Mark 13:5 Jesus said to them: "Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and will deceive many. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8 Na-tion will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.
The Olivet Discourse vs The Seven Seals
Mark 13:1 As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!" 2 "Do you see all these great buildings?" replied Je-sus. "Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down." 3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, 4 "Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?" 5 Jesus said to them: "Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and will deceive many. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.
Introduction
If I asked you, “Which of the headlines in the news has you most concerned,” if you’re like me, you’d have a hard time deciding. It’s hard to watch the news these days and hang on to your sanity. But in today’s passage, Jesus is going to teach us how to do just that—and not only hang on to our sanity, but to have peace and hope even as the chaos rages all around us.
Review
After Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple, 4 of his disciples catch up with him on the Mount of Olives and ask when it will happen and what will be the sign that all the things Jesus had promised will finally come to pass. And Jesus says, “Tell you what—how about instead of telling you when, I tell you how to survive between now and when it happens? You have a mission to complete. I want you to complete this mission, but it’s not going to be easy because there are three massive forces that will be against you. So instead of giving them dates and signs, Jesus teaches them how to can overcome those three monsters and faithfully carry out the mission.
The Beginning of Pains
And this period in history when Jesus’ followers are fighting those three obstacles and trying to accomplish the mission—Jesus has a name for it. He called that time period the beginning of pains.
Mark 13:8 … These are the beginning of pains.
That word is traditionally translated “birth pains,” but this word is like our word “pains.” It only means birth pains in contexts that talk about birth. There’s nothing about birth in this context, so it should be translated just plain “pains” or “agonies.”
The order of events Jesus gives us for the end times in this sermon is very clear. He says things like “following that will be this” and “before all that, this will happen.” It’s all laid out in a very defi-nite order. These are the 5 things in the order that they happen:
1) The beginning of pains, when Jesus says, “Don’t be alarmed.”
2) The abomination that causes desolation
3) The actual pains when he says, “Okay, now run for your life.”
4) The signs in the heavens
5) The Son of man comes on a cloud and sends angels to gather his elect.
That’s what’s going to happen, and the first in the list is the period Jesus called the beginning of pains. That’s our focus tonight. The first 9 verses of the discourse (vv.5-13), the beginning of pains.
Definition of the Beginning of Pains
This is the period when Jesus’ followers are trying to accomplish their mission of preaching the gospel to the nations, but it’s hard because of the three monsters that threaten to stop them.
Deception
The first monster is deception.
Mark 13:5 Jesus said to them: "Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and will deceive many.
Deception is a massive threat. You can’t succeed in bringing the gospel to the nations if you get deceived and wander from the truth.
Disasters
The second threat is disasters.
7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.
Natural disasters like earthquakes and famines, human disasters like wars and rumors of wars—those disasters are a threat to the mission because they cause fear.
Persecution
The third monster is persecution.
9 "You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the syn-agogues.
Then more persecution down in v.12.
12 "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 13 All men will hate you because of me.
Persecution is a threat for the same reason as disasters—it can cause fear, intimidation, and cow-ardice.
When Is This?
So that’s what the beginning of pains period is—it’s a time of preaching the gospel to the nations, which is hindered and threatened by the three monsters: deception, disasters, and persecution. That’s the beginning of pains. I don’t think any of that is controversial. The big controversy comes with the question of when this period is. Is it the years leading up to 70 A.D. or the years leading up to the Sec-ond Coming of Christ? I’ll give you my view on that, but before I do, let me say two things.
Put Down Your Dukes
First, before you get too worked up about whether it’s a reference to the past or future, consider the fact that either way, the implications for us are pretty much the same. If Jesus had 70 A.D. in mind, the point is he didn’t want the Apostles to be deceived in the next 40 after Jesus died. What would the implications for us be? He doesn’t want us to be deceived either.
Suppose it’s about the Second Coming. If the point is Jesus doesn’t want his followers in the fu-ture to be alarmed about wars and rumors of wars, what would the implication for us be? He doesn’t want us to be alarmed at them either. The same goes for enduring persecution and preaching the gospel and being alert and vigilant—all the components of the Olivet Discourse.
So I hope you don’t feel like when you come to this passage you have to put up your theological dukes and prove the other side wrong like it’s some life or death issue. Of course we want to get the interpretation right, and I’ll get to that. But for now, I just want to point out that the theological stakes on this point aren’t as high as people make them out to be.
The Prophecy Flower
The other thing I want to say before giving my take on when the beginning of pains period is has to do with the way prophecy is fulfilled. You’ve heard of dual fulfillments of prophecy—a near one and a later one. Or a prophecy of an event, and that event ends up itself being a prophecy of a greater event.
But as I’ve been studying prophecy the past few months, I think those models might be a bit of an oversimplification. It might be more accurate to think in terms of a process. Especially with end-times prophecies, many times the fulfillment is like the blooming of a flower. When the prophecy is first giv-en, it’s like a rose that’s closed up tight. Can you see the whole rose at that point? Sure. But then it begins to open and you see a little more, then a little more, and more as bit by bit it unfurls into greater and greater beauty and complexity. When the prophecy is first delivered, it’s closed up. When it begins to be fulfilled, it triggers a process of gradual opening. Not just a fulfillment now and another one later, but an ongoing, complex progressive, unfolding fulfillment.
For example, when God sent his people into exile, he gave simple prophecy: 70 years of exile and then I will restore you. 70 years later, what happened? Did God restore them? Well, a small number of Jews return to Israel and build a tiny little temple, but nothing like all the glorious promises in Zechari-ah about a new Jerusalem without walls that extends out forever and gathers in all the nations under the Messiah’s reign and all the rest.
That prophecy of restoration from the exile was a flower that started opening up right on time, 70 years after they were taken. In the following years it opened a little more, then a lot more when Jesus came, what Jesus did has been unfurling its pedals for 2000 years, then more unfolding in the future millennial kingdom, and then finally the full bloom when Jesus returns.
So it’s not just a two-part fulfillment. It’s a growing, unfolding, expanding process that keeps fill-ing out with greater and greater complexity.
I believe that’s how the fulfillment of the Olivet Discourse prophecies will come. And if you agree with that, then you can see that the argument over when this flower first begins blooming isn’t quite the life and death issue that some have made it.
When Is It?
So having said all that, let’s tackle the controversial question—what time period is the Olivet Dis-course pointing to? I believe the flower definitely started blooming in the years leading up to 70 A.D. There are numerous parts of this that only make sense in that time period. But was the flower com-pletely open in 70 A.D.? I think it would be hard to make an argument for that, because when it comes to wars, earthquakes, famines, deceivers, and persecution, nothing really changed after 70 A.D. There was still just as much of all that after 70 as before. And it’s all continued to this day. We still have false teachers, wars, famines, earthquakes, and persecution and we’re still taking the gospel to more and more nations.
And that’s no surprise given the fact that Jesus talked about these same things in other contexts that had nothing to do with end times or the destruction of Jerusalem. For example, when Jesus sent out the 12 on a short-term mission way back in Matthew 10.
Matthew 10:17 "Be on your guard … they will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues. 18 On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them … 19 But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, 20 for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speak-ing through you. 21 "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 22 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.
That’s pretty much word for word what he said in the Olivet Discourse when he was talking about the beginning of pains. And in Luke 12 we see the same words again in yet another context. These things are the reality for the whole time between Jesus’ first coming and the Second Coming. The be-ginning of pains are not a sign of the end.
You hear people say all the time, “Oh, things are really getting bad. I think Jesus is coming soon.” Jesus told us just the opposite. An earthquake could shake the whole west coast into the ocean so you could sail from Las Vegas to Hawaii, and China and Russia could join forces and wipe the rest of the U.S. off the map, and a real pandemic could wipe out 50% of the world population, and it still wouldn’t be a sign of the end. It would still fit in the category of the beginning of pains.
