Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Are You Looking At? | The Gospels | John 12:1–11

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Why did Mary respond with worship while Judas responded with criticism? What are you focused on today? And how can fixing our eyes on Jesus change our perspective? In today's episode, Tanya walks through John 12:1–11 and reminds us that when our eyes are fixed on ourselves, we'll miss Jesus, but when our eyes are fixed on him, everything else begins to look different. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: John 12:1–11

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Today we're in Luke chapter 21, and we're going to be talking about something that I think all Christians are interested in, and that is the end times. What happens at the end of the world? That topic has always been really interesting to Christians, and it's tempting to read the Bible in a way to try to figure out how does all.

this end, especially the book of Revelation. So we read Revelation in one hand with the newspaper and the other, and we try to decode exactly when Jesus is coming back. For a lot of us, in times theology, it doesn't produce peace or hope. Instead, it produces anxiety. We basically treat the Bible like it's a crystal ball. Well, today, like I said, we are in Luke chapter 21, and we're going to start reading in verse 20. This is one of those classic passages in the gospel where Jesus talks about the end times. But what if our modern 21st century way of reading this passage completely misses what Jesus was trying to say? What if his goal wasn't to turn his disciples into anxious doomsday preppers, but to give them very practical warnings and a profound, unshakable hope?

Imagine you live in a coastal town in Florida and a Category 5 hurricane is. three days away. The local meteorologist comes on TV, looks right at the camera and says, a massive storm is hitting. The winds will be 150 miles an hour. The storm surge will be 10 feet. Evacuate the island immediately. How would you respond to that? Do you grab a calculator and start arguing with your spouse about whether the wind will technically be 148 or 152 miles per hour? Do you start a blog about the intricacies of barometric pressure? Of course not. You board up your windows, You pack the minivan, you grab the dog, and you hit the highway. The warning wasn't given to turn you into an amateur meteorologist.

The warning was given to save your life. When Jesus speaks in Luke 21, he is acting as a rescue, giving an evacuation order, not a fortune teller giving us a puzzle to solve. Let's look at verses 20 and 21. Jesus is sitting with his disciples. They've just been marveling at the magnificent Jewish temple in Jerusalem. it was a glittering architectural marvel of the ancient world, and Jesus drops this bomb on them. But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near,

then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart. For a long time, well-meaning Christians read this and assumed that Jesus was talking about a future World War III in the Middle East. But context is everything. Jesus is giving a literal, urgent historical prophecy to the people standing right in front of him. History tells us that about 40 years later, in the year 70 AD, this exact scenario played out. The Roman Empire finally got fed up with the Jewish rebellion, and a general named Titus, who later became an emperor, marched the Roman Legion into Judea, surrounded Jerusalem, built a siege wall, and completely leveled the city. they burned that beautiful temple to the ground. It was an absolute catastrophe. But here's the incredible part of God's grace. Historical records from the early church tell us that the Christians

living in Jerusalem remembered the exact words of Jesus. When they saw the Roman army's gathering, they didn't stay and fight in the city. They said, wait, Jesus warned us about this very moment. They literally fled the city, crossed the Jordan River into a town called Pella, and they survived. Jesus gave them an evacuation plan, and it worked because they listened to him and obeyed what he said. But then right after that very literal historical warning, Jesus shifts gears. And this is where the language gets weird. So we pick up in verse 25. And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity

because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken, and then they will see the son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. All right, hold on. We just went from normal Roman soldiers to the sun going dark and stars falling from the sky. What is going on here? Did Jesus switch from history to a sci-fi movie? Did this happen in the first century? Well, to understand this, we have to understand that the Bible uses prophetic language. Think about a modern political cartoon. If you open the newspaper and see a drawing of a giant elephant wrestling a giant donkey on the roof of the White House, you don't panic. You don't call

animal control. You don't think there's a zoo breakout in Washington, D.C. You intuitively know that it's symbolic language. The elephant represents the Republican Party, the donkey represents the Democratic Party, and they are fighting for power. What we're reading in Luke 21 is the first century equivalent of a political cartoon. When you read Old Testament prophets like Isaiah or Ezekiel, whenever a massive empire like Babylon or Egypt was about to fall, the prophets would say, the sun is turning black and the stars are falling from the sky. They didn't mean that a literal solar system was collapsing. They meant that the political and religious institutions that seemed as permanent as the stars in the sky were coming crashing down. For a first century Jewish person,

the temple falling wasn't just losing a building. It was the center of their world. It was their sun, moon, and stars. Jesus is saying, the Roman armies are going to come, and the center of your universe is going to be wiped out. And then Jesus drops the most misunderstood phrase in the whole chapter. He says,

They will see the son of man coming in a cloud. Now, if you're like me, you probably picture Jesus writing a fluffy white cloud downward from sky to earth. But that's wrong. Jesus is quoting a very specific Old Testament text here. He's quoting from Daniel 7. And if you go back and read Daniel 7, the Son of Man isn't writing a cloud down to earth.

