"The Day of the Lord"

Luke 12:54-13:8

September 16, 2001

Text Comment

12:55 Rain came from the direction of the sea (West) and the heat up from the deserts to the South.

13:1 The reference is to an event unattested in other records but entirely in keeping with what we know of Pilate and those times. Apparently some Jewish worshippers were killed by Roman soldiers at the time of some Jewish religious festival, perhaps Passover. We know that Pilate, on several occasions, brutally suppressed what he took to be insurrection and killed numbers of people when they were gathered for worship in the temple.

We have as a nation and as a people, and indeed as a world community, been through a week that is, in some respects, unparalleled in our history and certainly unparalleled in our recent history. We will remember for the rest of our lives where we were when we heard what had happened in New York City and Washington D.C and how it was that we heard the news. These have been momentous days in the truest, deepest meaning of that word. Whether or not they will be definitive days, days that define this coming period of history we will have to wait and see. There are thoughtful students of the 20th century who consider the sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 as the definitive event of the 20th century, the perfect symbol of what was to come through the next almost 80 years. We must wait to see if this catastrophe, in some ways, comes to represent the next period of world history and American history. So quintessentially modern was the tragedy last Tuesday that it was caught on camera from beginning to end. And the result of that has been an impression upon the minds of people, a shock to the heart, that has brought home the enormity of the evil to vast numbers of people who live far away from the American East Coast and have no personal connection to those bereaved of loved ones, co-workers, and emergency workers who risked and, in many cases, lost their lives in the effort to rescue others.

There are so many things that a Christian minister might say about a catastrophe like this. The Word of God furnishes many perspectives. It can be viewed as a demonstration of human evil and a thoughtful and searching examination of Tuesday's mass murder would disclose that the people who did this were human beings in the most ordinary sense of the word: they clothed their cruelty in the mantle of righteousness and the service of God and man. How much could be said about all of that; how much that our age, defined in many ways by its superficial and irreal judgments about man and his sinfulness, needs very badly to face.

Tuesday's violence and destruction of life could, however, also be viewed from the perspective of the human woe visited upon so many. I could speak of the sympathy of the Lord in the face of the sorrows of human life and of the fellow-feeling Jesus Christ has taught us to have for those whose lives have been devastated by loss. "Weep with those who weep," we are taught in God's Word and our Savior set an example for us in that.

I know a minister, a faithful minister, who intends to preach this morning on the distinction between personal vengeance and that proper and necessary execution of justice by the magistrate. So much of the conversation nowadays is about how to exact retribution and he wants to clarify in the minds of his hearers the distinction between the love of enemies, to which all Christians are called, and the wielding of the sword in the service of justice to which all governments are called.

And we have only begun. What of the mysteries of divine providence and theodicy, what of the justification of God's ways? How could a good God allow this to happen? We have already heard that question being asked. What is more, here are acts of terror committed by ardently religious men, supposedly in the service of their God. How does religion itself and the reputation of God escape unscathed from such an enormity committed on their behalf? There are great mysteries, hidden depths, in the ways of God who rules over all. Surely the events of last Tuesday are a demonstration of that! That God is righteous in all his ways, we know. But how he is righteous is not easy for us to understand.

And, still more, what of our own comfort in the face of such evil and what of our own discouragement in the realization of such loss of life, such emotional devastation visited upon so many, such unspeakable cruelty as happened first on those planes and then in the buildings hit by them, a woe that continues and will continue as people are sought in vain and bodies are pulled from the wreckage of those great buildings. What thoughtful person has not felt unsettled in the pit of his or her stomach over these last days. Even, the sense of loss in the recognition that the world will not be the same and that even simple pleasures will go by the way because of what those men did: greeting loved ones as they get off a plane or seeing them to the gate. Innocence lost, perhaps never in our lifetime to be entirely regained. A blow has fallen upon us. There are the tender mercies of the Lord to be preached, the consolations of the Gospel, the promise of grace abounding where sin has much more abounded, of all things working together for good to those who love God and who are called according to his purpose. Above all else we need to hear again of the sovereignty of God. Tuesday came upon us as a bolt from the blue, a totally unexpected calamity. But it was not so for God. There was never any other plan for this world but that which included Tuesday's reign of terror. Not for one moment in all of that day did the Lord Christ cease to be "head over all things for the church." Not once was God not doing what pleased him in heaven and on earth. Mysterious? To be sure. Unfathomable? Absolutely. But comforting and consoling to the saints? Without any doubt!

