This proverb humbles us by reminding us that the glory for our success does not belong to us but to God. When we do succeed in some endeavor in life, we can thank God rather than ourselves. And when we fail, rather than having an identity crisis, we can humbly submit to God in worship rather than chafing at the limits of our control.

Proverbs 21:31: The horse is made ready for the day of battle,but the victory belongs to the LORD. (ESV)
“What if I fail?” This possibility is so frightening for some of us that it is nearly unthinkable. The shade of a notion of the possibility of failure can induce panic or something close to it. Failure is not unique in this regard. The same could be said of many other “what-if’s”.
And that is the purpose of this series. We will examine various “what-if” statements that often plague us by creating a vague anxiety which can haunt even our dreams.
In fact, I recently had just such a dream. I woke up this morning thinking I had, in fact, failed at something. I dreamed that half of a project I had turned in to be evaluated had received a failing grade and would have to be re-done. I remember doing damage control in my dream, trying to rationalize, trying to excuse myself, trying to re-read and read again the results to see if I could re-interpret them as something other than failure. What did failure mean? Does this mean I don’t belong in my job? Does this mean I’m not capable of what I thought I was? Have I been kidding myself about who I am? When I awoke, I felt sad and stressed. 15 minutes later, I realized it had been a dream… or a nightmare.
But so often it’s not a dream, and we never actually arrive at a clear point of failure. This post is not about the experience of failure per se but the fear of it.
Defining Failure
What is success? And what is failure? Success may be defined as the fulfillment of a purpose or desire. We make a plan, the plan works, and we call that success. Failure as an experience is the opposite of success. We make a plan, the plan doesn’t work. We try something and it doesn’t work.
The proverb head at the head of this post can be very encouraging. It encourages us that God is the one in control over our successes, and that he receives all the glory for all our success. This is great news for those of us who believe that our success depends entirely on our own hard work. It doesn’t. There are far more factors at work in the outcomes of our investments and preparation than the dynamics we bring.
On the other hand, this proverb can be considered from a different angle. We do not control when we succeed and when we fail.
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The most important thing to say is that anyone who regularly reads the Bible, by the Spirit, sees the lion every day. The word of God is the one inspired, infallible path he has given us for life. “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises” (2 Peter 1:3–4). Google can’t provide answers like these. Artificial intelligence is a shadow of such wisdom. A hundred PhDs would only scratch the surface. We have no idea what we hold in the pages of this Book.

As I get older, decisions in life don’t seem to get smaller and easier, but bigger, harder, and more frequent.
In the moment, we often think the hardest decision we’ll ever face is whichever one we have to make right now. If we look back in ten years, though, this whale of a decision may begin to look a little more like a dolphin or a penguin.
When I was in my early twenties, the most difficult decision I had made was whether to stay near home for college (with my friends) or wander outside the safety of southern Ohio. Tears were shed. By my mid-thirties, however, I had made a dozen decisions bigger than that one. Where will I live? Where will I go to church? What will I do for a living, and who will pay me to do that? Whom will I marry? When will we try to have kids? Will I stay in this job? What school will we send our kids to? How will we pay for that? And those are just the big decisions most people have to make at some point. You have question marks of your own.
This year brought some new whales into our family’s harbor, and so we’ve been in need of fresh wisdom and clarity. As we wrestled through these weighty decisions, I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia with my six-year-old. On one of our hikes through its forests, my son and I came to a crossroads (as one often does in Narnia). And it was one of those crossroads that unveils the magic of Lewis’s world.
While standing there beside a dwarf (Trumpkin) and looking out over a gorge separating the four Pevensie children from Prince Caspian’s army, I suddenly wasn’t looking at a dwarf anymore, or a gorge, or even a book. I was looking at my life, at the hard decisions I needed to make. I was looking at myself. It was as if Lewis himself had decided to stop over from mid-twentieth-century Oxford to help me choose between the paths before me.
A Godless Calculus
Where we were reading, King Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are hiking with Trumpkin, trying to find the Great River. After arduous days, they’re questioning whether they’ve gone the wrong way when they suddenly come to a gorge. The chasm is too wide to cross, so they must either follow the gorge downstream, hoping it meets the river, or climb upstream, looking for a place to cross. Trumpkin’s convinced that the gorge must fall into the river somewhere below, and Peter quickly approves. “Come on, then. Down this side of the gorge” (Prince Caspian, 131). At that moment, though, young Lucy sees an old, majestic friend.
“Look! Look! Look!” cried Lucy.
“Where? What?” asked everyone.
“The Lion,” said Lucy. “Aslan himself. Didn’t you see?” Her face had changed completely and her eyes shone.
The other children, not able to see Aslan themselves, immediately suspect she’s seeing things. Lucy won’t back down, though. As they search and search and see nothing, they ask where exactly she saw the lion.
Right up there between those mountain ashes. No, this side of the gorge. And up, not down. Just the opposite of the way you want to go. And he wanted us to go where he was — up there. (132)
As Lucy insists, the dwarf resists. “I know nothing about Aslan. But I do know that if we turn left and follow the gorge up, it might lead us all day before we found a place where we could cross it. Whereas if we turn right and go down, we’re bound to reach the Great River in about a couple of hours. And if there are any real lions about, we want to go away from them, not towards them” (133). He’s the voice of conventional wisdom. He can calculate only what he can see.
In this case, his small, narrow eyes win the day, so the company turns right and goes down.
Unconventional Wisdom
First, the way turns out to be not as “conventional” as it had seemed: “To keep along the edge of the gorge was not so easy as it had looked” (135). They fight through dense woods until they can’t anymore and have to back out and go around the trees. When they find the gorge again, the hike down is slower and more treacherous than they expected.
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First, we need to remember why the disciples are asking these questions in the first place. They have not been thinking about global events that will transpire at the end of the world or cataclysmic phenomena that would usher in the end of history. These men were thinking about the things that were in front of them, such as the abandonment and destruction of their beloved temple and when Jesus would return to make sure that event happened. They were not assuming a multi-millennia wait for the second coming of Christ. They saw His next coming would be against Jerusalem when He destroyed it within a generation.

