LUKE: YEAR OF OUR LORD (WEEK 45)

Today we are going to look at a passage that has been quite possibly misinterpreted for some time. Many who read this passage automatically jump to a preconceived notion of what it means, namely, the end of the world.

For the past century and a half, there has been teaching that Luke 21 and the parallel passages in Mark and Matthew’s Gospel account point to the last days.

The word, BTW, is eschatology; from the Greek word eschaton, meaning “last” or “extreme,” as in “last days.”

Eschatology is the study of the end times. It’s a rather popular study in our world today. It seems as if there are scores of books and movies that have come out that have a certain bent on what the end of the world, the last days, will be like.

It’s natural for us to wonder about things like that. People tend to be morbidly curious. There are websites out there where you can put in your date of birth and a few other facts about yourself and the website will crank out the day of your death.

And people go to that website all the time! Let me tell you - I WOULDN’T. I really don’t think I’d want to know WHEN I’m going to die… Sure, it might give you a lot of confidence for quite a while - but as soon as that day approaches, it seems to me like it would be like the days in elementary school when we were told at the beginning of the school that sometime during the day there would be a fire drill. 

But people are curious. They want to know. And so reading passages like the one in Luke 21 gets people’s imagination going.