Q: Jesus coming back and the signs when it happens?

I heard that Jesus said that he would come back again (when the world ends) when everyone in the world have known about him and when the Jews turn back to God. Is it true? Either way, what signs are there when the time comes?
Those are good questions that deserve way more time to explicate, but nonetheless, here are some thoughts scripturally:

We do not know when Christ will return.

Passages such as Matt 24:44, Matt 25:13, and Mark 13:32-33 actually state that Jesus will come back “at an hour you do not expect”.  “Hour” or [hõra] is best understood as time in a more general sense.  The point of these passages is Jesus telling us that we CANNOT know when He is coming back and since He is coming back at an unexpected time, we should be ready at all times for His return.  There have been many attempts at making predictions of a future date and time of Christ’s return, which has in turn misled many Christians.  Therefore, we need to reject those predict specific dates and times in that regard.

The Apostle Peter reminds us that God has a different perspective on time, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.  The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness.”  So although there are numerous passages talking about the return of Christ being near, we should also consider that it does not necessary mean chronologically close by human time standards.

Lastly, there are definitely some passages that describe the signs of Christ returning.  Here are some:

    •    The Preaching of the Gospel to All Nations (Mark 13:10, cf. Matt. 24:14)
    •    The Great Tribulation (Mark 13:7-8, Luke 21:20-24)
    •    False Prophets Working Signs and Wonders (Mark 13:22, cf. Matt. 24:23-24)
    •    Signs in the Heavens (Mark 13:22; Luke 21:15-27)
    •    The Coming of the Man of Sin and Rebellion (Rev. 13, 2 Thess. 2:1-10, etc)
    •    The Salvation of Israel (Romans 11)

Very honestly, there has been much scholarly dispute to how all these things will pan out, but I think more importantly than trying to discern the “end time” is to consider this:

“No matter what the differences on the details, all Christians who take the Bible as their final authority agree that the final and ultimate result of Christ’s return will be the judgment of unbelievers and the final reward of believers, and that believers will live with Christ in a new heaven and a new earth for all eternity.  God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will reign and will be worshiped in a never-ending kingdom with no more sin or sorrow or suffering.”

Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology)
 

[Answered by Pastor Shu-Ling]

Q: Earthquakes, end of the world... HELP?

I remember someone mentioning that the earth will tremble more as the day of Jesus' return gets closer. There was just another earthquake in China - it feels as though the earth is crumbling beneath our feet. Are all these earthquakes these past few months a coincidence (like...part of a chain reaction) or do they actually mean something? Not gonna lie, it's getting kind of freaky at this point.

Matthew 24:3-8 gives insight into this matter. Here, Jesus tells us that He will return one day and the end of the age will come:

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you.  For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many.  You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.  All these are the beginning of birth pains.

As you can see, the signs associated with Jesus' return are:

1. false messiahs (v. 5)
2. reports of wars (v. 6-7)
3) natural catastrophes (v. 7), including earthquakes.

Given the news of recent earthquakes in Haiti and China, does this mean Jesus' return is upon us? Perhaps. I say this because nobody knows for certain. Scripture tells us that it will come like a thief in the night (Matthew 24:42-43) and as fast as lightning (Matthew 24:27). The only thing we know for sure is that Christ WILL return one day to judge the world. For those who have repented and put their faith in his salvation, they will be taken to heaven in glory at this time. For those who have not, however, only eternal separation from God awaits them.

What this all means is that predicting the exact time of judgment is not important. We can speculate all we want, but that isn't what we're called to do. It's not important. What is important is ensuring that you do delay the time of your salvation (2 Cor. 6:2). If you are saved, friend, there's nothing to be worry about or to be scared of. Jesus will come and take you home.

[Answered by Pastor HM]

Q: The point of living without God?

Q: If the world was to end and there was no God or Jesus and the world ended through natural causes, what was the point of living in the first place?

