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In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, we rejoice that our Lord Jesus is returning in glory soon for us. And this for us, for the Christian, is not a frightful thing or something to worry about. It’s, in fact, something joyful and something that we’re looking forward to. Jesus frightens when he’s teaching and he says, when you see these things happening, lift up your heads. Don’t run for the hills. Lift up your head in love because your redemption draws near. That’s what’s coming on the last day. That’s who’s coming on the last day. God’s Redeemer, the one who loves you. And it won’t be long now. The time in this life, the time of sorrow, the time of tears and weeping, will soon come to an end. Suffering for that day. We pray, Maranatha, come Lord Jesus. We look for that day, and we look for that return, and we’re ready for that.
But we’re also, and this is the lesson of the text, we’re also ready to wait for that return. We want to have a two-fold readiness. This is the lesson that Jesus is giving to us in the parable, and we’re headed towards it. I want to get to the parable through the epistle. I want to do a little bit of work on 1 Thessalonians to get there, but we want to get to the point where Jesus says, look, the wisdom of the five wise Thessalonians is this. They were ready for the wedding, and they were also ready to wait for the wedding. They had a two-fold ready verge, a now and not yet. If Jesus comes back today, God be praised. If he comes back tomorrow, God be praised. If he comes back in a thousand years, God be praised. And we want to have that kind of readiness. God be praised.
Now, the thing that I, one of the things that assaults that readiness is a Christian obsession with the end times. And I want to think about that because my own past, many of you know that I for a long time was in the evangelical church, was particularly interested in the dispensational theology, the idea that the history of world events was unfolding as God had promised in the prophetic books. When I was 19, I dropped out of college and was backpacking around Israel to see biblical prophecy unfolding before my eyes. I was ready for this thing. I remember, I remember one time I was driving in Albuquerque and listening to Christian radio and the radio station went silent and I thought, I’ve missed the rapture. I mean, looking at this at some point I was convinced that the king of Spain was the one world ruler who was going to be the Antichrist. So just this kind of thing.
And one winter in particular, I remember I was convinced by my uncle; he had this article or text or something that said that, I think it was 1998, that Jesus would return, giving me the date in 1998. I remember I was staying with my grandparents, my family was, Christmas, and they had one of those sort of Swedish calendars on the wall, you know, where it said the month and thus for that day and the year. And so I was sliding down the days. I would wake up on December 24, December 25, December 26, and I was looking there; there were only, you know, five more days left in the history of the world—25, 4, 3, 2, 1 day left. This is December 31st, and I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that this was the last day that Jesus would come back.
It was, I think, 10 o’clock when we went to bed and I was like, well there are just two more hours. And then I woke up the next morning and I thought, that was hard. That moment, I want to try to grab that moment, but I want you to know that when I woke up that morning and realized that the Lord had not returned, I thought, well maybe it’s still December 31st somewhere in the world, like Jesus isn’t coming back on Central Standard Time or something like that. But that maybe Jesus—did you see?—so there’s something that happens. There’s a lot of wrong things in reading the Bible on one hand and the newspaper on the other. There’s a lot of wrong things about that approach. The main wrong thing is you end up unchecking things that God has checked. You end up undoing promises that God has kept. You say, well, no, this Bible promise hasn’t been kept by Jesus, or this Bible promise the Lord hasn’t yet met. It’s already a dangerous thing to uncheck the things that the Lord has checked.
And He’s checked off, this is the point, he’s checked off everything. And it’s a day—there’s only one thing left: come in glory, raise the dead, divide the sheep and the goats, there’s the new heaven and the new earth. The last day is the only thing left on the Lord’s checklist. There are no more prophecies to bring about to be fulfilled, but if we start looking at the world as if God hasn’t kept all of his pieces—and if he is keeping them in history—then something dangerous happens, not only in the way we look at the world, but in the way we look at promises. But here’s the result. Once you are convinced that there is a promise that God has made, and that promise is not kept, this causes a deep spiritual conflict. I know that many of you have experienced this many times in your own lives. I’ve been able to walk through a few of these with a number of you. I can count these times in my own life as well, where I thought that God had given me a promise, and that promise wasn’t kept, and I had to be either angry with God if God even existed.
And something happens spiritually when we get so worked up into seeing the events of the world as fulfillment of biblical prophecies, and then the work doesn’t come back. It becomes very dangerous. So what do we do to make sure that we spend a little bit of time in 1 Thessalonians 4 here? What do we think of the text? Because this is one of the main texts you think just that’s used to argue the doctrine of the rapture—the idea that seven years before the great returns, the Lord will come back and remove his Christians secretly from the world and then go back to dealing with Israel. Remember those Left Behind books and TV shows? That’s what that was all about—that rapture. And this text is used by people as a defense of that.
I want us to see that that’s not the thing that Paul is teaching in the text. Paul had been to the Thessalonians; he was on his second missionary journey, he’d gone to Philippi, over to Thessalonica, and he had preached to them, and then he had to leave pretty soon, although he was there long enough to tell them that Jesus was dying and then returning in glory to judge the living and the dead, to raise the dead. But then a question just was raised: well, what about the living? What happens to the living when Jesus returns? He’s going to rise again now. We confess that he’ll raise the dead, but what if Jesus were to come back today? The dead will be raised, but what happens to us? You can imagine that the Thessalonians were wondering about that and thought, well, maybe they’ll miss the resurrection altogether, or maybe the Lord will kill us and then raise us from the dead. Maybe that is what will happen. They didn’t mention all that. And so, Paul writes to comfort them.
