Is COVID-19 A Sign of The End Times? | Mark Hitchcock at Kindred Church

[Applause] well it is great to be here with you it's an honor to be with you this morning and my wife cheryl is here with me as well i'd like to have her stand up mary and her is the best decision i made other than getting saved so it's a greatest decision in my life to have her but she's always glad to have her with us i want to uh thank all of you for being here those of you who are present with us here in person here and those of you that are out uh in the tents and those that may be watching online as well it means a great deal to have you here with us today on this lord's day to worship the lord and study his word together i was just uh reminded somebody was saying something about dean was saying something about people calling in and wanting a translation of what philip said when he was at our church one time he was talking about uh how the the lord had greatly he was talking about me and he says the lord has greatly used your pastor's pain over the years and you said that several times and several people came up after and said what pain is there that god's been using greatly in your life i said no he said my pen the pen not the pen but anyway so sometimes things do get lost in translation but we love philip and june and their family and we love uh the family here at kindred as well it's always a great joy to be here uh yesterday i was here in town speaking at an online prophecy conference with three other men at his channel some of you may have heard of that before and we were in town and so philip was kind enough to allow me to fill the pulpit this morning and you know one of the things i'm thankful for about this church many things and about philip's friendship but for a church and a pastor who loved the lord's coming and you know the early church was a second coming church and certainly that's not what we want to talk about all the time we don't want that to become some tangent that we're off and that's all we talk about but it is important to have a regular part of our diet as believers as uh looking for the lord's coming so we're we're glad to see that you all at least many of you are back here in the building and you know all the the talk about social distancing and masks and all that stuff i saw a really good church sign online if you'll put that up there for me said i want to be like saul i want to be on the road to demascus so i think we all want to get on that road probably and hopefully that will happen fairly soon maybe we'll get this get this all behind us but i want to bring a message today just on some signs of the times philip asked me to just kind of bring an update on that so let's open our bibles to matthew 24. we're going to be in several different passages but i thought this would be a a good one to just launch out from here this morning so let me read matthew 24 1-8 and then i'll go over and just read luke chapter 21 verse 11. i'm reading from the new american standard bible here this morning jesus came out from the temple and was going away when his disciples came up to point out the temple buildings to him and he answered and said to them do not do you not see all these things truly i say to you not one stone here shall be left upon another which it will shall not be torn down and as he was sitting on the mount of olives the disciples came to him privately saying tell us when will these things be what will be the sign of your coming in the end of the age jesus answered and said to them see to it that no one misleads you many will come in my name saying i am the christ and will mislead many you'll be hearing of wars and rumors of wars see that you are not frightened for those things must take place but that is not yet the end for nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes but all these things are merely the beginning of birth pains then over in luke 21 11 which is the parallel account in luke's gospel uh luke adds this and there will be great earthquakes and in various places plagues and famines there will be tares and great signs from heaven may the lord write his eternal word on our hearts here this morning well this year uh 2020 continues to be a unique and unprecedented year think of all the things that have happened we're not even to the end of it yet we have this pandemic there's been massive locust plagues in the middle east and asia this is the most active hurricane season in years we see all kind of social and civil unrest sweeping our nation we see the the cultural and political divide in america that's really deeper and wider than it's ever been before and i heard about a wife who said to her husband she said should we watch the six o'clock news and get indigestion or wait for the 10 o'clock news and have insomnia and that's kind of the way it is today you just can only take so much really of watching what's happening and it seems to me like people everywhere have a sense that the world is getting near closing time and even people who don't know the lord have this sense of apocalypse and that was brought home to to me and cheryl early this year i'm on february 29th cheryl and i left edmond our home there for a 13-day trip to israel and we could never have imagined how the world was about to change by the time we got back home it was literally like coming back to a different world because while we were in israel the coronavir is mushroomed back here in the states and in europe and the world really was changed forever the trip we had to israel was great we had great weather the fellowship was fantastic but near the end of the trip the dominoes kind of began to fall uh president trump canceled all flights to the the u.s from europe everyone in our tour with a connection in europe had to reschedule their flights and you can imagine all the groups that are there everybody trying to do that it was it was really chaos there's a lot of frustrating calls to uh airlines that dragged on for hours from any of our people and relatives back home were concerned about our uh our safe and speedy