Join us as we delve into the intriguing questions posed about the end times. Throughout history, the warning signs have sparked both fear and preparation among the faithful. This episode provides a detailed exposition of the key events that are believed to lead up to the return of Jesus. Examining wars, natural disasters, and more, we aim to uncover whether current worldly events are reflections of ancient prophecies. Meanwhile, discover the potential connection between historical temple destructions and future predictions that shape our understanding of the end of the age.
00:00:01 Introduction and Fascination with End of the World
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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How would you like to know, step by step, all the events leading up to the end of the world? Well, maybe you’d rather not know. I don’t know. But we really have a morbid fascination with the end of the world. It’s been the subject of movies, for example, ever since we invented movies or at least ever since we invented special effects. I remember years ago one that visualized or imagined some sort of a space arc. The Earth was going to come to an end. The Earth was being destroyed by some collision with another planet. And we were loading up a spaceship with 100 or 200 people who were going to rocket off to another planet and settle the other planet and bring up families and carry on life as we’ve known it. It was back when I don’t think we understood maybe as fully as we should have the dynamics. At least the movie makers didn’t understand the dynamics of space travel and the distances that are involved between habitable worlds in the universe. But they still made a pretty good movie, and it was a lot of fun to think about, to imagine. It gave you a thrill. Well, now things are different. More recently, we’re fascinated with how to head off the end of the world. Not how to escape it, how to get on a spaceship and go away, but how to head it off. We’re looking out for what could be, and we think maybe very really will be, an extinction event on this planet. An extinction event is when something big enough hits us to bring an end to life, at least certainly to human life, as we know it. Events like this, they tell us, have taken place in the past, and there’s no earthly reason why they should not take place in the future. There have been enormous catastrophes in the past of this planet that have wiped out giant species of creatures, leaving lower types of life in place. Well, now we fantasize in our movies about sending a team into space to blow up an asteroid or deflect an asteroid or somehow prevent the thing from hitting our planet. It was chilling a few years ago to actually see pictures and to watch almost in real time as a comet slammed into a neighboring planet, piece after piece after piece. It was a big planet, and it was impressive. And everybody knew, based upon the pictures they were sending back and the comparison of the earth’s size, that if that ever happened here, it would be all over. No, not all over, but the shouting. There would be nobody left to shout. It would represent the end of human life. The question of the end of the world was raised, oh, what shall we say, 2,000 years ago by the disciples of Jesus. And they got an answer from Jesus himself. Actually, it was only a couple of days before Jesus was crucified that they were standing in the temple area. And as they were there, the disciples said, Master, look at the kind of stones and what buildings they built here. And I expect it was really fascinating for those men to look at this magnificent building and the walls and the huge stones that had been put into place here. with enormous effort and maybe even with technology long since forgotten, for all we know. They were impressed. Jesus, well, he was not. He said, do you see these things? I’m going to tell you the truth. There shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down. It’s hard to imagine the impact of that statement on Jesus’ disciples. I mean, the temple was the center of their religious life. I mean, I wouldn’t say that it’s everything to them. God was everything. But the temple was where they went to pray. The temple was where all of the sacrifices took place. The temple was where even the plan of salvation, in a sense, was played out on the stage of the temple. And the idea that this building, which was God’s building, well, it was absolutely unthinkable. Of course, by this time in history, everybody knew that it had been destroyed once before. A temple far greater than this one, built by a man named Solomon, had been torn down generations before. This one, well, it was rebuilt on the ruins. And I doubt very seriously if it had the glory, even close to the glory, of Solomon’s temple. And so they, I expect they were shocked into silence by what Jesus said. Had not another word to say for a little while as they thought that over. And as he sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately and said, When shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of your coming and of the end of the world? I expect, in a way, that that expression, end of the world, entered into our language right here in this little verse, Matthew 24, verse 3, out of the King James Bible. Actually, they really weren’t asking about the end of the world. The expression they used was, well, Lord, when shall these things be? What’s the sign of your coming? And the end of the age. The end of the age. Whatever that may have meant to them. It didn’t mean the fracturing of the planet into a thousand or millions of pieces. It just basically meant the end of this age. And Jesus answered. He then answers with one of his longer speeches, in fact. It’s called the Olivet Prophecy. As he makes his way through the events that in the one case do and the other case do not represent the return of Jesus Christ. And what they’re asking about is three things. One is the destruction of the temple. Another is his return. And the third, the end of the age. What were those signs? And what did Jesus tell them would be that sequence of events, step by step, that would lead up to the end of the world?
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Well, we’ll talk about that when I come back after these words. Could Jesus Christ return tonight? Well, he could if he wanted to, but aren’t there things that have to happen first? If you would like to know what these things are, request the free program, Could Christ Return Tonight? Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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So the question is posed. When shall these things be, that is, those things regarding the destruction of the temple and its environs so that no stone is left on top of another? And what will be the sign of your coming into the end of the age? So Jesus sits down and begins to explain to them what is called the Olivet Prophecy. Take heed, he said, that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many. Now that’s fascinating, because what Jesus is telling us, that as we go down through the generations of time, in his own age he expected this to take place, but he also is telling us things that lead up to the end of the age. And he says people are going to come in his name. I guess they’ll call themselves Christians. I guess they will come in the name of Jesus, which suggests maybe that they are a minister of some sort who claim to be a minister of Jesus and are going to, in some cases, claim to be messiahs or false messiahs. And they’re going to deceive not just a few people, but a lot of people. Now, if you’re going to consider this and take it seriously, you’ve got to sit down and look around you and say, hmm, I wonder where these people are. I wonder who they might be. And you shall hear, he said, of wars and rumors of wars. See that you be not troubled. All these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. Now, I remember as just a boy when it was during World War II, and I can remember hearing my parents and others talking about the end of the world, as they said. And when I heard the words, end of the world, I started paying attention about that time. I kind of liked the world. I lived in a little town in northwest Arkansas, and it was about two minutes from my home to the city limits, and I was out of town. I was in the woods. There was a creek out there where I could throw rocks at turtles and things and explore little caves and have a wonderful time with my dog, or I should say dogs in the plural. It was a great life for me. The end of my world? Uh-uh. I don’t want to hear that. But when it was brought up, I had to listen. And one of the things they said that would be a sign of the time of the end, of the end of the world, was wars and rumors of wars. And the reason why they were worried was because, guess what? We were right in the middle of World War II. And wars were being fought everywhere. And apart from the real wars, there were rumors of wars. So they were concerned. But Jesus said, all these things have to come to pass. Don’t be troubled because there are wars and rumors of wars. The end is not yet. Well, that’s a little bit comforting in a way because, in fact, there probably hasn’t been a time in the history of man when there haven’t been wars and rumors of wars. And maybe we’re talking about a matter of degree. Now, I do believe that Jesus is talking about events leading up to his return, climaxing, that this whole wars and rumors of wars things comes to a climax. But what he’s telling his disciples is there’s going to be an awful lot of trouble in this world. And I don’t want you to think just because there is trouble that the end is staring you in the face. Nation shall rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in diverse places. And, folks, there have been for the last 2,000 years since Jesus told us this. And he said, this is all going to happen. Now, don’t be troubled by it. All this is the beginning of sorrows. Now, that’s not particularly reassuring. Okay, I’m not troubled by the fact that we’ve got wars and rumors of wars. I don’t worry over much about the fact that there’s a famine here and an earthquake there. But I do worry when Jesus said, don’t worry, this is just the beginning. Because what he is suggesting is, it’s going to get worse. A whole lot worse. And he said, they’re going to also deliver you up to be afflicted and kill you. And you’ll be hated of all nations for my namesake. And many will stumble and betray one another and hate one another. I’m afraid in the years subsequent to Christ’s ascension to the Father and the years when the church was doing its early work, that many of these things did come to pass, that people did stumble. Because even within the first century, there were times of terrible persecution upon the church. And you know, when the people around you that you love dearly are dying for their faith, And the question has to come to your mind, you know, do I really believe this? Is this something that’s really important enough for me to suffer torture and torment and imprisonment and death for? And an awful lot of people stumbled and fell. And having stumbled and fell, they betrayed one another and some of them even hated one another. And here we are in the 20th century, all these years later, wondering how long we have to go until the return of Jesus Christ, and people are still betraying one another, and Christians are still hating one another. Oh, we’re not being thrown in jail because we’re Christians, at least not here, but in other parts of the world they are. There are places in the world where Christians are being sold to slaves when they’re being thrown in jail and worked at slave labor. What can I tell you? Have times changed? Jesus said these things are going to happen, leading up to another destruction, to his coming in the end of the age. And many false prophets shall arise and shall deceive. Many. Not a few. Many. There will be false prophets, you know, on every street corner. There are all kinds of people who are foretelling the future. I don’t really know exactly what he means by false prophets or exactly how we ought to take it and all of its implications. But there are people everywhere out there trying to tell us what’s going to happen next year and the year after that. All the calamities that might befall us in the years to come. Some of them are economic forecasts. Some of them are forecasts of some terrible great computer calamity. And