Eschatology — how Jesus actually ended the Olivet Discourse, and it was not with a sign
Mark 13 is quarried constantly for signs. Wars and rumours of wars. Earthquakes. Famines. The abomination of desolation. Whole ministries have been built on the middle of this chapter.
Very few are built on how Jesus finished it.
Because after all the signs, the Lord does not hand the disciples a timeline. He hands them a job, and then a warning, and the warning is not about the antichrist. It is about being asleep at your post.
But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. (Mark 13:32-33, KJV)
Read that first line slowly, because it is the fence around every date anyone has ever set. Not the angels. Not, in His self-emptied earthly ministry, the Son. Only the Father. If the calculation were available, it would have been available to somebody in that sentence.
The Parable He Told Instead of a Date
Then comes the picture, and it is small, domestic, and easy to skim past.
For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. (Mark 13:34, KJV)
Count what the master does on his way out the door. He leaves the house. He gives authority. He assigns every man his work. He puts one man on the door.
That is not an abandoned house. That is a staffed house with an absent owner, which is a completely different thing — and it is the single most accurate description of the present age in the New Testament. The Lord is genuinely gone. Not symbolically, not in some spiritualized sense that means He is really here in our hearts and nothing else is owed. He is bodily absent, on a far journey, and He is bodily coming back. Two men in white said so on the day He left.
Everything in this parable depends on taking that literally. Spiritualize the departure and the return and the whole thing collapses into a mood. A master who never really left and is not really coming does not leave you with work, authority, or a reason to stay awake.
Why He Names All Four Watches
Then the Lord does something specific enough that it should stop us.
Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. (Mark 13:35-36, KJV)
Even. Midnight. Cockcrowing. Morning. Those are the four Roman watches of the night — roughly six to nine, nine to midnight, midnight to three, three to six. Jesus is not being poetic. He is listing the shift schedule, and He lists every shift.
That is the point. If He had named one watch, the porter could relax during the other three. Name all four and there is no hour of the night that is safe to sleep in. Which is precisely what the doctrine of imminence means, and why it is so often misstated. Imminent does not mean soon in the sense of a short countdown. It means any watch. Nothing further has to happen first for the master to be on the road.
Notice too what the failure is. Not treachery. Not defecting to the enemy. Not looting the house. The porter’s failure is that he fell asleep — which is what men on a long watch do when nothing has happened for a while and nothing seems likely to.
Watching Is Not Scanning the Horizon
Here is where a great deal of modern prophecy interest goes sideways.
We have turned watching into news consumption. A man can spend four hours a week on headlines, overlays, and charts and believe he is the porter at the door. But in the parable, watching sits inside a house where every man has been given his work. The porter is not the only one with an assignment; he is the one whose assignment is the door. Everyone else is on duty too.
So the master returning does not find a man who has correctly identified the hour. It finds a man at his post, doing the thing he was told to do.
Every man who has ever worked a job knows the version of this he is guilty of. The crew works one way when the owner is on site and another way when the truck pulls out of the lot. Nobody announces the change. It just settles in — a longer break, a corner cut, a standard quietly lowered because the only person who would have said something is not there.
The New Testament says the truck is coming back up the drive, unannounced, in one of four watches, and that the house you are standing in is His.
The Man Who Has Quietly Decided It Will Not Be in His Lifetime
Let me name the thing most of us will not say out loud.
You believe Christ is returning. You would sign the statement. But somewhere in the back of your mind you have concluded it will not be this year, or this decade, or in your lifetime — and you have made small adjustments accordingly. Sin you plan to deal with eventually. A conversation you will have when things settle. Giving you will start when the money is better. A faith you intend to get serious about at a later stage of life.
That is not skepticism. It is sleep. It is a porter who has decided, on no authority whatsoever, which watch the master will not use.
And the correction is not fear, and it is not a new chart. It is a return to your post. What were you actually given? A house? Children who need a man who prays? A trade to do honestly? A church that needs somebody to show up early and stack chairs and mean it? The work is not glamorous, which is how you know it is the assignment and not the ambition.
The Master Who Took the Far Journey
One more thing, or this becomes a sermon about effort.
The porter is not earning the house. He was given authority he did not buy, work he did not choose, and a place in a household he could not have entered on merit. Everything in his hand was handed to him.
And the master who took the far journey did not leave on a holiday. He left by way of a cross, an empty tomb, and a cloud. The absence you are standing in was purchased.
So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation. (Hebrews 9:28, KJV)
Once offered. Appear the second time. Two comings, both bodily, both literal, and the second one is for the people who are looking for Him. That is the porter’s real qualification — not vigilance he generated, but a sin question already settled at the first appearing, which is what makes the second one something to watch for instead of something to dread.
And What I Say Unto You I Say Unto All
The Lord closes the whole discourse with one word, and He aims it past the four men sitting in front of Him.
And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch. (Mark 13:37, KJV)
Not calculate. Not speculate. Not wait until the signs line up well enough to justify changing something.
Watch. You are on one of the four, right now, and nobody told you which.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist