The Good News of Jesus
01/17/2010 - Signs of the Times
On Tuesday afternoon a devastating earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale rocked the little country of Haiti. The quake was centered about ten miles west of Port-au-Prince, the capital of the country, and triggered thirty smaller earthquakes with magnitudes between 4.5 to 5.9 on the scale.
In 45 seconds the quake flattened the palace of the President, the UN headquarters, the country's main prison, the national cathedral, hospitals, schools, and thousands of homes like the ones in this picture. It was the worst earthquake to hit Haiti since 1770 and by far the most tragic event that's ever happened there. One article I read said, "I don't think a word has been invented for what is happening in Haiti. It's a total disaster."
Reports are still coming in but right now the Red Cross is saying that the lives of three million people will be affected. That's how many live in the Port-au-Prince area. The death toll is some where around 50,000 people, but there are still many who are missing and unaccounted for and feared dead.
An earthquake is not what Haiti needs right now. It's already the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Port-au-Prince, where most of the damage occurred, has no fire department, no rescue squads, no city or state services, no infrastructure. They are not set up in anyway to address this kind of catastrophe and there's no Haitian leadership in place to deal with it.
Immediately, President Obama went into action and promised to mount an all-out rescue effort to help the people overcome what he called "a cruel and incomprehensible tragedy." Soon after that ships and planes, helicopters and marines were on their way spear heading one of the largest international relief efforts ever.
And when I opened up my computer on Wednesday morning I was bombarded with emails from humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross and World Vision, Hope International and Tony Campolo's group called EAPE which stands for the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education. Their stated mission is to inspire and enable followers of Jesus to live out God's love for the poor and oppressed and their primary focus is the country of Haiti. So we gave a gift to them from Valley View, but they're all good, trustworthy agencies that you can give to as well.
In his email Tony put out a three-fold plea for prayer, for funds, and for help by those in the medical profession, doctors and nurses who would consider offering their services in the days ahead.
He then went on to say, "Just after the earthquake, as huge billows of dust caused by collapsing buildings hung over Port-au-Prince, witnesses heard not only the moans of suffering people, but also the eerie sounds of hymns being sung by Haitian Christians. These are the songs of an undaunted people who are determined to maintain their faith in God.
"Help them to hope! Help their prayers to be answered! I don't believe God called this disaster down on Haiti, but I do believe that God's grace and love, flowing through those of us who are surrendered to his will, can bring healing and redemption to our Haitian brothers and sisters. Please, please, please do what you can!"
And so we want to encourage you this morning to do what you can... to pray, to give, to help if you're qualified to do so. In order to expedite your gift we encourage you not to give through Valley View, but to give through one of the reputable agencies I already mentioned. But right now, I want to give us all a moment of quiet so we can pray and ask God to help the people of Haiti. Bring up series title slide while we're praying.
Whenever I hear about a devastating earthquake like the one in Haiti or like the one that triggered the tsunami a few years ago I often think of the words of Jesus in the passage that we're going to look at today. If you have a Bible turn with me to Mark 13.
This morning we continue our series through the gospel of Mark called The Good News of Jesus ... As Told by Mark with a look at what some scholars have called one of the most difficult chapters in the New Testament. And after studying it for a few weeks I'm ready to agree with them. These words of Jesus are difficult to understand because they're rooted in Jewish concepts and Jewish ideas and filled with Jewish images that would have been much more familiar to Jesus' audience then they are to us today. But over the next three weeks we're going to unpack it and do our best to try to figure them out.
Remember we're in the midst of Passion Week, the final week of Jesus' life. The week started out with Palm Sunday and Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem where he's hailed as King with hosannas and blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. At the end of the day we're told that Jesus went up to the Temple to check things out, "looked around at everything" it says and then went back to his friend's house in Bethany to spend the night.
On Monday morning he was up bright and early walking back to Jerusalem with his disciples. He cursed a fig tree on the way which was symbolic of what was going to happen to the nation of Israel and then he climbed the steep steps up to the Temple Mount where he started a riot overturning tables and throwing money on the floor and releasing animals from their cages and pigeons from their pens saying, "Is it not written: 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations?' But you have made it a 'den of robbers.'"
Jesus cleansed the Temple on Monday and that audacious act would quickly catch up to him and accelerate the plans of the religious leaders to capture and kill him.