return and cheryl was barraged with all kinds of anxious text messages now i always like to say nobody ever texts me um i don't get that many of them which i'm i'm happy with that she kind of takes care of all that for us but our tour group was one of the final ones to get out of israel no more groups were allowed after we left and really i like to i told the people in our group were like the last rats off the ship and during our final day or two there in jerusalem the streets were empty i mean it was eerie the vendors were closed uh shops were closed the only thing that was good about it is when we went to the garden tomb our last day there was basically empty we had the place to ourselves which is very uncommon but israel was getting ready to hunker down for the long haul now cheryl and i were coming back we had a flight a direct flight to newark fortunately we didn't have to go through europe so we didn't have to go through all those changes we were standing there two young men were in front of us there in tel aviv in the airport and one of them had one of the largest bags i've ever seen full of clanking bottles of vodka that he'd purchased at the duty-free store i mean it was a massive bottle it kept clanking around and um cheryl and i struck up a conversation with them and at one point kind of out of the blue one of these young men looked at me and cheryl with a bewildered expression on his face kind of seeing what was going on and said i don't know what on earth is going on i think the world is about to end i was surprised by that comment and i said something like this to him i said this isn't the end of the world but i do believe jesus could come at any time and you need to make sure you've trusted him so you're ready when he comes we looked at me with a blank stare having no idea what i had just said and began to turn back and just started talking to his friend again i don't think he wanted any part of what i was saying there and evidently he didn't find what i said very enlightening but but to me that young man's question in one form or another has been on the minds of millions of people in the last weeks and months i don't know what on earth is going on but i think the world is about to end now one of my friends recently put it like this this is kind of a good way to describe what we're seeing he just said apocalypse is in the air and i think that's true there's just a sense of apocalypse now why many people may not want to say it out loud they're secretly wondering if what we see today are omens of the end if these are signs and signals of what's to come if they're harbingers of the end of days if these might be signposts on the road to armageddon now by the way speaking of armageddon when we got back from our trip in israel of course israel was all shut down and online a few days after we got back i saw a picture there of the site there at armageddon and it had a big sign on front of it saying it's closed and i thought to myself when armageddon's closed you know things have gotten pretty bad so that's what it's like over there in israel now when you look at our world today there are a lot of signs that i think point to the stage setting for the end times the stage is being set um israel's back in the land from 1948 almost over 40 percent of the jews in the world live in israel now you've got the nations of ezekiel 38 and 39 that coalition coming together we have a globalistic uh society a globalistic economy and headed towards a global government that we see today there's a yearning for a peace over in the middle east a lot of things are happening today that point toward what the bible predicts now when we talk about signs of the times people are kind of too extreme some people that's all they think about are signs of the times other people are kind of skeptical about signs of the times i want to remind you in our passage we read when jesus disciples asked him what are the signs of your coming in the end of the age jesus didn't say well don't worry about it i'm just going to come back someday he gives a long litany of signs in matthew 24. i'm over in matthew 16 jesus talked about how the leaders in his day had missed the signs of his first coming and just as there were signs of his first coming that identified jesus as the messiah there will be signs of his second coming and jesus chided them for not discerning the signs of the times one other passage about signs we often don't think about hebrews 10 25 which by the way that's a good verse for today um i realize a lot of people can't come back to to gatherings like this maybe because of underlying health conditions and fear of that but i think some people are just staying home because it's more comfortable and hebrews 10 25 says don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together as the manner of some is but encourage one another and then it says do that all the more as you see the day drawing near so as you see the day of christ coming drawing near we should be together more not less we're easy targets for the enemy when we're not part of the herd and part of the pack and with god's people but i mention that passage because he says do this all the more as you see the day drawing near that must mean we can see the day drawing near right so it must mean there are things that we can look out and see that are happening that indicate that now let me just give three quick guard rails or kind of guidelines for thinking about signs of the times so we don't end off in the ditch and end up off in the ditch the first one is we need seriousness not speculation or sensationalism a lot of people are engaged in all kinds of wild speculation and sensationalism and i get stuff sent to me all the time you can't believe the emails i get uh being someone who's interested in prophecy and written in that area i get all kinds of interesting stuff from people but but think about this if everything's a sign then nothing's assigned and with some people everything that happens is some great sign so we want to have a serious view but not sensationalism and