferings and death.

This is how Jesus always thought about these things. Whenever he was thinking about the kingdom of God and God making everything right in the world, he always viewed the kingdom through the lens of the crucifixion. He knew that in order to establish his kingdom of grace, he first had to die in the place of sinners.

His kingdom could not come without the sufferings that would lead him to the cross. Therefore, if people were looking for the kingdom of God, as the Pharisees at least said they were, the first thing that they would see was Christ crucified. Really, it is the same for us. The kingdom comes at the cost of our savior's blood, and we can only enter the kingdom by trusting that Jesus did, in fact, die on the cross for our sins.

The kingdom will come to you, and you will come into the kingdom when you believe in Jesus for your salvation. Believing in Jesus means, first of all, believing that he suffered and died for your sins. Now, if the kingdom is coming, if those first things have happened—the first things of the sufferings and death of the Son of Man—then we need to be ready.

This is the very practical exhortation that Jesus gives at the end of this discourse. Really, everything else that he says is related to this theme of being ready. He has said that in one sense the kingdom is already come. He said that in another sense the kingdom is still coming. There are these two comings of the kingdom, and the important thing is to be ready for that second coming, to be prepared for it when it comes in all of its glory and all of its power.

To make that very practical point, Jesus gave two examples from the Old Testament. They are examples that show how unexpected the second coming will be and also, and very seriously and soberly, how disastrous it will be for anyone who falls under the righteous judgment of God.

The first example comes from the story of the great flood. Jesus said, "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all."

It must have taken Noah years to build his enormous ark. How ridiculous it must have all seemed to the people who saw what he was doing. They probably gave him no attention at all, or if they did, they ridiculed him for building such a big boat so far away from any water. They simply went about their business as usual. They were eating, they were drinking, they were getting married, they were doing all of the other things that people do. But they were not repenting of their sin, and they were not turning back to God. They were not trusting him for their salvation the way Noah was.

Then came that fateful day when Noah went into the ark together with all of God's animals, and that was also the day it started to rain. It rained and it rained until the floods came and everything was washed away. You see, people never really saw it coming. They just went about their lives, never stopping to think about the judgment to come.

We've been given a number of very vivid examples of the same kind of mentality in our own country in recent years. Think of what happened on 9/11 when the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City. It was just the most ordinary of September days, only more beautiful, perhaps. People were all doing the things that they ordinarily do. They were getting up, they were dropping their children off at school, they were going into work, they were having their morning coffee, they were getting ready for business meetings. They were doing all the things that they ordinarily did, none of them realizing that terror was about to strike. None of them realizing that many were about to lose their lives.

Jesus said the same thing will happen at the second coming. People will be going about their business as usual. They will be sitting down for dinner, they will be walking the dog, they will be playing computer games, they will be putting their children down for the night. They'll be doing all of the things that people ordinarily do. They'll be loving or fighting or serving or sinning or any of the other things that people do, and they will be so caught up in them that they will be taken completely by surprise.

Jesus himself is saying to you, "Are you ready for the day of judgment? Are you ready for the coming of the Son of Man?" Because most people are so preoccupied with what's happening today that they hardly ever give any thought to "kingdom come." Tell them that the end is near, as Jesus said it was, and they will laugh at you the way they laughed at Noah.

But really, instead of laughing, people ought to be listening. Surely of all the things that Jesus said, they ought to be listening to this. Don't make the mistake that so many people make. Listen to the warning that the Son of Man gives and get ready for his great day by trusting in him for your salvation. Because if you do that, you'll be as safe as Noah was when the day of judgment came in his day.

Or if you're not persuaded by that, consider a second example, also from the book of Genesis. "Likewise," Jesus says in verse 28, "just as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all."

Another terrible disaster, justly inflicted on a corrupt community. Even to this day, the sins of Sodom are infamous: injustice, inhospitality, immorality, especially flagrant homosexual and heterosexual sin. Day after day, the citizens of Sodom went on sinning, never imagining that God would destroy them. In fact, on that very day when fire and brimstone fell from heaven, they were wining and dining. They were striking business deals, they were breaking ground on new construction, and yet suddenly they all perished to their everlasting surprise.

"And so will it be," Jesus said in verse 30, "on the day when the Son of Man is revealed." The thunder and lightning of divine judgment will strike without further warning right in the middle of daily life. People will be shopping at the mall, they'll be stuck in traffic, they'll be taking out the trash or reading their financial reports. Whatever it is, they will be overtaken by the wrath of God right in the middle of it.

There are signs of the coming judgment in every disaster, but the end itself will come without any last warning. The question is, will you be ready when the time comes? Many people aren't because no matter how many warnings they are given, they never listen. We see this anytime there is any kind of natural or terrorist disaster. People say, "Well, why weren't we prepared? How did this happen? How could we have been caught off guard like this?" And it turns out, of course, it always turns out this way, that there were plenty of warning signs, people that had raised an alarm, and yet no one paid any attention to them.

In this case, the consequences for not being prepared will be eternally fatal. Because although some people will be saved at the second coming, many others will be lost forever. There's nothing that anyone can do at that point to escape disaster because people never came to safety in Christ while they had the opportunity.

