The Specific Moment Is Not Known

Published by Stanley Pouw in 2015 · 15 February 2015

Let us continue with Matthew, looking again at the signs of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is only a few hours now from betrayal and execution on the cross. He sits on the Mount of Olives and His disciples approach Him with an important question in verse 3. They say, “Tell us, when shall these things be and what shall be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age?” They have this feeling inside that the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon.

So their question has two parts. What are the signs and when will it happen? And our Lord began by answering the “what-are-the-signs” question. And we have already studied that from verse 4 through 35. In that section, He tells them the sign of His coming. And specifically in verse 29 where it says the moon doesn’t give its light, the sun is dark, the stars fall, the powers of the heavens are shaken, and then the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. That’s the sign of His coming to earth, when they see Him in heaven.

And those general signs are triggered by a particular event in verse 15, the abomination of desolation, when the antichrist sets up the idol of himself in the Holy of Holies in the temple of Jerusalem and demands that the whole world worship him. That triggers the birth pains. Now, all of these signs, beginning with the abomination of desolation until the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, are rapid signs. The Bible tells us three and a half years, or 42 months, or 1260 days. Now, that’s the what-are-the-signs question.

Now, beginning in verse 36, Jesus discusses the “when” question. When specifically will He come? And that’s where we begin our study this evening. Verse 36, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.” He tells them the “when” is an unknown. The signs that precede the second coming have been clearly given in Matthew 24 and also in Revelation 6 through 18. But the specific moment, that is the day and hour are not known.

Look at Matthew 24:42, “Watch therefore for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming.” Verse 44, “Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” Verse 50, “the master of that servant will come on a day when he is not looking for him and at an hour that he is not aware of.” Matthew 25:13, “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.” So Jesus is talking about the specific moment after the tribulation.

Remember that both Daniel and John writing in Revelation tell us that the Great Tribulation is a period of three and a half years, or 42 months, or 1260 days. We find that in Daniel 7:25, 9:27 and 12:7. We find it in Revelation 11:2-3, in Revelation 12:14 and Revelation 13:5. So that is very clear. Immediately after, says verse 29, comes the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. Now, how immediately after, we don’t know. And once the sign comes, we don’t know how long it’ll be before He actually establishes His kingdom.

Daniel gives us a hint of it because in Daniel 12:11, he speaks of a period of testing and tribulation of 1290 days adding another 30 days on the end. And then in Daniel 12:12, he speaks of 1335 days adding another 45, making a total of 75 days. So Daniel sees a three-and- a-half-year period, or 42 months, or 1260 days, and then he sees another period, which is not described, of another 75 days.

So the Rapture, the rise of antichrist, the birth pains, the sign of the Son of Man, all those things have not happened yet. We don’t know what generation they will come upon. But the generation that it comes upon, even with all those signs, still won’t know the exact day and the exact hour when Christ is coming. God has chosen not to reveal that specific moment and to give no specific sign of that specific moment. And there is reason in His great wisdom for that.

We would not have an incentive to be spiritually prepared on a daily basis if we knew exactly when the Lord was going to come. And then Jesus says, “No, not the angels of heaven.” Even the angels don’t know it. The natural world does not know it and neither does the supernatural world. Now, angels in Isaiah 6, are hovering around the throne of God doing His bidding. In Matthew 18:10, they are face-to-face with God in intimate communion with Him.

Now in Mark 13:32, which is the parallel passage, it says, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” How is it that Jesus Christ, who is God, cannot know something? Well, that is easily explained if we understand the meaning of His incarnation. Jesus Christ is fully God, but when He became a man, He voluntarily restricted the use of His divine attributes. So He lived without using His omniscience unless the Father told Him to use it.

In John 15:15, you have a very important verse in understanding Christ. Jesus said to the disciples, “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.” In other words, Jesus’ knowledge in His incarnation was qualified by what the Father had revealed to Him. And the Father revealed things to Him through Scripture; that is, the Old Testament, as He studied the Scripture, through experience as He walked in the world and saw the moving of the power of God, and also through direct revelation.

How could He grow in wisdom if He was God? Because He grew in wisdom in the sense that He limited His knowledge to what the Father revealed to Him, so as long as He lived on earth, the Father was constantly revealing things to Him, so He was growing in wisdom. That was a self-imposed humiliation of His divine nature to accomplish your redemption and mine. And so as you look at Him here, in a sense He is still growing in wisdom. He is still increasing in knowledge because the Father has yet not revealed this to Him.

Now after the resurrection, this timing was revealed to Him. So that when He came out of the grave in the glory of His resurrection life, in Matthew 28:18, He said to His disciples, “All authority is given to Me in heaven and earth.” And then in Acts 1:7, He said this, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority,” and Jesus now doesn’t include Himself anymore. So after the resurrection, His knowledge was complete again.

But we don’t know the exact moment of His return. And there is a reason for that. Because the Lord wants every generation to live in expectancy, every generation to live prepared for that. So Christians ever since the New Testament have always lived in the eagerness of the coming of Christ knowing that it could come right away. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:7, “so that you come short in no gift, eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here is a first generation church in Corinth waiting for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, why is Jesus waiting so long? The first part of that answer comes out of Revelation 14:15-16, “Another angel came out of the temple crying with a loud voice to Him that sat on the cloud Thrust in Your sickle and reap, for the time has come for You to reap, for the harvest of the earth is ripe. 16 So He who sat on the cloud thrust in His sickle on the earth, and the earth was reaped.”

The imagery here is very important. You plant and the grain grows to its full ripeness and then you harvest. And the Lord has waited for the ripening of evil and sin. And God is not going to move in judgment until the harvest is ripe, until sin has run its course, until all the ungodliness of the mystery of iniquity is revealed. Only then the sickle will be put in and the harvest will be accomplished. So that is the reason God has waited for these two thousand years.