Interesting question. If there was no God, there would be no purpose to life or point to living. If you read this forum thread, people were asked this very question: What's the point of living if you're going to die anyway? How did people respond? Some said the point of life is simply to live/have fun/enjoy every moment. Others said it is to procreate. One person said life is an illusion and left it at that. As you can see, there is a lot of confusion and speculation. This is one of the biggest problems with atheism: It cannot give you a satisfactory answer to the meaning of life. If you really believe that there is no God, then you must believe that you simply cease to exist. Your body is buried in the ground. This is how Matt Slick of CARM.org puts it:

If atheism is true: The universe has laws. These laws cannot be violated. Life is a product of these laws and can only exists in harmony with those laws and is governed by them. Therefore, human thought, feelings, etc., are programmed responses to stimuli and the atheist cannot legitimately claim to have meaning in life.

Mankind must find something outside of his own limited knowledge and interpretations on which to base his life if he wants any security at all. Science cannot define meaning in life, nor was it meant to. And it is meaning -- purpose -- that must be found for a man to be satisfied and have a direction in his life.

God created us to live forever through his Son Jesus. He crafted us with a purpose in this life and in the next. Even if the world ends today, Christ-followers have nothing to worry about. Jesus will come in his glory; He will gather us and we will live with him forever (Matthew 24).

I recommend you take a moment and read the first 7 chapters of Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life. I think it will help your thinking in this matter. Finally, ask yourself: What are you living for? What is the point of living? And consider what C.S. Lewis once said, "All that is not eternal, is eternally useless." God and his purposes are eternal. Live for Him.

[Answered by Pastor HM, who is glad I live for God's purpose - and not my own]

Q: I understand that us Christians should be excited for the return of Jesus, but is it a sin to want more time on earth?...

...Time to accomplish things such as making a family, graduating and going to places? If the world ends in 2012, does that mean that Jesus is coming in only a few years? If so, then what is the point to planning our future and going to school knowing that the world will be ending soon.


A: Thanks for sharing this thought with us! Let's break this question down a bit and we'll try to answer every little thing here.

First, the reasons of why you want more time on earth seem innocent enough. Who doesn't want to get married, have a family, travel places? I'm sure no one would argue with that. But in comparison to the coming of Christ, I would dare say that those plans (and all of our plans for that matter), pale in comparison to the glory that would be seen with Christ. I know we all want to have our time here and then go home (as in heaven) after we've had our fun. But that's not the way God works. So I would question whether you would want to honor and glorify God through that marriage, graduation or having a family. Or...do you just want to do those things because you feel as though they would bring YOU joy?

Secondm I asked myself where in the world did you get the idea that 2012 was going to be the day that the world would end? A quick google search answered that question! I understand that there are a lot of prophecies and teachings that tell us that this special day (12.12.12) would be the end times. Including a recent event in the news about a Bubble Boy and needing the money to build an undergrad lair to save him and his family. The truth is, is that we don't know when the end times would come. Jesus does not tell us exactly when He will come back.

The Bible is very clear to us as it says in Mark 13:31-33,

³²"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come.

We wont know when Christ will come. Through the history of time, there has always been these theories that people say will be the end of the world. But if you believe in the Bible, and you believe the Word of God as true, the above passage needs to be your standard. Don't fall for what false prophets are saying. Listen to the one that is true.

If we don't know the time or place that Christ is coming, what is the point of planning our future if there's a possible He could come tomorrow?

First of all, I think it would pain God to see all of His children being sluggards, waiting for Him to come. We have been gifted with so many things in our life...they are most definitely supposed to be used to glorify Him! Second, God's commands and His word still stands, even in our anticipation of Christ's coming. It's kind of like people arguing why we need to stop sinning if we know that we'll always be sinners and God will forgive us. Just because we know that, does that mean we can stop trying to be better Christians or stop trying to strive to be like Christ? Of course not! We still are to aim our lives as models of Christ, even though we know that we'll never achieve that perfect standard. Do you write your test with the aim to just get only 70%? No...you write it with the mentality that you want to get 100%. And when you don't, you just work harder again next time!

