The 2nd coming of Christ is not merely for the salvation of our souls, but for the renewal and healing of all creation. Thus, in a certain sense, the degree to which we “watch” for it (as Christ commands) runs parallel to the degree of how broken we are over the brokenness of this world. Jesus was – literally – broken over it.

If we don’t believe that God is coming to judge the earth in a final act of justice, then given all the violence in the world our lives will devolve into lives of anger, lives of hopelessness, lives of bitterness and vengeance.  We will never be able to escape the cycle of violence and retaliation, if we didn’t believe God will right all wrongs, that he would vindicate unnecessary misery, and that ultimate good would triumph over ultimate evil.  The only way there can possibly be true peace, and true reconciliation, and not a world of endless violence and revenge, and warfare, is if there is a God of justice who will intervene.  Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian/philosopher – professor at Yale – writes:

“My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with man in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…if God were NOT angry at injustice and deception and did NOT make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship.”

What you see in Mark 13 is that there will come a time when Jesus will return and a setting right of all that is wrong, vindication, a COMPLETE demolishing of all monuments that’s taken the place of God – even (to the shock of the disciples) the Temple in Jerusalem.