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Can you think of events that, if you had known in advance that they were to take place, you would have acted differently beforehand? If, like me, you quite enjoy the Back to the Future franchise of films, you will remember the discovery of a copy of the sports almanac that found its way back in the past. Or if in January last year you knew what was to happen in March last year, what might you have done differently? Fitted in one final holiday, or maybe more modestly, fitted in one final haircut. And this recently was the ten-year anniversary of the earthquake that destroyed parts of Japan, and they’ve been remembering that event soberly again. Large numbers of people who live in that part of Japan would have taken very different action in the week before the earthquake if they had known that it was coming. They would have left the region.
The trouble is, we don’t know the future. But what if I could tell you about a future event — a future event so catastrophic that it makes Independence Day, Armageddon, Greenland, and The Day After Tomorrow combined look tame? A day that will catch out large numbers of people, and a day for which there is one simple thing that you could do even today that would ensure you are fully prepared and disaster will not strike you. You would take action if that was the case, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m going to do just that.
Let me remind us where we are in the Bible. The church in Thessalonica was a young church. They had not been Christians very long. Paul started the church there and then had to flee because of the opposition that would have cost him his life. And last time we discovered that the church he left behind was confused about the return of Jesus. This was the event they were all looking forward to. The return of Jesus was central in Paul’s preaching, and all of their hopes were tied up in that day in the future when Jesus would come back. But then, in the short time between Paul leaving and writing this letter, some of the Christians in that church had died. Jesus had left it too late to come back, and the question they were all asking is: those people who died — does that mean that they have missed out on that thing that we were all looking forward to? And the answer — we met it last time, it’s online if you want to look at it and you missed it — the answer was no, they haven’t missed out, because when Jesus comes back they will be raised to life and they will still be there.
Well, having addressed the question that came from their confusion, Paul now addresses the confusion itself. Why did Jesus wait so long to come back? When will he return, and what will it be like when he does? And today I want to just focus us on the first three verses of that reading, and we will return to verses 4 to the end of the reading in a few weeks’ time, after we’ve done some Easter-related stuff for a few weeks.
So in these first three verses, I want to show us three things Paul wants them to be clear on about the return of Jesus.
1. A Public Day of Judgement
Number one: it will be a public day of judgement.
Paul calls it ‘the day of the Lord.’ ‘You know very well that the day of the Lord will come.’ The day of the Lord is an Old Testament phrase. The Old Testament prophets regularly prophesied — lots of them did — an event called the day of the Lord, and they all meant the same thing by it: a very public day in the future when God himself will gather all the nations of the world for judgement, and all that is wicked will be punished, and all that is good will be rewarded. It won’t be an event that you miss. It’s a global event.
So contrast other events that are very missable. For example, if the Queen herself chose to visit Kensington and you happened to be on holiday at the time, you would miss it. And actually, after she’s been, life will pretty much go on, so when you came back from holiday, apart from the fact that several public buildings have the smell of fresh paint about them, there wouldn’t be an awful lot of evidence that she’d been.
Or back in December we had a thing where, as viewed from earth, Jupiter and Saturn lined up so they looked like they were at the same place in the sky, creating a kind of double-brightness planet. And some people think that that might be what the Magi witnessed in the sky to tell them that a king had been born, and it’s quite exciting to think that actually that could have been the thing they saw — and hey, we’re going to get to see the star that led them to Jesus! Except that every single night in Kemsing it was cloudy, so we didn’t see anything. We missed it.
But the day of the Lord is public. It’s global. It’s unmissable. That’s Old Testament language. In the New Testament, whenever you get the title ‘the Lord,’ it always means the Lord Jesus, and therefore this Old Testament prophetic hope of a day of the Lord becomes the day when Jesus himself will return to this world to judge each and every person, and nobody will miss it because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because they slept through their alarm clock, or forgot that the clocks had changed. And nothing will ever be the same again, because at that point everything that is wicked will be gone.
So there’s the first thing about the return of Jesus: a public day of judgement.
2. An Unknown Date and Time
Second thing about the return of Jesus from these verses: it will come at an unknown date and time.
Remember the background here in this letter. Fred has died, Jesus hasn’t come back, and so they’re thinking perhaps Jesus lied about coming back in our lifetime. Well, I said last week that actually Jesus never promised that he would come back in the lifetime of his first disciples, and if they thought that, they completely misunderstood what he actually said. But it raises the question: so when will it be? And the answer is, they already know the answer to this question. Verse one: ‘We do not need to write to you about times and dates.’ Verse two: ‘You know very well’ — when? Like a thief in the night.
Slightly strange illustration for Paul to use, isn’t it? What’s the return of Jesus Christ got to do with a burglar coming to your house? Strange idea. Well, Paul gets that from Jesus himself. So if we want to know what point Paul is making by saying that Jesus will come like a burglar, we’d better ask Jesus. So here is Matthew 24, verses 42 to 44. Jesus says this: ‘Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect him.’ That’s the point of the illustration of the thief, the burglar: it’s at an hour you’re not expecting.
So if the electrician comes to your house to rewire a couple of light fittings, they make an appointment and they come at seven in the morning to start work, because for some reason tradesmen’s days run from 7am to 3pm whereas the rest of us work from 9 till 5. I’ve never understood why, but they do. So they come at 7 and rewire your house and they’re done by lunchtime. Or if you put your supermarket online shop in, they’ll give you a one-, two-, or four-hour delivery slot when they’ll come. Or you go online and order something from a website and you get an email to say it will come between 7am and 10pm, if you’re lucky. But either way, there’s an appointment. Burglars don’t make appointments. They just come. And neither does Jesus. He comes when you will least expect.
