Matthew 24, and its parallel in Mark 13, are arguably the most significant Bible chapters on the end times, and contain Jesus’ most sustained teaching on the subject; we need to grasp them if we want to grasp what God has to say to us about the future! (So this is a companion post to the posts on that topic in `Other Useful Stuff`.) Yet, they’re not entirely easy to interpret. Then again, we can hardly say to the Lord that we’re going to write off His sustained teaching here this because it’s too difficult! So this post sets out some options, focusing primarily on Matthew 24.
(This is an extended post.)
Let’s start with two problems. First: At the start of the chapter the disciples ask Jesus two questions (v3). One is following up His statement in verse 2 that the magnificent Jewish temple will be completely demolished: ‘When will that happen?’ The other is, ‘What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’
When we look at Jesus’ reply, we find that parts of it seem very relevant to AD70 when the Romans destroyed that temple (particularly when we look at Luke 21’s record of the same discourse). However, other parts clearly seem to speak to the second question – Matthew 24:14, for example, or 24:30 where Jesus describes ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory’. But whereas the disciples – who perhaps couldn’t conceive of the temple’s destruction without it being also the ‘end of the age’ – were comfortable putting these two questions together, we know that AD70 has already proved to be separated by nearly 2,000 years from Jesus’ coming in glory. So how do we know when Jesus is responding to one or the other of these questions? How do we know which verses to use in building our understanding of Christ’s ‘coming and the end of the age’?
And then there’s a second problem. In verse 34 we find Jesus saying that ‘this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened’ (NIV as usual). All of them? Both the temple’s destruction and the second coming?
Liberal scholars often look at that and argue that Jesus is predicting the events leading up to the fall of Jerusalem in verses 8-24 as belonging with the End and His second coming (‘immediately after the distress of those days’) in verses 29-31, and finishing ‘this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened’ (v34, emphasis mine); and they conclude that He was simply wrong. ‘Generation’ in verse 34 means forty years or so,
they say, and everything in the chapter before this was supposed to happen within that time; Jesus thought the End was near, and He was mistaken. (C S Lewis’ ‘The World’s Last Night’ sees v34 as the ‘most embarrassing verse in the Bible’, while observing that the fact that it’s recorded at all says a lot for the Gospels’ reliability – and also how interesting it is that this problematic verse comes right before Jesus’ statement that He [by choice!] doesn’t know when the End will come [v36].)(1)
But there are several facts that the liberal approach doesn’t allow for. First, of course, we must then go the whole hog and say, if Jesus was entirely wrong about this vital matter, His teaching is not reliable, and it is then hard to know when or why He should be trusted about anything else. (Particularly since it is precisely here that He emphasises the trustworthiness of His teaching [v35].) An Old Testament prophet was to be executed if His predictions didn’t come true: how, since Jesus’ predictions didn’t come true, is He a true prophet from God? (And of course He claims far more than that.) But then a host of data kicks in to remind us that we are on the wrong track here, because there are such good reasons for believing that Jesus really was God.
But let’s stick to the evidence in this chapter itself. It’s odd, if Jesus is saying ‘The End is soon’, that the thrust of His teaching in Matthew 24:4,6 (see especially the phrasing Luke records in Luke 21:8-9), and in Matthew 24:48 and 25:5,19, is to cool down expectation, not to heat it up; He is preparing them for a longish (at least) absence on His part. In contrast, He says in Luke 21:8, those who say, ‘The time is near,’ are false prophets.
Most importantly, however, the early Church evidently weren’t embarrassed by this verse. If many of the liberals were right and the Gospels were written after AD70 (ie a ‘generation’ after Jesus), then surely the Gospel writers would have edited out so damaging a saying – if it really meant that the End would come within forty years; but Matthew, Mark and Luke all left it in. Or we can come at it from the other end: the writers of the Gospels clearly thought Jesus was God incarnate, so they could not have thought He would have said something so utterly mistaken as that the End of history would certainly come within forty years: hence, whatever these words meant for them, this cannot be it.
And indeed there are other things this word ‘generation’ (v34) can mean that resolve the problem. If we check some of Jesus’ other uses of the word, we see He also uses it to mean ‘group or type of people’ (eg Matthew 11:16 and 17:17). And that’s how it’s sometimes used elsewhere in the Bible, eg in the Greek Septuagint translation of Psalm 24:6; or in the ESV of Psalm 12:7 (where the NIV has ‘such people’) and 14:5 (again see the ESV).