and the worst kind of sensationalism the most reckless form is date setting where people set dates for certain events or dates for the coming of jesus christ you always like to say when someone sets a date for the coming of christ you can know that's not the date when he's going to come back because he said he's coming in a time when people don't think that he will a second kind of guard rail for us is we need to look at scripture first not the headlines first a lot of people look at the headlines and find some wild event or some sensational event and then they try to come to the bible and find something to fit that now we do it the other way around we look at current events through the lens of the bible that's what we'll try to do here this morning and then the final point and this is an important one is signs of the times are for the second coming of christ not the rapture philip and i both believe in what's called the pre-trib rapture the christ will come and catch his church away before the coming time of tribulation we call that the rapture then we'll return with him sometime longer than seven years after that back to the earth at his second coming and so the rapture is an imminent event that's signless that can happen at any moment the signs are for the return that will be at least seven years after the rapture dr john walvoord who taught many years at dallas seminary has a really good illustration to help us with this he said that the rapture is kind of like thanksgiving and the second coming or return is like christmas and you know how it starts now i guess in malls in in september you know i start playing christmas music and decorating for christmas to get you in the mood to buy presents and spend a lot of money for christmas so there's all kinds of signs out there in our culture that christmas is coming but there really aren't any signs for thanksgiving and thanksgiving is like the rapture and dr walvard used to say if you can see the signs for christmas and thanksgiving hasn't arrived yet then you can be certain that thanksgiving is pretty near and that's a good way i think to look at this when we see these signs so the rapture could happen in any moment but we're already seeing signs of events that will happen during the tribulation that will herald the second coming so with those guard rails in mind let's look at a couple of signs that are kind of in the foreground today that you might be hearing about and wondering about now as we look at these signs and we think about these things this morning i want you to remember that god has given us bible prophecy not to scare us but to prepare us he hasn't given these things to us to make us anxious but to make us alert and aware of what's happening in in the world around us so with that in mind let's look at these two signs they're just two i want to mention today peace in the middle east and then pestilence or plagues obviously this coveted 19 that's all around us so let's start here with peace in the middle east now peace in the middle east is uh very elusive i think we all would recognize that it's it's been a phantom that's been chased by president after president secretary of state after secretary of state since israel was founded as a modern nation in 1948 they had their war of independence that year they had the six day war in 1967 the yom kippur war in 1973 that were in lebanon in the early 1980s and there have been numerous intifadas which are uprisings arab uprisings and so it's been very difficult obviously to broker some kind of peace there in the middle east and part of the reason is that's a unique part of the world with all of the the long-term uh rivalries that are there when we go to israel with our group i always like to tell them this story to kind of help them understand the middle east it goes like this a scorpion came out of the desert to the banks of the nile whereupon he accosted a crocodile my dear chappie said could we form an alliance to get to the other side of the nile the crocodile answered do you think i'm stupid i'd be at your com i'd be at your complete mercy you could sting me and kill me at any time during the crossing of course not said the scorpion i promise not to sting you because if i did sting you i would drown too the crocodile thought for a second and then agreed this made sense and took the scorpion on his back about midstream the scorpion became agitated and stung the crocodile as the two were about to go under the crocodile turned to the scorpion and said now we will both die what possible explanation or logic is there for such an act and the scorpion said there is none this is the middle east that's kind of what we see over there right and that's why it's been so difficult to have some kind of peace but there's a historic uh peace movement in the middle east right now in fact just last week many of you may have watched this on television for the first time in 20 years um israel secured peace with arab nations the first nation that they secured peace with was egypt back in 1979 then jordan followed in 1994. but now it's been 25 years and president trump his administration spearheaded all of this and president or prime minister netanyahu was there at the white house and signed these normalization agreements or peace agreements with the united arab emirates and with bahrain and interestingly these were called the abraham accords because you have obviously these descendants of abraham through through isaac and through ishmael kind of coming back together now i think a lot of things have motivated this i mean i think it's prophetically significant god is the one orchestrating it but on the human level these nations are frustrated with the palestinians they're kind of going out on their own now and saying look we're frustrated that you haven't made peace with israel by now also these nations are scared to death of iran they want to get some peace agreements with israel and also they want access to advanced israeli technology so there are a lot of human reasons this is happening but behind this i believe god is