Stay awake implies keeping watch, and keeping watch necessitates being awake. Jesus gave this command because it is the attitude and posture that He expected of His disciples. The great tribulation upon Jerusalem was coming, and they needed to be able to properly discern between true and false signs so that they could escape being caught up in the slaughter. Such discernment required being awake and watching, being alert and on guard, being vigilant at all times. Thankfully, the Christians living in Jerusalem took this to heart and, as we have already said, fled from Jerusalem before the Romans cut off all possible escape routes.

But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”
Mark 13:32-37 ESV

After nine supernatural signs of God’s judgment, Pharaoh’s heart was no less softened, and he was no closer to submitting himself to God’s greater authority. Therefore, God promised to bring one plague more upon the land of Egypt. The LORD would come down and strike dead all the firstborn in the land, both human and animal. This vast yet targeted loss of life would finally cause Pharaoh to cast God’s people out of Egypt.
Yet this tenth sign was unique from the other nine in ways beyond simple escalation of intensity. In the previous plagues, the Israelites in the land of Goshen were unaffected in order to emphasize the distinction between God’s people and Pharaoh’s people. Yet with the tenth plague, the LORD would not avoid Goshen entirely. He would pass by every house in Egypt, both of the Egyptians and the Hebrews, and only the households marked with the blood of a lamb, as God directed, would be passed over by the LORD’s judgment.
Having slaughtered their lambs, eaten them in haste, and marked their doorposts with the blood, the Israelites huddled in their homes and waited for the sword to fall upon the Egyptians and for it to pass over them. They waited with sandals on and their staffs in hand. At midnight, the LORD did as He promised, and the night sky was pierced by the great cries of the Egyptians as each household discovered their dead.
Summoning Moses and Aaron that very night, Pharaoh ordered them to take the Israelites and all of their possessions out of Egypt once and for all. After 430 years in Egypt, Israel departed at last. Moses summarizes that fateful night with these words: “It was a night of watching by the LORD, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the LORD by all the people of Israel throughout their generations” (Exodus 12:42).
Concerning That Day or That Hour// Verse 32
In our present passage, we study the conclusion of Jesus’ Olivet Discourse. Let us remember once more that this teaching of Jesus began with Him leaving the temple with His disciples after a series of confrontational questions from the Jewish religious leaders that were intended to ensnare Jesus in His own words. Upon their exit, one of Jesus’ disciples commented to Him about how beautiful the temple was, to which Jesus said: “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down” (13:2). When He then sat down later on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the temple, four of His disciples asked Him these two questions: “Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished” (13:4)?
So far, from verses 5-31, Jesus has been answering the second question. Particularly, in verses 5-13, He warned His disciples not to mistake ordinary tribulations as signs of God’s judgment upon Jerusalem. Instead, in verses 14-23, Jesus gave them the explicit signs of that coming judgment and warned them to flee Jerusalem whenever they saw. Finally, in verses 24-31, we were told what signs would immediately follow that great tribulation and again warned to consider those signs.
All of this means that Jesus has not yet answered the first question of His disciples: “when will these things be?” Yet that is the question that He answers in verse 32, saying, “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
While last week, we did consider what I have come to believe is Christ’s only explicit reference to the end of the world in this discourse (“Heaven and earth will pass away”), we still ought to note that Jesus referenced the passing away of all things in order to highlight the permanence of His words. He was, thus, sealing His prophecies with the kind of surety that can only come from the One through whom all things were made and without whom “was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). In other words, the destruction of the temple seemed so unlikely that Jesus needed to remind them of the eventual destruction of the created order itself and of the indestructability of His words.
Because even verse 31 serves to cement Jesus’ predictions about God’s judgment upon Jerusalem, the phrase that day or that hour in verse 32 does not refer to the passing away of heaven and earth but to the annihilation of the temple, the abomination of desolation. And Jesus stated definitively that only the Father knew precisely in advance on what day and hour that judgment would fall. Nor did the Father disclose that knowledge to any angel nor even to Jesus the Son.
Regarding the Son’s lack of knowledge, we come to a common yet very reasonable question: if God is omniscient (that is, all-knowing), then how can Jesus claim to be divine while also admitting a lack of knowledge? To answer this question, we must bring before us a great mystery of the faith that is somewhat like the great mystery of the Trinity, for they are both realities that are simply beyond our finite grasp. Here is how the Athanasian Creed puts it:
Now this is the true faith: that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is both God and man, equally. He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is man from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely man, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity. Although he is God and man, yet Christ is not two, but one. He is one, however, not by his divinity being turned into flesh, but by God’s taking humanity to himself. He is one, certainly not by the blending of his essence, but by the unity of his person. For just as one man is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and man.
That is what we confess and believe to be true. Therefore, Jesus in His humanity is not omniscient, even though He most certainly is so in His divinity. While Jesus did not forsake His divinity when He became man, He very much did walk this earth as we do, only without sin. There are certainly splendid moments in Jesus’ life where a ray of His divinity pierced through the veil, yet throughout His life the Infinite One walked within finitude.
Again, it is important that we remember that the destruction of the temple in AD 70 is squarely what Jesus was speaking about. There are certainly many who take this verse to mean that even now as Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father He does not know when He is returning for His bride. But that is not at all what Jesus said here. Jesus is simply acknowledging that in His humanity even He did not know the exact date of Jerusalem’s judgment. Indeed, that admission was meant to guard His disciples against any false prophets who might have claimed such knowledge that even Christ Himself did not possess.
In this way, there is still significant application of this verse to our present waiting for Christ’s return. While Jesus most certainly does know precisely when He will return, we do not. In Luke 12:40, which seems to be pretty clearly about His second coming, Jesus says, “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” Of course, according to countless false prophets throughout church history, His return could be expected so long as you have the right revelation or mathematical formula. Yet we know them as false prophets precisely because their words proved false. Jeremiah 28:7-9 says,
Yet hear now this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the LORD has truly sent the prophet.
Read More
Related Posts:

