"Eschatology" Tagged Sermons
Eli’s death, falling backward at the news of the ark’s capture, reads as a small commentary on the end of the world itself, the same pattern nearly every Old Testament story follows in miniature. Putting God’s will above even our own families turns out to be the real cost of faithfulness here. Christ’s own righteousness, not Eli’s failure, is what finally answers that cost.
Hebrews 11:16’s longing for a better, heavenly country supplies the lens for Machen’s own eschatological theology, set against an America in the 1920s eager to put the church to its own nationalist use. Machen’s Biblical orthodoxy is read as resistance to exactly that use. His own hope, in the end, was fixed on heaven rather than on America’s approval.
Modern eschatology, from Schweitzer and Bultmann through Dodd and Cullmann, gets weighed against the Reformed alternative worked out by Vos, Stonehouse, and Ridderbos, particularly their shared sense of two overlapping ages. That eschatology, the lecture argues, has direct consequences for how church office itself should be understood, old views against new. Kline’s three stages supply one attempt to work out what a proper view of office actually looks like.
Matthew 11’s account of John the Baptist’s own question, sent to Christ from prison, becomes the occasion for asking what the gospel actually is, and for arguing that liberal theology has largely abandoned the mighty acts of God in history in favor of timeless ideas. Luther and Calvin’s own gospel is set against Rome’s tendency to institutionalize it. Eschatology, once again, turns out to be inseparable from the answer.
End-time date-setters and Albert Schweitzer’s own eschatological Jesus both get set aside here in favor of a Christ whose spiritual accomplishment combines suffering and glory rather than deferring one for the other. The Last Supper, read in that light, is where believers’ own union with Christ becomes most concrete. Neither speculation about dates nor a merely tragic Jesus can account for what happens at that table.
Paul’s talk of a ‘rod’ in 1 Corinthians 4:21 keeps love and discipline in separate categories rather than dissolving one into the other. Real church discipline, on this reading, is never merely corrective; it carries eschatological weight, anticipating a final judgment already at work now. The same logic, the sermon argues, extends to how parents discipline children.
The series opens with Jewish leaders clinging to property and power even as Micah pronounces God’s coming judgment against them. Beyond that judgment, Micah’s eschatology points to a transcendent kingdom in which Christ himself is the true temple.
The third petition, ‘thy kingdom come,’ usually gets approached two ways, personal holiness or world renewal, and this sermon sets both aside in favor of God’s own work alone as the real focus, drawing on Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21. Real prayer, on this account, has to start with the end already accomplished rather than build toward it. What God does, not what we resolve to do, is where the third petition actually rests.
The first petition of the Lord’s Prayer gets careful definition by what it is not, as much as by what it is, with Ezekiel 36’s promise of a name vindicated among the nations supplying real eschatological weight. Already and not-yet governs this petition the same way it governs the rest of the sermon. Those who genuinely pray for God’s name to be hallowed, the sermon promises, will themselves stand in the day of his coming.
Several details in verse 1 alone repay close attention, setting up everything that follows in this chapter. Elijah’s bodily ascension functions as a real lesson in eschatology, the resurrection of the body into heaven, not merely the soul’s survival. The whirlwind that carries him is itself prophetic, a small picture of the end-time consummation still to come.