the one who's orchestrating this in his providence and bringing it together now if you watched the speech after that or before the signing of that i can't remember if it was before or after but president trump said five or six more arab nations are lined up to normalize relations with israel now this is geopolitically and historically significant but i think it's prophetically significant as well if you have your bible turn back to daniel 9 27 for just a moment and we're going to look at a look at this verse and i'll mention another passage in the old testament but this is uh really the biblical entry point for any discussion of this middle east peace treaty in the end times daniel 9 27. now we're kind of parachuting down here into the middle or near the end of this great prophecy that was given to daniel but you'll notice in 9 27 it says and he now the he here is a reference back to verse 26 to the coming prince the coming world ruler or the antichrist and he will make a firm covenant with the many now in the context here the many would be the many in the nation of israel it'd be israel for one week and again in the context if i had time i would show all this to you but the one week there's one week of years it's one set of seven years so the bible tells us here that the antichrist is going to come on the scene he's going to appear initially as a great peacemaker and he's going to come and make a covenant with israel for a one week period of time or seven years and this treaty must involve some kind of peace for israel because notice in the middle of the week at the middle of that seven year period he's going to break the treaty and put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering well that means if he's going to stop it at the midpoint then they must have been doing sacrifice and grain offering right which indicates that israel has a rebuilt temple there on that 35-acre temple mount and are carrying out their sacrifices so it's some kind of a guaranteed peace for the nation of israel now when it says here he'll make a firm covenant there's several ways to take that it could mean that he'll confirm a covenant in other words he'll make it it could mean that he will make a firm or a compelled covenant a forced covenant in other words he's going to bring the parties together the antichrist is and give him a take it or leave it kind of deal but another way this can be interpreted is or translated is he will make a he will strengthen a covenant with the many in other words it's going to be a covenant or at least the basic parts of that covenant will be in existence and he's just going to come along and strengthen that covenant so what we see today could be the beginnings of some kind of covenant that the antichrist will come along later and strengthen now people often ask well you know the person who's getting this done is donald trump the president so could he be the antichrist well if you read about the antichrist in bible he's a very smooth person and donald trump's not exactly the smoothest person you would think of in politics i like him but he's not very smooth the antichrist will be a satanic charmer of men and also in daniel 9 26 it tells us that the antichrist will come from the people who destroy the temple in 70 a.d that's the romans i don't think it necessarily means he'll be an italian but i think it means he will come from the confines of the old roman empire so i don't think the antichrist will be an american president although almost every american president since um jfk has been identified by the antichrist as the antichrist by somebody now i've got a slide here to put up hopefully this will a picture will speak a thousand words here but on the left side of that is where we are today we're in the current church age and someday the church age will end the church age began dramatically and suddenly on the day of pentecost and it's going to end dramatically and suddenly at some point at the rapture of the church the lord's going to catch us out of this world and philip i think i got this from you you said at the rapture we're going to get it's going to be an airlift accompanied by a facelift i think that's what you said one time but anyway we'll get new bodies and be transformed to go to you with the lord and then after that there will be a time that i like to call a time of further preparation because here's a very important point to remember the rapture does not start the seven year tribulation the signing of the covenant with the antichrist in israel that's what signs at that peace treaty so the rapture may happen if it happened today that the treaty may not be signed for a week or a month or several months or maybe a year or two so there'll be a time after the rapture of kind of further stage setting and preparation and then this treaty will be signed at some point in time by by the antichrist and you'll notice there that i have in that first three and a half years the battle of gog and magog because if you go to ezekiel chapter 38 it talks about a group of nations that will invade israel when they're back in their land in the end times and it's nations like russia or rosh um it's it's persia modern-day iran meshech tubal gomer togarmah those are all part of what is modern-day turkey and it says those nations are going to invade israel in the end times and it says in ezekiel 38 verse 11 that israel will be at rest when that happens i think it's during the first three and a half years of that treaty when israel has a guaranteed peace from the antichrist and then three other times in ezekiel 38 it says israel will be living securely so this idea of a peace treaty for israel and them living securely is a critical if a critical event that has to happen in the future that i think we're seeing the stage setting for today again that's the event that starts everything going it starts the the clock running again if you will in the end times and and if you've been paying attention to the news as president trump got israel to sign these agreements with bahrain and united arab emirates and