Jesus and Changing the World
‘Will there be more pandemics?’ ‘Yes’. How do I know?
Jesus says so.
‘Will there be more wars’? ‘ Yes’. How do you know?
Jesus tells us so.
10 Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. 11 There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven. (Luke 21:10-11)
Jesus pulls no punches in foretelling wars and pandemics and ‘natural’ disasters - and the last two thousand years have proved him right!
Covid and Ukraine are the latest instalment.
So we need to face a realistic fact.
“Since Jesus didn’t change the world, his disciples need not try.”
This statement from Doug Webster, one of my favourite, and most trusted, biblical expositors, certainly grabbed my attention!
And ‘his disciples need not try’ to change the world! Wow, that stops us in our tracks, too, doesn’t it?
If Doug Webster is right, then our well-intentioned church mission statements (like the one your church has perhaps!) will seem naively over-hyped and idealistically adolescent!
‘Can we make a difference?’ Yes. ‘Is everything different because of His Resurrection? Yes – but ‘change the world’ in eliminating all its brokenness? No.
Let’s try to get our heads and faith around this!
(1) Reflect first on what Jesus does NOT say.
He never promised that political violence or military aggression would suddenly stop in the wake of his coming.
In this sense nothing in the harsh world of political power-play would change. How could we think otherwise when his own short-lived career would be inscribed in the creed as ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’? How could we think otherwise when – as he promised – his chosen apostles would, almost to a man, endure martyrdom at the hands of the powers-that-be. What has changed for the persecuted church and the faithful martyrs in the two thousand years since?
Nor did Jesus indicate that what we call ‘natural disasters’ would be eradicated by His coming.
On the contrary, earthquakes and eclipses of the sun accompanied his crucifixion. Response to a widespread famine became a major mission project of Jesus’ first great apostle to the Gentiles (see Acts 11:28; 1 Corinthians16:1-4;
2 Corinthians 8-9; Romans 15:25-29).
There will be, Jesus says, plagues, pestilences, pandemics…
And notice that what Jesus does NOT say about God his Father is significant here.
Faced with evidence of atrocities and disasters, notice what Jesus does not do.
He does not offer any hand-wringing apology for his kind and compassionate Father for allowing such tragedies to happen! He makes no cringing defence of God to truculent would-be atheists who sneer at how a good God can allow such monstrous evils things to occur. Never for a moment does Jesus seek to explain the Father’s mercy in allowing a rebellious world to continue to exist by the breath he bestows.
Jesus knows his Father too well to be embarrassed by the thought that God has taken his eye off the ball. No sparrow falls that is not noted; no hair of a disciple’s head goes unaccounted for.
Such is the Father’s close providential care.
In short, to use a theologian’s term, Jesus offers no ‘theodicy’, no justification
of how God can co-exist with such a suffering world as this.
In the Father’s good time and out of his Father’s great love, Jesus will give his ‘answer’ – the only answer that matters, the only answer that can save the world – his cross and resurrection.
(2) Reflect also on the context as Luke gives it.
5 And while some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said, 6 “As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” 7 And they asked him, “Teacher, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?” (Luke 21:5-7)
Jesus’ reply in the long ‘apocalyptic’ discourse that follows is an elusive prophetic statement.
It seems to be bi-focal: referring (a) to what is immediate and definite and at the same time (b) to what is more distant and indefinite.
(a) The immediate: The fate that Jesus predicts for the glorious Temple – that one stone will not be left on another – happened, as he said it would, within the lifetime of his contemporary generation (v32) when the Roman Armies destroyed the Temple and sacked Jerusalem during the Roman-Jewish Wars of AD 70-73 (see 21:20-24).
This catastrophe, as God’s city is engulfed in tumult and war, must have seemed for God’s people the ‘end-of-the-world-as-they-knew it’.
But such terrible events, he warned them, will not be ‘The End’ – and don’t be fooled into thinking they are (vv8-9).
As G. B. Caird put it: “The final crisis of history is not to be confused with the historic crisis which Jesus said would happen within a generation…”
(b) the more distant: The world as we know it will go on – climate change or no climate change (!) – for it is, as yet, not fully redeemed.
What batters our broken world, still, are the groanings of an as-yet unchanged creation, registered on sensitive Spirit-attuned hearts as a groaning for the final peace and justice of the new world coming when God will put everything right.
The ‘hour’ for that, Jesus said, is known only to the Father (Mark 13:32; Acts1:7).
The ‘day’ of the End is not dateable on anyone’s prophetic chart! It will come suddenly as a ‘thief in the night’, unexpectedly, as a trap that a consumerist, godless generation will fall into! (21:34)
(3) So, no, the world, in this traumatic sense, did not change when Jesus first came.
“Since Jesus didn’t change the world, his disciples need not try.”
So what can we do to make a difference?
‘Our aim’, says Webster, ‘is not to change the world but to be changed by Christ in the world’.
Listen to Jesus instructing the disciples here in the discourse.
· Don’t be deceived (v8), don’t be fooled by false messiahs, fake news, or phony conspiracy theories. Don’t fall for prophecy-salesmen with charts and scary predictions who claim to know more than Jesus claimed to know about the ‘last days’! (Mark 13:32)
· Don’t be terrified (v9) by the reports of violence and upheavals shedding blood in our world. Let us not allow fear to paralyse us.
· Don’t be deterred by opposition from bearing witness to the truth of scripture and the Gospel. See it as an opportunity and ask for courage to speak and act for Jesus in this way (v13).
· Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers to the questions thrown at us by critics in the culture (vv14-15). Trust the Spirit to show you what to say.
· Don’t be surprised if not everyone likes you for bearing faithful, truthful Christian witness on the issues of our day – not even in your own families! (vv16-17)
· Don’t give up (vv19-20). Keep on keeping on, knowing that even the hairs on our heads have eternal guarantees stamped on them, and that endurance leads to the new life of the new world coming.
Finally, Jesus says:
· Don’t fall asleep; don’t be so wrapped up in the cost of living and energy prices that we forget the eternal issues facing everyone (vv34-36).
Don’t get side-tracked from the truth and drawn into bitter cultural wars but stay alert to lies and falsehood in society that are damaging human lives.
Christians, stay awake in a ‘woke’ world!
Of course, much in the Christian era has changed for our good… often inspired by a biblical world-view… and initiated by believers. So we can be thankful for science and modern sanitation(!), for medicine and vaccines, for education and media technology, for transport etc… and remain thankful that so much of our created world remains beautiful and life-enhancing.
But the fault lines remain: wars, uprisings, pandemics …
Renowned evangelical author, Philip Yancey, sums this up for us: “Jesus knew better than anyone that his brief sojourn would not solve the injustice, sickness, poverty, and violence of planet earth. It did, however, ignite a flame of hope that has never gone out. For those who believe, His birth, death, and resurrection, are daily glorious signs of what God plans for the entire cosmos.”
So we pray earnestly, but hopefully, with tearful groans if need be:
Father, let your kingdom come… Jesus, come soon.
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