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Mark 13. I'm going to start reading in verse 24. Last week, we read the entire chapter and we'll kind of cover some of what happened before, but I'm going to read beginning in verse 24. It says:

"But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven."

"From the fig tree learn its lesson. As soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out leaves, you know that summer is near. So also when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away."

"But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake, for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore, stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight or when the rooster crows or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake."

I told Rory I was going to, every few minutes or so during the sermon, say to her, “Lorelei, stay awake.” I'm not actually going to do that, but Jesus repeats that phrase over and over there in the last section. Stay awake. That's why it's the title of the sermon.

As I mentioned last week, Mark 13 is a hard passage to put all the pieces together and understand what's going on. I'm just going to briefly now run over three—there's way more nuances than this, I mean, there's all kinds of different positions—but the three big buckets that people fall into as they interpret this.

The first one is to take everything that's in this chapter other than the destruction of the temple itself—so everything from verse 3 on—to take it all as in the future. That's probably the most common way people understand it today, to look at the wars and rumors of wars and the gospel being proclaimed in all the nations, the abomination of desolation—that's all out there in the future. We're waiting for that to happen.

Why I don't think that particular reading makes sense is because of what Jesus says in verse 30: “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.” In a chapter full of symbols, a chapter full of confusing imagery for us, the clearest thing Jesus says is that these things will take place within one generation. And you could try to say, well, it's the generation that sees these things that's going to see him come back. Or you could say generation just means the world will be like this when he comes back. But everybody standing there listening to Jesus, everybody reading the first copies of Mark's gospel would have understood "generation" to mean about a 40-year period starting when Jesus said these words, which would put it between about 30, 33 AD, when Jesus spoke this, and 70 AD, you have the destruction of the temple. And one of the things we walked through last week was seeing, well, I think all of the things from verse 3 through verse 23 we can say were accomplished in that one generation.

So I don't think to look at this as all happening out in the future really makes sense of the text itself.

The second view is completely on the other side. If you want some theological jargon, it would be a full preterist reading of the