they go on and on and on. There are prophets everywhere telling us what’s going to happen. And some of them may even be right once or twice. Jesus said, Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. And I’ll tell you, I have little doubt that that was true in the first century, and it is certainly true right now. Because lawlessness, that is a general disrespect for law in general and the law of God in particular, because that’s what iniquity is, you know. The Greek word that’s translated iniquity is the word for law with a negative in front of it. It basically means no law. And so consequently, it says, because this antipathy toward law, and particularly toward God’s law, shall be everywhere, the love of many for God will wax cold. And you’ll come to the place where you can have all types of immorality in the highest places and the highest political offices in the land and perhaps even in the church. And people will say, well, it’s not that big a deal. Maybe we should judge the man on his administrative capabilities instead of on his character. And we begin to decide that, well, maybe God’s stricter than he really needs to be. Jesus had something to say about that. He said, but he that shall endure to the end, that’s the man that’s going to be saved. What does he mean by that? He means the person that stays true, true to the faith, the person who is not lawless, the person who doesn’t cast aside the law as standards of moral conduct and standards of right and wrong that show a man how to live his life. He’s not going to throw that aside. The man that will endure, who will stick it out in the face of all the lawlessness that’s around us, that man will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations. And then shall the end come. Now, if you really like this world, I guess, and you really didn’t want to ever see this world come to an end, then you ought to get in the way and interfere with all those people out there who are printing up Bibles by their millions and scattering them around in every language known to man in every corner of the world because God says, when the gospel of the kingdom has finally gone everywhere, preached in one gospel, it says, another account says, published, when it’s gone there, then the end shall come. Now, I think an argument could be made that if we’re talking about the gospel being the Bible, that’s pretty well been done. There are very many places in the world where it has not gone. There may be a little crevice here, a little nook or cranny there where it has not gone, but I don’t know where they are. But God’s watch doesn’t run at the same speed ours does. And something taking place within a century of the time of another event is no big deal with him. Have we already gotten to the place to where the gospel has been preached or published or taken everywhere, at least in terms of the book itself? You may want to argue about, well, my version of the gospel hasn’t been preached. Mine is the true gospel. I’m the only one that’s got the truth, and I haven’t taken my gospel everywhere yet. Well, if that’s what you believe, then you need to get yourself in gear. On the other hand, if you can be said to have taken the gospel everywhere when you take the original gospel in written form in the Bible everywhere, well, then maybe we have completed a major part of what Jesus prophesied, and we ought to take a look at what comes next.
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We’ll talk about what comes next after these words. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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What does come next in the things that Jesus said we had to look out for? Well, it’s in Matthew 24, verse 15. When you therefore shall see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place. Whoso reads, let him understand. Oh boy, understand what? Well, it’s a reference back to the book of Daniel, and I’m going to try not to bore you with a lot of historical references in all this, but when Jesus tosses this, whoever reads this, let him understand, you really have got to be careful. He’s telling you, be careful. He’s referring back to Daniel’s prophecy, and it wasn’t that hard to understand. It was a reference to the desecration of the altar in the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes in 168 B.C. But what’s interesting about that is that that was over. That was history. That had been done. And that’s why he says, now you’d better be careful when you read Daniel to understand this. Because the presumption is, well, it’s been fulfilled. It’s over. It will never happen again. Right? Wrong. He said, when you therefore shall see, future, the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet. So we’re looking for something that’s in the future when Jesus made this statement. And it’s apparently going to be like the one that was prophesied in Daniel. Well, Antiochus Epiphanes erected a pagan altar in the holy place and sacrificed a pig on it and forbade any practice of temple service on pain of death. He’d take you out, cut your head off, hang you, or whatever his particular preferred mode of execution was for practicing any form of Judaism in and around Jerusalem. So it was over. For then, Jesus then tells his listeners that when you see this, Whoever reads this now, be careful, let him understand. Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains. Let him which is on the housetop not come back to take anything out of his house. Neither let him that is in the field return back to take his clothes. There are little different formulas on this in the different gospel accounts, but all of them really agree on the fundamentals. There comes a point in time when there are signs, portents taking place, that tell you you had better get out of there. And the area that you’re supposed to flee from and get away from is Jerusalem. Now, maybe there is some far-flung application of that way off in the future somewhere, but we can look at this. The problem with Matthew 24 is that it deals with a time that’s supposed to start with the present where they are right then, and it’s supposed to take us forward to the destruction of the temple, but it goes all the way to the return of Christ and to the end of the age. And a lot of commentaries look at this and they think, oh, well, this