other nations are online the countries that are lining up against this are mainly iran and turkey who are two of the aggressors mentioned in ezekiel 38 against israel and in ezekiel 38 verse 13 it mentions the nations that are going to be on israel's side when they're invaded it's sheba di dan and the merchants of tarshish and tarshish in that day was really a word for what we would call today europe but sheba and didan were located in the the place today where the the moderate gulf states are located like united arab emirates and like bahrain so you see the nations lined up exactly as we would expect them to be if this event will happen in the not too distant future so again we see the setting of the stage in the paving of the way for all of this this is a foreshadow i believe and a precursor of what's to come we could see in the antichrist coming along at some point after the rapture and again if a lot of these nations have signed an agreement with israel that he'd come along he would strengthen that covenant strengthen that treaty and so we need to stay tuned there'll be more to come but this is a an important sign i believe that setting the stage for what's coming well there's a second sign we see all around us today and this is the sign of plagues and pestilence the coronavirus plague is echoes what we find in the bible and i think it's important as believers for us to understand what jesus said about plagues in the end times both for ourselves but also to be equipped to talk to other people who have questions about this so let's uh in that light let's turn back to revelation chapter 6. now there's really two main places in the new testament that refer to plagues in the end time and now one of them hears in revelation chapter six now when we come to this passage this is uh the famous four horsemen of the apocalypse this is the beginning of the tribulation period these are the first four of the seal judgments and let me read revelation chapter six verse seven when he broke the fourth seal heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying come and i looked and behold an ashen horse or literally a pale horse and he who sat on it had the name death and hades was following with him and authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth now this is a grim picture here and this is preceded by three other horses the first horse is a writer on a white horse which i think pictures of the antichrist the counterfeit christ in revelation 19 jesus is going to come riding on a white horse this is the antichrist there at the beginning of the tribulation as we had in this uh this graphic earlier this is him coming with some kind of temporary peace he's going to bring to the earth because the next rider is a rider on a red horse and it says he takes peace from the earth well to take peace there had to be peace to begin with so the antichrist is going to come on this platform of peace and of course there's peace then the red horse brings war and then in the wake of war we often find famine and that's the rider on the black horse spoken of here in revelation 6. so with each successive horseman the severity of the judgments intensifies and so then finally we come to this final horse this pale horse and the word used here pale is chloros it's used of kind of a green color that the color of a decomposing corpse i mean it's very graphic now chuck swindoll says this about the pale rider in his shadow he says in this terrifying scene john saw the grim reaper and the gravedigger moving together across the face of the earth death slays the body while hades swallows up the soul these two symbols represent the massive number of deaths that will follow in the wake of the first three horsemen one quarter of the world's population will be lost in their rampage now think about that here it says with sword with famine with pestilence and the wild beasts of the earth a fourth of the people on the earth are going to die now we all know what the sword is and what famine is and what pestilence or plagues are but what about the wild beasts of the earth let me just mention quickly three views about this some people say the wild beasts of the earth here means that animals are going to become especially unrestrained and ferocious in the end times and you'll go around killing people certainly possible other people will say well no the wild beasts of the earth here is military and political leaders who are who are wild and and killing people during this time because the word here wild beasts is found in revelation 38 times and all the other times it refers to the beast or the antichrist and his henchman the false prophet so that's certainly a legitimate view but the way it's used here right next to the word pestilence i believe it refers to diseases that come from animals when you think about this in history the most destructive animal of all time is the rat i mean the bubonic plague was split spread by rats that killed 25 million people in europe and today the wild beasts of the earth have expanded to bats and monkeys and pigs and birds i mean think of all these deadly viruses that hop from animals to humans they're called zoonotic diseases or spill over diseases because they come from animals to people and it's interesting the cdc says that three out of every four of the new emerging infectious diseases in the world come from animals 75 percent of them and in the last 30 years there have been 30 new infectious diseases so they're they're mushrooming we remember some of us do sars and mers and bird flu then there was the swine flu i remember when swine flu was going around i saw a headline in a magazine that said apocalypse now obviously it was a person who saw some connection between that and the end times but there's all these diseases that are spilling over and coronavirus is just kind of the newest one and of course all of the globalism and the interconnectedness of our world and the travel is what allows these diseases now to spread across the world so quickly you know one other connection here i see with coronavirus