The Christian may and does properly reflect on what has transpired in his life in the past. There was joy and sorrow and laughter and deep pain. There were successes and painful setbacks. There were struggles and toil and times when things seemed to fly along as effortlessly as a bird soars in the heavens. There were births and deaths and marriages and the breaking of a marriage bond by death. To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. There is a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to pluck up, a time to kill and to heal, a time to break down and to build up, a time to weep and to laugh, a time to mourn and to dance with gladness and joy. There is a time for love, hate, war, and peace and a time to speak and to be silent. Have we not experienced all this as time marches onward and forward, as time flies past, and we are carried with it?

When we look back and see all the scenes and situations and circumstances through which time has brought us, we also invariably see much sin, weakness, and unfaithfulness. We may have many regrets in our lives, so much so that there may be pictures that we have a hard time looking at because they bring up and call to mind all our failures and sins.

We have passed all our days here in much sin.

So when we look back, we must, we cannot look back without calling to mind God’s perfect faithfulness to us: his great love toward us; the greatness of his forgiveness; the overflowing of his goodness to us. Whether in sickness or health, in riches or poverty, in sadness or gladness, God has always been with us for good. And calling to mind his goodness and grace, we can also look forward. Though we can and we may and we should look back, the text calls us to look forward also, to look upward, to look away from this world, and to look in hope for one who is to come. We look toward the end of this age, the end of all ages, and the coming of the new age that shall be ushered in with the coming of Jesus Christ.

Behold, the end of all things is at hand.

Joyful announcement!

To that end we are called to look forward.

The nearness of that end we must contemplate.

By the “end of all things,” the apostle means the end of this present age and all that is a part of it. When the verse says “all things,” scripture speaks of all things without any limit. Exhaustively—in heaven, on earth, and under the earth—there will be an end of all those things, and there will be a passing away of the form of the earth and heaven as they are currently constituted and as we know them.

We can understand that there is an end of all things as they were originally created by God in the six days of the creation week because we have two great examples of the disappearance of the form of things as God created them.

The first example is the fall of Adam and Eve. God made everything perfect in the beginning, and there was no death. There came an end of that form of the creation. Those things as they were originally created fell under the power of sin, the curse, and death. By the rebellion of Satan and his angels, there were great upheavals in heaven, and Satan and his angels were cast out. Through Satan’s instigation man believed the lie of Satan, and man and all things of the earthly creation came under the power of death. All things as they were created fell under the curse, and that curse turned all things to destruction. So the perfect creation passed away never to return in that form, and the present creation groans now for a higher form.

The form of the world as it was cursed in Adam lasted until the flood. In the preceding chapter and in another place, Peter speaks of the flood. The world that then was perished, being overflowed with water, so that its very form passed away. It passed away never to return, and another form arose from its destruction: this world that now is being reserved unto fire for the judgment that is to come.

That world as it has existed since Adam, as it underwent the fall and groans under the curse, that world as it passed through the flood and is now reserved unto fire, that world will end. It is an end like those others, so that the present form of the world will perish. Yet that end will be so thorough and complete that a new creation must be made. A new form will be given to the world, a form that will be its everlasting form.

Thus the apostle means the end of time as we know it.

There are so many ends that remind us of the coming end of time as we know it. There is the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of a month, the end of a year. Time moves forward like a rushing stream, and time can never return to the place it once passed. There is an end of your life and of the time that you have in this creation. That all points to the ultimate end of time as we know it. Not time as such will end, for time too must be lifted up and glorified to bear the weight and glory of the eternal creation.

But time as we know it—as it has regulated and has been the condition of creaturely existence since the beginning in Genesis—will end. In the beginning God made the heaven and earth. Then time began. That time runs and regulates all things, holding all things in its power. To everything there is a time and a season. That time—as it is composed of seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years, and as those years pile up into centuries, and the centuries add up to millennia and the millennia into epochs and ages—carries all with it. For some six thousand years, time has had this function. Every moment governed by God to accomplish its purpose.

But the end of all things is when this present age passes into the everlasting age.

Then everything that exists in time as we know them will end too: the universe as we know it; the sun, moon, and stars as we know them; the mountains and valleys; the rivers and oceans; the trees, flowers, and grasses; the beasts and birds. Every creature will end.

And man! Man in his earthly existence—with all his earthly thoughts and plans, his earthly inventions and works, and all that he ever produced, thought, and composed—will end. There will be a moment when man’s entire earthly existence shall be swept away, shaken, destroyed, and burned with unquenchable fire.

