Jesus Was Clear: Stop Looking for a Date

When it comes to the end times, most people just want a date. We want to crack the code and know exactly when Jesus is going to return.

But Jesus is incredibly clear that nobody knows the day or the hour—not even Himself during His earthly ministry.

He doesn't want us ready for a specific calendar date.
He wants us ready for a lifestyle of faithfulness.

In this episode, we kick off a study of the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24. We break down the massive difference between a "thief in the night" and a "faithful servant," why the main sin of Noah’s day was actually total unawareness, and why trying to keep watch as a lone wolf is a guaranteed strategy for failure.
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Equipping Men for the End Times. Be Informed. Be Prepared. Be Faithful.
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Timestamps
00:00 The obsession with predicting an end-times date
03:15 Digging into the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24:36-51)
05:15 What the "Days of Noah" actually teach us about being caught off guard
09:15 The boiling frog mentality of modern daily pressures
11:45 The home security illustration: Keeping watch is a defensive posture
14:15 Why keeping watch requires a team, not a lone wolf
15:30 The faithful servant: Being caught mid-stride doing the work

PS: Feeling like the world is getting crazier by the day, but you’re not sure what it all means? Download our free guide The Final Countdown to explore the biblical end-times signs that help us interpret this season of chaos.

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Transcript

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Speaker 0:01

When it comes to the end times, more often than not, people just want a date. We want to know when it's gonna happen. And throughout history, people have always wanted to know this. When is it that Jesus is gonna return? And there have been many people over the course of history who have tried to predict a day and time that Jesus' return is actually going to take place. And yet Jesus himself is really clear that we aren't going to know that. He even says in Scripture that he doesn't know that, that only His Father knows when he's going to return. Still, many of us keep searching for the answer to that question of when His return is going to happen. Some of us are just curious and wanna know. Others of us want to actually be able to just live the life that we wanna live up until the time that Jesus actually shows up, and then we'll get right with Him, you know, kinda right before that. Jesus doesn't want to give that to us on purpose. That's because He doesn't want us to be ready for a date, He wants us to be ready for a lifestyle of living with Him. His return is about Him. It's not about a day and a time. And so today, we need to take a look at what it is that Jesus actually tells us about His return and how we are meant to be ready for it. Men, my name is Don. I'm the host here at the Manhood Tribes show, and I see it as my job to help equip men for the end times. I am helping you to watch and be ready for what it looks like for Jesus to return. But not only that, to actually become the kind of men who are going to be capable of standing firm to the end for Jesus' return I want you to be informed. I want you to understand what's going on in the world and how it relates to the end times predicted in the Bible. I want you to be prepared, meaning that I want you to be the kind of men who can actually weather the chaos and the storm of everything that's gonna be thrown our way. But most importantly, I want you to be faithful. I want you to be the men who, in the midst of intense opposition, can actually stand firm in your allegiance to Jesus. Now, to make all of that happen is going to be a tall order. Things are going to get more difficult, more complex, and more oppressive the closer that we get to the time of Jesus's return. So for those of us who are living, and it's very possible that's going to be us in our season, we are gonna have to really work at maintaining our allegiance to Jesus. So let's talk today a little bit about what that's going to look like. For these next few episodes, we're going to be spending some time in a biblical passage in Matthew chapters 24 and 25. This is what biblical scholars often refer to as the Olivet Discourse. That's just because Jesus delivered this speech on the Mount of Olives. So Olivet means of olives, and that's, you know, that's the name of the speech. So we're gonna look at this Olivet Discourse and kind of talk about what is his return gonna look like, and what is it that he's telling us all about it. Now, the beginning of this section is actually him giving a bunch of signs and warnings about what the end time season really could look like. And we've spent the past few episodes now talking about a lot of those things, so I'm not actually going to cover that ground again. So we're gonna pick up here in the middle of Matthew chapter 24 at verses 36 to 51, where we see this curious passage where Jesus kind of contrasts two different people, a thief and a servant. And so we wanna kind of spend some time looking at those two men and what it is that Jesus is calling us to be like by giving us those examples. So let's begin in Matthew chapter 24, verse 36. And Jesus just tells us straight up, "But about that day or hour no one knows," meaning the day of his return, "not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Okay, let's just read that verse again because this is a little bit mind-blowing. "But about that day or hour of his return no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son," that's him, Jesus, he doesn't even know, "but only the Father." If Jesus in his earthly ministry deferring himself to the Father and the timing of his return to the Father, if he's claiming there's no way for him to know, then you better believe there's not gonna be any way for us to know. And look, this is on purpose, guys. Jesus knows that we love to solve puzzles. As men, that is one of the things that we love more than anything. We love to find a fix, a solution to any kind of problem or puzzle, and that is exactly what we have tried to do over the course of centuries in figuring out when is Jesus's return going to come. We want to be able to crack this code, but Jesus is telling us right off the bat, "That's not where I want you to put your energy." It's not in calculating the time, but it's in consecrating our lives to him. It's in becoming the kind of men who can maintain our allegiance to him