But I have chosen another theme for our consideration this morning. I chose it for several reasons. First, it is the theme of the only text in God's Word that explicitly reckons with the collapse of a great building and human death resulting from it. In Luke's Greek there is, in the use of the article, the tower, perhaps the suggestion that it was the tower, that is a well-known tower, a famous tower, a landmark. That would make the text even more strikingly apropos of Tuesday's events given the fame of the two great towers that were brought down in New York City. [Plummer, ad loc.] But that reference, to the tower falling, is cheek to jowl with a reference to the brutal murder of unsuspecting people to make a political point. Could there be a text in all of Holy Scripture that evokes more literally the events of last Tuesday? Political terror and a great tower collapsing.

But I also chose it because it seems to me to be the great meaning of the history we are passing through, the great biblical meaning of this event. And this meaning is the meaning I fear almost no one will attach to these events or draw from them. It is certainly the meaning that no television commentator will allude to or think to allude to. The television watching public has not heard and will not hear this interpretation placed on Tuesday's events. But, in the same way, I suspect that most Christians will not be told to think of what has happened in these terms. And, yet, they are the terms the Bible teaches us to reckon with first and foremost.

I am speaking of Tuesday's catastrophe as an intimation of the judgment of God. I am speaking of that devastation as a picture of a far greater calamity that lies in the future of mankind. I am speaking of the events of September 11, 2001 as a window on the future. Can we not safely conclude that this is the very interpretation of these terrible events that the Lord Jesus would himself have placed upon the catastrophe of last week. No one would have been more sympathetic than he. No one would have felt so keenly the woe of others. No one would have so genuinely wept for the loss of life and love and happiness. No one would have cared so much that every effort be made to rescue the perishing and to aid the bereaved. He was himself the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

But, when asked about a disaster that had taken many lives - remember, populations were much smaller in his day - he immediately turned that event into an intimation of the judgment to come. He drew from it a lesson about taking seriously the prospect of the divine wrath.

The people who came to Jesus wanted to talk about the terrible events that had occurred recently in Judea and Samaria, but they wanted to speak about them in their immediate significance. Were those who died, they wanted to know, more guilty than the rest. Did the fact that the tower fell on them and killed them mean that they were more sinful than the generality of men who had escaped their fate? No, Jesus said very plainly. That is not what these calamities indicated. That is not their meaning. You cannot interpret them as divine judgment on some individuals and divine approval of others.

But, he hurried on to say, such catastrophes are, very definitely, portents of divine judgment. They are a window on reality. They are a warning given in time of events to come at the end of time. That is the point of each of these units of material in turn: the debtor thrown into prison who wasted his opportunity to be reconciled to the man he owed money; the people killed by Pilate; the collapsing tower; the fig tree cut down because of its fruitlessness. All are illustrations of the principle of judgment in the world. The world rings with premonitions of this judgment, Jesus said. Why do you pay no attention?

And that is hardly a lesson taught only here in the Bible. Over and over again human calamity, the carnage of war, the destruction of cities, the depopulation of nations, natural disasters - all the sorts of catastrophes that shake human beings down to the bottom of their hearts - are employed as pictures of divine judgment and what must come upon all mankind at the end of the world.

"Disaster will come upon you, and you will not know how to conjure it away. A calamity will fall upon you that you cannot ward off with a ransom; a catastrophe you cannot foresee will suddenly come upon you." [Isa. 47:11]

That is the Lord's prophecy through Isaiah of the judgment that he will bring upon Babylon. And you have scores of texts like that one throughout the OT prophets, who mix their depictions of judgments soon to be visited upon the nations of the ancient world with very similar accounts of that great judgment, that great Day of the Lord, that must come upon the entire race when the Son of God returns in glory. And so it is as well in any number of New Testament texts that describe the judgment of mankind at the end of the world. In the text that I had thought to preach this morning, from 1 Thess. 5, it speaks of that disaster coming suddenly upon the world. In 2 Thess. 1 we read of the ferocity of it, the blazing fire. We saw blazing fire suddenly, did we not, last Tuesday? We hear of earthquakes and floods. And, then, what of the terrible depictions of the destruction of Jerusalem in the teaching of the Lord Jesus. In the Gospels he uses those images of suffering and anguish, of starvation, of death, of fleeing in terror from advancing armies to describe not only what would happen at Jerusalem in A.D. 70 - and what did happen! - but what would happen at the end of history. And when we come to Revelation it is a concentration of the same.

"…in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her." [18:8]

"In one hour she has been brought to ruin!" [18:19]

"With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again." [18:21]

"The smoke from her goes up for ever and ever." [20:3]

"Mourning; fire, a great bringing down, smoke rising;" is this not what we saw last Tuesday? Our 21st century church and the culture around her get almost nothing of the message which the prophets proclaimed and then the Lord Jesus repeatedly gave to his congregations: the solemn warning that without a genuine repentance and faith in him, men and women will perish, victims of the wrath of a holy God. There are, of course, a great many congregations who never get this message because their ministers don't believe it. However plainspoken the Bible might be and Jesus Christ may have been, they do not believe in the wrath of God and the specter of divine judgment is, for them, nothing but a mirage. But in many churches where the minister still believes the truth of what Jesus said here, still accepts as real the prospect of doom descending upon the unbelieving world on the day of the Lord, there is still no talk of it. Christianity cannot live without this truth, it cannot survive without this doctrine. If there is nothing to fear, nothing to be saved from, there is no need for salvation or for a Savior. But still it is not preached.