This opens up several alternative possibilities:
1. Chrysostom and others have seen ‘this generation’ as meaning ‘this group of people’ and referring to His disciples. In that case, in Matthew 24:34 Jesus is stating, by way of encouragement, the remarkable fact that despite all the terrible events He has just prophesied in verses 21-22, His followers (particularly in Judaea, vv15-16) will make it through. Christ’s words will not pass away (v35), so nor will the people of the Word; indeed, this was why those days were ‘shortened’ (v22). Jesus is then giving a promise but also a challenge (see also 24:13 and Luke 21:36): amazingly, the persecution will be overcome, Jesus’ true disciples will survive; will you be one of them?
However, the negative usage of ‘generation’ in Luke 17:25, which is in some ways a parallel passage, might make this less likely.(2)
2. In referring to ‘this group of people’, He could be speaking of the Jewish race. (Ryle, Hendriksen and,much earlier, Jerome have seen it this way, and the NIV offers ‘race’ as an alternative reading in the margin.) It is remarkable that as a race the Jews (unlike, say, the Moabites or the Ammonites or the Edomites) have survived all that history has thrown at them, including Jerusalem’s destruction, with their identity intact. This says something to the glory of God – see Paul’s remarks in Romans 11 on God’s ongoing and (Romans 9:6) undefeated purposes for the Jews, which lead him towards the cry of praise in 11:33. However, to me at least, it is difficult to see the point Jesus is making here, if the Jewish race as a whole is what is meant.
3. A better option might be that He is referring to the Jewish unbelievers who, amazingly, will go on rejecting Him. William Kelly wrote many years ago:
He is saying, as it were, I will prepare you for the terrible truth [cf Romans 9:3], that this Christ-rejecting generation is to continue till all these things are fulfilled … It might have been supposed that while Christianity was going over the whole earth, and making conquests everywhere, if one nation more than another was to be brought under the power of Christ, it must be Israel, loved for the fathers’ sakes. But no.(3)
Better education, for example, will not alter this. And Christ may also be saying that they will go on catastrophically disbelieving even as the signs of the end accumulate around them. This makes particular sense if an aspect of the final crisis-period is God speaking in a fresh way to the ethnic Jews.
Mark 8:12 might be a helpful parallel here, where ‘generation’ may well refer, not to a particular age-group, but to the unbelieving type of people who are demanding a sign, because they were ignoring the sign the believers had just been given (8:8-9). This also seems to be the meaning of ‘unbelieving generation’ in Mark 9:19 (rather than a forty-year age-group), and as we’ve noted in the Septuagint Greek of Psalm 12:7 (see ESV).
It is even possible on this understanding that Matthew 24:34 starts a new paragraph of Jesus’ discourse, saying that this ‘generation’, the type of people described in verse 38, will not pass away until disaster comes; Jesus’ words won’t pass away – they’ll indeed be fulfilled – but no one knows when the End will actually come, and so this wretched kind of people, heedless and foolish, will carry on just as they are until catastrophe comes upon them.(4) The flow of thought there is attractive.
Verse 34, then, is not as problematic as it first appears, and doesn’t determine how we read this chapter. But we still have to deal with the fact that in this chapter Jesus is answering two questions from verses 2-3: one about when the destruction of the magnificent Jewish temple would happen, which followed in AD70; and the other about the sign of His coming and of the end of the age, which would seem to point to the End of history and to verses 27-31 at least. How do we recognise when He is talking about one or the other? Here are the three most obvious possibilities.
Option one: It’s all in the future
One way to read Jesus’ discourse is as being almost entirely about the end-times; from the clear reference to ‘the end’ in v14, through the unique ‘distress’ of v15-28, to, ‘immediately after’ this (v29), ‘at that time’ (v30), the second coming. This makes completely coherent sense of Matthew 24 as a whole.
But there is a big problem with this approach: it doesn’t fit what is usually seen as the meaning of the parallel chapter in Luke, Luke 21. The verses about the attack on Jerusalem in Luke 21:20-24 are usually seen as being about AD70, after which ‘Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled’. Only after this does Luke move on to record Jesus’ teaching about the end times.