You'll be interested to know that in the 1st Century - during the time of Paul - people in his community felt this way also. They had just witnessed the Crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ and had heard His promise that He would be returning. And so they (people during the Apostle Paul's time), believed that He would be coming back within their lifetime. And so they prepared themselves for His 2nd arrival. Obviously, Christ had not come yet, and so they had no choice but to go on with their lives and strives to live in the example of Christ.

[This is one of the reasons why we have the written Gospels and the writings of the New Testament. The Jewish culture is a very oral culture; as in they passed down stories not in writing, but verbally. When the people saw that Christ was not coming back any time soon, they felt it was necessary to preserve the truth in writing, so that the future generations would know what really happened. Hence, we have the Gospels and the Epistles.]

Since we do not know the day or hour in which Christ will come back again, we need to simply follow the commands set out for us in the Bible and also with the example given to us with Jesus. We need to still strive to submit and follow our Lord Jesus Christ.

[Answered by Pastor Kelly J. Tam]

Q: The end of the world in 2012??!!!

Top of the Mayan Ruins.

Belize, Central America.

July 2007.

"I was watching the Discovery Channel the other day and there was a show on about the 13 Crystal Skulls. Actually, it was really more about the Mayan Calendar, and how the world would end on December 21, 2012. The Mayans were far more intelligent than people today - their calendars are extremely accurate. It also mentioned something about how the Earth would be aligned with the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, thus spurring many catastrophic events. Apparently, there are three ways of viewing the situation:

1) The world will be destroyed on that day.
2) There will be a drastic change in the way we are living.
3) The Mayans were all killed before they could finish the calendar, so it ends abruptly.

Which one should we believe? Also, since God told us that not even the angels know when judgement day is, does that mean December 21, 2012 is definitely NOT that day (since we, as humans, predicted it already)?"

Thanks for asking your question. Interest in the year 2012 has been steadily increasing over the past few years, partly due to our culture's recent fascination with ideas such as conspiracy theories, spirituality and prophecies. Movies such as the upcoming 2012 (see trailer below) have attracted the attention of media and households alike.

Admittedly, I am not an expert in Mayan culture in the slightest, so I cannot comment on whether the Discovery Channel's documentary about this ancient peoples group is accurate or not. I did, however, do some research and stumbled across this article from the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies. It would seem they answer your first two questions about Mayan prophecy:

Is the world really going to end? Did the Maya really believe the world would end?

There is nothing in the Maya or Aztec or ancient Mesoamerican prophecy to suggest that they prophesied a sudden or major change of any sort in 2012. The notion of a "Great Cycle" coming to an end is completely a modern invention.

Maya inscriptions that predict the future consistently show that they expected life to go on pretty much the same forever. At Palenque, for instance, they predicted that people in the year 4772 AD would be celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of their great king Pakal.

Of course, astronomers expect the Sun will eventually blow up into a red giant, then collapse and eventually burn out, but not for several billion years. Although the Maya did cast some predictions into the far distant future, we have not yet discovered any that reach that far. As to whether our world will end in 2012, the answer is, well, yes and no. Americans' sense of invulnerability ended on 9-11-2001. Everything is getting darker and more desperate. Wall Street is crashing. The prospect of peace in the Middle East dims year by year. Some Russian nuclear weapons are unaccounted for. Oil consumption has outstripped our oil production capability. Don't even start with global warming or overpopulation. By any measure, the world after 2012 will certainly look much different than it does today. Statistically, some significant change for the worse is bound to happen in 2012 –or in 2011, or 2013, or 2020, or whatever year you choose.

Even if we were to find evidence of actual Maya prophecies about 2012, that doesn't make them true. Apparently all of Christendom expected Jesus to return in the year 1000, for example. And maybe the most important question to ask was voiced to me by Bill Saturno, discoverer of the San Bartolo murals. If the Maya were such skilled prophets, how could they have missed the Conquest? "Didn't see that one coming, did they?" The single most devastating disaster to befall the peoples of the Americas of all time, and not a word about it in the entire corpus of Mayan prophetic literature.