The end is a conclusion, a drawing to a close. Like the year draws to a close, so all history and all that is in it will draw to a close. In that end, like the death throes of some gigantic beast, the creation will roll, shake, and tumble violently and wildly, seemingly uncontrolled and with terrifying upheavals.

Angels shall blow their trumpets over the nations, and nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be wars and rumors of wars.

When all of these things happen, the end is not yet.

The gospel will sound forth to the ends of the earth until all of God’s elect have been called to repentance and have been gathered safely within the sheepfold of the great Shepherd. Like choking smoke after the fire of the gospel, false prophets shall come and say, “Here is Christ, and there is Christ.” Do not believe them! But the love of many shall wax cold because of iniquity, which shall abound, and lawlessness as the world rushes in the development of sin to its final manifestation in the man of sin.

Then shall come that wicked one, the son of perdition, to whom the great red dragon will give his seat and his power and his authority. Like a great beast the antichrist will arise out of the turbulent sea of nations, and all the world shall wonder at him and his kingdom and his great power and shall worship him, except those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. And with that son of perdition will come trouble for the church such as she has never seen; he shall wear out the saints, and a great tribulation shall descend upon the church.

Then the vials of God’s wrath will be poured out on that wicked king of Babylon, who swallowed up Zion, to break up his kingdom and his power and his authority with terrible plagues. The earth, which is the seat of his power, will cast him out, and the nations shall be gathered to Armageddon.

Then the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven as this form of the creation is shaken and falls to pieces and the very fabric of the universe begins to unravel.

Upon this scene of desolation shall be the last and the greatest of all the signs, the sign of the Son of man in heaven—Jesus in all of his magnificent power—when the truth of the Son of man, as the one in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, shall be revealed; and every eye shall see him, even those who pierced him; and he shall declare himself to be the awesome and irreprehensible judge of the quick and the dead.

At that end the goal has come! An end is a goal. “End” is the word that the Holy Ghost uses, but the goal of all things is at hand. With the coming of all those things will come the goal that God established eternally in his counsel.

Seemingly, the coming of the end is with uncontrolled violence, but it is not uncontrolled. Rather, the end is closely, minutely, and precisely controlled as that end had been determined by God before the foundation of the world. He declares the end from the beginning! God shakes the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, in order that that which cannot be shaken endure and that which he eternally purposed as the final form of the creation might be revealed.

The creation as God made it, the creation of Adam and Noah and Abraham and ours too is the scaffolding necessary for the construction of God’s eternal house. He erected that scaffolding in the beginning. That form of the creation is not the purpose and goal, but the form serves the purpose and goal.

That this creation and its form is the goal is a carnal doctrine. It is the carnal doctrine of the worldly-minded man whose god is his belly and who minds earthly things. It is the doctrine of those who seek a kingdom of God on earth and seek to build a good and godly culture in the world in cooperation with that world.

But Peter says that all things will end. The world—all things as we know them, as they have existed, and as they presently exist—is not the goal. The world and all things shall end. They shall be shaken and fall to pieces and be dissolved in order that the eternal home and house that God has built, the new Jerusalem, may be revealed in that day.

The goal is God’s eternal covenant. God—God in Christ, God in Christ in fellowship with his elect people in a new heaven and a new earth—is the goal. This is the reason that all things exist. This is the reason that all things were created in the beginning. It is for that purpose that all things were by the sin of Adam subjected to vanity and to destruction. This is the reason that all things continue as they have. And when that goal is reached, then the scaffolding will be taken down. This is the reason all things must also end. This world must pass away in order that the eternal be revealed.

The building that God has made must stand in all its glory and beauty to the praise of his name and the name of his Son, Jesus Christ. This is the goal from eternity. This is the goal of all history. This is the goal of all things. This is the goal of Eden the first. This is the goal of Adam, although he did not know it at first. All things must exist and continue to exist; they must groan and travail at present; they must labor and strive, strain, suffer, fade away, and pass away until that moment when God’s house is finished. Then the end has come. Christ shall be revealed in his glory, and all the elements shall melt with fervent heat.

The earthly clock, like the clock in some gigantic nuclear explosion, shall stop. And the clock of eternity will begin, never to end. To the coming of that end and according to his eternal counsel, God directs all things.

Behold, the end!

The end is at hand!

The end is very near. The night is far spent. The day is at hand!

This is not immediately apparent. Faith believes this according to the word of God. This is not a conclusion that man can arrive at by investigating the world. When man investigates the world, he says in his wicked unbelief that the world has lasted for billions of years, that in all likelihood the world will last for billions more, and that all things continue as they have from the beginning.

