This sermon on April 26, 2020 by our pastor, Winston Pratt (Peace Mennonite Church, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada) is very timely and deserving of a wider audience. You can listen to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mPUiJDxcro and my notes on it are here
from Luke 12:54-57; Pastor Winston Pratt
12:54 Jesus also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A rainstorm is coming,’ and it does. 12:55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and there is. 12:56You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky, but how can you not know how to interpret the present time?
We can see from this passage that Jesus expects us to “know how to interpret” the times. We are not bystanders watching form a distance but need to be wise interpreters of how and where God is at work and what God might be trying to tell us.
Reaching the wrong conclusions can be disastrous.
Today, dealing with a pandemic and Canada’s worst contemporary mass shooting people are asking:
Where is God?
What does this mean?
What is happening?
How should Christians respond?
We need to be able to think biblically to know how to:
1. respond to our world
2. be faithful to God
3. live in hope
4. be a beacon of hope, a witness to our world
We don’t need to defend God. God can defend himself. The Bible does not explain or justify many of God’s acts. They are recorded to help us see who God really is and what he has done, is doing and will do.
Israel in exile in Babylon in the 6th century BCE was asking the same questions as are being asked today. In the midst of God telling them their being there was his doing but that he will deliver, restore them (Isaiah 54-5) God’s response was “Isaiah 55:8 “Indeed, my plans are not like your plans, and my deeds are not like your deeds.”
In the midst of crises such as ours we need to accept the following truths:
1. God’s ways are not our ways. We can’t fully understand this transcendent Being, let alone be like him in our knowing and ability to control things and determine outcomes. But God has left us a witness – the scriptures – to tell us what we need to know. He also revealed himself most fully in Jesus and this is recorded in those scriptures.
2. God is always active and involved in his world. He is not “Watching from a Distance” as Bette Midler sings and as the 17th and 18th century Deists thought. This can even include the direction of pagan kings without their knowing it, such as Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar and Persia’s Cyrus. Mostly though, he is behind the scenes. We tend to understand things in hindsight, although the nearer we keep to God, the more likely we are to understand sooner than if not close to God.
3. There is a bigger picture of God acting than what we might see in front of us, and we need to keep that in mind and seek to discern what that is.
Jesus also pointed out, as recorded in Luke 13, how we judge wrongly: “13:1 Now there were some present on that occasion who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. 13:2 He answered them, “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered these things? 13:3No, I tell you! But unless you repent, you will all perish as well! 13:4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in Jerusalem? 13:5 No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”
The points we can make from this are:
1. We make wrong judgments: “They deserve it.” No, the message is for us to repent to be sure we are prepared for come what may, so that we do not also perish.
2. Bad things happen to good and bad people. Jesus’ healing of a blind man (John 9:1-3) was not because of a need to correct any sin on his or his parents part but to show God’s power. Too often we need our own spiritual blindness corrected.
3. Tragedies should remind us that our day of reckoning could come quickly too.
4. Suffering can have a purpose in God’s plan. The ultimate example is Jesus on the cross. The powers of evil thought by killing him they had won, but it was really their defeat. All of this knowledge should give us hope we can share. We should not turn elsewhere for answers and support.
5. These things can be signs of the end times, “birth pangs”, beginnings, Jesus called them (Mark 13:8); signs of something new God is doing. However, he did not expect us to try and predict when the time of the end will be, as he told his disciples during his ministry and again before ascending to heaven (Mark 13:32, Acts 1:7). That is wrong.
Questions for us:
1. Has God given up on the world and left it to follow a course to its own ruin? No, God created the world good and God will now allow us to totally change that. Look what he did in Noah’s time and at the Tower of Babel when humans were doing other than what God wanted.
2. Are the bad being punished? Are we being punished for being bad? No, God can use these things to show his power and glory.
3. Is this a sign of the end? Not necessarily. In any case, what did Jesus tell us? Watch and pray, but go about your work (Mark 13).
4. What is God telling us?
a. Life is short and unpredictable; are we ready to face that?
b. Something new is underway in the world. Can we see what it is?
5. How are we reading the signs of the times? Are we mistakenly going our own way and making our own judgments? Jesus wants us to see him for who he is.
This could still be a wake-up call for us all!
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