Black Mamba Eschatology
One of the things that separate great players from legendary players is drive. Great players wake up early in the morning and give everything they have in practice. Legendary players get up hours before everyone else, play through blood, sweat, and tears, perfecting every facet of their game before practice, and then outwork everyone else during practice. Great players get scoring titles and end up in the hall of fame. Legendary players put their teams on their back and will get them into championship, after championship, after championship. Great players are disappointed after a hard-fought loss. Legendary players would rather die than lose a game.
That, in my humble opinion, is what differentiates truly great players like Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, and Lebron James from NBA legends like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, (also known as the black mamba). One group was truly great and deserves all the accolades we can give them. The other group lived with a never-ending obsession to be the greatest that ever lived and they are in a class all by themselves.
One of the ways we see this distinction playing out is among childhood fans. Fans love the great players and cheer for them. But when it comes to who they want to be when they grow up, or who they pretend to be in their driveway when no one else is looking, children almost always choose the legends, because they can sense the difference. And as a child growing up in the 80s, I certainly fell afoul of this fandom, wanting with all my heart to be “Like Mike”, while being unwilling to put in the effort of men like Jordan and Kobe. This silly introduction, ironically, may help us understand one of the great dilemmas in eschatology and may aid us when we come to Matthew 24.
The Most Important Chapter
When it comes to Biblical chapters of eschatology, Matthew 24 is the zenith of all the end-times passages. It is the Superbowl, it is game seven of the NBA finals or the last round at Augusta. No one wins at that level accidentally just as no one begins to understand Matthew 24 by sloth. It is a chapter that will only yield its treasures to the ones who are willing to put in the maximal effort. Perhaps this is why so few understand eschatology in the church today. Because passages like this one can only be understood with rigorous effort, which is out of style in a culture of easy believism.
For the last eight weeks, we have been working towards Matthew 24. We did so by attempting to understand the basics and introductory materials of eschatology in our first couple of weeks. Then we moved along to Malachi where we learned the hermeneutical principles for interpreting eschatology. From there we saw those principles playing out in the theology of John the Baptist and our Lord. And over the last several weeks, we have observed how Matthew 21-23 provides the essential context that will aid us in understanding Matthew 24. Had we not labored in the way we did, we would not have been prepared for what we now face. So, with that introduction, let us remember very briefly the context and then let us dive, or maybe only stick our pinky toe, in the water of Matthew 24.
Remembering the Context
Matthew 24 occurs as a part of the dramatic events surrounding Jesus’ final week where He will bring judgment to some and salvation to others. In judgment, He rides into the fruitless city, judges the fruitless temple, curses a fruitless tree, and shows how this judgment applies to Jerusalem (Matthew 21). With three successive parables of judgment, Jesus demonstrates that Jerusalem will soon fall and that God’s Kingdom will be given to a people who will bear God’s fruit (Matthew 22). After prophesying Jerusalem’s downfall, Jesus seals their fate with seven covenantal curses of woe and pronounces the wrath of God upon the city and its temple (Matthew 23). In Matthew 24, Jesus does not abandon the narrative of judgment against Jerusalem but instead gives the clearest prophecy ever uttered describing its downfall.
Since this passage is of the utmost importance for our understanding, we will move slowly through it over the next several weeks until we have sufficiently covered its material. Our goal is that we would understand it, not fly through it. With that, let us begin.
A Shocking Point
The passage picks up immediately where Matthew 23 left off. Jesus finished uttering fiery woes against the Pharisees (Matthew 23:13-33). Then He prophesied God would visit that generation with the harshest judgment ever given (Matthew 23:34-36). And then He tells them Jerusalem’s house, the temple, will be left entirely desolated (Matthew 23:37-38).
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