is about the destruction of the temple, which was going to take place down around 70 A.D. It was. But since the original abomination of desolation wasn’t the only one, why should we assume that one later to come might be the only one, especially when the prophets give us many indications and hints that there is an abomination of desolation right at the very end time, and that at the very end time there is once again a flight into the mountains? Well, now, The warning that the church had to heed and others had to heed in 70 A.D. when the Romans came down was not the abomination of desolation. Really, it was when Jerusalem was beginning to be surrounded with armies. When they could see it coming, as it were, they had to get out and get out fast. The fact is that by the time the Romans desecrated the altar and did their thing on the temple, it was too late to flee. There was no way to go. So they had to be out of there on that occasion before. But what if there’s going to be yet something like this in the future? This is why a lot of prophecy buffs are reading their Bible and saying, well, there has to be a temple or at least a tabernacle at the end time. There has to be a holy place for an abomination of desolation to be set up. Daniel speaks of a stopping of the daily sacrifice. And if there’s going to be a stopping of it, then somewhere along the line it has to start. And if you follow this at all, you’re probably aware of the fact that there are people in Judaism who have made preparation for the reinstitution of sacrifice, for the rebuilding of a temple, for the re-consecration of a priesthood. All the things that are supposed to be done are being watched very carefully. Plans are being made. Now, the Israeli government is very nervous about this, and they’re not a bit anxious to see this type of thing take place because it is out of times of religious fervor like this that wars are fought and lives are lost and disasters take place. And so you will hear various stories coming out of Israel about the future of daily sacrifices, the future of a temple, perhaps a tabernacle, the creation of a holy place. You’ll hear a lot. I would suggest you listen very carefully, not jumping to any conclusions, but studying carefully Matthew, studying carefully Daniel and the other prophets, so that as things take place, you will understand what’s going on. Otherwise, something pretty significant could happen on the world scene and you’d just be blissfully unaware of it. So there was to come a destruction. There was to come a time of fleeing from Jerusalem. In fact, when the Romans came in and took the city and destroyed the temple, they tell us that you could walk across the place where Jerusalem and the temple was and never know any building had been there. They did such a thorough job of destroying that city. And there was a flight prior to that. The church fled off to Pella, and I don’t know how many Jews went off in other directions. Jesus said, Obvious reasons. Cold. neither on the Sabbath day. And the presumption is, then, that this particular flight he’s talking about would be affected by somebody trying to interfere with you traveling on the Sabbath day, of not being able to get services on the Sabbath day. It presumes a fairly diligent observance of the Sabbath day at the time that this flight takes place. Now pray about this, because at that time there will be great tribulations such as was not from the beginning of the world to this time, and never will be again. My, so we are dealing with here a time in history that is unique. There was never a time like it before, and there will never be a time like it again. And he goes on to make what I think had to be a truly astonishing statement to Jesus’ disciples at this time. He said, Except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved alive. But for the elect’s sake, those days will be shortened. Now, when I was a boy in World War II in the 40s, if I had, and I didn’t, I wasn’t that sophisticated to read these things and understand them at this level, if I had read that, I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about because something happening that’s going to destroy all life, a war going on and great tribulation wiping out every man, woman, and child, in fact, every animal as far as that’s concerned, was a little bit beyond my ken. And then there came a time in years subsequent to that when it became something that you could imagine in the atomic age. Then passing on a little beyond that, it became not only something you could imagine, it became possible. And we even got to the place to where we were worried that it might happen, and nobody even intended to do it. And Jesus said the time would come when the kind of warfare that we would be involved in could lead to the destruction of all flesh. I think it’s a remarkable prophecy in a way, because in the early wars, most of the fighting was done very close and hand-to-hand, and you’d destroy some people, but you wouldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, destroy them all. But he says that’s not going to happen in the future, even though men will invent weapons that you and I cannot even imagine. In fact, probably already have invented weapons that we know nothing about that transcend nuclear warfare. Then there are the weapons we know about, like bacteriological warfare, germ warfare, chemical warfare. And you begin to realize that once they let those genies out of the bottle, there is no telling where it all will go. Well, I take some heart in what Jesus said, for the elect’s sake, those days shall be shortened. What he seems to be saying is that Jesus’ return, when he comes back to this earth, is going to be a rescue operation. It’s going to put a stop to a lot of the nonsense and the destruction that we are doing. And that if he did not come back to save us from ourselves, there would be nothing there to save. If we can believe Jesus, things are going to get pretty hairy in the years just ahead of us. But we’re not going to lose. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart.
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And you were born to win. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at… Stay in touch with the new Born to Win with Ronald L. Dart app.
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