I used to pay a lot of attention to prophecy.

Not so much generic prophecy or popular prophecy, predictions about what will happen today or this week or next year. (That feels pretty random to me.)

I’m talking about eschatology, the study of the end times. In the Bible, books like Revelation and Daniel talk about the end of everything as we know it. Books like Isaiah and Jeremiah talk about what will happen with Israel in the short run (from where the prophets are living) and in the long run.

There was a time when I paid close attention, when I could understand what some people were saying about trumpets and bowls and weeks. (Some of you understand that last sentence very well. Some of you don’t. Don’t worry about it either way.)

What I found happening every time I started looking at those subjects was twitchyness. I started to get scared of what might happen. I started to get caught up in conspiracy thinking. I started to read the news and calculate and speculate.

I did everything but think about actually living.

Matthew 24 and 25 are about time ending. Jesus talks about the end of the age, about what will happen before the end. He tells three stories about living in expectation. And he seems to give as much opportunity for argument as he does clarity. Or so it would seem as we read the arguments about end times that have happened across church history.

I’m not anxious to start additional arguments, but I’m also not anxious to avoid the last major teaching that Matthew records. So we will plunge into these chapters, with this in mind:

So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.