Her questions lead to a rather extensive e-mail conversation.
One of her questions was, “Is ‘just being prepared’ our most important concern in light of the end of time?” As I thought about this I realized the question had two answers.
Yes it is!
No it’s not!
“Just being prepared,” suggests we do something. But doing is not all there is to it.
Jesus talked, in Matthew 24, about being prepared. He said, in verse 42, “Therefore keep watch.” The remainder of that chapter and the one that follows describe ways to go about “keeping watch.” However, everything Jesus says about this “vigilance,” He says with an assumption. His assumption is that all we do is more about who we are than about the deed. Being prepared requires doing. It also involves our being. Actually, it is more about being than doing. What is done, in the life of a Christ follower, comes out of who we are.
Luke writes, in chapter 17, that Jesus conversation with His followers about “end times” began with a question. Pharisees, he tells us, “asked … when the Kingdom of God would come …” Jesus response is profoundly significant. In these few words we are given a radical new understanding of who we are; what God’s purposes are for us. “Jesus replied,” Luke wrote,
“The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people
say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you."
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
This is a summary of God’s Sovereign plan. The men who asked the question which prompted it understood the “kingdom” in a particular way. They believed that they and their ancestors were chosen by God to rule the world. Their vision of that was national, political, cultural, and economic. Jesus rejects that vision throughout His life, and now, in these final days of His life on earth, explains why. The Kingdom of God is a personal thing. The “rule of God,” He says, “is now accessible to everyone.” (Mark 1:15.) Our “being prepared,” requires that we understand this.
Look back across the history of God’s dealings with our ancestors from the Fall in Eden to this Luke 17 moment in the life of Jesus. When the man and woman He created disobeyed Him he cursed them; the serpent who deceived them; and everything else. But, implicit in that curse is a promise. The promise is hidden in His curse of the serpent. “I will make you and the woman; you and your offspring, her and her offspring; enemies,” He declared. “He, her offspring, will crush your head. You will strike his heel.” Obviously a “crushed head” is more serious than a “bruised heel.” A child of woman will prevail over the tempting deceiver. This is a promise. God will ultimately undo the mess sin brought on our race and our world.
The rest of the story of the Bible is about that “undoing.” All of the goings on in Jewish history over millennia were moving this chosen race, and all people effected by these events, to a crucial, dramatic, Divine intervention. Jews believed that and for generations looked forward to it. Ironically their expectations and God’s fulfillment of the promise were diametrically different. They expected a Kingdom with all the customary pomp and power. God was working in the completely opposite direction. They were correct in their anticipation that they, the Jewish people, would be prominent in all of it. But they were mistaken as to how. C.S. Lewis describes God’s direction well in an essay titled “The Grand Miracle.”
“One people picked out of the whole earth; that people purged and proved again
and again. Some are lost in the desert before they reach Palestine; some
stay in Babylon; some becoming indifferent. The whole thing narrows and
narrows, until at last it comes down to a little point, small as the point of a
spear – a Jewish girl at her prayers. That is what the whole of human
nature has narrowed down to before the Incarnation takes place.”
God’s Grand Scheme to rescue the Human Race from the mess it got itself into is reduced to the work He will do in and through one, humble, Jewish girl, Mary. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” the Heavenly messenger said to her. “The holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”
With this radical departure from the usual drama, so often seen as the necessary sign of a great event. God begins what we now know to be the “Greatest Event in Cosmic History.” The Incarnation – God becoming human so that we may become Divine.
Our “being prepared” for the return of Christ hinges on this very thing. The “Holy Spirit” coming “upon” humble, prayerful individuals empowering them with the “power of the Most High God,” and bringing about the birth of “children of God.” These are words right out of John’s telling of the “Greatest Story Ever Told.” (See John 1:12 &13.) This is the Christmas Story fully told. We must understand this. We must know what it means to us personally. The “Kingdom of Heaven,” as Matthew repeatedly calls it, comes inconspicuously, sometimes imperceptibly, one heart at a time. Because Christ is born it can actually happen! Your heart; my heart can be one of those hearts.
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