Man—if he has his heart set on an earthly kingdom of Christ at the end of the ages when Christians will be supreme and hold the powers of government and of society—says that the end is not at hand. He calls an end that is at hand pessimism. He looks around at the world and sees that the world is anything but Christianized, and he calls the church to be busy Christianizing the world. He sees that there is much work to be done, and so for him the end is surely not at hand. Indeed, the end about which Peter speaks is not the end for which he hopes, but he hopes for the coming of his earthly Christian kingdom. Thus he places the end of all things far, far, far in the future.

But the end is at hand when this world will be no more and when the eternal has come, says Peter. This is the revelation of the word of God to you and to me as much as the truth of the end is a revelation of God. God will have us know that the grand and glorious culmination of all things is at hand. Faith believes this.

What does the nearness of the end mean? Even if we reject the unbelieving doctrine of the evolutionist, yet we can say that the world has lasted for nearly two thousand years since the birth of Christ and the time of the apostle. Some say that the apostle was mistaken and only thought that the end was near. It may have been that the apostle Peter, who was only a man, when he wrote these inspired words indeed did think that the end would come much quicker than it has. But that does not mean that that is what the word of God means and what the Spirit intended when he moved Peter to write these things as inspired and infallible scripture.

The apostles like the prophets before them were inspired to write the word of God, and the apostles like the prophets did not understand fully the meaning of the word of God that was in them and of what they wrote and all of the implications of their words and prophecies. The church has had to search and to interpret the scriptures by the guidance of the Spirit to come to an understanding of these things.

So what does it mean that the end is at hand, for surely it is?

The Spirit cannot mean that the end can come at any moment, as is the doctrine of so many. They suppose that the end can happen at any moment because Jesus can come at any moment to rapture his church off the earth. They teach that without warning and thus without signs, the end will come. Carnal doctrine! Its hope too is in an earthly kingdom and that the church will escape the tribulation of the end.

But the Lord himself spoke of signs of his coming. The apostle John revealed in great detail the signs that precede the coming of the Lord, as did Daniel and many of the prophets. The end of all things cannot happen at any moment. The end will not happen tonight or tomorrow or for that matter in a week or a month. Even though things might develop quickly, it is very possible that the end will not arrive for years.

But the end is at hand!

Certainly, we reject the interpretation of those whose hope is in the earthly kingdom and a golden age of Christian dominance in the world in the future and who say that Peter was talking about the end of Jerusalem and of the Jewish economy and that all these things were fulfilled in AD 70 when the Romans came against Jerusalem. Thus they tell us that Peter was speaking of an event that was very near! In that case the text has nothing to say to us and is irrelevant for the church. The church receives no instruction from this text, and the church need not know that the end is at hand because the end that Peter foretold has already in a sense happened.

But the end is at hand!

That the end of all things is at hand means that this end is the next great event on God’s calendar.

That was not true when God made the world. The world and the church in the world had to pass through many stages. The calendar turned after a brief stay in Eden. Adam and Eve stepped out of Eden, and the world continued for a time. Then the calendar turned at the flood after only seventeen hundred years. And quickly man came to the tower of Babel. The calendar turned as God smote the beast with a deadly wound by confusing the tongues and scattering the nations. The calendar turned again with Abraham, again when Jacob went down into Egypt, again as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness, again when Joshua took the Israelites into the promised land, again with David, and again with Solomon and the coming of the temple. Throughout the history of the Old Testament, the calendar of the world was turning and always aiming for the appearance of the Lord. Always with uplifted heads and outstretched necks, the church looked for his coming.

Suddenly, the Lord appeared in his temple, and the last hour had come. He was meek and lowly and came as the suffering servant of Jehovah. He was crucified, dead, buried, and descended into hell. He arose and ascended into heaven far above all things. Now there is only one page yet to turn.

There is only one great, grand, and glorious event that must happen. There will not be another turn of the earthly calendar of God’s plan until the calendar turns and the kingdom of heaven is revealed in its glory when Jesus Christ stands on the clouds of heaven, declares himself judge of the quick and the dead, and accomplishes the resurrection and regeneration of all things.

That the end is at hand means that now the end is in sight and rushes on. It means that everything has that end in itself. With a kind of single-minded determination, all things are bent toward that end; like a huge river that is forced between the narrow walls of a great gorge piles up, tumbles, and rushes, so all history now is rushing toward the end. Or, like a great tsunami sighted on the horizon, the wall of water builds and builds until it finally crashes into land and swallows up all things in the eternal.

