I am moved to echo one word of Jesus almost two thousand years ago. At this moment it is no less significant than when he first uttered: “Watch!” The word is frankly a military term. It does not mean “stargaze” or “keep your eyes open.” It means “be on your guard” like a night watchman or a security guard—significantly the only category of employment in the Caribbean that just keeps on expanding!
What are we to watch for?
I would implore you to watch world news. Coming out of that news is prophecy fulfilled before our very eyes. A world combining religious fanaticism with mindless hate and genocide. A world combining expanding witness to gospel truth with increasing persecution of the godly. A world combining vastly increasing wealth, consumerism and materialism with vastly increasing multitudes in poverty and despair.
The utterly selfish immorality of most Caribbean movies today, such as “The harder they come…” and even more so the popular video shows, is ominously similar to what we read of in Genesis 6,11, and 19, Exodus 32, and Judges 19. Did not Jesus tell us to watch for days like the days of Noah and Lot? If our days are still the days of the green tree, what will it be like in the dry?
The United Nations recently stated that in absolute terms there are more human beings, especially women, in absolute slavery in the year 2000 A.D. than ever before in history. And there are millions more in abject economic oppression and enforced destitution. Quoting Exodus 3:7-8, I am sure that soon the Lord Jesus will say, “I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them.”
In I Kings 12:1-19, we are introduced to a young autocrat who is so like the many self-seeking tyrants of today who stash away billions in European and Cayman banks and chastise us with scorpions. No wonder people revolt and demonstrate! But God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble.
Luke 21 records Jesus’ words giving, according to the modern chapter heading in my Bible, “Signs of the end of the age.” Jesus describes two “Age Ends:” the Jewish and the Gentile. Some of those signs are all around us today: cosmological events, national and international turmoil, anguish, perplexity (v. 25); terror, apprehension (v. 26); Israel sprouting leaves (v. 29).
Jesus is emphatic. “My words will never pass away.” They certainly have not.
But Jesus would not have us just watch world events. –Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness, and the anxieties of life” (v. 34). Those are the very things that even the unbelievers tell us universally characterize our age as almost no other.
So Jesus concludes his Olivet discourse: “Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man” (v. 36).
In the spirit of the prophet Ezekiel, we must be the world’s watchmen. Let us “be careful” ourselves and bring pressure to bear on others to avoid the awful “trap” (v. 34). Once it snaps shut it will be too late for regrets.
One of these days we will gather as we do today to break the bread of God, but unknown to us, it will be last in the mortal pilgrimage. The “trap” will spring, and it will be next week in Jerusalem.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One