In some cases this part of the Bible's message has been systematically and intentionally removed from preaching and teaching. It is felt by such men that contemporary men and women will not listen to the message of judgment, will not tolerate it, and so, if we preach it, we will lose all opportunity of reaching them with the truth. But in many other cases this major emphasis in the Lord's teaching and preaching and in that of the prophets before him and the apostles after him is dropped out of sight with less thought and intention.

Preachers too are men of their own time and are influenced by the currents of contemporary opinion. Divine wrath, the prospect of the sinner's doom overcoming him or her suddenly, by surprise, the terrible depictions of divine judgment of which Holy Scripture is full, the stern warnings addressed to the impenitent - especially to the impenitent who happen entirely to meet and satisfy the accepted moral standards of our contemporary culture - it all seems so out of date, so alien, so far removed from our time and our ways of thought, so unconvincing, so provocative. And so months pass and then years with no mention of the severe and relentless warnings preached by our Savior. And the longer the silence extends, the more difficult it becomes to break it. Churches are now full of folk who are completely unused to this message, have not heard it, and have been brought into the church largely without it.

Some preachers used to argue that the preaching of divine wrath had been compromised by the over-enthusiastic, almost lascivious preaching of the sufferings of the damned. But, whether or not that argument was valid in some earlier day, it carries no weight in our own. No minister can excuse himself from preaching divine judgment because other preachers are overdoing it. We are a very long way from anything remotely resembling a preoccupation with damnation and the judgment day.

Indeed, people have so little to fear anymore in thinking of God and the future, that the church has become in many places and to most people in the West - the people most touched by Tuesday's carnage - a complete irrelevance. A recent report in the Washington Post began: "At Morning Prayer last Sunday, the great vaulted ceiling of Canterbury Cathedral looked down upon a grand total of 13 worshippers. A midday communion service did better, with about 300 people on hand, counting the choirboys in their white ruffled collars and a phalanx of tourists with video cameras. But that still left [almost all] of the seats unused. … In Britain and France, less than 10% of the population attends church as often as once a month." [Cited in Touchstone, September 2001, 6] Why bother with church if it has nothing to say to us of eternal and ultimate importance?

But, if we preach divine judgment, will anyone listen, will anyone believe? That question, that concern is what makes so terribly significant the events of this past week. The Lord said to those who came to him that day, "You can be such acute observers of life, of human affairs, -- you study the signs to predict the weather and in many other ways you draw conclusions from your observations - but you refuse to apply those same powers to the ultimate issues of life and salvation, even though you have indications of those realities all around you. If you want to know what Tuesday last was a picture of, the Lord says, I will tell you. It was a picture of divine judgment. It was a picture of a far greater catastrophe that is to befall our land and our world when Jesus returns and the impenitent and unbelieving are brought into judgment before him. That is what all such terrors are pictures of. They are intimations, premonitions of this coming destruction and ruin.

But people will say: how can that be? It was an evil deed done by evil men who had no intention of doing the will of the living and true God. True enough, but how many times are we told that God often uses evil men to accomplish his purposes in the world. Assyria was evil and cruel almost beyond belief when it served as the instrument of God's judgment upon Israel. Babylon was an evil empire when it was used to destroy Jerusalem for her unbelief.

But, then, are you saying that New York City and the World Trade Center and the people in those buildings were evil, more evil than others, and were being judged by God. No. I am not saying that. That is precisely what Jesus teaches us here not to say. God may have visited specific judgment upon specific people last Tuesday. Who can say? He may have meant to judge the City of New York. He may have intended to judge our land. There is surely that in our national life that deserves his judgment, his most severe judgment. But who can say? But, surely, those people who perished were not more guilty than many who survived. Surely there were Christians among them for whom that sudden death was sudden entrance into eternal light. No! Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that we know the destruction of the World Trade Center and of the Pentagon was itself an act of divine judgment. It may have been. But I cannot say.

We cannot know God's purposes in such detail. It is not our business; it is beyond us. But, Jesus said in speaking of a similar tragedy, a terrible and sudden loss of life, what you can be sure of is that in this, as in all human catastrophes, you have a premonition of the last day, a forewarning of the divine wrath against sinners.

When we see terrible loss of life, sudden and terrifying destruction, the one thing we know for sure, perhaps the only thing we can say with a certainty, is that in it we have a picture of that day which is certain to come and which will overwhelm, on a scale far beyond anything we saw Tuesday, those who are not at peace with the living God through faith in his Son.