God devised prayer “as a means of enlisting us as participants in the work he has ordained, as part of the outworking of his sovereign rulership over all.” Our prayers do in fact make a difference. Yes, God is God, lacking nothing. Yet he has chosen to work through his people and their prayers. This is mind-boggling stuff. It is all about participation with God.

My title question is not a rhetorical nor a theoretical one. It is a very real question, and one that all believers should contemplate. Many matters come to mind here. Part of the issue has to do with the fact that if God is omniscient and knows all things, then why pray? He already knows everything about us and what we need. He gains no new information and insights from us when we engage in petitionary prayer.
So why pray? Zillions of great books have been written on prayer, many of which deal with these very sorts of questions. Here I want to look at just one volume, and only part of it deals directly with prayer. It has actually been out for a while now, but I recently revisited it. I refer to God’s Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith by Bruce Ware (Crossway, 2004).
You might recall that this author had previously penned God’s Lesser Glory (Crossway, 2004), in which he took to task the openness theologians who say, among other things, that God does not have exhaustive knowledge – certainly not exhaustive foreknowledge as is normally understood.
In God’s Greater Glory he looks further at some of these matters, especially focusing on the providence of God. Those wanting a helpful and thorough biblical and theological treatment of the issue of God’s sovereignty and how it ties in with human moral culpability and responsibility will find much of value here.
But even if you do not buy his theological stance on these issues, his closing chapters are both pastoral and practical. Thus Chapter 7 has to do with how all this ties in with prayer. And there we get the questions I already mentioned, such as: ‘If God already knows everything, why even bother to pray?’
He begins his chapter by reminding us of some basic biblical truths. While God made us and the world, he did not have to. He is complete and sufficient in himself. Indeed, the three persons of the Trinity have always enjoyed fellowship and community within the godhead. So God did not NEED to make man. As Ware writes:
God exists eternally independent of creation, possessing within himself, intrinsically and infinitely, every quality and perfection. All goodness is God’s goodness, and he possesses it in infinite measure. All beauty is God’s beauty, and he possesses it in infinite measure. All power and wisdom and every perfection or quality that exists, exists in God, who possesses each and every one infinitely and intrinsically. Therefore, God needs none of what he has made, and nothing external to God can contribute anything to him, for in principle nothing can be added to this One who possesses already every quality without measure. Instead, everything that exists external to God does so only because God has granted it existence and has filled it with any and every quality it possesses (Acts 17:24-25).
But God did create us. Not because he had to but because he wanted to. And Ware reminds us of this basic truth: while God is fully and perfectly self-sufficient and dependent on no one, we are fully dependent on God. Like a newborn baby, we are completely helpless and unable in the least to survive and thrive on our own. We owe everything to God.
Prayer
This is where the amazing biblical truths about prayer come into play. Although God is perfectly sovereign and complete in himself, he has chosen to use the prayers of his people for his purposes. Again, he need not have even created us, let alone deign to take into account and make use of our prayers.
And again, God knows all about us and all about our needs. As Jesus said about our need of daily bread and clothing, “your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (Matthew 6:32). So is prayer a waste of time then? Jesus did not think so.
Says Ware, “Clearly, Jesus doesn’t see a conflict between 1) our complete and total inability to inform God of anything, and 2) our prayers being meaningful, significant, and necessary.” He offers two major reasons why God has designed that his people pray. The first is this: he devised prayer “as a means to draw us into close and intimate fellowship with him.”
At this point let me interject with a quick personal story. Last night as I was looking at my Jilly dog, I thought that she too misses and is sad that Averil is gone. The trouble is, she cannot reason it through and properly process it all. She simply has a hole in her doggie soul.
But then I thought, ‘Am I really much different?’
Read More
Related Posts:

Letting God decide the future of each soul freed Prosper to preach to others without wondering whether or not they were of the elect. He was in fact one of the first Christian voices to speak of bringing Christ outside the Roman Empire, and his De vocatione omnium gentium (“The Call of All Nations”), was the first Christian book to support this idea. “Today there are in the remotest parts of the world some nations who have not yet seen the light of the grace of the Saviour,” he wrote. “But we have no doubt that in God’s hidden judgment, for them also a time of calling has been appointed, when they will hear and accept the Gospel which now remains unknown to them.”[7]

The fourth-century debate between Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius left a profound mark in church history, with Pelagius’s views condemned as heresy at the ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431. In a nutshell, Augustine explained that, because of the Fall, human beings are incapable of redeeming themselves and depend totally on God’s grace. Pelagius instead believed that God has endowed human beings with the ability to choose to obey God and to resist sin.
Augustine’s position led to a belief in predestination, since if God is the only agent in redemption, he is also the only one who can determine who will be saved. Those who believed that God’s grace was preeminent in salvation but were not ready to deny the importance of human agency often adopted the belief that the original sin had only a limited effect on human abilities and that man could contribute to his salvation by cooperating with God’s grace.
Augustine’s teachings continued to have many supporters. Among these was Prosper of Aquitaine, a poet and lay theologian who lived in Marseilles, France, in the fifth century, when these doctrines of grace were most fiercely debated. He is considered the author of the expression “semi-Pelagian” to denote anyone who tried to reach a compromise between Augustine and Pelagius.
The Development of Prosper’s Views
We know very little about Prosper’s life. He lived in Marseilles when some foreign populations such as the Vandals and the Goths were making their way into France. In fact, he was there when the Goths invaded the city and was taken prisoner for some time.
In a long poem entitled De Providentia Dei (Of God’s Providence), Prosper expressed his pain in seeing the devastation of his city. “O happy the man whom God has given such a power to live free from cares at a time like this! Who is not shaken by the heap of ruins all around him, remaining intrepid amids the flames and flood. But we, the weak ones, under such a tempest of evil, are cut down everywhere, and we fall. Each time the image of our fatherland, all in smoke,
comes to our mind, and the whole range of destruction stands before our eyes, we break down, and the tears water our cheeks beyond restraint.”[1]
Prosper wrote De Providentia Dei when possibly still young in the faith, as a possible explanation of why God allowed such suffering. After a long discussion, he concluded that disasters were part of God’s punishment of evildoers, and that Christians were inevitably caught in them. At this time, his understanding of God’s grace was still limited by his emphasis on man’s free will.
Sometimes later, however, he was introduced to the writings of Augustine of Hippo (possibly by a deacon named Leontius), and became thoroughly convinced of their orthodoxy and authority. In a later letter, he described Augustine as “the first and foremost among the bishops of the Lord” and “the greatest man in the church today.”[2] He was certain that “the church of Rome and of Africa and all the sons of the promise the world over agree with the teaching of this doctor both in the faith and in particular in the doctrine of grace.”[3]
Denouncing the Semi-Pelagians
It was then only natural that, when some opposition to Augustine’s doctrines became vocal in his region, Prosper sent letters to Augustine, asking him to intervene. And he was not the only one. Another young supporter of Augustine, Hilary, did the same.
Read More
Related Posts: