We are in week two of our new series, Return of the King, as we remember the promise of Jesus, who tells us three times in the final chapter of Revelation that he is coming soon. He said it once, then again, then a third time, almost as if he knew we would need to hear it more than once before it really sank in. And so he wasn’t shy about it; he’s not vague about it, because he wants us to be alert, to be watching, and more than that, he wants us to be ready.

Last week, we looked at seven signs coming out of the nation of Israel, and each one points to the same truth: that Jesus is preparing to return. Let me remind you of a few of them, because they set the stage for everything we are going to look at today.

We saw that in 1948, God brought the nation of Israel back together in a single day, fulfilling both Ezekiel 37 and Isaiah 66:8. And since that day, God fulfilled his promise to Zechariah,

"I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling” (Zechariah 12:2).

In 1967, God gave Israel back the Temple Mount and their capital city, Jerusalem, fulfilling the very words Jesus spoke about Jerusalem being trampled by the Gentiles, words we'll read in full in just a moment from Luke 21.

Then, in 2018, the United States and other nations formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and that same year, for the first time in 2000 years, a red heifer was born in the land of Israel, being a requirement for cleansing the temple according to the Scriptures in Numbers 19.

Now, that fulfillment in 1967 teaches us how to read everything else we are going to look at today, because throughout Scripture, when God speaks through the prophet and gives us prophecy, it often arrives in stages or phases. There will be a partial, historical fulfillment first, and then a final, complete fulfillment still to come.

For example, Jerusalem being trampled by the Gentiles began in A.D. 70, and it found a real historical turning point in 1967, but Jesus is telling us in this same passage that there is still a greater and final fulfillment ahead of us. You see, God has always given progressive revelation, giving down payments in history so that when the fullness finally comes, we will recognize it. Because he is not a God who leaves us guessing, he gives us just enough to trust him with what we cannot yet see.

And so, over the next several weeks, I want to walk you through the events of this final chapter of human history, not to frighten you, but because Jesus could return soon. I want you to be ready when you see these things unfolding around you, so that you won’t be shaken and will be steady.

Open your Bibles to Luke chapter 21, where Jesus is answering a question his disciples had just asked him, one people have been asking ever since.

“Teacher,” they asked, “When will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are about to take place?" (Luke 21:7).

His answer was likely more than they expected, and in verse 24, he begins by speaking about the Jewish people. He says,

"They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled" (Luke 21:24).

Then he lifts his eyes from the earth to the heavens, and he says,

"There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars" (Luke 21:25).

And so, Jesus doesn’t just tell us to watch the news; he tells us to watch the skies.

Now, that really shouldn’t surprise us, because the Scriptures declare that the sky is one of God’s favorite ways of speaking to his people. David tells us by the Spirit of God,

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge" (Psalm 19:1-2).

And God has never stopped communicating through the heavens, has he?

In fact, you can go outside tonight, away from the streetlights, and look up to see the glory of God. There is something in your spirit that knows there is an amazing Creator behind everything you are seeing. And most of the time, this communication in the sky is a quiet, general, ongoing testimony to his glory, running 24 hours a day since the fourth day of creation.

But in verse 25, Jesus tells us that as his return draws near, this is communication in the heavens will become specific, personal, and pointed. He’s going to use the sun, moon, and stars as signals, much like your parents may have flashed the porch light to call you home as the sun starts to go down late on a summer evening. In the same way, Jesus wants his people to be alert and watching.

In fact, this isn’t a new strategy for God, because he did something similar leading up to Jesus’ first coming. Matthew tells us that wise men came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?” Because they had “seen his star in the East” (Matthew 2:2).

Both Bible scholars and astronomers have pointed to a series of celestial events around the time of Christ’s birth as an explanation for how God announced his Son’s arrival to a watching world. And no matter their perspective, however the details are understood, the Scriptures are clear on the main point: God used the sky to announce the first coming of Jesus. And the Gospels tell us plainly that he will use it again to announce his second coming.

Luke’s account is brief, so we will turn to Matthew chapter 24, which provides much more detail in its parallel passage. This is Matthew’s eyewitness account, recalling the time when they asked Jesus,

"Tell us, when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age" (Matthew 24:3).

Now I want you to notice that Jesus doesn’t answer their question right away with “the signs in the sky,” because that changes how we read everything that follows. He answers them first with a pattern that every single one of us already understands, whether we have ever sat in a delivery room or not.

Down in verse 8, after describing false christs, wars and rumors of wars, and famines and earthquakes, Jesus says,

"All these are the beginning of birth pains" (Matthew 24:8).

In other words, birth pains don’t come once and then stop. Now, I have not personally experienced birth pains, but I do know that they come suddenly, they come again and again, and each time they come, they come closer together and hit harder than the one before, building toward one final, unmistakable moment that cannot be ignored or denied.

And so, what Jesus is telling us is that the season leading up to his return won’t be a single dramatic sign that drops out of the sky without warning. It’s going to be a pattern, contraction after contraction, growing more intense until it finally reaches its climax in the sky itself, the very sign Luke recorded for us.

"There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars" (Luke 21:25).

Nations will be in anguish, men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

Now, not that the words of Christ, the Son of God, need confirmation, but the apostle John, writing decades later, sees this exact same pattern unfold in a vision. First, he says there is conquest, then war, then famine, then martyrdom, and only after all of that, a great earthquake as…

"The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind" (Revelation 6:12-13).

