Already today on television and radio and with
increasing frequency throughout this evening, I presume, and
certainly throughout tomorrow, there will be in all
the newscasts and special programs a review of
the events of this past year that has
just, or is going by, and there will
undoubtedly be some kind of prognostications concerning what
the future may hold.
But as you and I look out upon
our world tonight, we recognize that it's a
very troubled and disturbed world, to say the
very least.
People ask sometimes, as they also look out
upon our upset and disturbed society, where's it
all going to end?
Well, we may not know when it's going
to end, but we know where and how
it's all going to end.
The how will be when God brings together
all things under the subjection of the rule
of his own dear Son, and the where
of this is likely to be at the
city of Jerusalem, if we understand Old Testament
prophecy.
Again, I say our world seems to be
hopelessly caught in a web of its own
weaving.
Peace is an elusive, wishful thought, and the
ray of hope that men will live together
harmoniously, side by side, regardless of race or
color or creed, I think grows dimmer with
each passing day.
And then the news media of our day
bombards us constantly with all sorts of tragedies,
wars, earthquakes, uprisings, rebellion, murder.
They become the daily diet on which we
are forced to feed on television or radio,
newspapers and magazines.
We're painfully aware that we are poisoning the
air we breathe.
We're polluting the water we drink.
We're contaminating the food we eat until our
planet, our home, is becoming an intolerable place,
and will get worse.
It isn't getting any better.
It will get worse if we proceed as
we are now going.
Famine and pestilence are everyday happenings.
It adds up to a very desperate situation
that has caused men to turn or to
seek, in some cases, to some very desperate
measures.
Take our younger generation.
I think that a great many of the
young people of the past decade or two
have become so unconsciously aware of the desperate
situation in which we find ourselves as human
beings on planet Earth that they want to
escape from it.
And maybe the whole drug traffic is a
device that youth uses to somehow get out
of the reality of life.
One of the grimmest factors, it seems to
me, is that every single year in the
United States of America, 50,000 young people
between the ages of 11 and 14 attempt
to commit suicide.
Did you know that?
And 5,000 of them are successful in
that attempt every year, and the numbers are
increasing.
I can understand a little bit a man
who commits suicide who may discover that he
is afflicted by an incurable disease and only
has a short time to live and may
say, I want to run away from it
and I'll end it all.
I can sympathize with a man or a
person who faces a total marital disaster saying,
I can't live on and takes their life.
I don't excuse it.
I say I can understand it, and I
can sympathize with such a person perhaps.
But please tell me in the name of
common sense, why would an 11-year-old
kid blow his brains out?
Why would a 12-year-old boy or
girl take poison and commit suicide at that
early age of life?
This is a national tragedy.
It may well be that subconsciously the youth
of our times are saying there is no
way out, there's no hope.
Why even try to live in this kind
of a society?
Well, it's a bleak picture.
The turn of the year, 1987 into 1988,
is not a very bright or happy prospect
for us.
And I think of the words of the
Lord Jesus when in Luke's Gospel it's recorded
that he said that the Jews should fall
by the edge of the sword and shall
be led captive into all nations, and Jerusalem
shall be trodden down of the Gentiles until
the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.
Some years ago I was standing on the
Mount of Olives with a very dear brother
who was one of the brethren from the
assemblies in England, and he happened to be
and had been for some 25 years the
manager of Barclays Bank in Jerusalem.
And when the troubles subsided a little bit
at that time, he was the only non
-Jew and non-Arab who was unanimously asked
by both parties if he would consider becoming
the mayor of Jerusalem, Mr. Stanley Clark.
And on this Sunday afternoon as we stood
on the Mount of Olives, we looked down
with Jerusalem at our feet, and it was
one of those crystal clear days, and we
could actually see the waters of the Dead
Sea yonder, and we could see the waters
of the Mediterranean also.
That little land is so little, really little.
And I said to him, Mr. Clark, you
know the Word of God, and you've lived
in this land for a long time, a
quarter of a century or more.
Tell me, do you believe, sir, that the
Lord Jesus Christ is coming back again?
And very fervently he said, I certainly do.