The end is here and approaches quickly. Behold, Jesus Christ is ready to judge the quick and the dead. Behold, he comes quickly. He fills his days and nights packing in all that must be packed in order to come to his beloved bride and to give her the eternal habitation that he has prepared for her from before the foundation of the world.

The calendar of history will turn once more and never turn again.

Behold, it is the last hour!

But the end of all things is at hand!

How sad—devastating, in fact—is that announcement for the man whose heart is fixed on things here below and whose horizons extend no farther than this earth. His plans are all here on the earth, and his satisfaction and fulfillment are found in the earth.

He lives on the scaffolding that God erected in order to build his house. When God tears down that scaffolding, he tears that man down along with everything that man stands for, all that he lived for, and all that he hoped for.

That man is insane the text says. The Greek word translated as “be sober” means sane. Because the end is at hand, we are to be sane. But then the man who lives for the world is insane. He is like a man who takes up a load of bricks on the scaffolding that surrounds some beautiful, multi-roomed mansion being built. He takes his load of bricks off the pile, and he starts to build himself a house on the scaffolding. He never gets himself a room; he never peeks in the windows to see what is going on inside the mansion or asks any questions of the builders who are busy inside and outside building the mansion. He never takes a brick and puts it on the wall of the mansion, but he makes his own house separate from the mansion. You see him climb up. He starts to build a life on that scaffolding. He works hard too. He goes up and down. He takes his groceries up there. And he gets married on that scaffolding. His life might even be impressive and full of good things. And there are those who are working in and around the mansion, and he laughs at and jokes about them and calls them crazy. He is busy on the scaffolding, and all he does takes place on the scaffolding. And to add to the folly of the man is the very clear evidence that the man of the mansion is preparing to tear down his scaffolding. He announces that it is the last hour and that the building is almost finished. But the man keeps building his life on that temporary scaffolding.

Insane!

Either that, or he is drunk. This is the other condemnation in the text of that man. The word “watch” means not drunk. The man who climbs the scaffolding of Father’s house of many mansions and builds his life on that scaffolding and never peeks in the windows to see what is going on must be drunk. He is drunk on this world. Do not think that the text has in view only the drunkard, the drug addict, or the worldly man who adopts as his creed the hedonistic philosophy of the world, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” The text is talking to all men and condemns as insanity every work of man, effort of man, and plan of man that is apart from Christ, his kingdom, and eternity. The man who builds his life and lives his life for this world is also drunk.

He does not pray either. The drunkard cannot pray. He does not pray, but he cannot pray. That is always true of the drunkard. That is why that man is a spiritual vacuum. A man who is intoxicated with this world does not pray either. He may mouth some words, but the words are something like, “Come, Lord Jesus, but not yet!”

And what a sad announcement for that man is this announcement: “But the end of all things is at hand!” God is preparing to tear down the scaffolding and with it that man, all his life, and everything that he holds dear, and to bring him and all his life into judgment in the day of the revelation of the righteous judgment of God.

And how often are we not like that man. The Lord must tell us that the end is at hand to awaken us to that reality.

Therefore, “be ye sober, and watch unto prayer.” That phrase is a single entity. We should understand it as exhorting us to prayer. The attitude that is required in light of the end of all things is one of prayer. “The end is at hand,” the Holy Ghost says. “Pray!”

Prayer is heavenly. It is the entrance of the child of God into the presence of God by the Spirit.

Fundamentally, then, the whole life of the child of God as a pilgrim and a stranger here below is a life of prayer. That the end of all things is at hand is a joyful announcement for the pilgrim and the stranger because he lives in a tent here and his home is almost ready to be revealed. It is prayer for the forgiveness of sins. It is prayer that is made about earthly things that casts the burden of those things on the Lord and is not anxious for them because they will all be added unto him. It is prayer for the glory of the name of God and the name of his Son: that he be revealed in all his glory in his judgments in the world, that his kingdom come, and that his will be done in my life and in all the world. It is prayer that expresses the desire of the soul for the coming of perfection, deliverance from the body of this death, and for the coming of the Lord.

Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

How can you and I pray that prayer in the attitude of longing for our heavenly home if we are insanely rushing up and down the scaffolding to build a home here, or if we are drunk on this present world and cling to the things here below? These things shall not remain. They do not abide.

Watch!

The world seduces the flesh and would make you drunk with its pleasures, its life, its goals, its satisfactions.

Watch because Satan as a roaring lion goes about seeking whom he may devour because he knows his time is short.

Watch. That you might be sober. And pray.

For the end of all things is at hand.