There’s a lot of stuff going on
in the world. There are wars. There are terrorist threats, which sometimes
turn into terrorist attacks. There’s
persecution of Christians in some countries.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in the country, too. We have our own terrorist threats, which also
sometimes turn into terrorist attacks.
We have shootings. We have people
pitted against each other in all kinds of ways.
Some Christians look at these things and wonder if they
might be signs of the coming of the end.
They wonder if these are signs that we’re in the end times, when Jesus
is going to come back to the earth.
Well, I don’t know.
I mean, if you think that, I cannot tell you that you’re wrong. You could be right. I really don’t have any idea. I don’t know if we’re in the end times or in
the beginning times. After all,
civilization as we know it has only been around for about six thousand
years. What if we’re going to around for
sixty thousand years? What if we’re
going to be around for six hundred thousand years? Again, we could be in the end times, I don’t
know. But it’s also possible that we’re
still in the very early stages.
What I can tell you is that there’s nothing new about all
this end times stuff. We’re continuing
our sermon series, “Let’s Go to the River”, by looking at something that
happened, at least in Daniel’s vision, at the Tigris river.
In our Bible
reading for today, Daniel was given a vision.
He’s told of a time when there’s going to be a time of great distress,
but then the people of Israel are going to be delivered from it. And then, Daniel is told, there will be a day
of judgment.
And then come the verses we read for today. The question is asked, how long will it be
until all this stuff happens? And the
answer is “it will be for a time, times, and half a time”. And Daniel says, gee, thanks for clearing
that up.
If you research this, you can find various meanings and
explanations for that phrase “a time, times and half a time”. But I think it’s interesting that Daniel
says, “I heard, but I did not understand.”
Apparently, Daniel himself did not know what this phrase meant. So I’m not sure we should be too confident
that we understand it, either.
But here’s what I think is really interesting. Daniel does not understand, but he wants
to. He wants to know more. So after Daniel tells us that he does not
understand, he asks, “My lord, what will the outcome of all this be?”
And here’s what he’s told: “Go your way, Daniel, because the words are
closed up and sealed until the time of the end….go your way till the end.”
“Go your way”. To
me, what that means is that Daniel is being told, don’t worry about it. God has it handled. Go live your life. Do what you’re supposed to do. Do your best.
Follow God. Trust God. Don’t worry about all this end times
stuff. God will take care of it. In fact, it’s all written down. God’s already taken care of it. It’ll be all right. Just go your way and do what you’re supposed
to do.
And I really think that’s what God would like to say to
us, too. Whether you think we’re in the
end times or the beginning times or the middle times. Whether you think about any of this stuff at
all. I think God would tell us, “Go your
way. I have it handled. Go live your life. Do what you’re supposed to do. Do your best.
Follow me. Trust me. It’ll be all right. I’ll take care of things. Just go your way. Do what you’re supposed to do.”
And too many times, we don’t want to hear it. Or that’s probably not the way to put
it. We’d like to hear it. It sounds good. We want to believe it. But somehow, we just cannot get ourselves to
do it.
Instead we say to God, “How can you say that? Have you looked around at your world
lately? Have you seen what’s happening
in it? Do you see all this stuff that’s
going on? It looks to me like the bad
guys are winning. How can you tell us to
just go our way, live our lives, trust you?
How can you tell us you’ve got it handled? It does not look like you or anyone else is
handling anything right now. It looks
like everything’s out of control.”
And I agree with some of that. There are times when it does look like
everything’s out of control. There are
times when it does look like nobody’s handling anything. And as I’ve said before, if we believe in an
all-powerful God, then logically we have to believe that God could put a stop
to all this stuff if God wanted to do so.
And yet, all this stuff continues to happen.
As often happens in the Bible, we’re not told what Daniel
thought when he was told, “Go your way.”
In fact, the book of Daniel ends at this point. We don’t know what happened next. We don’t know what happened to Daniel or
anyone else in this story.
But maybe that’s part of the point, too. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen
to us, either. We don’t know what the
rest of the story is. As Daniel was
told, the words are closed up and sealed.
We’re just going to have to live it out, one day at a time.
And that’s why we have to make a choice. We can choose to live our lives believing
that all kinds of things are going wrong and everything’s out of control. We can live our lives in fear of the future,
thinking that the bad guys are winning and they’re going to keep winning. Or, we can do what God tells us. We can go our way. We can choose to believe what God told the
prophet Jeremiah, that God has plans to prosper us and not harm us, plans to
give us hope and a future. We can choose
to believe what God told the prophet Isaiah, that God’s thoughts are not the
same as our thoughts and that God’s ways are not our ways. We can choose to believe what God told the
prophet Habakkuk, that God is still in the holy temple and that God is still in
control.
And I don’t want to pretend that this is an easy choice
to make, because it’s not. It’s hard for
us not to believe what we see right in front of us. It’s hard for us to look at all the bad
things happening in the world and say, “I’ll just go my way and live my life
because God’s got it handled.”
And let me make clear that when Daniel was told “go your
way”, Daniel was not told to avoid responsibility. He was not told to just sit home and not do
anything. We are supposed to be active
in the world we live in. God has things
handled, but God’s way of handling things usually involves using people. People like you, and people like me. We’re still supposed to go out and do
something about the problems in the world.
And we can start by doing the things Jesu told us to do. We can start right where we are, by loving our
neighbor and going and making disciples of Jesus Christ.
And that sounds good, of course. But it’s still easy to think, “Well, what
difference will that make? Sure, it
might make things better for a few people around here, and that’s a good
thing. But it won’t change anything in
the world. It’s not like me loving my
neighbor is going to stop ISIS or something.”
And no, probably it won’t. But you know, this is not the first time it
looked like everything was going wrong in the world. Some of you are old enough to remember World
War II. In fact, some of you were in
it. The world had just seen the Great
Depression, and now it saw the Second World War. There were a lot of people who thought
everything was going wrong and that it might be the end. But it was not. God was still in control, even though it may
not have looked like it. And God had it
handled, even if people could not see how at the time.
And as we look back in history, we can see this happening
time after time. It even happened in
Biblical times. People thought
everything was going wrong and that it might be the end. But it was not. God was still in control, and God had it
handled, even if people could not see it at the time.
And God’s still in control. And God still has it handled. Now, understand, the Bible tells us the end
times are going to come at some point.
We’re going to talk more about that next week. But was Daniel was told, and what we’re told,
is that we don’t have to worry about that.
Even if it does come in our lifetime, we don’t have to worry about it. Whatever’s going to happen, God’s already
taken care of it. All we need to do is
live our lives the best way we can. All
we need to do is follow God and trust God.
So let’s do that.
God will take care of the world.
And God will take care of you.
And God will take care of me. So
trust God. And go your way.
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