That is not an insuperable obstacle. We could perhaps read these verses, and hence Luke 21 as a whole, as referring to the end time too. Instead of referring to the dispersion of the Jews after AD70, verses 23-24 could be predicting the beginning of an end-time destruction of the entire state of Israel of the kind demanded by Iranian president Ahmadinejad (it is ‘When the power of the holy people has been finally broken’ that the End comes, Daniel 12:7), accompanied by the mass deportation of many Israelis to other countries. There is a difficulty, however. The Matthew equivalent, 24:15-21, seems to be describing the same events as Daniel 9:27 and 12:7,11, given the allusion in Matthew 24:15 and 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4; and the most obvious way of reading all these is that the ‘setting up of the abomination of desolation’ in the temple by the invading end-time satanic dictator happens at, and marks, the start of 1260 days of terror. But if the Jews being deported en masse in Luke 21:24 refers to that moment, how is it (besides demonic seduction, Revelation 16:14) that ‘all the nations’ are gathered together again to fight ‘against Jerusalem’ at the end of that time, immediately before the second coming in Zechariah 12 and 14?
And there is a further major objection to any approach that sees these chapters in all three Gospels as being entirely about the end time: if that’s so, the question about the first-century temple’s destruction, which alone triggers the entire discourse in both Mark’s and Luke’s accounts, was never answered at all by Jesus. And as He speaks of Jerusalem’s destruction, He does not even hint that what He describes is far removed in time from the destruction they have specifically asked about. That seems very strange indeed.
Option two: It’s mostly in the past
A second possibility has been advocated by an increasing number of evangelical writers, who see the bulk of the chapter, right through to Matthew 24:35, as Jesus’ teaching about AD70, answering the disciples’ question about when the temple will be destroyed, and explaining en route that, terrible as those events within the next generation will be, they should not see them as the end times (compare v6). This creates a straightforward parallel with the usual view of Luke 21 as being about AD70, at least up to 21:24; it makes complete sense of Matthew 24:34; and it also explains the sudden shift from the certainties of Matthew 24:32-34 to the uncertainty of verses 36,42-44, because these latter verses can be where Jesus turns to answer the disciples’ questions about ‘your coming and … the end of the age’.(5)
There are obvious issues here with making verses 29-31 describe events around AD70. But both for example R T France and Tom Wright read verse 29, which describes the sun being darkened and the stars falling from the sky ‘immediately’ after the terrible events of AD70, as a typical apocalyptic way of describing the (admittedly earth-shattering) political and religious convulsions when Jerusalem is destroyed.(6) (Compare the non-literal imagery in Psalm 18:7,14-15, a situation where David’s history is an example of an apocalyptic pattern; also Judges 5:4-5, Isaiah 13:10 on the fall of Babylon [a verse which is being alluded to here], Ezekiel 32:7-9 on the destruction of Egypt, and Amos 8:9- 10 or Micah 1:4-5 on the fall of Samaria.(7))
Then, secondly, they both take Christ’s ‘coming with power and great glory … at that time’ in verse 30 as being His coming to the Father in the ascension as described in Daniel 7:13-14, not His coming back in glory to this world; while His vindication on earth is consummated by the events of AD70. (These approaches do obviously help with the problematic Matthew 24:34, because there ‘all these things’ seems to include the coming of the Son of Man, but now that can be understood as first-century.)
A similar explanation was presented by the great Alfred Edersheim in the nineteenth century, where ‘coming’ in Matthew 24:30, like Matthew 21:40-41, refers to Christ’s coming to Israel in vindication and judgement in AD70. (‘It is scarcely conceivable’, Edersheim suggests, ‘that these sayings would have been allowed to stand’ [at least without interpretative comment?], unless the early Church had understood them as being about AD70, and as answering the first question in verses 2-3. (8))
And then, thirdly, these writers view verse 31, the ‘gathering of the elect’ by the angels (or ‘messengers’), as referring to the preaching of the gospel, newly motivated now that Israel is so clearly not the centre of God’s plan.
But there are a whole series of problems with this approach:
1. Firstly, we might well feel that the simplest way to read Matthew 24:15ff is following straight on from verse 14, where Jesus is already talking about the End when the gospel has been preached to all nations. Admittedly it’s possible, that having described in verse 14 the most important marker of the ultimate End, He then returns in verse 15 onwards to give very practical advice about their other question, regarding the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple in AD70. But it’s still difficult to see these next verses as being about AD70. Don Carson makes the point that in AD70, by the time the Romans had actually desecrated the temple, it was far too late for anyone to flee in the way verse 16 exhorts.(9) F F Bruce points out that in AD70 the desecrating sacrilege didn’t happen in the holy place (compare v15) but in the temple court(10); and ‘nonliteralist’ Storms has to admit that none of the events of AD70 ‘quite fits what this verse says’.(11)
We should note, too, that Luke (17:31) records Jesus teaching the dire warning of the next verses, Matthew 24:17-18, in the same context (‘that night’, Luke 17:34-35) as the verses Matthew records in 24:39-41 about the ‘coming of the Son of Man’, which France himself agrees are about the end times (just as Luke 17:24 and Luke 18:8 also in the same context would seem to be). And then, the Daniel passages to which Jesus (or Matthew; either way, God) links the desecration of the temple in verse 15 would seem to be Daniel 9:27 and 12:9-11, and both of these seem clearly to refer to the end time.(12) So, most certainly, does 2 Thessalonians 2:1-8, where Paul likewise presents the desecration of the temple as the key sign that the end-time climax of history has come. All this seems to be strong evidence for reading these verses in Matthew 24:15ff as being about the end times.