Then I said, sir, do you believe that
His feet will actually touch somewhere near where
you and I are right now standing?
And I could feel him choke up just
a little bit at the thought of that
thing, and he said, I do, I do,
I do indeed.
Then I said to him, sir, will you
tell me how far away do you think
the Lord's return is?
And his reply was a shocking reply to
me.
I was expecting him to say, oh, maybe
within five years, ten years, twenty years, within
our lifetime.
But he looked at me for a moment
and he said, I'll tell you how far
away the coming of our Savior is, 1500
feet away.
I said, what do you mean by that?
He said, look yonder at that city at
our feet, Jerusalem.
At that time it was divided when I
was there and when we were talking together.
You could only go through one gate.
It was divided, a divided city.
You really literally had to have two passports
to pass back and forth.
He said, one of these days, very shortly,
the Jews are going to move across that
no man's land strip, 1500 feet wide, and
they're going to occupy this city.
And when that happens, the times of the
Gentiles will be fulfilled and the Savior must
come.
Well, now, you know, we've lived to see
almost the fulfillment of that.
I don't think Jerusalem is yet totally occupied
by the Jews.
There still is some doubt about their right
to occupy it, at least.
But it does betoken the fact that maybe
these words of Jesus could easily be fulfilled
in a very short time.
The times of the Gentiles, Jerusalem will be
trodden down until then.
Then our Lord went on to say, and
there shall be signs in the sun, in
the moon, in the stars and upon the
earth, distress of nations with perplexity.
Now that's a fascinating Greek word.
What it really means is a cul-de
-sac, the end of a road, a dead
end.
And it could well be translated, no way
out.
Hear it again.
And upon the earth, distress of nations with
no way out.
The sea and the waves roaring, men's hearts
failing them for fear and for looking after
the things which are coming on the earth,
for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.
Then shall they see the Son of Man
coming in a cloud with power and great
glory.
And when these things begin to come to
pass, look up, lift up your heads, for
your redemption draws nigh.
I think it's almost impossible for us to
come to a moment like this on the
calendar without thinking about the most important event
yet in the future.
Perhaps the most important event beyond Calvary, and
that is the personal return of the Lord
Jesus Christ into our world.
Now, when our Savior was here, he gathered
his disciples together, you remember, on that last
briefing session just before the darkness of Gethsemane
and the deeper darkness of Calvary.
And what he had to say to his
disciples is recorded for us in a heart
section of the Gospel of John.
It begins with chapter 13 and ends in
chapter 17, the last words of our Savior
to his disciples spoken here on the earth.
And they were prefaced by this great statement.
He knew that they were disturbed.
He knew that they were upset.
He knew that they were emotionally uncertain at
that moment.
And so he says to them, listen, don't
you let your hearts be troubled.
As the Greek puts it, don't let there
be even a ripple of concern in your
hearts, because I'm going away.
I'm going to prepare a place for you
in my Father's house.
And then listen to this.
And if I go to prepare a place
for you, I will come again and receive
you unto myself, that where I am, there
you may be also.
Those are the most astonishing of all the
words, I think, that our Lord spoke.
I will come again.
Did he mean that literally?
Of course he did.
If he didn't, he shouldn't have said it.
He meant what he said.
I will come again.
A year or so ago, I was in
the Philippines, and I went down one morning
to what was to me a nostalgic kind
of experience.
I went down to Manila Bay, and there
in the haze as I looked across the
shimmering waters of the bay, I saw the
dim outlines of that famous rock Corregidor.
The name Corregidor raises in American minds a
lot of grim memories.
You remember how the Japanese came down through
the Bataan Peninsula, and they drove our military
forces, they shrank the area in which they
were, and they drove them over to the
rock of Corregidor.
Then, without any help from home, with dwindling
supplies, with diminishing medical supplies, with increasing illness
on the part of our troops, General Douglas
MacArthur faced the awful problem of what to
do, and with no air force to combat
the bees of the Japanese that bombarded the
rock, and with very little artillery to respond
to the heavy bombarding of that rock that
the Japanese were able to do without any
interference, until it was like a bullseye on
a target, and they hit it and hit
it and hit it again, day in, day
out, day in and day out.
