You Must be Ready for Jesus Return!
(Notes on Matthew 24:37-44)
That day in October ’93 began like every day. I was twenty-three, at theological college. I was going out with Amanda-Sue Forder, and we knew were going to be married. It was October 19, a Monday. I worked and studied, and at night I attended a theological lecture—just like every other Monday. Soon after, as I returned as usual to my share-house in Subiaco, my brother called me.
“Cam, Grandad’s died. He died an hour ago.”
I had not yet lost a close relative. Grandad was a kind and generous man who had played an enormously positive role in my life. There had been no indication that he was unwell. But that evening, after dinner, his aorta ruptured: suddenly, catastrophically, and utterly unexpectedly.
My world, and that of my family, was quite different at the end of what had begun as a normal Monday.
In Matthew 24:37-44 Jesus teaches us that he will return on a similarly ordinary day. Do you think about that? Does it change your outlook on your life? Does it affect your behaviour? Do you look forward to it?
As we will see, it ought to affect everything. Radically.
Matthew 24:37-41 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
This appears in the heart of the so-called Matthew 24-25 “Olivet Discourse,” Jesus’ sustained teaching about his coming visible return. He urges us to contemplate the world of Noah, to see there a vital preview of what is to come.
In the TV show NCIS, Special Agent Jethro Gibbs labours in his basement to restore with untold love and care a classic wooden boat, a boat that fills his basement. It will be impossible to get the finished boat out to sea. This helps make Gibbs rather an interesting character. Likewise Noah. He is the village idiot, a laughing-stock, because he builds a great boat where there is no sea.
When he wasn’t building he was preaching (2Pe 2:5): warning people about the coming flood, urging them to repent and seek the grace of God. No doubt people mocked his preaching as much as they mocked his boat. I think I would have.
When we know things are going to happen then we plan our future around them. We “factor them in.” If a baby is coming, you don’t plan a three-month mission trip to Yemen around due date. If you have exams in June then you won’t take off to Disney Land for the month of May.
But everyone ignored Noah and got right on with their lives. They ate and drank. They got married. They arranged marriages for their children: an excellent custom that should be revived post haste. They ignored the flood, and planned to enjoy the days and years ahead of them. Mad Noah’s preaching was neurotic nonsense.
And Jesus said that the same would happen in relation to his return. “For just as the days of Noah, in this way will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
“Coming” translates parousia (παρουσια), a most important New Testament word. Ancient writers often used it in a religious sense, to describe “the coming of a hidden divinity, who makes his presence felt by a revelation of his power.” They also used it in a civil sense, to describe the visit of a high-ranking official, king, or emperor. This made Parousia an ideal technical term in the New Testament for the return of Jesus (see Mat 24:3, 27, 37, 39; 1Co 1:8; 15:23; 1Th 2:19, 3:13, 4:15, 5:23; 2Th 2:1, 8; Jam 5:7; 2Pe 1:16, 3:4, 12.) I will use the word Parousia for the rest of this article to refer to Jesus' Second Coming.
We must note also how Jesus, by referring to “the coming of the Son of Man,” grounds his Parousia in the Daniel 7:13-14 account of God’s coronation of Messiah over all nations forever:
“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”
How though does Jesus link his Parousia with Noah? In the same way that Noah’s generation did not factor in the coming flood into their present and future, the world would do exactly the same with Christ’s return. Noah’s generation refused to believe his warnings, and refused to change their lives: “Up to the day Noah entered the ark, they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away.”
In the original language, Jesus simply says “they did not know, until the flood came and carried them all away.” Flood translates kataklysmos (κατακλυσμος). The emphatic final word in Jesus’ phrase is the adjective “all.” Outside of the ark they were all swept away. No exceptions, no special cases.
Compare also NIV2011 “they knew nothing about what would happen” with the original terse “they did not know.” The NIV virtually restricts their ignorance to the flood. The original leaves open the idea that they remained ignorant about everything: about God, God’s will for their lives, God’s holiness and justice, the need for repentance, God’s grace and the possibility of finding mercy, the certainty of coming judgment, and the urgent necessity to find safety in the ark, the one and only shelter that God had provided. And when we remember that God had, through Noah, “a preacher of righteousness” (2Pe 2:5) told people about these things, we see that their ignorance was wilful and culpable. They did not want to know.