So there are two possibilities. Either we are living in the beginning of pains, or we are living in a time that is exactly like the beginning of pains. Either way, the instructions Jesus gave about how to live during that period apply directly to us.
Application: Insight
And what are those instructions? (That’s the end of the controversial part. What Jesus said we are to do during the beginning of pain is pretty straightforward.) The mission is to preach the gospel. But how do we successfully do that in the face of deceivers, disasters, and persecution? I think you can boil it down to one word: insight. When Jesus begins the sermon, the very first word out of his mouth is “watch.”
Mark 13:5 Watch out that no one deceives you.
Blepo
That word means more than just “watch out.” The Greek word is blepo, and its’ the word Mark has been using all through the book to describe spiritual insight. When they asked Jesus why he spoke in parables, he said: Mark 4:12 … so that, " 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving That’s the word blepo. It means to not only see, but to see beyond the surface. Then he told his disciples:
Mark 4:24 Consider carefully (blepo) what you hear
Don’t just hear it, but really see it.
In ch.8 Jesus told his disciples to blepo the yeast of the Pharisees. Have enough insight to detect it. They didn’t understand what he meant, and Jesus said, “You have eyes, but fail to blepo.” And then, to illustrate what he meant, Jesus healed a blind man’s eyes but not his understanding so he could see just fine but couldn’t understand what he was seeing. He saw people and thought they were trees.
So all through the book Jesus has been using this word blepo to refer to spiritual perception—insight into unseen, spiritual realities. And now, when the disciples ask Jesus about the end times, the first word out of his mouth in his answer is blepo! And he repeats it four times in his answer. Blepo, blepo, blepo, blepo. If you want to be one who stands firm all the way to the end with your faith intact, you’re going to have to watch the news through spiritual eyes.
Insight About False Teachers
And that’s especially true when the false teachers start showing up.
5 Blepo, so that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and will deceive many.
False Fears
Why so many? Because when disasters happen, people become gullible. The world feels like it’s spiraling out of control, people get uneasy and unsettled, and false teachers use that to deceive them. Once you get people scared, you can get them to believe pretty much anything. If you doubt that, I just have one word for you: COVID. Scare people enough, they’ll be putty in your hands. That’s why Jesus says, “Don’t be alarmed,” because it’s when you’re alarmed that you become gullible.
That word “alarmed” is used only one other time in the Bible.
2 Thessalonians 2:1 Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come.
That’s what false teachers do—get people alarmed, and then they’ll swallow whatever false doc-trine you feed them. They point to wars, famines, and earthquakes and say, “It’s an omen! It’s a sign of the end.”
One preacher in Australia came up with one of those predictions and on the day of, all his follow-ers showed up and sat around singing hymns waiting for the moment. The local press covered it, along with a crowd of hecklers. And when the time came and went, they were all heartbroken and embar-rassed. One man was crying, and someone in the crowd told him, “Cheer up! It’s not the end of the world.”
People make fun of Christians who fall for that, but the world is just as gullible—if not more. Most of the end of the world predictions nowadays come not from religious nuts, but from political nuts. And scientific nuts. The climate change prophets have been walking around with “the end is near” sandwich boards for decades now. Al Gore is no different from the preacher in Australia. He had millions of people fully convinced that New York would be under water by the year 2000. The climate change guru’s convince millions of people that the world is going to end because of global warming, and the only way to stop it is to send the money to offset your carbon footprint (payable to them, of course), and they rake in hundreds of millions of dollars and buy mansions on the coast! And still, the masses are so blinded by fear that they can’t see that none of the gurus actually believe any of their ridiculous doomsday predictions. Climate scientists are 0 for 100 in their last 100 predictions, but mil-lions of people keep falling for them.