Nighttime, too, the rock shook under the pounding
of the Japanese, and little by little we
were worn down, and at last came the
command from Washington to General Douglas MacArthur, where
we must surrender, and he was ordered, you
remember, to get off the rock, and so
under the cover of darkness one night, a
submarine, first a PT boat and then a
submarine farther out, they came and took him
and Mrs. MacArthur and the little boy and
their household belongings, and they took them out
and put them on a submarine and took
him down to Australia, there to re-plan
the strategy of how to get back at
the Japanese.
He left that wretched condition in the hands
of a then, at that time, ranking colonel,
Jonathan Wainwright, a very slim, skinny man.
They called him Skinny Wainwright, and his was
the sad task of at last surrendering our
forces to the Japanese, and the American flag
for the first time in years and years
in military conflict came down in defeat, and
the rising sun flag of Japan took its
place, and then our men and the nurses
and all our forces were taken off the
rock by the Japanese, and there followed one
of the ugliest chapters in American history, the
Bataan Death March, as they marched our men
up that Bataan Peninsula in the blazing Philippine
sun, sick and weary and hungry and thirsty,
and whenever they staggered, they dashed their brains
out with the butts of rifles or killed
them on the spot, and it was a
bloody, bloody trail back to Japanese concentration camps.
I thought of all that as I looked
at that rock, but I thought of something
else, too.
The night MacArthur left, he turned to Jonathan
Wainwright, and he said, Skinny, you can tell
the Filipinos and you can tell our troops
one thing, I will return.
I'm coming back.
You can count on it.
And you know, in the months that lengthened
into a year or two after that, I
understand that every cartridge that was dropped from
the air, every pack of cigarettes, every six
-pack of beer that was dropped from the
skies on our troops up in the hills
and the mountains, on every piece of equipment
that was stamped these words, I will return,
Douglas MacArthur.
And when the going got tough and dark
and bleak and hopeless, that promise of return,
that he was coming back again, buoyed them
and gave them hope, and they fought on.
And I'll never forget, who can forget it,
that day when he waded ashore, did MacArthur,
in Leyte, Leyte Gulf, and he took a
microphone, and over the clandestine radio network of
the Philippines, MacArthur said, I have returned.
I've come back.
And victory followed.
And from that moment on, until the decks
of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, it
was constant victory all the way until a
battle was won.
Now, I want to tell you something.
For two thousand embattled years, the Church of
the Lord Jesus Christ has the forces of
hell.
It sometimes has been dragged into the fire.
It sometimes has been martyred.
It has baptized itself in its own blood.
But always it has been supported by a
glorious promise.
I will come again.
I'm coming back.
And one of these days, he is coming
back.
Now, you know, I believe tonight that the
coming of the Lord Jesus is imminent.
That is liable to happen at any moment.
That's what imminency means.
His coming is not, I don't think.
If I'm wrong, it won't make any difference
anyhow.
If he doesn't come for a thousand years,
you won't be able to chide me too
much, except in heaven to remind me you
said what you said, you know, down there
at Park of the Palm.
But I don't believe that.
Maybe some of us, as I look out
in this audience, I see so much snow
on the roof and shingles missing that I'm
aware of what's happened to us calendar wise.
But if you were, say, 15 or 20
years younger on the average, I would dare
to say that you are going to be
in the generation that will be raptured when
Jesus comes.
That's how close I think his coming is.
Now, don't say he's a heretic.
He set dates.
I didn't set any dates at all.
And you'll know that before I'm finished that
I am anything but a date setter.
But I'm saying to you that I believe
that the generation of young people today is
going to be the rapture generation.
I hope that the Lord spares me long
enough because there's an undertaker back there in
Bloomfield that used to bury all our people.
And whenever I'd go there and have a
funeral, I get the feeling he's looking at
me saying, I'll get to you too one
of these days.
And I should like to cheat him.
I tell you, I should like to cheat
him.
I don't want him to collect anything on
me.
So I hope the Lord comes while I'm
still alive.
And you are too.
How wonderful to be able to go at
that time.
Well, that promise of Jesus is still there
in the book.
I will come again.
I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go, I'm coming again.
And that promise was further reiterated on the
day of his ascension.
When having been caught up into heaven, the
disciples were standing there gazing at the spot
where he disappeared when two men, supernatural beings
of sorts, appeared and said, what are you
men gazing up into heaven for?
This same Jesus which is taken up from
you will come again as he's gone.
And I think there was a little chiding
note in that.
Don't stand here gazing.
You're not called to be stargazers.
That's a waste of good life and time.
I've just given you a commission.
You shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost has come upon you and you shall
be witnesses unto me, beginning at Jerusalem, both
at Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.
And don't stop until you've reached the uttermost
parts of the earth.
Now stop standing here wasting time gazing up
into heaven.
This Jesus is going to come.
Now you get busy.
Get out and do the job that he's
committed, that he's commissioned us to do.
And that's still true.
It's still there in the book.
And that's what our business ought to be.
Now, other particulars and other details of his
coming, how he's going to come, what's going
to happen when he comes, who's going to
be affected when he comes, all those details
are filled in somewhat in other passages of
Scripture, such as 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, where
the apostle Paul, you know, says to them
that he had received a very special revelation
from God and the Lord Jesus was going
to come, first of all, to raise the
dead and transform them and then to rapture
the living and transform them.
And together they will be caught up in
the clouds to meet the Lord in the
air.
And we pursue all those details.
Now, the biggest question that we face all
the time is the question of the when.
When is he going to come?
You remember at the end of that Bible
conference that lasted some six weeks following the
resurrection, when the disciples and the Lord met
together for 40 days between resurrection and Pentecost,
it must have been a great Bible conference,
don't you think?
Wouldn't you like to have attended it?
When our Lord opened unto them the Scriptures
and revealed so many things they didn't know
and solidified their faith and strengthened them.
And now came the moment when he was
going to leave them for good.
But, you know, just before he did, he
may have said, now, there's anybody got any
questions?
And one of those disciples said, yeah, Lord,
wilt thou at this time restore the king?
What was the heart of that question?
When is it going to happen?
We're all so innately curious.
We want to know when.
Now, it's not always easy to answer that
question.
And so in the time that I have
left, I want to just address myself very
quickly to this matter of signs, signs of
the times.
First of all, let me say that I
believe that the coming again of the Lord
Jesus will be in two distinct phases.
There will, first of all, be the secret
phase, we may call it, which is popularly
called the rapture of the church.
That will be when he comes in the
clouds of heaven and does just what I
said a moment ago, raise the righteous dead,
the believing dead, and rapture the living.
That's going to be an exciting moment.
And he will take his church out of
this world, out completely, because the church is
not involved at all in the events that
follow, which we call the great tribulation period.
There's no reason for the church to be
on the earth or experience those events.
There's no purpose, and they're not included in
the plan of God at that time.
The tribulation period is an exhibition of divine
wrath against three groups of people.
A, Israel, the Jews.
B, the apostate church.
And C, the unbelieving Gentile nations.
The church isn't involved at all.
It's in heaven when all of this takes
place.
But then at the end of the tribulation
period, just a short period of time between
the rapture and this return of Christ, he
will come from the heavens.
His feet will touch the Mount of Olives
at the moment of Israel's deepest crisis, when
the city itself is surrounded by military forces
that we simply can't contemplate how great it
will be.
Representation will be from all the nations.
And there sits Jerusalem, ready to be plucked
by the nations.
In that awful hour of crisis, he will
come and his feet will touch this earth.
He'll split the Mount of Olives and so
on.
You know the other particulars of the eschatological
program.
But we call that near, that first phase
of the Lord's return, we call the rapture
of the church.
That little farther return, we generally call the
regulation.
The rapture, the regulation.
Now sometimes when I am asked to speak
in a meeting, usually in youth rallies, you
know, I say, do you have a program?
Who's pitching tonight and who's catching?
I want to know what the program is.
And they'll hand me one.
And then I look at it and I
start counting.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine.
I'm number 19 on the program.
They got 18 things to happen before I
get a chance to speak.
