Audio Transcript

Several decades ago, preaching was defined as an act meant “to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed” (Campus Gods on Trial, 102). You’ve heard that definition before of preaching. Disturbing the comfortable remains one of the great challenges faced by the preacher and the evangelist and all of us who seek to share the gospel in the prosperous West today. Because to be comfortable in sin, apart from Christ, is the deadliest place to be.

With that concern comes this question from a listener named Matt. “Hello, Pastor John! As an evangelist, what have you done to try and convince people who have their material needs met of their need for Christ? I have a wealthy brother who has no interest in the gospel or spiritual matters. I’ve been praying for him for years to be saved and I just don’t know how to break through all the comforts of his life that make him feel confident and assured and safe.”

This question resonates deeply with me, not only because of people I know who are outwardly quite content and yet are lost, but also because my father was an evangelist who saw thousands of people come to Christ through his ministry, and he said to me when I was a boy, “Johnny, getting people saved through the gospel seems not to be the hardest thing in my ministry. But getting them lost so that they know they need to be saved — that’s the hardest thing.” So, this question is not new to me. It’s been around for a long time. I suspect it’s not unique to our time.

Alternative Gospels

The thing that this question is getting at is that most people do not feel any need for the most important thing that Jesus accomplished and offers. And add to that the tragedy that so many Christians, and even some preachers, in our day have altered the message of the gospel so that the main thing — the most important thing Jesus accomplished by dying and rising again — is not the most important thing being offered when people share the gospel. Rather, there’s a constant effort to make the message fit the felt need, which drastically alters the message from something infinite and ultimate and glorious and precious to something temporal and far less important.

The prosperity gospel, of course, is the most egregious example of this, as prosperity preachers try to sell Jesus as a kind of magical force in your life that will make things go better in this world. But there are less egregious forms of prosperity-gospel distortion, which do the same thing at a lesser level, that is pretty much infecting the American church. We create alterations of the gospel as we try to persuade people with our own seemingly innocuous version of the prosperity gospel — by mainly referring to the fact that your psychological state or your marriage or children or finances or health will improve if you accept Jesus.

Death and Judgment

Now, my father was a very happy man. He knew the wonderful effects of God’s forgiveness and justification by faith and the hope of eternal life. He knew the wonderful effects here and now of being a Christian. He was a happy, well-rounded, balanced Christian. I think that’s probably why I’m a Christian today. I never saw in my father or my mother any reason to jettison what they were so authentically changed by. My father wrote a little paperback. Most fundamentalists don’t write books like this — and he was one, a very happy one. I have it on my shelf: A Good Time and How to Have It.

And yet he also knew that most people thought they were having a good time and the gospel would just get in the way. That was the problem. That’s what he had to overcome. Therefore, what I remember most clearly in his preaching is the flame in his eyes of mingled kindness and severity when he quoted Hebrews 9:27: “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” Oh, I can just hear him say it. I can see the look on his face.

“At the bottom of all other problems is the problem that we are under the wrath of God.”

Sometimes we joke and say, “Well, two things are unavoidable in life: death and taxes.” Well, that’s not true. Taxes are avoidable. You can just go to jail. But there are two things that are unavoidable without Christ: death and judgment, death and hell. The main thing Jesus came into the world to accomplish was to make it possible for human beings, under the just sentence of death and hell, to escape that eternal condemnation and live forever, glorifying God by their happiness in him. That’s what he came to do — centrally at the bottom of all other things.

Solving Our Biggest Problem

What God sent Jesus into the world to do was to solve every human problem eventually. The problem that has to be solved at the bottom of all other problems is the problem that we are under the wrath of God. That’s humanity’s biggest problem. No matter how rich we are or happy we are — or healthy or famous or strong or beautiful — we are all sinners. We have belittled the glory of God by making so little of it, and we deserve eternal condemnation. Romans 5:9 says, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” And 1 Thessalonians 1:10 says, “[God] raised [Jesus] from the dead, . . . who delivers us from the wrath to come.” And Romans 2:5 says, “Because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.”