though prophetically is just the idea of globalism when the coronavirus broke out the ex-uk prime minister gordon brown called for a global government to combat and tackle the coronavirus pandemic you wanted the world to form a a temporary form of global government to combat this virus so we we see people you know looking out and saying we need something global to fight this and also we see from this that governments local governments on up to the national government are are using this to expand their control and their authority now certainly a lot of things that have been done or for people's safety but i think a lot of it is also about submission and all the track and trace technology that's out there and that's going to certainly be used some day by someone like the antichrist who's going to come in and want to know where everybody in the world is and control their lives i mentioned i was at an online prophecy conference yesterday with some other men one of the men was ed heinsohn dr ed heinsohn he made just a comment to me in passing while we were talking he said if the government can make you wear a mask they can make you take a mark and kind of this idea of just more and more government control and authority again seizing something like this to gain more control now as frightening as it is the outbreak of coronavirus i don't believe is the fulfillment here of these prophecies in revelation chapter 6. it's not the fulfillment of these things but it is a foreshadow or a foretaste you say well how do we know this is not being fulfilled today you know a lot of people i i listen to today they're always trying to find out where we are in the book of revelation well look we're still back in chapters two and three in the church age the tribulation hadn't started yet i saw a cartoon not long ago where a man walked into the the kitchen in the morning and he looked kind of weary from the night and the news was on the tv and he asked his wife he says well which chapter of revelation are we in today and that's kind of the way sometimes people feel but we're not in revelation 6 because the rapture hasn't happened yet and also because the tribulation period has not commenced because the antichrist the writer on the white horse has not shown up yet to implement his peace plan so we can't be in the fourth seal if the first seal has not even been opened yet so this is a foreshadow or a foretaste of what is coming in the future now let's backtrack let's go back to matthew 24 again and we'll uh we'll close here back in matthew 24 and then again the parallel in luke 21 11 where jesus mentions plagues now this is jesus kind of farewell address here with his disciples and jesus and his disciples are in the temple and it's two days before he dies on the cross it's wednesday um april the 1st of a.d 33 and jesus and his disciples are heading out of the temple area for the last time and he points to the beautiful buildings there the temple buildings and says not one stone is going to be left upon another but what is torn down now you can imagine somebody today predicting the destruction of the white house or the empire state building or buckingham palace or the sydney opera house or the louvre i mean people would want more information so the disciples when they they get over to the mount of olives they go down the kidron valley over to the mount of olives they're looking down into the temple precincts jesus sits down there on a rock and his disciples ask him when will these things be what will be the sign of your coming in the end of the age and jesus then launches forth here into what's often called the mini apocalypse it's kind of a condensed version of the book of revelation we won't have time to look at it in detail jesus said a lot of things but the one big idea that we can't overlook is this world is not going to become a better place to live in over time things are going to get bad and really bad before they get better when christ returns people who believe this world is going to get better and better and better are in for a rude awakening jesus holds out no such false hope for this world to the contrary jesus gave his disciples and us a foreboding forecast a dark description of what we should look for as the end draws near jesus said it clearly in matthew 24 21 for then there will be great tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now nor ever shall so jesus didn't pull any punches i mean people can't accuse jesus of sugar coating of the truth i like what max lucado says he says painful contractions are in the forecast now jesus lists these different signs and he says these are the beginning of birth pains now again in luke 21 11 luke includes plagues in this now there are a lot of people today a lot of pastors you'll hear that will say that we're now in the birth paints we're experiencing these birth pains today that's what we're enduring now the view that i hold and that many others hold as well is these birth pains that are here in matthew 24 will be what will come about during the tribulation period after the rapture these birth pains aren't happening now they'll happen during that time of tribulation and one of the reasons we know that is other passages in the bible that mention birth pains are set within the time of the tribulation in 1st thessalonians chapter 5 the apostle paul says concerning the times and seasons you have no need for me to write anything to you for you yourselves know full well the day of the lord that's the tribulation will come like a thief in the night but while they are saying peace and safety sudden destruction will come up on them suddenly like birth pangs upon a woman and they will by no means escape so he's tying the birth pains there to the time of the tribulation also back in jeremiah chapter 30 in the old testament when it talks about that time of tribulation for israel it pictured it as a time of birth pains so these birth pains here are not things we see today they're things that will happen during the tribulation period now certainly we see wars today and we see famines