P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

NO MAN KNOWS . . . EXCEPT FOR ME, OF COURSE

For once, it was great to have one of these stories turn out right. It was a Wednesday evening, March 12, and in Salt Lake City, Utah, there were a lot of TV cameras and microphones and lights and happy people to celebrate the homecoming. After being missing for nine months – kidnapped and certainly feared dead – 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart was safely home at last. Her parents, Ed and Lois, could hardly believe their incredibly good fortune. Back on June 5, the year before, at around two in the morning, a man had forced open a window, broken in, and taken the teenaged girl, wearing just her red pajamas. And for the next nine agonizing months all Mom and Dad and Elizabeth’s siblings could do was watch and pray. Wait and hope. Put their trust in the Salt Lake City police and in John Walsh’s TV program, America’s Most Wanted. And now, these many terrifying months later, when two randomly passing couples – Rudy and Nancy Montoya, and Anita and Alvin Dickerson – spotted the missing girl with abductor Brian Mitchell and called the police, the moment of dreams finally came.

Well, friend, for any parent, that has to be a kind of joy the rest of us can only praise God for; we certainly can’t understand it. And you’ll understand that, as a preacher, I can’t help but take us to the wonderful day when Jesus comes again, and reunions like that one will just be happening everywhere. Kidnapped victims will be restored to their families. Sick children will be well. In cemeteries all around the world, someone who was seemingly taken beyond your reach forever will miraculously be THERE again. You’ll see them, touch them, feel them, hug and kiss them, cry for joy, and most of all, fall down on your knees and praise the mighty name of Jesus . . . as the Smart family continues to do every single day, I’m sure. An unknown poet once described the Second Coming as “Christmas morning for ever and ever,” and I daresay we can’t improve on that.

Today I want for us to think about and remember just one verse, and then celebrate how this Smart family triumph teaches us all an important lesson. In the book of Matthew – and chapter 24 is known by believers everywhere as the “Second Coming Chapter” – Jesus gives a warning that too many of us have ignored, forgotten, misinterpreted, reinvented, dissected away, or just plain tried to BEAT. But here it is in verse 36:

“NO ONE knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

I shared with you last week – and on this matter I don’t have to TRY to be humble, because, believe me, I and my church family ARE humble – my own denomination earnestly but unwisely swept right past this clear teaching back in 1843 and then again in 1844. “No man knows the date,” Jesus warns, but good Christians from that feverish era went right ahead and set a date . . . twice. Twice they were wrong. Twice they were disappointed. Twice many of them were disillusioned . . . and those looking on from the sidelines were amused, gleeful, and spiritually cynical. But here in this 21st century, friend, we need to prayerfully do two things all the time. First of all, remember this warning. “No one knows about that day or hour.” Because God’s followers continue to set dates, continue to predict, continue to stubbornly do math and dissect prophecy and try to narrow down what God said could not be solved. It’s still happening in my church, and I imagine in yours as well. There are dates and timelines all over the Internet, as people try to construct a “millennial year framework” to show that Planet Earth is about to enter into a seventh thousand-year era of peace.

There was a wonderful editorial in our church paper, the Adventist Review, which I don’t have in front of me here. But author Chris Blake, one of the best in our church, had one simple plea. “Never again,” he wrote. “Please, everyone, never again. Let’s never again have the arrogance to defy what our Savior and Lord told us. No one knows the day or the hour. No one knows! No one CAN know. No one can solve it. Because God isn’t telling.” Writer and pastor Leith Samuel writes:

“If there is one thing certain about the timing of the Lord’s return it is this, that we CANNOT be certain of the timing.” He then quotes the Living Bible, which puts God’s warning this way: “‘You know perfectly well that no one knows.’” And then the conclusion: “It is inevitable, but unpredictable.”

All through these New Testament warning, you see, Jesus teaches His friends the spiritual lesson of constant readiness. Of mature faithfulness in the sunshine and in the shadows. If people really did know the day and the hour, what kind of Christianity would that lead to? We’ve already answered that question many times over. It leads to hysteria. To arrogance and persecution. To the ever-present tendency to wait and “catch the last trolley out,” an expression my friend Morris Venden coined and put on a book cover.

But this is our second point: God is looking for faithful servants who will humbly take the assigned five talents, or the two, or the one . . . and then just keep on working for the Master. When signs look hopeful and when they don’t. When the glad reunion day might be tomorrow or one thousand years from tomorrow.

In the Tyndale New Testament Commentary for Matthew, author R. T. France amplifies on this theme. Working through Matthew 24, he writes:

“Endurance is a prominent apocalyptic theme. When the majority ‘cool off,’ only those who endure will be saved, i.e. only they will enjoy the blessings of the new age.” A bit later he adds this: “It is possible to prepare for the parousia, not by calculating the date, but by a life of constant readiness and response to God’s warnings and introductions. There will apparently be only two categories, the prepared (and therefore saved) and the unprepared (and therefore lost.)”

And you know something? I think back to this recent wonderful headline, where young Elizabeth Smart finally walked into the embrace of Mom and Dad. Those parents never once gave up. Did they know a date when their child would be with them again? No, they didn’t. They didn’t know if or when the case would break open, and the one crucial tip, that hotline call, would finally pay off. But these Christian parents did know, with all the certainty that God’s Word provides, that there would come a day! There would be a moment when they would have Elizabeth back. They would either get her back because of brave citizens and diligent police officers, or because Jesus Christ is a diligent and courageous Redeemer who comes in the clouds. They couldn’t set a date, they couldn’t mark a calendar; all they could do was to watch and pray. And trust and abide.

So friend, this is our challenge too, then. This is discipleship: to “abide till He comes,” in calm expectation. We keep one eye on the sky, and the other on our needy neighbor. We continue to plant our field, go to church, love our neighbor, care for our environment, pray and work for peace. And even though we realize we don’t know the hour, we know there IS going to be an hour. Elizabeth Smart and all the other orphans taken away by Lucifer WILL come back home.

John Stott, the wonderful evangelical writer, calmly puts it this way:

“It is just as mature to say ‘I don’t know,’ as it is to say ‘I know,’ provided we say it about the right things.”

And back to that Richard France, who adds this comment about the metaphor – Matthew 24:43 – where Jesus likens His own return to the coming of a thief in the night. Not that Jesus is in any way like a thief, or that His coming will be secret and surreptitious like a thief. No, and I think many of us twist that metaphor in the wrong direction. When He comes, every eye will see Him. But it WILL be unexpected like a thief in the night. When He does come, it will not be a date that anyone successfully posted on a web site. Because no man knows the day or the hour. And Dr. France wisely observes:

“The Son of man, like the burglar, does not advertise the time of his arrival. The only precaution, therefore, is constant readiness. In view of such plain statements as this it is astonishing that some Christians can still attempt to work out the date of the parousia.”

I’d like to invite you to join me right here and now, and in the days to come, as a part of the great body of expectant believers. We don’t set a date, but we certainly look forward to it. And, just like the Smart family, our confidence doesn’t waver. We know Jesus is going to do it; He’s going to come back and get us.

We’ve been borrowing just a line here and there from an old sermon by this ministry’s founder, H. M. S. Richards. He has a quiet little poem we’ll close with today.

“He said He’d come! Christ will not leave us. Forgotten on a hostile shore. Through all our exile and our waiting, His promise holds – to come once more. He will return! With flash of glory, With shout on shout of risen men, With thunder anthem of the heavens – He’ll keep His word to come again.”