Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

We are coming into the season of Advent in a couple of weeks.

Advent is a season of the church where the anticipation of the birth of Christ is observed.

The advent is the watching for his arrival; the manifestation of Christ as foretold by the prophets.

However in our celebration of advent, we must even more anticipate His second coming.

Just as there were signs that pointed the world to his first arrival, there are clear indications of his second.

A casual scroll through Scripture (OT and NT alike), will give you clear prophetic indicators of his return.

More than 30 percent of the Bible is prophetic in nature.

There are more passages in the Old Testament about his Second Coming than there are about his first.

The Apostles lived and wrote to the church with the full expectation of Jesus’ imminent return.

I have a clear understanding that anytime you get into prophetic teaching and the Second Coming of Christ, you touch subjects that are theologically controversial and people will disagree.

That’s not uncommon when we’re attempting to dissect future events.

The are nuances that are debatable.

However, there are also clear and distinguishable events that are not secondary issues, like the Rapture of the Church.

Some have tried to explain this away, but in do so, there are serious implications to Scripture that cannot be reconciled.

The way to approach the study of Prophetic Scripture is the same way you interpret Scripture that is historical, narrative, doctrinal, poetry, or prose.

You use the same principles of interpretation to study end-times as you would the parables of Jesus.

In doing so, you will find that Scripture is not ambiguous on the topic as some people want to say.

However, if you abandon the basic principles for interpretation of Scripture, you add ambiguity, you introduce false teaching, and you increase confusion.

Here’s the bottom line: The Lord wants you to know and understand His Word.

What we need to know is plainly revealed in Scripture- both Old Testament and the New Testament.

What is plainly revealed in the Bible is that this world is going to end with the return of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Environmentalists want you to believe that climate change is going to bring our end unless the tide is turned through human achievement, or that there’s a big asteroid on the way.

Others want us to get focused on a nuclear dooms day scenario or a pandemic, and then those who believe that aliens will over take us.

Yet with all these speculations and pontifications, it leaves God out of the equation and that He has a plan.

You can be certain that when the end comes, everyone will know He is Lord.

We know that the end of this age will arrives with Christ arriving the same way he left (Acts 1:10-11), with the church behind him.

That begins with the Rapture of the Church, followed by a 7 year period called the Tribulation as the world faces fierce judgment, which is really God’s final appeal for repentance.

All of that will be culminated by the personal and physical return of Christ, followed by 1000 years of his reign here on earth before the final judgement.

All of this is presented in the Bible in amazing detail.

What is remarkable in our day are the number of people who will believe anything (including humanism, the paranormal, or aliens) but those simple, but profound truths clearly taught in the Bible.

What I originally intended to do was to show you how our world is being deceived by the doctrine of demons (1 Timothy 4:1).

But this exploration led me to the passage we’re going to focus on this week and next week.

I want to take you today to Matthew 24, a passage of Scripture called the Mount Olivet Discourse.

We’re going to zero in on a passage where Jesus likens the days just prior to his return as the days of Noah in verses 36-41.

You will find this teaching Mark 13 and Luke 17.

Clear Signs of the End Times

In Matthew 24, Jesus list a litany of signs that will indicate his return.

This inventory of last day events starts with the return of Israel as a nation in 1948 (the fig tree).

If we were to go back and review the others we would discover a host of cosmological, environmental, and spiritual indicators of Christ’s return.

We would read about wars, famine, and earthquakes.

Jesus warns us about false Christs, deceptive doctrine, false teachers and a host of other signs.

Jesus refers to these as birthing pangs and there is no doubt that, just as with the pangs of birth, they increase in intensity and frequency.

In fact, they are accelerating exponentially as we speak, which will be incumbent of his sudden return.

But then, after reminding us that no one, not the angels in heaven or the Son of Man himself knows the day or hour of his return- only the Father in Heaven knows, Jesus brings yet another and important sign in verse Matthew 24:37 “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

This is where I want to take a little time this morning to discern so that you can be awake to what is going on in our world.