2. But that’s not all. Surely the emphasis on the unique horror of the days of Matthew 24:21-22 (‘There will be great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short, no-one would survive’) makes it very hard to see this part of Matthew 24 as limited to – or even primarily about – Palestine in AD70. Indeed, they match Daniel 12:1 (‘a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then’), which is very clearly about ‘the time of the end’ (look at Daniel 12:2-4). Riddlebarger rightly comments, `The events of the fall of Jerusalem … simply are not the worst tribulation that men have brought or experienced on the earth.`(13) Given Jesus’ statement that the whole of human history will contain nothing worse, were the events of AD70 really worse than the Holocaust? (Or, in terms of loss of life, the Flood?)
3. Then moving on, please look again at Matthew 24:29-31, because these verses present a whole range of further problems for this view. What political event around AD70 is the supposedly apocalyptic language of stars falling in verse 29 referring to, since it happens ‘immediately after’ (emphasis mine) the uniquely horrific time of verses 21-22? Clearly not the ruining of the temple, because that has already happened at the beginning of that terrible time in verse 15. Indeed, it seems strange if Jesus is speaking about the events of AD70 here but in an apocalyptic way, given that Luke 21:20 records Him speaking of them entirely prosaically in the very same discourse. In fact, the parallel verses to Matthew 24:29-31 in Luke 21:25-27 (‘Men will faint from terror … for the heavenly bodies will be shaken’) sound like something even bigger than the fall of Jerusalem; they sound like literal (and terrifying) ‘signs in the sky’ visible to everyone (cf Matthew 24:30), rather than mere metaphors for the fall of Jerusalem. Again the end times seem to be in view. (We might note too that when Revelation 6:12-13 uses almost the same words, it is clearly talking about the end times [see 6:15-17].)
4. Then, next, as regards Christ’s ‘coming’ in Matthew 24:30: if this verse is about a cosmic ‘coming to the Father’ by Jesus (as in Daniel 7:13), not Christ’s end-time coming to the earth in glory, then presumably Matthew 24:27 (‘For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man’) is not about His coming back to this earth either. But then whatever is Jesus’ point in that verse? And surely ‘in the sky’ (v30) makes most sense as being in the time of the second coming. And clearly the nations who are ‘on the earth…apprehensive of what is coming on the world’ (emphasis mine) are the ‘they’ who see Christ coming in ‘great glory’ (Luke 21:25-27), not any cosmic audience to the events of Daniel 7:13. Looking at Matthew 24:26-27,37,39,42-44 and 50, it is hard not to feel that when Jesus refers to His ‘coming’ He most consistently means His return openly to this world. (Likewise if we turn to Matthew 16:27, 23:39, or 26:64, or indeed John 14:3.)
In particular, what Matthew 25:31-32 in this same discourse says about Christ’s coming ‘in His glory’ (compare 24:30 ‘coming with power and great glory’) is very clearly about the end times and His return to this world: ‘When the Son of Man comes in His glory … he will sit on His throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.’
If, on the other hand, we want to think of 24:30 as being about Christ coming to Jerusalem in AD70 invisibly in judgment, it is hard to fit this with ‘They will see the Son of Man’ (emphasis mine). The same is true of verse 27, since it was certainly not so blindingly obvious to the unbelieving Jews in AD70 that Christ’s ‘coming’ was what was happening then.(14) Nor does Christ’s invisible vindication through the events of AD70 seem the most obvious thing for the disciples to have meant when they spoke of ‘your coming’ in their question of verse 2 (following as it does on 23:38). Douglas Moo, at least, is willing to state clearly that in the New Testament in general Jesus’ ‘coming on the clouds’ ‘always has reference to the Parousia’ (Jesus’ coming back to earth at the End).(14)
Again, Luke 17 records Jesus giving much of the same teaching as in Matthew 24, but when He moves on to ‘when the Son of Man comes’, the question is ‘will he find faith on the earth?’ (Luke 18:8, emphasis mine).