This is the problem at the bottom, under all other problems, and this is the main problem for people who feel they have no problems and don’t need the gospel: the rich, the comfortable, the content; the poor, the comfortable, the content.

So, my father pleaded with healthy, wealthy, self-satisfied people to wake up and realize that every heartbeat could be your last, and you’re not ready to face an all-holy God. There’s only one way to be ready, and that is to be united to Jesus Christ by faith in him as our Savior and Lord and treasure. According to Romans 8:3, God condemned sin in Jesus Christ’s flesh. That is, he gave his Son to bear the condemnation of his own wrath for all who will trust him.

Or in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” My father would plead with people, “If you don’t accept the curse that Jesus came under God’s wrath against you to give, you will have to bear your own curse in hell.” That’s the one crucial message that our comfortable, oblivious friends and neighbors need to hear. There are many other good things to say; that dare not be neglected.

Warning with Wisdom and Love

We need to be deeply aware that this is a message of love about an act of love that is so great it cannot be exaggerated. Just before mentioning God’s wrath in Romans 5:9, Paul said, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). There is no greater love than that God would put his only Son through hell on the cross to save his enemies from going to hell. That’s the heart of the gospel.

So, Matt, let’s pray that God would give us tears and compassion, not just for the pains and sorrows of this life. Oh my goodness. You read the news of what’s happening around the world, and there is just so much suffering now. Yes, by all means let us weep for that, but also, may God give us tears for the pain-free people, the comfortable people, the healthy, wealthy people who are blind to what awaits them without Christ.

God will show you, Matt, when and how to give this message as you seek to lay down your life for others. He will. He’ll show you. I have seen such warnings — I mean severe, earnest, tearful warnings, from my father and in my own ministry — I have seen warnings from my father and from me bear the fruit of salvation. May God cause our love to abound with great wisdom so that we know how best to deliver this essential message.

Audio Transcript

Happy Friday — I hope you had a wonderful week. As you might have noticed, we’ve been picking on men recently on the podcast, talking about how a man’s anger destroys the home or how a man’s lust wreaks havoc on his marriage. We looked at the major fallout of one man’s decision to abandon his wife and daughters. And we’ve addressed unbelieving men twice in recent episodes. So what about women?

We end this week with an international question, which I love, because our international listeners are willing to ask questions that don’t get asked by anyone here in the United States. We take it. We pose it. We answer it. We publish it. And very often, those episodes prove interesting to international listeners and to our local listeners as well.

I could give you some very specific examples of how this has played out in the past — on interracial-marriage episodes, for example. Instead, let’s get into today’s question from an international listener, a woman. “Pastor John, hello! I have been hearing from Christians around me that women are more sinful than men. I know from my daily ungodly thoughts and actions how sinful I am. But as a mother of boys and girls, does the Bible teach that I should teach my girls they are more sinful than boys? I know the Bible says we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. But Eve, Delilah, Samson’s wives, Solomon’s wives, Potiphar’s wife — these have been listed to me as proof that women are more evil than men are. Is this true?”

I think it would be a huge mistake to raise our children with the assumption that our daughters are by nature more sinful or more prone to sin than our sons. Now, let me give you at least six reasons why that would be both misleading and harmful.

1. Scripture’s Testimony Against Men

In response to the argument that Eve, Delilah, Solomon’s wives, or Potiphar’s wife proves that women are more sinful than men, consider how utterly lopsided that observation is when, for example, there were far more wicked kings in the Old Testament than wicked queens, and all the Pharisees, Sadducees, high priests, and scribes that Jesus indicted with such deep sinfulness were men — all of them. If you were to make a list of especially wicked people in the Bible, the number of men would far outnumber the number of women.

“Any attempt to argue for the greater sinfulness of women statistically from the Bible is doomed to failure.”

So even if you should focus on those relationships where the woman’s sin is especially pointed out, there’s no evidence, for example, that Potiphar was any less sinful than his wife in the way he treated Joseph, or that Samson was any less of a sinful dupe than Delilah was devious. Any attempt to argue for the greater sinfulness of women statistically from the Bible is doomed to failure.

