(Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge.)
Compare Matthew 10:17-22; 24:24; Mark 13:22; Luke 12:11-12; John 14:26; 15:21; 16:2
These warnings strike me as more directly relevant, in certain respects, than they ever have been before at any point in my lifetime.
“False prophets,” love growing cold, iniquity abounding, divided families, hatred and contempt from “the world,” hostile governments and judges, members of the Church becoming “offended” (or, as at least one translation puts it, “falling away”) . . . and an exhortation to endure faithfully to the end despite it all.
It could have been written this morning.
By the way, did anybody who’s read these verses ever imagine that the “false prophets” would be successful by being obviously false? Plainly this won’t be the case. They’ll be persuasive, convincing, plausible, reasonable. But, for all that, no less false.
“In your patience possess ye your souls,” says the King James translation of Luke 21:19. But that’s a bit unclear. The Greek ἐν τῇ ὑπομονῇ ὑμῶν κτήσασθε τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν might also be rendered something like “By your endurance you will gain your lives,” or “Stand firm, and you will win,” or “Hold on and you will win your souls!”
A funny story, irrelevant but amusing, about Matthew 24:12, where the King James Version says that “the love of many shall cold”: A friend told me, many years ago, of a Gospel Doctrine class that he had recently attended. A zealous teacher had brought in a candle in order to illustrate the idea of “waxing cold.” He lit the candle and blew it out several times, and then the class was invited to comment on the supposed meaning and significance of cooling wax.
I hope you see the problem here:
“Waxing cold” has nothing whatsoever to do with candle wax, nor with wax of any kind. The archaic English verb to wax simply means “to grow.” It’s directly cognate with the common German verb wachsen, which likewise means . . . “to grow.” The moon, going through its monthly phases, “waxes” and “wanes.” That’s all.
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