Two different men, testifying on two separate occasions decades apart, both describe the same birth pains building to the same climax. That is not a coincidence; that is the Spirit of God confirming his own word through two separate witnesses, just as Scripture always asks us to test and confirm the truth.

So, when we get to the sign in the sky, we’re not looking at some isolated, random event. We’re looking at the hardest, final contraction, following a pattern that has been building for a long time. And so let’s go to Matthew 24:29, where Jesus describes it plainly. He gives us four cosmic signs in a single verse:

"Immediately after the distress of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken" (Matthew 24:29).

Now, some well-meaning Bible teachers have pointed to recent solar and lunar eclipses, meteor activity, and even movement in the spiritual realm, but the Scriptures never give us a formula for reading the sky like a calendar. These are signs or illustrations, and Bible scholars disagree on how much weight to give these patterns because God has not given any of us a private hotline to the exact date. However, Scripture plainly teaches that the sun, moon, and stars all answer to their Creator, so not one meteor or shadow crossing the sun is outside his sovereign hand.

And so, we don’t need to understand every detail of the signs to walk in the truth Jesus is teaching us here. He simply wants us to be alert, sober, and ready, because the same God who set the sun, moon, and stars in motion at the very beginning of time is the same God who is coming for his Church.

Jesus continues in verse 30, and this is where his words turn from warning to awe and amazement.

"At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other" (Matthew 24:30-31).

The Scripture tells us that at Jesus' return, the angels who accompany Jesus will sound the trumpet as on the Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah. The trumpet is sounded across the land. The first blast is picked up by the next watchman, and the next, and the next, passed from hilltop to hilltop until the whole nation has heard the news that the new year has come. In the same way, at Jesus' return, that same kind of call will go out, watchman to watchman, and this time the whole world will hear it. There will be no place on earth that misses the sound of the trumpet.

After laying out the signs, Jesus doesn’t leave us wondering; he goes right into the application, because he doesn’t want us to simply understand the end times; he wants us to live differently because we are living in them. He says in verse 32,

"Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door" (Matthew 24:32-33).

In other words, a fig tree doesn’t announce summer with a trumpet blast; it quietly puts out new, tender leaves so that anyone paying attention knows what is coming. That is the posture Jesus calls us to take in these last days. Not panic. Not obsession. Just a quiet, attentive faith that reads the season correctly.

Then he goes further, and this is where the warning gets personal.

"But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 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. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man" (Matthew 24:36-39).

I want to draw your attention to what made the people in Noah’s day so oblivious, vulnerable, and blind to the destruction about to come upon them. It wasn’t wickedness in any dramatic or obvious sense, but distraction. They were eating, drinking, marrying, and living perfectly ordinary lives, completely unaware that the door was about to close on them forever.

That should sober us and prompt us to reflect on our lives, because distraction doesn’t look dangerous while it’s happening. It looks normal, like Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Paul describes this same blindness in his letter to the Thessalonians, saying,

"You know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, 'Peace and safety,' destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape" (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3).

I want you to notice that even as the birth pains are building all around them, including wars, natural disasters, deception, and the sky itself beginning to shake, the loudest voices around them will be saying, “Peace and safety. Everything is fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Jesus’ warning in Matthew chapter 24, verse 38, tells us that the greatest danger isn’t dramatic rebellion but a slow, subtle drift. It is being lulled to sleep, reassured by the wrong voices right up until the moment the door closes and the flood comes and takes them all away. Jesus said, “that is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

So, what do we do with that warning? Jesus tells us plainly,

"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 at an hour when you do not expect him" (Matthew 24:42-44).

In other words, Jesus tells us plainly what he expects of us. It’s not a suggestion; it is a command spoken by the Lord Jesus himself, “Keep watch and be ready.”

This command of the Lord sits at the heart of everything we have read today, but readiness can feel like a vague, anxious idea if we leave it there. So Jesus doesn’t leave it there; he tells us exactly what readiness looks like in practice. Verse 45 says,

"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" (Matthew 24:45-46).

Readiness isn’t anxiously watching the skies. It isn’t losing sleep over astronomical or eschatological charts or news alerts. Readiness is faithfulness; it’s a servant doing exactly what the master left him to do, loving people, serving the church, sharing the gospel, praying, giving, showing up, and being faithful in the small, ordinary things, so that when the master returns, whenever that day comes, he finds us right where he left us, hard at work in his name. Not stressed out, frantic, or fearful, but faithful!

Of that faithful and wise servant, Jesus said,

“I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions” (Matthew 24:47).

I believe that in these last days God is building a community of faith in this world, a people bound together by faith in his Son and by love for one another, so that he can bless us and, through us, bless the whole world.

Today, that community is almost complete, but not quite; there is still room for someone to join you. Our part is not to calculate dates, chase self-proclaimed prophets, preachers, or any movement among the constellations. Our part is to be faithful, to love deeply, to pray without ceasing, and to share our faith while there is still time. That is what it means to be ready when he comes.

I want to close with the words the apostle Peter gave to the first-century church, words that are every bit as urgent for us today as they were for them. He said,

"The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:7-8).

That, church, is how we get ready for the return of the King, staying full of the Spirit, full of prayer, and full of love, right up until the day the trumpet sounds, when the dead in Christ will rise first, and we who are still alive and left will be caught up together to be with the Lord forever.

Graphics, notes, and commentary from LifeChurch, Ministry Pass, PC Study Bible, Preaching Library, and Sermon Central. Scripture from the New International Version unless otherwise noted.