2. Modern Statistics Against Men

If someone wants to use statistics against males and females, they’ve got this to contend with: in America today, 93 percent of everyone who’s in prison is a man. Of all the people arrested each year, 73 percent are men. Of all those convicted of violent crimes, 80 percent are men. Of all the rapes that are reported, 99 percent of the time the one forcing the other is a man. Of all the homicides that are committed, 89 percent are committed by men. Of all those arrested for robbery, 87 percent are men. Of all those arrested for arson, 83 percent are men. This is devastating. I feel horrible just saying it. If statistics are going to prove anything, we’re going to be hard put to say that women are more sinful than men.

3. Shared Sinfulness

When you look at the principial statements about human depravity in the Bible, what you find is that human beings, without distinction between male and female, are said to be under the power of sin. For example, in Romans 3, Paul sums up his indictment of the human race by saying, “We have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one’” (Romans 3:9–10). And later, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

And in Romans 5, Paul writes, “Therefore . . . sin came into the world through one man” — man, by the way, not Eve — “and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. . . . One trespass led to condemnation for all men” (Romans 5:12, 18) — that is, all persons. There is no effort in any of this to say that the corruption we inherited from Adam, not Eve, is worse in women.

4. Failure of Both Adam and Eve

Maybe the most commonly cited text to ascribe to women a greater sinfulness or proneness to sin is the role that Eve played in the fall in Genesis 3 and what Paul says about it in 1 Timothy 2. He writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:12). And then he gives two reasons for why he says that. First, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). Second, “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:14).

Now, here’s what I think Paul means. If you look at Genesis 1–2, there are at least seven or eight exegetical pointers that man was meant by God to bear a special kind of responsibility and leadership in relation to the woman. “Adam was formed first” means that, following temporal priority (Adam first, Eve second), Paul infers that giving the role of an elder or overseer to men accords with God’s design. That’s his first argument.

And then the reference to Eve being deceived, not Adam, is, I think, a reference to the fact that Satan assaulted and undermined Adam’s God-given leadership role — snubbing him and ignoring him as he stood there with his wife during the temptation. Genesis 3:6 makes it very clear: he was standing there as Satan was interacting with her and bringing down the relationship. Satan was ignoring the leader and instead speaking to the woman, who was to be protected by the leader if he had been stepping up to do what he ought to do. And the point of the text is, I think, that the disaster that followed is owing to this assault on the God-given roles of man and woman as Eve was made the spokesman and Adam abdicated his role as protector and leader.

Now, which of those sins, hers or his, is worse? The text doesn’t say. There was a peculiar sense in which Satan targeted her in the face of him for deception, and both they both bought it — he passively, she actively.

5. Both Unnatural

When Paul does describe unnatural female sin, he does it in perfect parallel with unnatural male sin. For example, Romans 1:26–27:

God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and [notice the parallel] the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error.

We don’t come away from this text thinking that Paul saw in men or women a greater bent to sin — even a sin that’s against nature.

6. Our Peculiar Temptations

My last reason for saying we should not raise our kids with the assumption that our daughters are by nature more sinful or more prone to sin than our sons is that there’s a better way. There’s a better way to prepare them for the peculiar male temptations to sin and the peculiar female temptations to sin. The better way is to teach them what it means for sons to grow up and be godly men and not women, and for daughters to grow up and be godly women and not men — and then to show them that manhood and womanhood really are beset, because of our fallen nature, with temptations that are peculiar to being a man or to being a woman. We need to prepare our kids for this. They need to know what’s peculiar about a man, what’s peculiar about a woman. And then they need to know what temptations might touch them peculiarly as a man or a woman.

“There are differences between male and female. And there are, therefore, different temptations that they might face.”