A further issue is that Luke’s parallel to Matthew 24:30 about Jesus’ ‘coming’ is Luke 21:27, and the point Luke records Jesus as making in all this is, ‘When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near … when you see these things happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near’ (Luke 21:28-31, the parallel to Matthew 24:32-33). It’s exceptionally hard to understand these verses if ‘these things’ is about the horrors of AD70. How could this tragedy and its central `abomination’ be reasons for joyful ‘lifting up your heads’ for any believer who was a Jew? (Compare Paul’s attitude to the Jerusalem temple in Acts 21:26.) How was the bloodshed that accompanied the AD70 fall of Jerusalem a pointer that ‘the kingdom of God is near’ (Luke 21:31), in the same imminent sense that summer is soon to follow when the fig leaves come out (v29); what happened after AD70 that this could possibly be referring to? Or, to apply the question to the end of Luke 21:28, what ‘redemption’ followed AD70? The obvious conclusion seems to be that Luke 21:27-28, and therefore their parallel in Matthew 24:30, refer rather to the ‘redemption’ (compare Ephesians 1:14, 4:30) that happens at Christ’s second coming in glory.(16)
5. Moving on lastly to Matthew 24:31: those who see the whole chapter as being about AD70 have to see the ‘angels’ (or ‘messengers’) who are sent ‘with a loud trumpet call …[to] gather his elect’ as the missionaries preaching the gospel worldwide as the first century continued. But would anybody read this as something so mundane after the preceding two verses if it were not for other considerations? It certainly seems that references elsewhere to the angels in connection with Christ’s coming, in Matthew 13:41 (especially), 16:27 and 25:31, all have to do with supernatural beings, and with the End; not with AD70, nor with missionaries. We must also ask, just how did AD70 make any difference to the spread of the gospel?(17) World evangelism proceeds very fruitfully throughout Acts, long before the temple falls.(18)
All in all, then, interpretations seeing Matthew 24:4-35 as entirely about the fall of Jerusalem in the first century don’t really fit the text. Most of it – particularly verses 14, 21-22 and 29-31 – makes most sense when seen as describing the End.(19)
(And incidentally, all this has a practical significance: people – or a church – are much more likely to take the trouble to dig into this passage that Matthew gave so much space to, if indeed we have good reasons to hope it will teach us about the end-times that we may possibly live through; rather than about the long-passed events of AD70!)
Option three: Double fulfilment
If, then, we can’t see the chapter as limited either entirely to the end times or entirely to AD70, we have to take on board the idea that these prophecies have some sort of double fulfilment, in both eras. (Or to quote Cranfield’s respected commentary on Mark: `It seems then that neither an exclusively historical nor an exclusively eschatological interpretation is satisfactory, and that we must allow for a double reference, for a mingling of historical and eschatological.` (20))
Whether we like it or not, God the master Artist has a way of shaping history where earlier events foreshadow or even somehow participate in the ultimate events of the End. Scholars often speak of ‘prophetic foreshadowing’ in Old Testament prophecies to describe the way they set together predictions of a suffering and reigning Messiah, or combine Christ’s first and second comings, even though the fulfilments of these were widely separated in time. (See, for example, Zechariah 9:9-10, or Isaiah 53 (21); or the well-known example of Isaiah 61:2 – when Jesus quotes this passage in Luke 4:19 He omits the part about the day of vengeance and judgement, that being for a later time.)
This phenomenon is often illustrated from the way mountain peaks that are actually far apart can seem to be close together if seen from a distance (22); it is only as we draw nearer that we realise the true distance between them. So might it not be with this same ‘prophetic foreshadowing’ that Jesus answered both of the disciples’ questions in Matthew 24:3 together, combining His responses to the question about the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple (which happened in AD70), with their other question, ‘What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’?