He's writing a cloud up from earth to the throne of God, to the ancient of days. He's writing that cloud up to be vindicated, to be proven right, to receive an eternal kingdom. Jesus here isn't talking about his second coming. He's talking about the time where he will be vindicated before the world. Jesus says saying, look, I'm going to be crucified. The religious leaders are going to reject me and think they won. But when this temple comes crashing down in AD 70, it will be the ultimate cosmic proof that I was right all along. It will prove that I am the true king and my kingdom is the one that lasts.

Because of this incredible reality, Jesus gives his followers a radical command. Here's verse 28. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up, raise your heads because your redemption is drawing near. When the world feels like it's falling apart, what is the natural human reaction? Well, we cower, we hide, we hunch our shoulders, we scroll through the news and brace for the worst. But Jesus says the posture of a Christian in the middle of a global chaos should be entirely different. We stand up straight. We lift our heads. Why? Because we know who was on the throne. The shaking of the world isn't a sign that God has lost control. It's a reminder that Jesus, our king, has already won. See, Jesus ends this with a brief little parable about a fig tree.

He says, look at the trees. When they sprout leaves, you know summer is near. In the same way, when you see these things happening, you know the kingdom of God is near. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place. People have done a lot of theological gymnastics with the phrase, this generation. They've tried to say it means some distant future generation, but the simplest, most faithful reading is that Jesus was looking right at the disciples and saying, look, some of you standing here will live to see this happen. And they did. AD 70 was roughly 40 years later, exactly one biblical generation. Jesus is telling them, your world is going to end. The structures you thought were permanent are going to collapse, but my words will not pass away. And that brings us

to the final section. This is where the ancient text gets out of the first century and meets us right where we live today. Let's look at verse 34 and verse 35. But watch yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness, cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. Stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place and stand before the son of man. I just love how relevant the Bible is. Jesus says the greatest danger for you and me in a chaotic world isn't missing the Antichrist.

It's not getting caught up without a bunker full of freeze-dried food. The greatest danger is a numb and heavy heart. He lists three things that weigh our heart down. Discipation, which basically means wild excessive living, drunkenness, and the cares or the anxieties of life. See, we either numb ourselves to the chaos. of this world, or we sit and worry and stew about it. Just pause and think about yourself and how you respond to the chaos in the world. If I asked you to name the great and destructive sins that will

ruin your spiritual life, you might come up with drunkenness, those sins that numb us to the reality around us. But Jesus also adds the anxieties of life, the everyday worries. Maybe it's about money or politics or kids or health or weather and he lumps them right next to the sins like drunkenness that numb us why do we do this they all do the exact same thing to your soul they act like a spiritual novacane and think about going to the dentist when you have to get a cavity filled the dentist gives you a shot of novocaine why well because the drill is painful and the novicane numbs the nerves so that you don't have to feel reality we do the exact same thing with our souls We live in this broken, painful world, and we have to deal with collapsing empires or personal tragedies.

And instead of bringing our fears to God, we inject ourselves with a spiritual novacane to kind of numb out. For some people, this really is just alcohol. But for a lot of us, it's doom scrolling on social media. It's binge watching Netflix for hours so that we don't have to think about our marriages or we don't have to think about what's going on in the world. It's obsessing over our retirement portfolios. It's letting the 24-hour news cycle work us into panic. We think that by worrying about the world, we're being hyper-alert, but Jesus says, no, when you're consumed by anxiety,

your soul is fast to sleep at the wheel. Imagine you're driving down the interstate at 70 miles an hour late at night. If you fall asleep, you're in mortal danger. Jesus is shaking us by the shoulders and saying, wake up, don't sleep walk through life. Don't let your heart get weighed down by the things of this world. How do we stay awake? Well, verse 36 told us it says stay awake at all times by praying.

Prayer is the antidote to anxiety. Prayer is the antidote to numbness. Prayer is the caffeine for your soul. When you pray, you are actively refusing to be numb. You're refusing the Novocaine. You're choosing to stay awake. You're zooming out of your tiny little anxiety-filled bubble, and you're reminding yourself that is God's world, that God is in control,

and you're aligning your heart with God's purposes. So maybe you just need to do a Novacane audit. Like, what are the things that you turn to when the anxieties of life start creeping in? Is a glass of wine or shopping online or a political podcast that makes you angry, endlessly scrolling on TikTok? The next time you feel that urge to numb out, I just want you to catch yourself to stop, to just take a breath and pray. Just whisper, Lord Jesus, I am feeling anxious right now. Keep my heart awake. Remind me that you are on the throne.

Turn your worry into worship. And then, of course, rest in Jesus' victory. The whole point that Jesus is trying to communicate in this passage in Luke 21 isn't to scare us. It's to comfort us. The early Christians saw the Roman army coming, and because they listened to Jesus, they were rescued. Friends, you and I have an even greater rescue. Whatever is coming on the world, whatever shaking happens in the economy or in politics or in your personal life, Jesus has already secured your salvation.

He died for your sins. He defeated death. He's the vindicated king of the universe. His words will never pass away. When the world feels like it's ending, remember, it's making way for the kingdom of God. So stand up straight. Lift your head. Your king is holding you tight.

Jesus, I pray that you would remind our heart that you are on the throne. Show us where we try to avoid being engaged with you and this world. Show us where we try to numb. ourselves to what's happening around us. I pray that we would take our anxieties, give them to you, that we would turn our worry into worship. Amen.