For example, you might say that both men and women have sexual longings. But their peculiarities will tempt them to pursue those in sinful ways that are different. The man’s superior strength might tempt him to use force to get what he wants sexually (called rape) instead of using his strength to protect and to care for the woman. And the woman, being the “weaker vessel,” as Peter describes it (1 Peter 3:7), might be tempted to be more subtle and manipulative to get what she wants sexually. So, there are differences between male and female. And there are, therefore, different temptations that they might face.

Or you might say that because man has a special responsibility to be the sacrificial, loving leader, he might be tempted to neglect that responsibility and be a passive couch potato. And the woman might be tempted to grasp after that leadership and become domineering.

Or you might say that since the husband is designed by God to be a father, and the wife is designed by God to be a mother, he might be tempted to sinfully “father” his wife as he would a daughter. And she might be sinfully tempted to “mother” her husband as she would a son. And thus both of them demean and offend the other in different ways.

Deep Depravity, Deep Mercy

In other words, yes, we teach our children that they are sinners. And yes, we teach them that there are peculiar temptations to sin that come differently to men and women. They are not always the same. But it does no good to try to tally up who has the deeper depravity. It is so deep in both of us that we have plenty of work to do without claiming that we are better or worse because of being a man or a woman.

And we can be thankful that if we trust him, Jesus has died for us and covers all of our sins — the ones that are the same and the ones that are peculiar to us.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Friday. Pastor John, back in June of 2021, here on the podcast, you gave us a personal update. And at the very end of that update, like a little footnote, you briefly mentioned that you were about to head off for a two-month writing leave to write a whole book about 2 Timothy 4:8 on the second coming of Christ. That was back in APJ 1641. In God’s kindness, the book you alluded to there got written, edited, and published, and is now out under the title Come, Lord Jesus: Meditations on the Second Coming of Christ (Crossway, 2023). We’re going to look at that book over the next week or so on the podcast in four episodes of questions that I have for you.

First off, in this new book, what becomes pretty obvious to any reader is that you don’t spend too much time dwelling on wrong views of the end times. Your goal really was to clarify what actually happens when Christ returns and to celebrate it and encourage us to love his appearing. That’s the main theme of the book. But I wonder if you would be willing to take ten minutes or so on this episode to sketch for us some of the misconceptions — the blunders and the urban legends — about the second coming that you hope your book will help people to avoid in the future.

In general, I do think it’s right that we do the most good for the church with regard to the second coming when we don’t focus on distortions and misconceptions, but rather on the truth and the beauty of what it really is in the Bible. And yet, it’s right, now and then, to make our people understand there are misconceptions; there are errors.

Five Misconceptions

Frankly, I’m really happy that my book is viewed as being mainly proactive and positive rather than critical. But of course, even that positive view can be overstated. If we never focus on what’s wrong and show how harmful it is, we won’t really be biblical, because the biblical witness itself describes errors and their harmfulness — like Jesus did with the scribes and Pharisees or like Paul in exposing errors of false teaching in Colossians and other places.

So yes, I am willing to point out some misconceptions about the second coming. Let’s just take them one at a time, and I’ll try to explain why I think they’re a problem.

1. Christ will come after a golden age of Christendom.

First, I would mention the view that the second coming of Christ is far into the future. It will not happen until the kingdom of God is established as the ruling earthly power, including the Christianization of the cultures and societal structures of the earth. This is usually called postmillennialism, meaning that the second coming happens after (or post) the millennium. And the millennium in that view is understood to be an extended period in this age when the gospel has triumphed in such a way that a golden age of Christendom holds sway around the world and the powers of civil government, for example, are brought into the service of promoting Christian doctrine.

Now, I think this view does not adequately come to terms with both the teaching and the spirit of the New Testament that we are to live with a consciousness of the nearness of the coming of the Lord. I don’t think it comes to terms adequately with the teaching of the New Testament concerning this present age as lying “in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19), or how Paul describes this age till Jesus comes as this “present evil age” (Galatians 1:4), or the statement in Hebrews that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14), or how the movement toward the end is described with a movement of greater evil, not less evil (2 Timothy 3:1–5). And practically, I think this view pushes the appearing of the Lord so far out into the distant future that it becomes inconsequential in the daily consciousness of the churches that embrace this view.