Is the Maya Calendar really more accurate than ours?

Depends how you define "accurate."

Their Solar calendar of 365 days did not count leap-years, so it was far less-synchronized with the actual tropical year of 365.2422 days than the Gregorian calendar that we use (400 Gregorian years = 146,097 days; giving an average year of 365.2425 days).

Their 260-day sacred calendar has been in use without interruption for at least 2300 years, but then, so has our weekday cycle of 7 days. "Tradition" is not the same thing as "accuracy."

Teeple (1906) found evidence that convinced him that the astronomers at Palenque recognized that the slow drift out of synchronization between the Maya 365-day calendar and the actual tropical year would take 1508 Haabs (years of 365 days) to come back into synchronization (1507 tropical years). This correction factor would come closer to 365.2422 days than the Gregorian calendar does. (This evidence consists of a distance number of slightly over 754 Haabs, almost precisely half of 1508. The "Triad Progenitor," a.k.a. "Lady Beastie," gave birth to GI, GII, and GIII 754 years and some months after the Era date 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u, for example.) So one could claim that the Maya were conscious of precisely how inaccurate their Haab cycle was with regard to the tropical year, but I don't think that amounts to saying their calendar was that accurate. We know how inaccurate the Gregorian calendar is, too, with far greater precision.

Their moon cycle alternating 29 with 30 days came close to the actual lunar month of 29.5306 days. They made it even more "accurate" by simply adjusting it by observation. That is, if the new moon appeared a day early, they simply declared the cycle to have 29 days rather than 30. Lounsbury showed they did notice a pattern in these discrepancies, however: in Copan they appear to have recognized a cycle of 149 moons = 4400 days, while the Palenque astronomers used a different cycle with 81 lunations equaling 2392 days. The later Dresden Eclipse Pages are based on the Palenque cycle multiplied by five: 405 moons = 11,960 days. All these factors come very close to the acutal value of a lunation; the latter two within a thousandth of a percent (9.3 x 10^-6, or 9.3 millionths).

Ancient Maya astronomers also were apparently aware of the very long astronomical cycle we call Precession of the Equinoxes (ca. 25,800 years), and their approximation of it (26,021 years) was accurate within 1.6%. This, too, is not quite the same as possessing a superior calendar. Although it is technically incorrect to say the ancient Maya had a "more accurate calendar than we do," one must respect that the precision of their observations and their astronomical recordkeeping were astonishingly accurate. However, they were no more precise than the ancient Greeks, and considerably less accurate than our modern measurements.

Claiming that the Maya calendar was "more accurate" than the Gregorian implies, of course, that they had access to knowledge superior to our own, knowledge of a highly esoteric or even extra-terrestrial nature. This is simply not true. They simply used the tools they had at hand, and their penetrating, persistent intelligence to do the best they could. An advantage they possessed was a clearer, darker sky than we of the Industrial Age will ever see again (except the lucky few who travel in space).

Summarily, the article agrees with the Bible on the matter of the time of judgment. The ancient Mayans did not predict December 21, 2012 as the day of judgment. Likewise, the Bible says the day of judgment cannot be known in advance. In fact, Scripture tells us that it will come like a thief in the night (Matthew 24:42-43) and like lightning (Matthew 24:27). The only thing we know for sure is that Christ will return one day to judge the world. For those who have repented and put their faith in his salvation, they will be taken to heaven in glory at this time. For those who have not, however, only eternal separation from God awaits them.

What this all means is that predicting the exact time of judgment is not important. What is important is ensuring that you do delay the time of your salvation (2 Cor. 6:2). Whether final judgment happens in 2012 or 2011 or 3012 is not crucial; faith in a true savior is.

[Answered by Pastor HM, who has only visited ancient Mayan ruins on several occasions]