So if someone says to you that Jesus will come during your lifetime, they’re not wrong that he could come in your lifetime, but if they say that he definitely will, they have no way of knowing that, because nobody knows when it will be. It could be in your lifetime, but it could not. If someone says that Covid is lining up with some obscure verse in the Old Testament from which they can do some calculations and conclude that Jesus will come back in 2023, they’re wrong — because nobody knows. He might come back in 2023; could do. But they don’t know that. The Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted that Jesus would come back in the year 1878. They revised that to 1881, to 1914, to 1918, to 1925, and to 1975. To the best of my knowledge, they’ve since stopped making predictions. Now we can chuckle at that, because we know with hindsight that they’re wrong. But actually, people back then knew that they were wrong, because Jesus said you won’t know when it’s going to happen.
3. Unexpected Destruction
Date and time unknown. Public day of judgement, unknown date and time. Number three: unexpected destruction.
This is verse three: ‘While people are saying “peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labour pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.’ In other words, Jesus’ return is not just unexpected because you don’t know the date and the time. There’s an extra dimension to the unexpectedness, and that dimension is destruction. And note three things from this verse about the destruction.
Number one: it will be marked by terrible pain. It is compared to labour pains, but actually that is only a comparison. Destruction is far worse than labour pains.
Secondly: it comes when we think all things will always be well. People will be saying ‘peace and safety,’ and in many ways that little phrase ‘peace and safety’ is a kind of mantra for our age, is it not? We love the idea of living in a state of peace and safety where we have all of our home comforts and life is just lined up how we like it and it’s all okay. So all kinds of things today that are just so comfortable and so nice that we just take for granted, that other people in other parts of the world or previous generations did not have. Wall-to-wall fitted carpets — okay, everybody has that these days; there was a day when that was a radical invention, although if you don’t have it today it’s often because you’ve chosen to have something different instead that is more to your comfort and liking. Washing — it used to be the case, of course, that you had to wash everything by hand, and in some parts of the world they still do, at the river. And then they invented that wonderful modern invention, the twin tub — if you’re young, go to the science museum and you can probably have a look at one, dismantled. And then the automatic washing machine, and now everybody has one, such that if you want to find a laundrette, they’re there but they’re quite hard to find.
Well, Covid cut in on our little life of peace and safety, didn’t it? It’s one of the reasons we take offence at Covid. Life is no longer peace and safety. You can’t just pop on an aeroplane and fly to Australia. But that’s okay, because with the aid of modern science and some vaccines, we can restore ourselves to a condition described by the phrase ‘peace and safety.’ Peace and safety will once again be the anthem of our nation — that’s the aim with Covid: not just to cure the pandemic, but to restore peace and safety. And it’s exactly while everybody is either basking in their peace and safety, or striving to achieve a state of peace and safety, that this destruction will come.
Third thing from this verse: no escape. ‘As labour pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.’ I hate going to the dentist. Anybody here like going to the dentist? Okay, good, glad some of you do — you’re weird. What do you do if there’s a dental appointment coming up? You ring them up and you say, ‘Do you have one in six months instead? My teeth don’t hurt.’ What do you do if you go into labour? Do you ring up the midwife and say, ‘This is going to hurt, it’s not convenient — can we reschedule for three weeks’ time please?’ It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just rearrange it if it’s not convenient or you don’t feel like the pain. There is no escape.
Unexpected destruction. Public day of judgement, at an unknown date and time, causing unexpected destruction. Put it all together: there is a future event that will be a public and unmissable day of judgement, that will catch people unprepared — unprepared both because they don’t know the date and time so they can’t get ready, and because it comes at a time when people will assume that all will always be well — and therefore there will be terrible suffering and terrible destruction. As I say, it makes all of your favourite disaster movies combined look tame.
Be Prepared
But I also said that there is one simple thing that you could do to be prepared. So let’s skip to the end, to verses 9 and 10: ‘For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live together with him.’
God has already determined what that day will look like for these Christians. It will not be a day of wrath, of suffering the anger and judgement of God. It’ll be a day of receiving salvation. That day will not be their moment of punishment; it’ll be their moment of rescue. It might remind you of chapter one, in which Paul said that these Thessalonians ‘turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead — Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.’ His return is the day of rescue. And that’s all because Jesus died and rose. He died for us so that when he died, he took the wrath, the anger, the punishment of God on himself, so that whether we are awake or asleep, whether we’re alive or dead when he comes, we can live together with him. We thought about that last time — the great hope of one day being with Jesus forever.
And so the one thing to do to get ready is what these Christians have done: come and put your trust completely in Jesus. And then you can know that whether you’re awake or asleep, you’re ready. And so he can say, verse 4: ‘You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day.’ You still don’t know when it will come, but whenever it is, you won’t be surprised.
If only you could have predicted the rugby score, or the Fukushima earthquake, or the pandemic, you could have been ready. You can know in advance that Jesus will return, and you can know what it will be like: a public day of judgement for people from every nation, alive or dead; a day of destruction, disaster, and pain for those who are not ready — and lots will not be ready, either because they’re trying to time it to perfection so they can get ready at the last minute, a little bit like exam revision, or because they’re so busy living comfortable lives and saying ‘peace and safety’ to themselves, or trying to get things to a state of peace and safety. But Jesus died and rose so that his people who love and trust him can be in the daylight, and can be ready to meet him — indeed, better than that: can be delighted to see him when he comes.