“There is no New Testament promise that the church, in this fallen age, will transform any given culture.”

And I think it skews the mission focus of the New Testament away from world evangelization and personal disciple-making and the process of sanctification. It reorients people’s passions onto culture transformation as a foregrounded goal rather than a possible secondary consequence of speaking truth and doing love to the glory of Christ. And the reason I say “a possible secondary consequence” is that the culture is not the report card of the church. There is no New Testament promise that the church, in this fallen age, will transform any given culture. It may. It has. And it may not. It is as likely in any given setting that martyrdom, not transformation, will be the effect of obedience. And when that happens, the church has not failed. Just read the book of Revelation. Martyrdom is not failure.

2. Christ has already come.

Second, there is a view of the second coming that basically says it’s already happened — for example, in the events of AD 70, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. It’s not a very common view, I admit, but in that view, the descriptions of his coming that sound globally visible and world-shaking and obvious were really just traditional apocalyptic language to say that the Lord comes in historical judgments in this age, and then he carries it out for the rest of the time — namely, his rule over the world through the church, with no expectation of any literal second coming at all.

And I don’t think the language of the New Testament that describes Christ coming can be reduced to symbolic statements of historical events like AD 70. Paul’s understanding of the second coming in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17 is that it involves the resurrection of all the Christians from the grave. That did not happen in AD 70 or at any time. It’s going to happen when the Lord’s appearing comes.

3. No events need to happen before Christ comes.

Third, I think it’s a mistake to say that there are no events that are yet to happen in history before the Lord comes. Second Thessalonians 2:1–12 describes an apostasy and the appearance of the “man of lawlessness.” And Paul gives these two realities as an answer to the question for those who thought that the day of the Lord was upon them. And he says, “Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction” (2 Thessalonians 2:3).

4. Christ will spare his people from the tribulation.

Fourth, perhaps the most common misconception of the second coming is that it happens, so to speak, in two stages. First, he comes and takes Christians out of the world and returns them to heaven with him while there’s a great tribulation on the earth. And then, after a short time, maybe seven years, he returns with his saints to establish his kingdom.

Now, that’s one misconception I do deal with in the book. I devote a whole chapter to it, in fact. So I’m not going to go into any detail here. It is probably the most common misconception, and people will be surprised. “Whoa, I didn’t know that was a misconception. That’s what I’ve always believed.” I grew up with this view. My dad held this view. I love my dad to death, to the day he died, and we got along just fine. But gradually I came to see that this view did not have the Bible on its side.

I think the primary danger of a view like this is not that it undermines any important doctrine (at least I’m not aware of anybody going off the rails in any fundamental way because they hold this view). But the danger is that it fosters the expectation that God will spare his people from suffering in the latter days. I think that’s a mistake. And it could be a harmful mistake if people lost their faith because suddenly they found themselves enduring end-time hardships that they thought they were going to escape.

“God’s own people experience some of the suffering of judgment, but we don’t experience it as punishment.”

First Peter 4:17 says, “It is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?” I think he’s showing in that statement that God’s own people, the apple of his eye, experience some of the suffering of judgment, but we don’t experience it as punishment. Christ took our punishment. We experience it as testing, proving, purifying us.

5. Christ will never come.

Finally, I think it’s a mistake to say what the skeptics did in 2 Peter 3:4: “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” In other words, it’s a serious mistake, Peter says, to think, “Well, it’s just been too long. Everything just goes on. He’s just not coming. It was all a myth.” That is a tragic mistake. And here is Peter’s response: “Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Peter 3:8–9). Wow — what a response.

Love the Lord’s Appearing

So again, Tony, like I said at the beginning, I would much rather spend three hundred pages in a book meditating on the beauty and the power and the wonder of what’s really going to happen when the Lord comes than I would talking about mistakes. So that’s what I tried to do in the book. The aim isn’t mainly to correct errors. It’s mainly to help people love the Lord’s appearing.