Before climate change it was the ozone hole. Before that, cell phones were going to kill all the bees and destroy the entire ecosystem. Most of us can still remember the panic leading up to Y2K. It’s got to be the end of the world because the calendar turning to an even number.
When I was a teenager I was taught that the world would run out of topsoil by the time I was 30 and there would be no more crops. In the 80’s there was supposed to be acid rain. Before that, the air would be unbreathable on earth by 1985. Overpopulation was going to bring mass starvation and worldwide food rationing by 1980. Instead, we have a food glut. Farmers grow way more food than all the people in the world could possibly eat. In the 70’s we were going to destroy the oceans and run out of drinking water by 1974. In the early 70’s we were going to run out of gold, tin, oil, natural gas, copper, and aluminum. Super Hurricanes, killer bees, murder hornets, nitrogen buildup will make all land unusable, pollution will kill all the fish … I could go on. People never stop falling for the dooms-day predictions no matter how many times the doomsdayers cry wolf. When COVID blows over, it will be something else—guaranteed. You’ll be hearing new predictions of the end of the world from really smart people, and millions will fall for it, again.
False Hopes
The false teachers use fear to make you gullible, and then they offer their solution. They induce false fears and then offer false hope. With the environmental stuff, the false hope is always some ver-sion of the government spending more money and taking more power. In the spiritual realm the false hope is always some human solution that isn’t in the Bible. It always involves trusting the preacher, rather than God. But he makes it sound like trusting what he says IS trusting God.
5 Jesus said to them: "Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and will deceive many.
They usually don’t come right out and claim to be Jesus, but they put themselves in his place, so that your faith is in them, and you don’t even realize it. They read a passage of Scripture, and another passage and another, but then sneak in their own ideas between the lines so it really sounds like it’s coming from Scripture.
Damaging to Faith
Being deceived is so damaging because when you become convinced that the Bible says some-thing, and it turns out the Bible doesn’t say it and it doesn’t happen, that can have a devastating effect on your faith—including your ability to believe other things that really are true. You would think that if you believed something that turned out to be false, once that became evident you could just say, “Oh, I was mistaken. I’ll just change my view.”
But it’s not that simple. Faith is more than just holding something in your head as true. When you truly believe something, your whole heart—your whole inner man wraps around it. That involves more than just your mind. It’s also your affections, your emotions, your hopes and your confidence. So even if your brain comes to realize it’s not true, the rest of your inner man can remain entangled with it.
Your most deeply held beliefs didn’t get that way in a moment. And neither can they be dropped in a moment. A lot of time and experience and thinking and confirmations went into entwining those beliefs into your soul, and it takes the same kind of process to disentangle them. And until that process is done, it just feels to you like God’s Word failed. And you struggle to believe anything the Bible says. You think, “I was wrong about that—what else might I be wrong about?” and suddenly your entire be-lief system is on shaky ground. False prophets are so deadly. That’s why the first word out of Jesus’ mouth was blepo. Use spiritual insight.
Spiritual Insight: The Beginning of Pains Must Happen
So, what is the spiritual insight that will help me not be alarmed and gullible when disasters come?
7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen.
How do we keep calm when we watch the news? By remembering this insight. The beginning of pains must happen. The word “must” points to purpose—divine necessity. The disasters have to happen because they are an essential part of God’s plan. The chaos around us isn’t just a broken world spinning out of control.
Disasters are not omens. They aren’t signs. They don’t mean the end is near. But that’s not to say they are a total red herring. They do matter. They don’t tell us when the end will be, but they do re-mind us that the wheels that will carry history to its culmination are in motion. And the one setting them in motion controls them and is working out his purposes in history.
Let me show you this in Revelation 6-7. These are the 7 seals which, I believe, are an outline of the Olivet Discourse.
The Olivet Discourse vs The Seven Seals
Jesus began with a warning about false teachers. The first of the 7 seals is a rider with a bow. That’s Apollo, the god of pagan prophecy and who was a counterfeit of Christ.