On Tuesday he had the courage to go back to the "scene of the crime" so to speak and spends all day answering questions about his right to do what he did and to say what he said. He's double teamed and triple teamed by the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians, political parties that didn't get along at all, but who put their political differences aside to gang up on Jesus they're mutual enemy.
He ends the day spying on a poor widow as she puts two small copper coins, the legal minimum, into the temple treasury and says, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth, but she, out of her poverty, put in everything - all she had to live on."
Now it's the end of an exhausting Tuesday and as Jesus and his disciples are exiting the Temple we read these words in Mark 13:1-2, As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!" 2"Do you see all these great buildings?" replied Jesus. "Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down."
Stop right there. What Jesus just said in response to all the ooing and aahing over the magnificence of the Jewish Temple is absolutely astounding! Let me read it again, "Do you see all these great buildings?" replied Jesus. "Not one stone here will be left on another, every one will be thrown down."
Throughout this series I've tried to stress the importance of the Temple in Jerusalem to the Jewish people. The centrality of the Temple and all that it stood for is something that's been dawning on me as we've worked our way through Mark's gospel. And we need to understand the role that the Temple played in the minds of the Jewish people now more than ever if we're going to make any sense at all of what Jesus is going to tell his disciples and us in Mark 13.
Architecturally the Temple was the largest and most beautiful building in the ancient world. King Herod had begun building the Temple about twenty years before the birth Jesus. And so by this time it had been under construction for about fifty years and would take another thirty years to complete. It was Herod's stated goal that the Temple would outlast the great pyramids of Egypt.
One article I read this week said that in today's currency it would cost 174 billion dollars to build Solomon's Temple and Herod's Temple was even more magnificent than that. That's more than Jerry Jones spent to build Texas stadium! Why so much money? Well, because the Temple was made of limestone, overlaid with imported white marble and then crowned with pure gold. The front doors of the Temple were 80 feet high and overlaid with gold. The pinnacle on the roof was lined with spikes of pure gold so that birds couldn't land and soil the building.
The ancient rabbis said that if you looked at the Temple in the sun you'd have to close your eyes because of the brilliance shining off the gold and all the white marble. The Talmud said that if you haven't seen Herod's Temple you haven't seen a building. And as much as the Jewish people despised King Herod the presence of the Temple that he had built was a sign of God's blessing on their nation and gave them all a sense of stability and security in the midst of Rome's domination.
The Temple sat on top of Mount Moriah the same mountain where 2,000 years earlier God had told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. But in order to put a building on top of that mountain a platform had to be constructed to level the summit. And the stones that make up that platform are enormous and to this day baffle engineers as to how they were put in place.
Many of the stones are over twenty feet long, five feet high, and eight feet thick. They weigh over 100 tons. And yet they're cut so precise that you can't even get the blade of pen knife between most of them. There's no mortar holding them together, just the weight of the stones themselves is enough.
The largest masonry stone known to man has been excavated under the Western wall in a place called the Rabbi's tunnel. It is forty-five long, twelve feet high, eight feet thick and weighs over 700 tons. That's 140,000 pounds. The average car weighs 2 tons. That's the combined weight of 350 cars!
"Look at these massive stones," they say to Jesus. They were massive then and are still massive by today's standards. And Jesus tells them, "Do you see all these great buildings?" "Not one stone here will be left on another, every one will be thrown down."
That's shocking. That's scandalous. That's the kind of talk that can get you arrested and beaten and crucified. Because not only was the Temple an architectural marvel. But it was the centerpiece of the religion of Israel. It was at the heart and soul of how people worshiped God and had been for centuries. It was at the Temple where sacrifices were made and prayers were prayed and confessions were uttered and sins were forgiven. You couldn't enter into God's presence without sacrifice. That's the way God had set it up and to talk of it all coming down someday was blasphemy. It was like a terroristic threat.
The Temple was where God lived. It was God's house. It was where heaven and earth intersected. It was the most sacred place on earth. For it to be destroyed was unthinkable.
But that's what Jesus said. And as they make their way out of the Temple and up the Mount of Olives Jesus launches into his longest recorded answer to any question he's ever been asked and his second longest discourse next to the Sermon on the Mount.
Mark 13 and the parallel passages in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 are known as the Olivet discourse because this teaching was given by Jesus on the Mount of Olives. Here's a picture of the Mount of Olives as it looks today just east of the city of Jerusalem.