Jesus speaks very plainly about these realities in this passage. He goes on from the example of Lot to show how hopeless your situation will be in that eventuality. Jesus said on that day, "Let the one who is on the housetop with his goods in the house not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back."

In other words, when judgment comes, you won't have time to run back inside and get your belongings. In the other Gospels, Jesus used this same analogy to speak about the judgment that would fall on Jerusalem, but here he seems to be speaking about the final judgment. That's the context here, and when that judgment comes, you won't have time. It'll be too late.

The only thing that can be saved on the day of judgment is a person's soul, not any of their belongings, not any earthly thing. The only souls that will be saved are the ones that are joined to Jesus by faith. To further emphasize the warning of this, there comes one of the shortest verses in the Bible and also one of the saddest, one of the best warnings: "Remember Lot's wife."

Remember Lot's wife? Do you remember her? Remember how she and her husband had compromised their godliness by living in the sin city of Sodom? I mean, these were people who wanted to get as close to the world and what it had to offer as they possibly could. And yet God had purposed to destroy that city.

In his mercy, he had pity on Lot and his wife and on their family as covenant people of God. He sent angels to deliver them from that judgment, and those angels gave very specific instructions for their escape: "Do not look back," they said. "Do not stop anywhere in the valley," Genesis chapter 19. "Escape to the hills, lest you be swept away."

But of course, Lot's wife did look back, and in his justice, all of a sudden God turned her into a pillar of salt. Now, why was the woman destroyed? I mean, looking back seems like such a small thing, but it wasn't so much because of where she looked but because of what she loved. That was the thing with Lot's wife.

She was giving a backwards glance at the burning wreckage of Sodom, and in doing so, she was looking back on all of the things that she loved, all of the things the world had to offer: the security of the family home, the pleasures of sin, the approval of neighbors who knew how to have what they called a good time. That was her fatal attraction.

God had shown her the way of salvation. She was already on her way to safety, but because her heart was still back in Sodom, she perished along the way. It's one of the saddest stories in the whole Bible. Charles Spurgeon commented that Lot's wife was almost saved but not quite—almost saved but not quite. It's hard not to wonder: are there people here almost saved but not quite? Aware of spiritual things, having heard of the testimony of the Gospel that there's salvation in Christ, and yet not actually having made that commitment, not having repented of sin and turned away from the world to come to Christ in a saving way.

What a terrible thing it would be to be almost saved but not quite, because it's the "not quite" that makes all the difference. We should ask ourselves by way of reflection, in keeping with this command to remember Lot's wife, what are the belongings that I'm still trying to salvage from this fallen world? What sins is my heart still longing to commit even though I have halfway turned away from them? What temptations of sex or of money or security, all of the things that Sodom had to offer, all of the things our own culture has to offer?

Jesus is warning us against any selfish attachment to worldly things, including those things that we know that we ought to leave behind but don't want to and haven't quite left behind yet. Think of all of the things you aspire to in this life: the nice house, perhaps, the bigger paycheck, the job or the spouse that you always wanted, the earthly possessions that you have been dreaming about possessing. None of these things will save you on the day of the Son of Man. None of them will save you. So don't look back to them, but flee from the wrath to come.

That's the warning that Jesus gives: Remember Lot's wife. And he goes on to reinforce that by saying, "Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it." Here is one of those strange paradoxes of the Gospel. If you try to save your life—that is to say, if you try to hold on to your position in the world with all of the possessions it has to offer—well, then you will end up losing life itself and everything you have worked so hard to gain.

But on the other hand, if you give yourself away, if you give your whole life over to Jesus, if you commit your whole life to him and offer your time and your talents and everything else in his service and in sacrifice to others, well, then you will keep your life forever. Many people will think you're crazy for doing it. But when you let go of what the earth has to offer, you can gain what only heaven is able to give.

I can't help but think of those famous words of Jim Elliot: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." Of course, you could reverse that and you could say, "He is a very great fool who seeks to gain what he cannot keep and gives up what he could never lose." You see, that's the way Lot's wife was, and that's the warning for us. Will you live for yourself or will you live for Christ and his kingdom? What a difference it makes what you choose.

Because when the Son of Man returns, he will make an eternal separation. That's what Jesus goes on to describe here. He's showing us what is at stake. Some will be saved, others will be lost forever. Jesus speaks about it plainly. He says, "I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding their wheat together; one will be taken and the other left."

Possibly here Jesus may have meant that one person would be taken to glory—some here see what some Christians refer to as the Rapture—while the other is left behind. I think it's more likely here that one person is taken away to judgment while the other is spared. But either way, God will cut right down the center of the human race. He will make a final division between the redeemed and the damned.

That division, that separation will divide even the closest relationships. Here you have two people sharing the same bed—husband and wife, it is probably thought—co-laborers working side by side in the same office. I mean, people in the exact same situation in life. There's almost nothing to choose between them, but they will end up on opposite sides of eternity because of the difference they have in their relationship to Christ.