Then to make it worse, just before I
do, they say, these young people are tired.
Don't be long.
Come on, buddy.
I just traveled four hours to get here
and I'll sit through 18 points and you
tell me not to be long?
Well, anyway, allow me one more, will you?
So I count up.
17, 18.
And when it gets to be about the
17th part of the program, I straighten my
tie.
I get my notes ready.
I get my Bible ready.
I clear my throat and I say, one
more thing and I'm on.
And then the master of ceremonies pulls this
stunt.
Oh, now before our speaker, and I know
it's coming, we'll have Sister Bronson.
She's going to sing the third time.
Now, Sister Bronson couldn't sing the first two
times, but we have to endure her third
performance.
Or a guy blows a horn.
Nobody knows what he was blowing.
And they put him on a third time
to eat up another four or five minutes
of my precious time.
Or else they'll say, oh, one thing, we
had a rally four months ago and we
forgot to give out the awards.
So before Dr. Anderson speaks, we're going to
have a rogue.
Oh, no.
And I say, oh, that program doesn't mean
a thing.
Well, now I'll tell you something.
If you could take your Bible and a
piece of paper and start writing down the
prophecies mentioned in the Bible.
Start with Genesis 3.15 and very carefully
list all the things that are prophesied in
the Scripture.
The prophecies will fall into two classifications.
One, fulfilled prophecies.
You can tick them off.
Here's the prophecy.
There was the fulfillment.
That's finished.
That's past.
There it is.
And you go down the line.
Then there's a large number of what we
call unfulfilled prophecies.
They await fulfillment.
Though they may seem impossible of fulfillment, yet
they will be because God is faithful to
his word and his promise and he'll do
it.
All right.
Now, as I look down that calendar, I
say, where are we on the calendar?
This is 1987.
And within a few minutes, it'll be 1988.
Now, what's next on the prophetic calendar?
And it's exciting to know this.
Between 1988 and the return of Jesus Christ
for his church, I say to you very
soberly and seriously, I do not believe there
is a single yet-to-be-fulfilled prophecy
before he comes.
That is the next thing on God's program.
Nothing between us and it.
Ah, but you say, where then comes the
signs of the times?
You will destroy a favorite message of mine
if you don't be careful.
Well, first of all, let me say I
believe that this near event is a signless
event.
No signs are given to us as to
when it will occur.
Not one.
But there are many signs pointing to that
farther event.
Maybe I can illustrate it thus.
I'm on my way down 95 toward South
Florida.
I'm a stranger.
Never been this way before.
I don't have a map.
And I'm such a hurry to get where
I'm going to Miami.
Can't wait to get there.
When I get there, I can't wait to
get out.
But anyway, I'm on my way to Miami.
And so I've traveled a good many miles.
And I say, I wonder how far it
is to Miami.
And then I say, no, I'm not going
to go to Miami because I do see
some signs.
Miami, 200 miles.
Oh, that's a long way.
I think I'd like instead to go to
Melbourne on the coast.
Now, as far as I haven't seen a
sign pointing to Melbourne, I only know somehow
I know that Melbourne comes before Miami.
Now, there isn't a single sign that tells
me how far it is to Melbourne, but
I see many signs telling me how far
it is to Miami.
So I conclude very simply that if it's
200 miles to Miami, it must be something
less than 200 miles to Melbourne.
Right.
OK.
Therefore, the signs that we read concerning the
future all point to Miami.
The revelation, the revelation phase.
None of them point to Melbourne, the rapture
phase.
But when I see some very obvious signs
pointing to that second event, have I not
a right to conclude that if those signs
are genuine and real, then we must be
nearer to the first event than the second
one?
You see?
So it's proper to look for signs.
So long as I don't pin my expectation
upon whether or not I properly interpret a
sign, and instead of that, I should be
pinning my hope and expectation upon the naked
word of the living God that any moment
he will come.
Whether I understand signs or don't understand them
will have nothing to do with my relationship
to that event.
Now, I have only time to point out
this.
There are areas where I think we can
observe some very significant signs.
First of all, in general society, I believe
that our society is being prepared inevitably, inexorably
now, for tribulation times.