even though it's going to be tested significantly as the day approaches. Okay, let's continue to read here Matthew 24:37-39 "As it was in the days of Noah." Now, that's a curious phrase, and we're gonna come back to it here for just a little bit. "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man." The Son of Man is Jesus. He's talking about His return. "For in the days before the flood," again, we're talking about Noah now, "people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark." The ark is the big boat that he got on to be able to escape the flood. "And they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away." Okay, so let's just Let me just read it one more time without interruption. "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. And they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away." Now, I wanna say something about this phrase, "in the days of Noah," because there's probably some of you guys out there that are watching who are a little more deep down the rabbit hole, uh, on what all of this prophecy prediction looks like and have done a lot of study on this idea of the days of Noah. And look, I've watched a lot of these internet videos as well. I've seen a bunch of information about that, and there's a whole strain of thought out there that refers to the days of Noah from this passage, saying that in the end times, we're gonna get something similar to the days of Noah and that that, in particular, refers to the propagation of giant or Nephilim-like species, some kind of human-angelic hybrid like we saw in Genesis chapter six in the days leading up to the flood. Now, could that be a possibility? Yeah, that's a possibility. I'm not gonna get into all those possibilities on this episode. We're gonna talk about that some. We'll talk about it even some in our Manhood Tribes community. And so if you're looking for a place to be able to talk about those kinds of ideas, I actually would recommend you to our Manhood Tribes community where you can talk about those things with other like-minded men and find ways of being able to not only be informed about those things but figure out they, how they help you be prepared. But for those of you who are watching or listening and you don't know anything about what's going on that I've just referred to, that's okay. You don't have to know any of that stuff because I think, honestly, even if Jesus is saying that something like that could be true in the last days, that's not actually what the focus of this little section of the passage is about. And we need to take the text more on face value than I think what all of those kind of, uh, Nephilim trains of thoughts are getting into as it relates to this days of Noah passage. Okay? So again, what Jesus is saying here is that as it was in the days of Noah, people were basically going on about their lives, and they were oblivious to what was happening, and they weren't prepared for when the flood would strike. And when it did, it just took them away. They were unprepared because they were focused on the day-to-day activities of just living. They were consumed by just what it meant to be alive and all the responsibilities that went along with it, and they were unaware of what was happening really in the world. They weren't paying attention. This is what Jesus is trying to draw our attention to about the days of Noah, is to say there were people who weren't prepared and they were caught off guard. Jesus doesn't want us to be caught off guard by His return. That's what He's trying to teach us about the days of Noah, is that we don't need to be like the people who were caught off guard by the flood and were consumed by it. Instead, He wants us to be the type of men who are aware of what is going on in the world, and what do those things actually point to? Is it the season of His return? And if it is, how would we know that and what are we supposed to be doing The main sin of the people of Noah's day that Jesus is pointing out here doesn't have to do with Nephilim. It has to do with unawareness. It has to do with kind of the boiling frog mentality, right? You're living in a world where the heat around you is ratcheting up, but the daily pressures of just getting kids to school and going about your work, earning a paycheck to be able to potentially buy a home for your family, like, the pressures of all of those things are so heavy and so intense that it becomes really easy to just kind of ignore what else is going on in the world. Like, I know that there's all these global conflicts happening, but what does that have to do with me? Can't I just, like, ignore that and get back to the things that are going on in my actual life? That's exactly what the people in the days of Noah were doing. They were focused on the things right in front of them and missing the bigger picture of what was happening in the world around them, and they were caught off guard. Jesus doesn't want you to be caught off guard. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to neglect your day-to-day responsibilities. It just means that you need to lift your eyes up, and you need to pay attention. Now, look, I get it. You might be in the shoes of a guy who's listening to some of this stuff and just going, "Okay, like, some of this stuff is kinda interesting. I'm, My curiosity is piqued," but let's be honest, like, if I really take this stuff seriously, like, is that gonna mean that, like, I need to go get a bunker, and I gotta start, like, buying canned food and water and guns? Like, like, am I becoming a prepper because I start to believe that, yeah, we might be in the end times? And I wanna say, hey, first of all, look, I acknowledge that. I get that tension, and I feel the, like, fear and concern that comes with it. Like, am I gonna have to be a weirdo and a whack job like one of those guys because I'm buying into, like, this could be the end times season that we're living in? And I wanna say the answer is no. Those aren't your first steps. Those aren't the things that you need to do to be able to be ready, and in fact, that's why I have created the Manhood Tribes community is because I want a place for men to actually be able to take steps towards being ready for Christ's return without it having to get weird and wacko. You don't have to have a bunker to be ready for Jesus to come back, but you do need to be taking some small steps now and acknowledging the fact that, hey, this really could be the season, and if it is, then what Jesus has called me to is readiness and preparedness, and I wanna take that seriously. We wanna show you how to be able to do that inside the Manhood