Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Gene Autry paid 27 thousand dollars for one letter of an old sign.

Back in 1923 a real estate developer put up a huge sign on the hill over looking Hollywood, California.

It became a symbol for the many who came seeking jobs in the movies.

Over the years it became weather worn, and was damaged by vandals.

Several entertainers decided it was time to start a save the sign movement.

They sold the letters of the old sign to raise money for the new one.

Gene Autry bought one of the old signs.

The new sign is 4 stories high, and is steel reinforced, and it has a fence to protect it from vandals.

It is a state of the art sign, and has to be considered one of the signs of our time.

People all over the world recognize this sign from Hollywood.

It is a sign of the stars that people idolize in our movies and culture.

Signs have power to move and motivate people.

Dorothy Parker, a short story writer and theater critic, had a small office in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

No one ever came in to see her, and she felt isolated and alone.

She solved her problem by hanging a one word sign on her door.

She got people coming in to see her all the time.

The one word sign simply said Gentlemen.

Signs determine the direction people go all the time, and we have to be constantly reading signs when we travel, or we could easily get lost.

In a strange city the number one task of a driver is to find the right signs.

We are all sign seekers as we travel, for they are essential for arriving at our destination.

Sign seeking can even become a full time job if you are in the situation Steven Callahan found himself in.

His small plane went down in the Atlantic, and he was adrift for 76 days.

This was the longest any man had ever survived in an inflatable raft.

He drifted 1800 miles, and when he was rescued he wrote a book called ADRIFT.

He said he spent his days looking for a sign.

He was looking for any sign of life.

It could be a plane, a fish, a bird, or any sign that would give him hope.

It is a world where people always need a basis for hope, and that is why they seek a sign.

This is a world of sign seekers, and the result is that it is a gold mine for sign makers.

There is a lot of money in signs, and not just the advertising and neon signs of the business world, but also the signs of the time makers, who make a fortune off people's hunger for signs.

Jesus knew Christians would be sign seekers like everybody else, and so to save them a lot of emotional turmoil, and a fortune, he warns them to be on guard against the most common tricks of the sign promoters.

The first one is war and rumors of war.

I call your attention to verse 6 where Jesus says, "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed.

Such things must happen, but the end is still to come."

Jesus makes it clear that no war or rumor of war is a sign of anything but the depravity of man.

It is not to alarm the Christian at all as if it had an significance as to the time of His coming and the end.

There have been hundreds of wars since he said this, and even two horrible world wars, but they were in no way signs of the end.

Commentators by the dozens point out that Jesus is teaching that war will be a part of history, and every age will see wars.

They cannot be a sign of anything because they are so common.

To make war the sign of the end would be like making bank robbery the sign of the end.

Commonplace matters of every generation are not of much value as signs of a once in a history event.

You need something unique and unusual, and not just everyday human folly.

So Jesus says, first of all, don't let talk of war get you alarmed.

Now what have Christians often done with this admonition to not get alarmed?

They have sounded an alarm with almost every war of significance in history.

Not just the cults and sensationalists, but some of the most godly men of history, whom God has used in a mighty way, have fallen into the trap of making some war the sign of the end.

They are not damned for paying no heed to Jesus, and doing what He says they are not to do, but by their disobedience they displease Him, and add confusion where He tried to calm the waters.

Dr. Oswald J. Smith of the Peoples Church in Toronto, one of the giants of the 20th century said, "I'm reminded of the fact that the Lord Jesus stated in unmistakable terms that one of the many signs of the approaching end of the age would be talk about war."

He was a great man of God, but he jumped to a false conclusion and twisted the words of Jesus to say just the opposite of what He really said.

Book after book quotes that war and rumor of war is a sign of the end, and that we should be alarmed, even though Jesus said just the opposite is the case.

This is precisely why Protestants do not believe in a pope or any higher authority having the final say on what the Word of God is saying.

The common people can often read the Bible and better hear what God is saying than the so-called experts.

The Bible has to be in the hands of the people to balance out the mistakes of leaders.

The Apostles themselves misunderstood Jesus and needed to be corrected, and so none of us are beyond misunderstanding the Word.

We need each other to bring balance, and to overcome impressions that are not consistent with God's revelation.

This is a good example, for many see war as a sign of the end, even though Jesus made it clear that it is not.

I don't care what authority you quote, or how many of them you can quote.

Jesus said war is not to alarm Christians as a sign of the end.

That is my highest authority, so I refuse to get alarmed by any war as being a sign of the end.

Christians have let many wars become occasions to signal to the world that the end is near.

Many of the cartoons depicting the doom of the world are aimed at religious fanatics.

They have refused to listen to the Lord of history.

None of us could escape the impact of the news coverage of the Persian Gulf War.

The rumors were wild and I expected a war far beyond the level it came to.

Rumors exaggerate war, and there is no way to escape some degree of alarm.

Jesus is not saying that we should not care about war and its awful consequences.

He is saying that we should not be alarmed that it is a signal that history is about to end.

It is not a sign of the end.

If the United States and Russia go to war and blow each other off the map, and destroy a major part of the world, that is something to be alarmed about, but it is not a sign of the end.

The work of the church will go on after that until the Great Commission is fulfilled, and the whole world has the Gospel.

Jesus said in 24:14 that only then will the end come.

Man will never set the agenda for Jesus by all of his wars.

They can kill people by the millions, and bloody this planet from one end to the other, but war will never bring history to the end.

Only Christ can do that, and He tells us war will not be His means of doing it.

It will be the onward Christian soldiers who take the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

That is the sign that Jesus says we should give heed to.

Durant in The Lessons Of History tells us that in the last 3,421 years of recorded history there have been only 268 years that have been free of war.

There are always wars going on someplace in the world.

If you are going to use war as a sign, you just as well use plane crashes for one as well, for one is as likely as the other to signify the end of history.

The problem with using war, or any disastrous event as a sign of the end, is that you have to delude yourself into believing you live in the worst of times, and that your war, or disaster, is worst than anybody else's.

This is almost impossible for those who know history.

Listen, for example, to the Roman historian Tacitus who wrote about life in the Roman Empire in 69 A. D. "I am entering on the history of a period rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife, and even in peace full of horrors.

Four emperors perished with the sword.

There were three civil wars; there were more with foreign enemies; there were often wars that had both characters at once."

After describing some of these he goes on, "Now too Italy was prostrated by disasters either entirely novel, or that recurred only after a long succession of ages; cities in Campania's richest plains were swallowed up and overwhelmed; Rome was wasted by conflagration, its oldest temples consumed, and the Capital itself fired by the hands of the citizens."

He goes on to describe the masses of exiles, and all of the many crimes.

The corruption in government was a nightmare, and everyone was out to get what they could at everyone else's expense.

He concludes his description with these words: "Slaves were bribed to turn against their masters, and freed men to betray their patrons; and those who had not an enemy were destroyed by friends."

These were not exacting the good old days.

It they ever develop a real time machine, don't be to quick to sign up for a trip back to the New Testament period in Rome.

On the other hand, the trip might do you good, for you would realize it still a fallen world today, but you would lose your illusion that it is the worst of times.

Those who latch on the wars and rumor of wars as the sign of the end are in direct opposition to Jesus, and they have filled history with many blunders.

Sign seekers create sign skeptics because they maximize the very thing that Jesus minimized-the wars, rumors of wars, famine, and earthquakes.

All of this is just a part of history is what Jesus is saying, and they are no particular sign of the end.

They come in all ages, and our age is no exception.

If we are to look at current events as the focus of our hope, then we had better be ready for disappointment, for it can't get much better than World War I got for fulfilling all of these signs.

One of the great Bible prophecy experts of his day was Louis Bauman.

He published the book Light From Bible Prophecy in 1940.

It was well received by the evangelical world, and it was about as good as such a book can get in reading the signs of the times from current events.