We are moving inexorably into the darkness of
the eclipse that will take place in the
tribulation period.
We may look for those signs.
What are those signs?
I'll name them.
Just name them.
Increasing ignorance of the word of God.
Decreasing power of the witness of God.
The acceleration of deception and abounding iniquity.
All of these mixed together are preparing our
society for the tribulation hours yet to come.
Then what's the second area in which we
may expect some signs?
The preparation of Israel.
How exciting it is for us right here
tonight, all of us, to have lived to
see the establishment of a Jewish nation as
a nation.
That is one of the most significant signposts
that one can imagine.
Just suppose for a moment that the Antichrist
had come before 1948.
Now, I know it's a hypothetical case I'm
proposing.
Suppose he had come in 1930.
We know that the prophecies of the Bible
say he must enter into a political and
religious kind of covenant relationship to a nation
called Israel.
Please tell me, if Antichrist had appeared on
the world scene in 1930, with what group
of Jews would he have entered into some
kind of negotiation?
Brooklyn Jews?
That wouldn't have helped any.
Brazilian Jews?
No.
They wouldn't have been totally representative.
But if he appears on the world scene
any time after 1948, he has a Knesset,
a Parliament, a Prime Minister, political parties, a
nation that has all the framework of a
bona fide nation in existence.
And not until 1948 could Antichrist have accomplished
that purpose.
Exciting to know that we've seen that happen.
I could mention some others, but I go
on.
The third area in which I think we
may see signs of the nearness of the
Lord's return, and I'll dwell a little bit
on that for just another two or three
minutes, is what I call the alignment of
the nations.
When one examines the prophetic scriptures, it would
appear that at the end time, at the
very end time, the world will be divided
in political, military alliances into four distinct
groups.
Group number one is popularly called the Great
Northern Confederacy.
That means Russia, and I am assuming a
great deal here tonight, you have a lot
of background in this so I can assume
it, Russia and her allies are going to
be involved in an invasion of the land
of Israel.
We know that.
So there will be on the world scene
a political, military alliance headed up by Russia.
Is it in existence tonight?
Yes.
Second, there will be a European coalition of
nations, and Bible students have called that coalition
by this name that you'll recognize, a revival
of a form of the ancient Roman Empire
in the Mediterranean and European areas.
Has it ever occurred to you why Germany
is divided tonight into East and West Germany?
Will they ever be reunited?
Never.
I dare to make that statement, almost categorically,
never.
Why?
Because Germany, part of Germany, must be allied
in the end with Russia in its rebellion
against God and Israel.
And yet, part of Germany was also in
the old Roman Empire.
Look at the ancient maps.
Now, it couldn't be on both sides of
the fence unless something had happened.
What happened was that as a result of
World War II, Germany was split in two,
and it remains a divided nation tonight.
And I think it will remain that way
down to the end of time.
But the second great military, political alliance is
an alliance of the European powers.
Then there's a third, called in the book
of Daniel, the Kings of the South.
All direction in prophecy is reckoned from the
city of Jerusalem, North Jerusalem, South from Jerusalem,
East and West.
The Kings of the South, I think, can
be identified with the Afro-Arab combination.
They're South of Israel.
And we are seeing that coalition taking definite
form in its anti-Semitic attitudes.
And then the fourth area, and this is
all, I think, discernible in Bible prophecy.
I haven't given you the scriptures, but I
can recite them tonight.
I think the fourth area is what is
called in the book of Revelation, the Kings
of the Sun Rising, or the Far Eastern
nations.
You know, we've lived to see the day
when the Tiger of China has awakened, when
Korea is awake, Manchuria is awake, India is
awake.
The Oriental nations, they're never going back to
sleep again.
World politics from this hour onward can never
be formulated without a consideration of the peoples
of the Far East.
And they will figure prominently in the end
time maneuvers.
So these four great military and political powers
have been forming during this very generation in
which we're living.
And as I see those signs, and they'll
all be involved in the period between the
rapture and the revelation, and I read those
signs, I say, hallelujah, we may be nearer.
I see them now, they're taking form.
Maybe I'm nearer to Melbourne than I thought.