Tribes community, so stay tuned. I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about that at the end of the episode. Let's keep going, uh, into the passage. Matthew 24, verses 42 to 44. "Therefore, keep watch because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this, if the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready because the Son of Man will come in an hour when you do not expect him." All right? Uh, hear what Jesus is saying here in Matthew 24. Keep watch. Be ready. These are the instructions that he's giving to us. These are the things that he wants to draw our attention to, and he's doing so by giving us a home security illustration, right? Readiness is a defensive posture. You don't start locking the doors to your house after the thief is already in the hallway, right? You are prepared for a potential home invader ahead of it actually happening. Now, Jesus is kind of curiously using this idea of home invasion as, like, a comparison to his return, but a home invasion, like a thief in the night, uh, is, like, a negative thing, and we want to think of Jesus' return as a positive thing. There's a little bit of curiosity there. We're not gonna dive into that today on the episode, but I do want to acknowledge that this points to the fact that Jesus's return may not be the rosy picture that you have imagined it to be and that our popular culture has painted it as. The most common theory in our popular culture about Jesus's return is this idea of the Rapture, where Jesus comes back, all the good guys get rescued and go to heaven with him, and then pandemonium breaks out on the world, and then eventually, he kind of, like, re-comes back with us, and we wipe out all the bad guys. All right, well, uh, that's one theory. Um, I wanna say that there's a lot about what Jesus says that may not quite line up with that theory, and here's one hint of those sorts of things, is that the way that he compares his return is that it has some really intense connotations to it, even for those of us who are meant to be prepared. The Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not expect him Now, this idea of keeping watch, this is a military term. It has the idea of, like, uh, staying up in camp or on the walls of a city, being prepared for an attack, an, uh, an army, an invasion, you know, whatever. But because it's late at night, or because you're having to do it in rotations, guys are doing this in shifts. The watchmen are taking turns keeping watch. If it is left up to you to try to keep watch by yourself, you are going to fail. You will not sustain yourself and be ready for Christ's return. Watchmen work as a group, and so part of keeping watch and being ready for Jesus's return is having other men around you who can help you be able to do that. Just as you would take shifts overnight at a campfire if you were trying to protect the people that you were camping with, you're gonna do it in shifts. The same thing needs to happen for Jesus's return. You've got to have people that you're doing it with All right. Let's close out this passage here with verses 45 and 46. We've talked about the thief, now we're gonna talk about the servant. "Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns." Readiness, as Jesus has called us to, isn't just about standing on the wall and looking for Jesus's return. It's not looking up, hoping for a shooting star in the sky and going, "Oh yeah, there it is." It's being found doing the work that Christ has given us. Just like the faithful servant who is taking responsibility for caring for the other servants of the household, Jesus wants us to take responsibility for the things that He has given to us. Are you provi- providing that kind of spiritual food for your household, for the men around you, for the community that you're a part of? Are you helping them to be ready for the return of Christ? Are you taking the message of the gospel to people around you and helping them know that this could be the season that Jesus is actually coming back? Jesus wants you to be actively at work doing the things that He has called you to do, so that when He shows up, He catches you mid-stride doing the very things that you're supposed to be doing. That is what He's called us to. That's what all of us need to be involved in doing. And even though the world is demanding and there are all kinds of things that are asking for our attention and our money and our focus and our time, what Jesus is saying is that we need to watch and be ready, and this is how we do it. Now, to be able to make all of those things happen, again, you're going to need other men around you to be able to do it. You will not survive as a lone wolf trying to live this kind of lifestyle in the culture that we have today, let alone in how much more difficult the culture may get as we get closer and closer to the return of Jesus. Trying to do it as a lone wolf is a sure way to fail. You need a community of men around you, and so I want to invite you to the Manhood Tribes community. Check it out at manhoodtribes.com/community. There, you can find a way to sign up to be a part of a group of men who regularly engages with the Bible in one hand and our smartphone in the other as we look at what's going on on the global stage and what might be indicating, uh, the timing of Jesus's return and what we need to do to be ready. We do spiritual devotions to help us prepare. We create manhood challenges that help develop our readiness for dealing with the, uh, challenges of the world, and we do all kinds of, uh, reading and engagement with knowledge to help us understand how have people thought about this end time season in the past, and what can we do to be aware of more of what's happening around us today. These are good things. These are things you want to be a part of. And I will even say that you can get a month of the Manhood Tribes community free if you will use the code 10SIGNS, that's the number one, zero, and the word signs, to be able to sign up. You get your first month for free, and you can check out the Manhood Tribes community that way free of charge, no pressure. If it's not for you, you don't have to stick around. But I pretty much guarantee you that if you're looking for a p- a group of people who can help you be ready for the return of Christ, this is gonna be the place where you're gonna find it. All right, men, I hope to see you inside of the Manhood Tribes community. And if you got any questions, leave them there in the comment section down below of this video. I look forward to engaging with you there, and I'll see you next time here on The Manhood Tribe Show.