So as we compare Matthew’s record of Jesus’ discourse, which makes almost complete sense viewed as speaking entirely about the End, with Luke 21:5-24, which makes most sense seen as speaking about AD70, we may well ask whether history under God’s hand has something of a spiral nature; whether a pattern was partially embodied in the events of AD70 that will develop in its final form at the end of the age. Indeed, we might even wonder if at the time of the Olivet discourse it was not yet certain that these two would be separate. It seems that if the Jews (or a large minority, at least) had accepted God’s clear offer in Acts 3:19-21 of repenting so ‘that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ … He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything’ – then the culminating events of history and the second coming would have happened. And then – to take a parallel from quantum physics – perhaps the ‘waveform would have collapsed’ (!), the two would have remained one. Until that time, therefore, the split between the two was not yet determined (so inevitably the prophecy would be unclear?). And it might seem from Matthew 24:36 that Christ Himself chose to share (as in Hebrews 4:15) His contemporaries’ pain in not knowing how long it would be before everything was fulfilled, before God stepped in and put everything right.(23)
But to say that it seems that there is a ‘spiral’ character to history, as divinely shaped, is to say something more: it’s to say that sometimes God builds a pattern into history that will finally emerge clearly in the end time, but manifests partially earlier. It may be a very alien thought to our secularised mindset, where human history goes its own sweet way with God’s purposes being almost tangential to it. But whether we like it or not, the Old Testament often seems to express this, presenting what is happening at that moment as a God-ordained foreshadowing of the future, and so tying it into the black-and-white revelation of how things are in the ultimate End. Joel 2 is a good example: the semi-apocalyptic language of 2:10 is used to underline the seriousness of a contemporary locust plague (which is only ‘like’ a mighty human army, 2:5,7); but then, as we watch 2:19-20 and chapter 3 develop, we find the events of Joel’s time merging into a pattern that manifests fully with the judgment on all nations that he foresees taking place in Palestine at the End. And look at Zechariah 3:8: ‘Listen, O high priest Joshua and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come … ’ (emphasis mine).
Another Old Testament parallel would be the ‘dual fulfilments’ of typology, the way in which contemporary situation and messianic fulfilment merge in and out again in some of the psalms: Psalm 2, for example, or 22; or Psalm 40 (combining vv6-8 which Hebrews 10 applies to Christ, with the confession of sin in v12); or Psalm 69 (where v9 is messianic, and vv5 and 23 are not). Or, again, the way that Cyrus as impending deliverer of Israel in Isaiah 41:25 merges into the ultimate Messiah in 42:1-4, and back out again in chapter 45.(24) In much of Isaiah, writes Motyer, the prophet `envisages the ultimate acts of God, though seeing them in thought-forms suggested by the historical crisis through which the people of God are to pass.`(25) It may feel alien to us, but this foreshadowing and dual fulfilment are evidently how God sometimes works in Scripture and in history.
And so it is that the events of the end times that seem to be described in Matthew 24:9-31 (particularly vv14,21-22,29-31), including verse 15, following as it does from the reference to ‘the end’ of verse 14, and apparently leading straight through to the uniquely horrific ‘then’ of verse 21, nevertheless seem ‘prefigured’, paralleled, foreshadowed, by the previous embodiment of the spiral, the previous desecration of Jerusalem, in AD70, which Luke 21:20-24 seem to focus on more clearly. (As that in turn was prefigured, we should note, by what Antiochus Epiphanes did in 168BC, Daniel 11:31.(26))
We may suggest, then, that Jesus’ complete answer to the two questions of 24:3 reflected this double fulfilment, and God in His goodness has clarified matters by giving us multiple versions of the Olivet discourse: He used Matthew and Mark to focus more on the second question and set out the end-time fulfilment (which would also apply to AD70 insofar as AD70 was a foreshadowing of that fulfilment); and He inspired Luke to focus rather more
on the AD70 events, which is the sole topic of the disciples’ question as Luke records it in 21:7. (Although Luke too merges into what is almost certainly the second coming in 21:25-27.(27)) For our purposes in studying on the end-times, therefore, Matthew 24:15-22 may rightly be read as giving us vital instruction about the climax of history.
Finding the flow
In that case, then, we may read Matthew 24 like this:
1. In verse 3, the disciples pose their two questions. What does Jesus focus His answer on? Verse 4 seems to be the thing they really need to know above all (and compare vv11,23,24), along with the warnings and challenge of verses 9-13 (just as the book of Revelation is given – arguably – to help believers survive the toughest times as ‘overcomers’).
In verse 6 He seems to be saying, ‘The wars are not the point; downplay them as signs.’ That doesn’t mean, however, that the experience of these things is meaningless. Suffering, in the New Testament, always leads to glory, and these things aren’t meaningless; they are the ‘beginning of birth-pains’ (v8, cf Romans 8:22, emphasis mine). There’s huge glory to come, although we have to pass through pain along the way. But still the vital thing is not to be deceived, because the ‘beginning of birth-pains’ is not ‘the end’ (v6), nor is it the climax of verse 14.(28)
2. Matthew 24:9-13: Jesus’ flow of thought seems to be moving on here to a more specific period (‘At that time’, v10). There is a sense of a time coming when the pressure ramps up. (Presumably we are no longer in the ‘beginning of birth-pains’ now [emphasis mine]?) Still the things they should focus on are not external signs but internal challenges, as with verses 23-26. But isn’t He already starting to focus on the more apocalyptic times – with AD70 in view, but particularly (v14) the End? ‘All nations’ in verse 9 also implies that the primary reference of these verses is not AD70.