Maybe I'm nearer to the rapture than I
even dreamed.
Now, I could name one other area, the
apostasy of the church.
When you put all these together, this is
the electrifying thing.
I often have people come to me and
say, ah, you've always had those sort of
things.
They've always been in existence.
I say, but not all at the same
time.
That's it, not all at the same time.
You've never had the combination of elements that
I have described in preparation of general society
for the coming of an Antichrist, a world
ruler, and at the same time Israel, the
resurrection and stirring of the Jewish nation, and
at the same time the formulation of these
four great factors in the end time, and
at the same time the growing apostasy in
the professing church.
When you put them all together, and they're
in existence and functioning simultaneously, then you've got
an exciting situation.
And I think that that's exactly what we
have now.
All right, I have to conclude, but I
want to just tell you this story.
There was a man, I read this, it
was in the New York Times.
Now, you know, the New York Times prints
all the news that's fit to print, so
they say.
That's their motto on the masthead.
I'm not always sure of that, but they
are pretty dependable.
And the New York Times told this story
back in the days when there was a
great storm in the East Coast.
There was a man who lived pretty far
out on Long Island, and he had made
the announcement to his family that he would
like for his birthday a barometer.
Not a thermometer, but a barometer.
He wanted to be his own weather prognosticator.
And so for his birthday, the family put
together, gave him enough money, and so since
he worked in Manhattan on his lunch hour,
he went down to Tiffany's.
And he went in and he bought himself
a classy and pretty expensive barometer.
He could hardly wait to get home that
night to fiddle with it.
But he got on the train and went
out, way out on the island, and of
course it was raining.
It wasn't such a nice night.
And he wasn't listening too much to people
chattering around about him, but they were chattering
about a storm of some kind, but that
didn't register at all.
So he got home, and after supper he
got that lovely instrument out of its box.
He unwrapped it, and he said he looked
at it for a minute, and the needle
pointed to STORM.
Now for just one moment, he went outside
to look up, and there was a break
in the clouds, and he saw a couple
of stars, and he said, don't tell me
now.
I got a wrong instrument.
Oh, well, maybe you're supposed to shake it
a bit.
So he shook it.
But he couldn't make the needle move.
Then he went, no, you don't do that
to these fine instruments.
But he did, and it didn't move.
So then he thumped it a little bit.
Then he banged it again.
And at last he came to the angry
conclusion that he'd been cheated, that this thing
didn't work.
And he determined in his mind that he
was going to take it back the first
thing tomorrow and tell those folks off.
He'd paid a lot of money for that
thing.
As he went to bed, he took one
last look at it and said, stormy.
Couldn't believe it.
Woke up in the morning and wrapped it
up, got on the train, and indeed the
weather had gotten a bit worse.
And the New York Times says he took
it back to Tiffany's, and they explained to
him there was nothing wrong with the instrument
because that next night when he got on
the train to come back home, that vicious
hurricane struck Long Island and blew his house
down.
Ironic.
Well, you know, we have an instrument.
Here it is.
And despite now and again there's a star
of hope that shines, now and again things
don't look quite as glum, and the book
still says storms ahead, judgment ahead, coming of
the Lord ahead.
You can trust this instrument.
You really can, no matter what it looks
like on the outside.
And whether we can interpret it or not,
this instrument is God's own word to us,
and we can trust it.
He is coming.
May he come within our lifespan.
Right?
Wouldn't you like that?
Let's don't go on a tour.
Let's go to heaven together.
More fun.
Let's pray.
Lord, how we thank thee tonight that our
hope is not in the machinations of men.
It's not in the programs promoted.
It's not in the political schemes that are
all worked on by the leaders of our
nations at this time.
Our hope is pinned not on them or
the best that men can do, but our
hope is pinned on thee and thy precious
word.
And we thank thee for this sweet promise
that glows like a bright star through the
word of God.
Thine own word, Lord Jesus, and if I
go to prepare a place for you, I
will come again and receive you unto myself,
that where I am, there you may be
also.
We look for that promise.
If in any way the hope of thy
coming and the love of thy coming is
not in the workings of men, it is
not in the workings