Jesus drives the lesson home by repeating that powerful phrase: “the Parousia of the Son of Man will be the same.” Stop and contemplate the unspeakable tragedy and grace of Genesis 6-9. It is a preview of the Parousia.
I diverge to note that Jesus’ words destroy any inkling that the Genesis 6-9 flood account is mythical or “a-historical” or something less than the truthful reporting of an actual event. Some class Genesis 1-11 as a “Primeval Prologue” to the Bible, (primeval means “first age,”) “which does not intend to report history, but grand mythical aetiologies that explain why the world is the way it is.” But if there was no historical Noah, who built a great ark-refuge and who warned about a coming flood; and if there wasn’t an actual flood that killed everyone on earth save Noah’s family, then the analogy that Jesus draws between Noah and his own Parousia is gutted. The analogy only grips and bites and works because people in Genesis 6-9 time and history failed to factor into their daily lives a coming catastrophe, and were then actually swept away to their deaths, and the same thing will happen when Jesus returns.
There will be differences though, as an overview of Matthew 24-25 elucidates. The flood brought a great disruption to creation, but the Parousia will bring about the complete wrapping up (and then renovation) of creation (24:29). The flood constituted an intermediate judgment of evil humanity, but the Parousia will usher in final judgment (25:31-46). Following the flood there was an opportunity for the human race, re-established from Noah’s family, to repent and find God’s mercy. There will be no second chance after the Parousia: a person’s place under God’s fierce judgment or within his tender mercy will be fixed for all eternity (25:11-12, 46). Whereas God’s punishment upon evil by the flood seems very fierce, this will seem as nothing compared to the “great distress, unequalled” of the Parousia (24:21). Instead of drowning, there will be eternal “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (24:51; 25:30), and blackness forever (25:30). God’s punishment for sin is neither arbitrary nor cruel, but it is implacably fierce and terrifying nonetheless.
Moreover, the Parousia will bring not a cataclysmic deluge, but a person. And every human being will either be the object of this person’s justice and appalling punishment for sin, or will find mercy and grace with and alongside and in this person. The saved will not be found huddled in an ark, but in the safe arms of Christ. Those therefore who have repented of sin and fled to him for mercy and grace (as Noah’s family fled to the ark), and those who have sheltered from God’s just wrath under the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice for sin (as Noah’s family sheltered from God’s just wrath under the roof of the ark) “will be caught up together… in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so they will be with the Lord forever” (1Th 4:17).
That’s why, at the Parousia, two men in the same field, or two women at the same mill, will be shockingly and instantaneously separated: one to be judged, one to be saved (Mat 24:40-41).
Jesus wraps up this section with a pointed application:
Matthew 24:42-44 Therefore keep watch [Be awake! Ready! Alert!], because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. 43 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
The day of the flood began like any other, and no one expected it to end any differently. No one imagined that they would not at the end of that day return to their homes and dinner and bed. The coming of Christ will be just the same. Wars and rumours of wars, famines and earthquakes, are constant reminders of the inevitable fact of the Parousia (Mat 24:6-8), but none of these things give any indication as to the time of the Parousia. No competent thief gives notice to his victims. And there will be no 12-month, 12-day, or 12-hour notice for the Parousia.
The day of Christ’s return will begin like every other day, and will end like no other day. It will bring joy to many, and devastation to the rest. Noah’s flood was a preview and pledge. The past promised and disbelieved cataclysm actually arrived on one fateful day. So will the Parousia.
Within Jesus’ description lies a prescription. The fact that he will come on an ordinary day must shape our ordinary days. They must be filled with constant expectation of Christ’s return. Our default posture must be “on the edge of our seats.” We must work and play, love and worship, in keen expectation of Christ’s imminent return. What tremendous dignity this adds to our daily tasks. Nothing we do is “filling in time until the Lord returns.” Everything is done in preparation for the Master’s return, and “It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes” (Luke 12:37).
[The main picture is very familiar to any of us who had the old Golden Books' Children's Bible, first published in the 1960s.]