There aren't many olive trees on the Mount of Olives, not much green at all. The trees were all cut down by the Romans in the catastrophic events that Jesus is about to describe in this chapter. So today, instead of olive trees you see tombs planted all over the mountain where both Jews and Christians have been buried over the last twenty centuries.
And if you climb the Mount of Olives like Jesus is doing with his disciples this what you see today looking down on what was the Jewish Temple in Jesus' day, but today is a gold domed Muslim mosque called the Dome of the Rock which was built on the site of the Temple in AD 691.
Now look at verse 3, As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, 4"Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?"
If we're going to understand Mark 13 we have to remember the two questions that Jesus is answering. They both have to do with the destruction of the Temple and the end of a religious system that had dictated how God's people related to God for centuries. Jesus said it was all coming down so they ask, "When will that happen? And what will be the sign that that catastrophe is about to take place?"
And Jesus said to them in verse 5, "Watch out that no one deceives you. 6Many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and will deceive many. 7When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.
Jesus uses the image of a pregnant woman and the intense pain she experiences in labor right before child birth to explain what's going to happen to the Temple and the trauma that will take place. A new baby is about to be born. A whole new way of relating to God is about to begin that doesn't depend on the Temple and the priests and the rituals and the sacrifices and all these things that they were so impressed with. But it's going to be a painful, bloody process.
And before it happens he says there will be impostors. Many will come and claim that they're the Messiah and that they'll save Israel from the Romans. "But don't be deceived," Jesus says, "they're all bogus." And history tells us that was indeed the case in the years following Jesus. A bunch of phonies rose up.
"There will be wars and rumors of wars, but don't be alarmed the end is still to come." "The end," that Jesus is talking about here is not the end of the world, but the end of the Temple and all that it stood for. That's the question he's answering. The end of the world is mentioned in other places in Scripture to be sure, but the end he's talking about here has to do with the end of a way of life that God's people were accustomed to that centered on a building.
"Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom." At this time in history the Parthians, from what today is the region of Iran, were pressing in on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire. And those living in Britain were challenging the western edge of the Empire. Conflict was heating up.
"There will be earthquakes," Jesus says, "in various places" which made me think of Haiti this week, but of course there have been devastating earthquakes all through history and apparently some occurred right before the Temple was destroyed. We know that there was an earthquake in Jerusalem the day Jesus died. There was earthquake in Philippi a few years later when the apostle Paul was in prison there.
"There will be famines" and in Acts 11:28 we read about a global famine that spread over the entire Roman world during the reign of Claudius sometime between AD 41 and AD 54. All these things were the beginning of labor pains and the delivery of something brand new.
Look at verse 9, "You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them. 10And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. 11Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit.
All these things happened and are recorded for us in the book of Acts. We know the disciples were arrested and appeared before the Sanhedrin, the supreme court of Israel in that day. We know they were beaten and flogged. We have record that Peter and Paul stood before governors and kings as witnesses to them.
And in the next generation the gospel did go out to the whole known world. It wasn't just a Jewish gospel. It's good news for all nations. The book of Acts says the apostles turned the world upside down. Some years later the apostle Paul would write in Colossians 1:6, The gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world. He then adds inColossians 1:23, This is the gospel you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.
All this must happen Jesus says before these stones get thrown down.
Look at verse 12, "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 13Everyone will hate you because of me, but those who stand firm to the end will be saved."
Parenting challenges are nothing new are they?! Family issues have been around since Cain murdered his brother Abel. Kids will rebel against parents, Jesus says, fathers against children, brother against brother. Abuse and domestic violence will all escalate in the days before the Temple collapses.
Everyone will hate you because of me, which is certainly what happened a few years later when Roman persecution broke out and Christ followers were viciously tortured and killed by Nero and the emperors that followed him.
"But those who stand firm to the end will be saved," if not in this life then certainly in the next. Remember this is eye opening and shocking news to these men. We know it to be true from our study of church history, but at this point they were still hoping that Jesus was going to establish his kingdom right now, this week even. In their minds he was going to set up his throne as the true King of Israel and they were going to sit on thrones in Jerusalem with him.
But now he's adding some graphic detail to what he said a few months earlier in Mark 8:34-35, Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.
These are the signs of the times that were to come and within a generation everything Jesus said would be fulfilled and the Temple would come down. What Jesus said came true and is just another reason why he is worthy of our worship and of our trust and of our love and of our full devotion, just another reason why we shout to the Lord this morning.
Read ahead and next week we'll see what actually happened when the Temple came tumbling down.