Affirm
I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven.
As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, s
o our eyes look to the LORD our God,
till he shows us his mercy.
Psalm 123:1-2
TEXT
Mark 13:19-23 (CEV)
This will be the worst time of suffering since God created the world, and nothing this terrible will ever happen again. If the Lord doesn’t make the time shorter, no one will be left alive. But because of his chosen and special ones, he will make the time shorter.
If someone should say, “Here is the Messiah!” or “There he is!” don’t believe it. False messiahs and false prophets will come and work miracles and signs. They will even try to fool God’s chosen ones. But be on your guard! That’s why I am telling you these things now.
READ
There was a time when I was afraid of this apocalyptic side of the coming of the Kingdom–it seemed materialistic, catastrophic, dependent on force, unethical. I now see my mistake. To separate the “ethic” and the “apocalyptic” is a species of dualistic thinking. . . Jesus did not teach an ethic–that would have made him a moralist, teaching moral ideas. He was not a moralist teaching abstract codes of conduct. He was a proclaimer of a Kingdom–a Kingdom of fact, not a code of morals–and the coming of that Kingdom was the impinging of realism on unrealism, the displacing of unworkable ways with God’s workable way. Now, obviously, that Kingdom must come by continuity and by catastrophe–by a building up from within and a sudden tumbling of old structures.
-E. Stanley Jones
Declare
I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. 1 Corinthians 15:50-52