You want to pick it up in Romans 16 at the very bottom of the page of the bulletin? For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with a voice of an archangel, with the sound of the trumpet of God—noting secret here—and the dead in Christ will rise first, the voice of an archangel. We who are alive, who are left, we will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, then, and so we will always be with the Lord. So encourage one another with these words. In other words, Paul is telling us that even if we’re alive when the Lord returns in glory, we will not miss the resurrection. He will change us, transform our lowly bodies to be like unto His glory, so that we can behold Him face-to-face and partake of the new life that’s coming in the resurrection. That’s what gloriousness is.
And just like all of the other times in the Scriptures where the Lord talks about the second coming, the promise not to go to all of the crazy world events that are happening, but to fix our eyes on Jesus. He is coming for us, and that’s the good news. Now to go back to that moment of the one who was January 1st, 1999, when I had to move the calendar to the day that I thought would never exist. The danger when I’m reading world history with the Bible and all these unchecked promises is that while on the one hand we might be very excited for the Lord to return in glory now—which is good and we should be—on the other hand, we should be ready for Jesus to come today, hopefully before the end of the sermon.
I mean really, we have this expectation to come before the end of the sermon that He’s on the way to rescue us. We have this eagerness to see Him in glory and to see the Lord Jesus gathered up together with Him and all the saints. It’s good, but the danger is when you read the history of the world events as fulfillment of prophecy is that we’re not ready to wait. We’re not ready to hold on. We’re not ready if He doesn’t come back. And that is the problem with the five foolish virgins. If the bridegroom turns out to come at sunset, it would have been fine. Their lamps would have been burning, the room would have been ready, the flowers were all in the hair, they had their nice robes; all ten virgins were ready at that moment. Their hair, the five foolish ones, were not ready to wait.
And this is one of the things that we have to grab a hold of. But the gift that we’ve inherited as Lutherans—and I want to maybe highlight it for us this morning—is that we are very interested in right now, in the particular moment that we’re living in, and the particular people around us in this particular time, but we are also interested in what happened before and what will happen. We’re not just interested in the salvation of this generation, but the next, and the next, and the next. One of the marks of American Christianity is that this obsession with what is right now next and there’s no thought of what’s coming in the future because there is even no future. I mean, Jesus is back if not this week, then next, and so there’s nothing to think of; and that is the foolishness that Jesus is calling out in the parable about His coming back. There were after all ten virgins, ten lamps, ten wearables, ten little things full of oil.
This is what the lamp would look like. You know, you got oil in there but it only burns for a couple of hours and then it’s done. They all had a little bit of oil ready; they all had a little over that. But the five foolish—they were not ready to wait; they were not ready for their children in the faith and their grandchildren and their great-great-great-grandchildren. They were not ready for the long, ready-to-rate Christian life of suffering, and of praying, and of waiting, and of looking to the Lord, and of all of the studying the Scriptures and abiding in Him. They were— the five foolish were like the seeds that were thrown in the rock.
In the parable, the sower threw some of the seeds, and some went on the path, and some went in the good soil, but some went in the rocks and it grew up very quickly. It looked like the weeds, and spiritually, if you were to just walk by a couple of weeks after the seed was thrown, you’d say, oh, look, the Moses has thrown all the seeds in the rocks, look at how tall it’s grown. But then the long summer came and the sun came and it was beating it down, and it all withered because it didn’t have those roots; it wasn’t ready for endurance.
I mourn, Carrie and I mourn because so many of our friends from those old evangelical days who were so excited about the Lord and His Word and His return in glory are now not even Christians. They’ve wandered from the faith or lost it altogether, like the five foolish virgins not ready to wait. So the Lord Jesus is giving us this significant lesson today—this two-fold readiness. It seems like it’s very different, right? The excitement of His immediate return so the preparedness to wait a long time for the day in glory to end all. We’re ready to wait only when we have oil.
A key difference between the wise and the foolish virgins is that the wise have a flask of oil. So we have to say, what does that mean? What does it mean to be ready? This oil is faith worked in the Christian heart by the Word and the Spirit. When you have the Word of God pressing into your heart His law, His command, His expectations, and when you have the Holy Spirit pressing into your heart the promise of forgiveness, the promise of the righteousness of Christ, the hope of the life to come, then you are, in fact, ready.
When you know that Jesus, returning in glory, is returning not to judge you, but to commune and to deliver you—to bring you into the eternal wedding feast that has no end—then you are ready. So, dear Saints, we stood the lesson in the wisdom that the Lord Jesus gives us in His promises and in His warning. We rejoin in the oil that He pours into our flasks in the divine service and in the meal, the Holy Sanctuary, the altar that we are, by the Holy Spirit, made ready for Jesus to come back and ready to wait.
May God continue to grant to us that wisdom in the name of Jesus, Amen. The peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.