What’s the next topic in the Olivet Discourse? Wars, rumors of wars, nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom. Seal #2 is a rider with a sword who takes peace from the world and causes men to kill each other.
The next thing Jesus mentions in the Olivet Discourse: famines. Seal #3 is famine—food is 8 times the normal cost.
Seal #4 is the center point of the 7 seals and works as a summary of all seven. A rider named Death—this whole period is summed up in the reality of death.
What’s next in the Olivet Discourse? Being persecuted and put to death for preaching the gospel and being a witness for Christ. Seal #5, those who have been put to death for the gospel cry out.
Next, Jesus talks about the heavenly bodies being shaken and the Son of Man returns and gathers his elect. Seal #6 is the heavenly bodies are shaken and the elect are sealed and protected from the judgment.
You might question some of those, but at the very least I think you have to acknowledge a very close connection between the material in the first half of the Olivet Discourse and the seals. “What does that have to do with Jesus saying, “These thing must happen”? The seals are first introduced in Revelation 5. There is a scroll, sealed up with 7 seals. And no one in all the creation is found who is worthy to break those seals—which is horrible. It makes John weep and weep. But then the Lamb steps up, and he is worthy, so he starts opening them. And it’s when he opens those seals that all these things happen.
Interpreters debate about what the scroll represents. Is it the title deed to the universe? Is it the ac-count of God’s purposes in the creation and all of history? There are various theories, but one thing is clear: the material in that scroll was written by God and it was very sacred, very holy. Not even the mightiest, most glorious of all God’s angels is worthy to open those seals. Only the Son of God himself can do it. And it’s the opening of those seals that causes all the events to take place.
So the point of Revelation 5-7 is that all of it—whether it be the sky rolling up like a scroll at the Second Coming, or just the ordinary process of wars, famines and earthquakes and persecution during the beginning of pains—all of it is the necessary, planned, purposeful unfolding of God’s plan for hu-man history. The headlines you see on the news—natural disasters and human disasters—it’s not just the fallen creation raging out of control, it’s not just sinful man being sinful man, it’s not random—it is the outworking of God’s prewritten, eternal purposes, and it’s happening because Jesus is breaking the seals.
That’s what you see if you don’t just watch the news, but blepo the news. You’ll see Jesus open-ing the first 5 seals. These thing must happen. And that’s the spiritual insight that will keep you from being alarmed and freaked out and becoming gullible.
• The crisis at our southern border and the human trafficking, drugs, etc.
• The threat from China
• The dozens of murders every weekend in Chicago
• The collapse of the building in Florida
• The famines going on right now in Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen
• The savage brutality against Christians in Nigeria—3500 Christians hacked to death by Jihadists in the last 200 days
It’s all happening because it must happen. It’s all happening because Jesus Christ is opening the seals on that scroll. The Lord is bringing about his purposes in history through the beginning of pains.
And if you believe the seals are a reference to a future time or a past time, the point still stands. If Jesus is in charge of earthquakes and famines in the future and past, he’s just as in charge of them to-day.
Does this mean Jesus is the source of the evil involved? Of course not—not in any way, not even a little bit. Jesus only does good things; he is never the source of any evil. All the evil involved in those things is supplied by human beings.
But don’t think for a second that when God allows evil people do carry out their wickedness that he’s no longer in control. How can God be in full control of everything and not be the source of the evil? I don’t know. All I know is God is in full control and he doesn’t do anything evil. If you can’t figure out how those two things can both be true then all that means is you’re not quite as smart as God.
Conclusion
When you watch the news or listen to the talk shows, and you feel yourself started to get alarmed, remind yourself, only Jesus Christ can make all this happen. Only the Lamb has the authority to unseal the beginning of pains and cause it all the move history forward toward the glorious planned climax he has in mind. And it’s all designed to maneuver us into a position where we can bring the gospel o the world.