3. Matthew 24:14-28: Arguably we are now in a new section and must ask when it refers to. Here is where the spiral or ‘double fulfilment’ understanding is so helpful, because if we look at the parallel section in Luke 21:20-24, we seem to be looking at AD70; but in the version God has given us here in Matthew, verses 21 and 22 (which have no equivalent in Luke) describe a period of horror that is emphasised as absolutely unique in world history and must surely belong to the end time (as does Daniel 12:1-2, which uses almost the same words). The sheer horror of verses 21-22 would seem to link this terrible time period (leading on from the abomination of v15, which has to be the trigger for what is described as ‘then’ in v21) to the time of the End that is referred to at its beginning in verse 14, and to the finale of human history that comes ‘immediately’ after it according to the verses that directly follow (vv29-31).(29) We can conclude, therefore, that we can look to these Matthew verses for deeper understanding about the End (whatever other fulfilment they may have had that is drawn out in Luke’s version).
4. Matthew 24:29-31: ‘Immediately after the distress of those days’ (presumably the same distress as verses 22-23 [‘those days’], and therefore of v15), the second coming occurs. The ‘sign of the Son of Man … in the sky’ of verse 30 is the true answer to the second question in verse 3, rather than the false signs of verse 6 or verse 24. The key (and thrilling) point here is surely the ultimate cosmic sovereignty of Jesus, even at a time of unequalled evil (v21) – when, as Hendriksen puts it, ‘the earth is drenched with the blood of the saints in the most terrible tribulation of all time’.(30)
5. Then comes the problematic section of 24:32-34, which we discussed at the beginning of this post. Verses 32-33 encourage Christ’s disciples to hold firm in faith (v13) through the terrible events described in verses 15-24. Verse 34 is more difficult, and what practically we learn from it will depend on how we understand the word ‘generation’ in this verse; see the discussion at the start of this post.
6. The next part, 24:36-42, is also difficult, for different reasons, and we discuss it in the appendix at the end of the post about the `rapture` in the `Other Useful Stuff` section of this site. Verses 36-42 present us with very practical warnings to be alert for the unexpected ‘coming of the Son of Man’. This may refer to the rapture, or else just possibly to the coming of judgment (particularly on Judaea). These are quite important verses for the feasibility of the whole ‘pre-trib’ framework. But they lead into the closing section, verses 43-51, and the challenges here, at least, are clear, pressing, and practical: see the post on `Jesus’ return: what does it mean for me?`, again in the `Other Useful Stuff` section of this site.
We can be confident, then, that although our Lord planned His discourse (and its record in Luke 21 especially) to equip those in Judaea who needed to be readied for the tragic events of AD70, its usefulness certainly did not terminate there. It is for us too, His Church down the ages, that He gave Matthew 24 and its unique revelations about the end time, that we must allow to ‘teach, correct, rebuke and train’ us, so that we may be ‘thoroughly equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:17). This chapter is foundational for our understanding of ‘Your coming and the end of the age’; it’s worth the effort!
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(1) C S Lewis, Fern-seed and Elephants (Collins, 1975), pp69-70.
(2) It might also be slightly odd if, by using both ‘you’ and ‘that generation’ in verse 34, Jesus is addressing the same people in both the second and third person. But the ‘you’ could be specific to the four leaders who raised the question, Mark 13:4; cf Mark 13:37.
(3) William Kelly, Notes on Daniel (G Morrish, 1881), p224.