Here it's as if to say that a wife will roll over in the middle of the night and find that her husband is gone forever. One business partner will find himself in heaven on the day of judgment while the other is banished to hell. The end of the world could come at any time. That's the point of this lightning striking, how unexpectedly, how suddenly Jesus will come again, and at the same time how disastrous that will be for anyone who is not prepared.

If you are trusting in Christ, there is nothing to fear in all of this because you already belong to him. You belong to him by faith in his cross and in the empty tomb. But if you do not believe in Jesus Christ, if you have not made your personal commitment to him, then you are not ready for the day of the Son of Man. Once you understand that, nothing can ever be the same ever again. You can't just go about your business as usual. First, you have to make sure that your soul is secure for eternity by asking Jesus to be your savior and your God. You need to do what Noah did. You need to find safety in the ark of God's promise by faith, not foolish like Lot's wife, who looked back at what she loved and was lost forever.

Then once you've put your trust in Christ, once you've come to faith in the Son of Man, you begin praying for the people you know. You start loving them for Jesus. You start talking straight with them about the Gospel, and you ask yourself what is going to happen to these people on the day of judgment. I need to be concerned for them in my prayers and in my personal witness. What will happen to my husband? What will happen to my wife? What will happen to the people who work in my office or who live down the street, the kid who sits next to me in class? What will become of them? Will they be lost when the time comes, or will they find safety in Jesus Christ? If that is the great question of their lives, then if I love them, it must become an important question in my life as well and in my love for them.

The disciples were deeply troubled when Jesus said all this. Perhaps we can understand that; we ourselves might be deeply troubled by these things. In part, I think they may have been terrified by the thought of being taken away or left behind for judgment. Perhaps hoping to find some way of escape, they asked the question they asked in verse 37: "Where, Lord? Where?"

Maybe they knew better than to ask when because Jesus had already told them that the end would come unexpectedly. But maybe he would at least tell them where so that they could stay away from danger. Jesus answered by saying, "Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather." That's the kind of answer that Jesus gave that kept you from asking too many questions, isn't it? What a strange statement it is. What are these vultures? What kind of corpse is Jesus talking about? Not surprisingly, many different interpretations have been offered.

You could understand it as a kind of proverb about spiritual life and death. I think it's a reasonable interpretation. The place where something is dead is where the vultures will gather, and in the same way, by analogy, the place where people are spiritually dead, that is where the judgment will fall, just the way vultures circle around a carcass.

I wonder if Jesus meant that, if he was using the proverb in that way, if he was referring to the Pharisees and all of the dead hypocrisy in the religious community of that day. He's saying that's the place where judgment will fall, if you follow that kind of spiritually bankrupt and dead life. But there is perhaps another way of seeing this. It could just be an image of the terrible finality of the coming judgment. Because you see, vultures only feed off the dead. By the time they have gathered, there is nothing anyone can do for the deceased.

Jesus used this grim and rather grotesque image as a warning. It's a way of saying, are you still dead in your sin, or have you found life in Christ? What will happen to you on the day of judgment? Will you end up in this terrible dead condition, or will you be saved and rescued by the Son of Man?

In one of his evangelistic sermons, Donald Grey Barnhouse told the story of a man that he went to visit in the hospital. He had heard that the man was dying. I can't remember if I've told you this story before, but I'll tell it to you again even if I have. He had met the man out in the streets of Philadelphia. He knew him as a man in the community. He knew that the man was not a Christian. He had some opportunity to speak with him about spiritual things, and although he was friendly with the man, there was never any kind of spiritual relationship there.

Dr. Barnhouse decided he really ought to go visit the man in the hospital and have one more opportunity to share the Gospel with him. Well, the man was on his deathbed. He knew he was on his deathbed, but he still wasn't really very concerned about his eternal destiny. Finally, Dr. Barnhouse decided that really, desperate times call for drastic measures. So he asked the man if he would be permitted to sit with him and to remain there through the night and even up to the time of his death. The man was agreeable with that, but then he wanted to know why Dr. Barnhouse wanted to do that.

And he said, "Well, I've never seen somebody die without Christ. I want to see what that's like." The man suddenly realized he wasn't quite so ready to die as he had thought that he was. He wasn't ready for judgment. He wasn't ready to meet his maker. So in the ensuing conversation, Dr. Barnhouse led him to Christ. The man repented of his sin, he trusted in Christ and was received into the kingdom of God before his death, which came shortly thereafter.

You see, that's a very small example of something that every person ought to do, and it's something you shouldn't wait until your deathbed to do either. No, you should do it now, now that you've heard the warning and heard the invitation to come to Christ while there is still time. There is only one way to be ready for the coming of the kingdom of God, and that is to trust in Jesus Christ.

Father, we pray for the faith by which we ourselves might believe. Perhaps someone here needs to repent of sin and turn to you for the first time and can pray to do that now, asking you to be their savior and God through Jesus Christ. And we would pray for them, Lord, and also for others—others we love, others we know, others who have not yet come to Christ, who are not yet ready for the coming of the Son of Man and will only be ready by the saving work of your Holy Spirit. So we pray for them, that they might come into the kingdom through faith in Christ. And it’s in his name that we ask this, and for his sake, and for his glory. Amen.

Guest (Male): 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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