and earthquakes and these kinds of things but the way they're going to happen in the future is what's being described here in matthew chapter 24. another reason that i take this as future and i've got a slide here again hopefully that will clarify this quickly for us but in jesus olivet discourse he mentions false christs wars and rumors of wars famine and then famines and plagues if you go to revelation 6 it's parallel it mirrors that you have the rider on the white horse the false christ the rider on the red horse that's war the rider on the black horse that's famine and the rider on the pale horse that's sword and famine and plague and the wild beasts of the earth so we believe revelation 6 is in the future during the tribulation if that's true and it's parallel to jesus sermon which is the mini-apocalypse then we have to put the events in matthew 24 into that period of tribulation as well so i see these birth pains as something that will happen in the future during the tribulation so then you ask well well does the coronavirus then have any relevance to the end times i like the way john mcarthur says it he says that doesn't mean the era we are living in is the one christ describes but it does underscore the imminency of christ's return for the church the world in which we live is right for the tribulation elements like the birth pang signs are already being felt the present afflictions may merely be the braxton hicks contractions premature labor pains but they nonetheless signify that the time for hard labor and then delivery is inevitable and quickly drawing near now i like that because we're not in the birth panes yet we're in the premature birth pains kind of like the braxton hicks contractions that signal the coming of these birth pains that will lead to the coming of jesus christ so what we see today and all these signs are like runway lights that are lighting up if you will signaling that the coming of christ is near and in these days in which we find ourselves we need to be reminded often that jesus is our only hope and that his coming is the only hope for this world i mean people who are looking for some utopia down here on this earth well i mean they should be looking around now and seeing what we're finding is dystopia that's taking place his coming is the only sure hope that we have we need to keep our hearts and minds focused on him well philip made a joke earlier about my football team and about football so i'll close with a football illustration since we've gotten that kicked off here's a great story on a balmy october afternoon in 1982 badger stadium in madison wisconsin was packed more than 60 000 diehard university of wisconsin supporters were watching their team take on the michigan state spartans michigan state had the much better team what seemed odd however as the score became more lopsided there were loud bursts of applause and shouts of joy from the wisconsin fans how could they cheer when their team was losing it turned out that 70 miles away the milwaukee brewers were beating the st louis cardinals in game three of the 1982 world series many of the fans in the stands were listening with portable radios and responding to something other than their immediate circumstances they're watching their team out there getting killed out there on the field but they're listening to another game they're tuned in to a different frequency and i would just encourage you in these days in which we live to ask yourself often what game am i listening to am i just constantly tuned in to to all the things that are happening on this earth or do i tune in regularly to heaven and do i allow that hope to fill me with joy that i know the final victory look up there our team is winning and that victory is going to be brought to earth at some point when jesus comes back to rule and reign and you and i need to live today in light of that future victory the ultimate victory that we have in jesus christ and may god help us to do that let me just say this as i close every one of us have a virus it's a universal virus it's the sin virus everybody's got it and there's no human cure there's no human vaccine now the only cure for this virus is the death and the resurrection of jesus christ when jesus came he took the full force of the sin virus upon himself the bible says god made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so we could become the righteousness of god in him so if you've never turned to jesus christ for that ultimate spiritual healing you can do that here in just a moment as we pray and you can turn to him and trust in jesus christ and believe in him the one who died on your behalf and took the sin virus for you and you can trust in him you know jesus is coming back for those who've come to him and i pray that you've come to him and i pray if you've not done that you'll do it now as we pray let's look to the lord together father we do thank you for our lord jesus we thank you that he took the sin virus for us so that we can be healed spiritually so we can be born again and have life and live in fellowship with you and someday that we can be caught up to meet the lord jesus in the air and live on this earth during his kingdom and go on into eternity and father as we look around at our world today there's a lot of despair a lot of disappointment a lot of discouragement father help us to tune into heaven frequently to listen to that game up there where we're winning and to think about that victory that's coming to earth very soon father help us to live in light of that each day help us to live ordinary lives but in an extraordinary way as we're empowered by your holy spirit to do our jobs and love our families and our spouses and be winsome and be attractive as we live out the the life that you've placed in us through our lord jesus christ father help us to be a testimony until jesus comes we ask these things in his name amen amen

Channel: Kindred Church

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Length: 43min 31sec (2611 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020