Even though we cannot know the day or hour, we are commanded to be aware of the season.

What can we learn about the Days of Noah as it applies to our world today and our expectation of Christ’s return?

First, let’s go back and read in Scripture what it says about the events of the days of Noah:

Genesis 6:1-6, 9-12 “1 Now it happened, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, 2 that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were good in appearance; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.

3 Then Yahweh said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever because he indeed is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.

Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

5 Then Yahweh saw that the evil of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

6 And Yahweh regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”

“9 These are the generations of Noah.

Noah was a righteous man, blameless among those in his generations; Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah became the father of three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

11 Now the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.”

There are numerous signs and corollaries here, but I want to focus on 6 specific signs and how they directly apply to our current world.

The Days of Noah Experienced an Explosion of the World’s Population

Notice that what preempts this is an explosion in the earth’s population.

However, I would add that this not just a numerical growth in the population, but a growth of evil within the population.

You see, God’s command to Adam and Eve before the fall was to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28).

The implication here was that the righteous men of God would increase and populate the earth.

With the fall, however, that command would be perverted and instead of righteousness multiplying, now evil would abound.

This increase in evil reached a point where men were integrating spiritually and physically with demons.

It reached a point of such moral erosion that God said he regretted creating man (Genesis 6:6).

How will this population explosion manifest itself today?

The Bible said there will be an explosion of knowledge and travel:

Clearly you can quickly and relatively easily travel anywhere in the world you want.

Not only that, but you can speak with locals, easily exchange currency, and find your way around thanks to technology.

Even more, you be anywhere in the world you like virtually.

The Bible said that mankind would be capable of destroying itself

As we sit here today, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are all threatening to use nuclear weapons.

Even more sinister are the globalists that believe reducing the global population to 500 million people is a righteous cause.

The Bible said that people would demand for global peace:

The Bible says that there would be continual war between nations

The Bible says that there will be a global governance over nations, the economy and religion:

Ten years ago, the fastest growing religion in America was Wicca, today it is atheism.

In 2020 more people believe in Satan than they do God.

What that means is the moral tether of our culture has been untied.

Today we are witnesses the unraveling of our culture as we have eroded the sanctity of marriage, celebrate abortion on demand, advocate for the perversion and mutilation of our children.

The reason is that are following deceiving spirit and doctrine of demons, even celebrating the detestable practices that God clearly forbids.

The Days of Noah Experienced The Commingling of Demonic Forces and Agendas

The Bible says there will be a perversion of marriage:

There are those who try to tie this into a connection between the Sons of God (descendants of Seth) with the Daughters of Man (the Canaanite women).

This seems to be a neat and tidy explanation of the text, but when you look at Scripture as a whole, it leaves the interpretation weak it’s connection to the rest of Scripture.

First Peter 3:19-20 says, “[Christ was] Preaching to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.”

The word used here for “spirits” (pneumata) is used in the Bible only to describe supernatural beings.

Here in First Peter, Genesis 6, and 2 Peter 2:4, 5, 9 all reference fallen angels (demons) through the context of the flood.

2 Peter 2:4-5, 9 “For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but cast them into the pit and delivered them to chains of darkness, being kept for judgment; 5 and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;” “9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,”

In addition to these New Testament references, the earliest Jewish theologians held this view (cf. 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Septuagint (LXX), the writings of Philo and Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

The same position was held by the early Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen.

Although the Old Testament sometimes declares God’s people to be His sons (cf.

Deuteronomy 14:1; Isaiah 1:2; Hosea 1:10), the normal meaning of “sons of God” is angels.

In addition to this, the Gospels record demons fallen angels as craving to inhabit humans (cf.

Mark 5:11–13; Luke 8:31–33; 11:24–26).

(Hughes)

Therefore, understanding that “the sons of God” are angels, and understanding that angels are sexless and cannot marry or procreate (cf.

Luke 20:34–36), “the sons of God” marrying “the daughters of man” is best interpreted as fallen angels (demons) commandeering the souls of men, and these demonized men marrying the daughters of other men.