What is so terribly important about the concentration of terror and woe and despair that we saw last Tuesday is the way in which an entirely unwelcome thought and unwelcome reality is forced upon our minds and hearts, even against our will. There is the real cause of that knot in the pit of our stomach.

What of the 20,000 people who lost their lives in two weeks in Burundi and Rwanda a few years ago. Were they worse sinners than others because they died in that sudden Gotterdammerung that followed the death of the presidents of both countries in the crash of the plane they were traveling in? I tell you, No! But, unless you repent, you too will all perish. And what of the 5,000 or more who died last Tuesday? Were they more wicked than the rest? I tell you, No! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. And with blazing fire, and billowing smoke, and darkness at noonday, and the cries of the dying, and the crowds running in panic, suddenly, in that moment, we can see the judgment day in our mind's eye. Perhaps for the first time, we can imagine that day of doom. We see how real the prospect and how terrible.

The world we live in takes the events of last Tuesday as something virtually unique, uncharacteristic, and the result is that most people will not interpret it as bearing on their own personal destiny or the true meaning of their lives. But we must take it and understand it as a window on reality. The sin that caused it, the woe that comes from it, are different in strength of impression but not different in kind. No person who has just received word that he has terminal cancer, no woman who has just been raped, no young parents who have just watched their little child die, no family devastated by a drunk driver, no wife who has just learned of a husband's affair, will think their sorrows of little consequence because they did not occur en masse. But, diffused over the entire landscape of life, these realities do not move us, do not make us sit up and take notice, do not force reality upon our consciences as does a cataclysm such as we witnessed last Tuesday. But when those realities are concentrated with terrible force as they were last week, then we see what otherwise we ignore. Tuesday woke people up not to a different world, but to the world as it always is, but which they rarely see! And what we now can see, Jesus said, above all, is how much in this world is an intimation of what will certainly come upon the world in the judgment of God.

The Lord says that this reality is all around us. Sinners are punished. He gives us illustrations that all of us understand. The insolvent debtor who goes to jail. And then he gives, as it were, some illustrations from the newspaper, from current events. Tragedies that had gripped the imagination of the people. And then he spoke a parable about a tree that would be cut down because it did not bear fruit. We all understand this. The Lord is saying that our world, our lives are chock full of intimations, premonitions of judgment and the death and destruction that it entails. Why in the world would we think, why would we ever suppose that something that happens to so many others will not happen to us, and, still more, that a world so full of death and destruction, does not foretell of a like reality in the world to come?

This is the point that Tuesday made with such special power. All of the arguments that we typically hear against the prospect of a severe and intractable divine judgment utterly fall before the facts of our own world. We hear men say that God would not do such a thing as punish men and women, or that it would be unjust or unworthy of God. But, hell is already with us in God's world. There is already so much in this life which never reaches its goal; so much fear, misery, sorrow, disappointment, so much wailing and gnashing of teeth, so much of the worm that never dies and the fire that never goes out and the darkness so thick you can cut it with a knife.

No one can say that there is no place for such things in God's universe, when the world God made and rules already groans under the weight of them. And that was precisely the Lord's point. We saw a piece of hell last Tuesday. If you are not sure that you are a true and faithful Christian, that you have obtained from Jesus Christ the forgiveness of your sins, you ought therefore to be seeking peace with God. I beg of you to seek peace with God. To those who had seen hell in the fall of a great tower or a savage reprisal visited upon helpless people, Jesus said, "Why are you not more concerned about your own souls and the world to come?" Why do you find it so easy to ignore these premonitions of judgment and live as if the only thing you did not have to worry about were the judgments of the Lord?" The world rings with anticipations of the judgment day. Why are you not paying attention to what is around you every day? And, especially, why are you not paying attention to what the catastrophes that are visited upon the world from time to time portend? And who said this and who gave these warnings? It was the king of love, the Savior of the world, who stands ready to receive and to forgive all who come to him.

If last Tuesday should do anything at all, and it should do many things - soften our hearts, make us determined to redeem the time because the days are evil, make us careful not to count on the endless succession of days when our lives may be brought to a sudden end, and on and on - I say, if Tuesday last should do anything for us at all, it should solemnize us at the prospect of God's judgment which he has promised to visit upon this world and all mankind in due time, and which he has told us is foreshadowed in the death and destruction with which our world is full.

If there are some here today to whom God has granted that one more year before the tree would be cut down, do not delay. Repent as Jesus says. Turn to him for forgiveness and for right and title to eternal life. I beg of you, do that, lest you spend the rest of time miserably wondering how someone as sharp-sighted as yourself could have missed so many signs, so many warnings.