There is another reason in Romans 11:25, “For I do not desire brethren that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.” The fullness of the Gentiles speaks of the gathering in of the church in this age. God is waiting to collect the Gentiles who forever throughout eternity will give Him glory, praise and honor and serve Him. And also, verse 26 says, “so all Israel will be saved.”

Now look at 2 Peter 3:8-9, “But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” God is waiting because He is long- suffering toward us, He is waiting until all the Gentiles and all the Jews planned from eternity past have come to redemption. It is not a lot of time because for God no time has gone by at all.

Look what the world thinks in 2 Peter 3:3-4, “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” The world is full of uniformitarians who believe that nothing ever changes. But verses 5-6 say, “For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.”

Listen, the world has not always continued the same way. God wiped out the entire world except for eight people in the flood. And there is evidence all over the globe, for a worldwide flood where God drowned all of human civilization. In Genesis 6, God looked over the whole of mankind and said He saw nothing but wickedness and evil continually and decided to only save eight righteous souls on the face of the earth: Noah, his wife, three sons and their wives.

But 2 Peter 3:10 says, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.” At the time when the Lord comes in His second coming to begin His thousand-year kingdom, the heavens and the earth are dramatically changed. He recreates a new heaven and a new earth for the Millennium kingdom.

Then at the end of the kingdom, in Revelation 21, John talks about the new heaven and the new earth. So this re-creation process is two-phased. When Jesus comes, there will be a modification of the universe. And at the end of the 1000 year kingdom, there will be a re- creation of a new heaven and a new earth that is eternal. During the kingdom it will be a restored earth as we know it and a restored heavens as we know it. But in the final eternal state, we will be in a new heaven and a new earth, something we have never known.

So Peter describes the whole dissolution of everything at the end of the 1000 year kingdom and says there will be a disintegration of everything as we know it in space and on the earth and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, he says in verse 13. But that change begins before the thousand years as we have a restored heaven and a restored earth. And we know that because the collapse is very clear in the Tribulation and something new comes out of that and then finally something even more glorious in the eternal state.

Now let’s go back to verse 36. No one really knows the exact day and hour. We know the generation, right, because it’s the generation that sees the birth pains in verses 32 to 35. So what should be the attitude of every generation? First of all we should be alert and secondly, we should be ready. And thirdly, we should be faithful. And now we’re going to look only at the first one, alertness. The unexpectedness of the second coming calls for alertness.

Now, here Peter relates the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and its cataclysmic tribulation judgment back to the flood. It is the only illustration in human history that can even come close because that event totally destroyed the face of the earth. And so we are going to find that the attitude that prevailed during the time of Noah will be the attitude that will prevail during the time of the second coming. That is the meaning when Jesus says in verse 37, “As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.”

You see, in the days of Noah, people ignored the truth. Do you know how long Noah preached? Noah told people there was going to be a flood. And they laughed because it had never rained. And there was no water there. And you know how long he built that boat? A hundred and twenty years and they laughed and they ridiculed and they derided him. But 2 Peter 2:5 says he was a preacher of righteousness. For 120 years, they went on with life as usual while he preached judgment to them by building a great big wooden boat right in the middle of everywhere so everyone could see it. And they still did not believe it.

Well, how will that compare to the second coming? Verse 38-39, “Whereas in the days of Noah that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage until the day that Noah entered into the ark and knew not until the flood came and took them all away, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.” What it means is life went on as usual, right? They just lived as if nothing would ever change. They totally disregarded what was going on. They didn’t see its implications. And that’s exactly what will happen in the Tribulation.

And there are going to be signs for three and a half years. And there will be preachers of righteousness, and the hundred and forty-four thousand, and the two witnesses of Revelation 11, and the redeemed Gentiles from all over the world of Revelation 7. The people will hear the message but they will not believe it until they are washed away in the ultimate judgment in the second coming. They will come up with all kinds of reasons to mock and laugh and ridicule. And if they were that wicked in the day of Noah, they will be more wicked in the day of the coming of the Son of Man.

Listen, there will be a massive redeemed remnant, innumerable, according to Revelation 7. There will be the revival and the faith of the nation Israel. But there will be also a worldwide rejection of all of these things as having anything to do related to God. And then you understand what it says in Genesis 7:11-16, when they went in the ark, and shut the door. “And so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be,” it says at the end of verse 37, “And so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be,” it says at the end of verse 39. Twice, it says that.

And then Jesus gets very specific in verse 40 and 41, “Then shall two be in the field, one shall be taken, the other left. Two grinding at the mill, the one shall be taken, and the other left.” The word “one” in verse 40 is masculine in gender while the “one” in verse 41 is feminine in gender. And so it’s just life as usual, and in the midst of the routine of life, one shall be taken in judgment. Two at the mill and one is taken in judgment. And the other left – the other left – what are they left for? They are the redeemed and saved.

Now verse 42, “Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming.” So the word here is to be alert. It’s a present imperative, be continually alert. Every generation, every person, be alert, “For you know not what hour your Lord does come.” It’s a cry for constant vigilance, constant alertness. He will come and men who recognize that He is coming will be alert spiritually to that coming.

Listen, this is not fiction, this is fact. This is how it will be. Just as the prophets said how it would be in His first coming and He fulfilled every prophecy, so will He in His second coming fulfill all. And if He’s not your Lord now, He will be your Lord then. And His Lordship will be made manifest in His right to send you into eternal hell, into punishment. And at that moment, every knee will bow, some in loving adoration, some in terror, but every knee will bow. Let’s pray.