(4) There are numerous other possibilities. Another is that ‘these things’ in Matthew 24:33 obviously don’t include the second coming of verse 30 itself; so conceivably there is a jump of thought here: a jump from AD70 in the preceding verses up to verse 26, into a digression about the second coming in verses 27-31 (a digression to make clear that they should not listen to the false prophets of verse 26, because when Christ indeed returns it will be very obvious), before returning to AD70 and ‘this generation’ in vv32-35. This works even better with the parallel verses in Luke: Luke 21:32 could be read as coming back to AD70 as described – probably – in verse 24, after a digression about the second coming in, say, verses 25-28. So then the ‘these things’ of Matthew 24:32-35 refers back particularly to verses 15-26 and AD70. Then, when Jesus has completed that line of thought about ‘this generation’ in verse 35, He returns in verse 36 to the unforeseeable second coming, ie to ‘that day’ of verses 27-31. (Variants of this view are proposed by eg Karl Barth [Church Dogmatics (T & T Clark, 1960), III/2], C E B Cranfield [The Gospel According to St Mark (Cambridge University Press, 1972), p409] and Craig Blomberg [in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, ed Carey Newman, p33].) This is attractive. But the big snag with it is surely the ‘immediately after the distress of those days’ in v29 (‘in those days’, Mark 13:24); which seems to make clear that verse 29 follows directly after the ‘distress’ of verses 21-22.
(5) R T France, whose Tyndale commentary on Matthew is a good example of the ‘mostly in the past’ approach, says that when Matthew speaks of the ‘end of the age’ in verses 36ff, as also in passages like 13:39-41 and 49-50, he does clearly mean the end time. Tom Wright, however, goes a lot further, asserting that the whole of Matthew 24 is about AD70 and none of it (not even vv43-50) is about the second coming; since, strikingly, ‘during his earthly ministry, Jesus said nothing about his return’ (Surprised by Hope, p137) – although (oddly, we might think?) the early Church did. But can this be? (Matthew 16:27? 23:39? 25:31? 26:64? John 14:3?) There is no space here for a full scholarly assessment of the weaknesses in Wright’s arguments on this topic; but see the symposium Jesus and the Restoration of Israel (ed Carey Newman), particularly the essays by Blomberg and Allison.
(6) Tom Wright says without any qualification that for first century readers the ‘one thing [this verse] didn’t mean was something to do with the actual sun, moon and stars in the sky’ (Matthew for Everyone [SPCK, 2002], p122). But as Stafford Wright points out, ‘When Jesus Christ was born, a strange star hung in the sky, and at his crucifixion the sun was blacked out… Peter probably refers to these heavenly and earthly phenomena when he quotes from Joel in his sermon in Acts 2:19-20. His hearers would have experienced them’ (in Handbook of Biblical Prophecy, ed Carl Armerding and Ward Gasque,pp170-71).
(7) But there is definitely another way of looking at these poetic images. Rather than being purely illustrative, they may be linking the contemporary political events into a supra-historical pattern that manifests fully in the End – the ‘double fulfilment’ we shall consider below. Matthew’s phrasing here comes firstly from Isaiah 13:10 about the fall of Babylon; but arguably, with its reference to ‘the world’ in 13:11-12, that Isaiah passage refocuses on the End. Another source for Matthew’s phrasing is Isaiah 34:4, and again, although this chapter focuses on Edom in 34:9ff, 34:2 is about the judgment of ‘all nations’.
(8) Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1886; various reprinted editions), III/xxvii.
(9) D A Carson, Expositor’s Bible Commentary on Matthew, p500.
(10) F F Bruce, Word Biblical Commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, p181.
(11) Sam Storms, Kingdom Come, p247.
(12) See John Lennox, Against the Flow, p304. Storms, pp81-91, tries to make Daniel 9:27 refer to AD70, but it is at the cost of treating Daniel’s 70 ‘sevens’ as not having any literal numerical significance, even though Daniel himself seems clearly to have been taking the seventy years at the start of the chapter (v2) entirely literally. (Literal ‘sevens’ of years were of course important in Jewish culture, because of the joyous jubilee arrangements of Leviticus 25.) Again, I was amazed at the weakness of the treatment of this section in both Storms and his fellow non-literalist Kim Riddlebarger (A Case for Amillennialism, pp181-84): neither even face the (to my mind) fatal problems the chapter’s last sentence poses for their attempts to make it apply to Christ (Riddlebarger) or Titus (Storms) in the first century, rather than to the end-time dictator.
(13) Riddlebarger, p307.
(14) Storms, trying hard to fit this verse into AD70, bizarrely reinterprets it as saying that ‘The people of Jerusalem will then recognise how they had mistreated their Messiah, but their mourning will not be the sort that comes from heartfelt repentance but rather a woeful and wailing lamentation that arises from their having witnessed his ultimate vindication and triumph’ (p270); that is, that as a result of the catastrophe of AD70, ‘all the tribes of the land’, all of Israel, ‘saw’ that Jesus was enthroned in heaven and was now being vindicated against those who had crucified Him. But did they? How can we possibly say that ‘all’ the unbelieving Jews realised this as a result of AD70?
(15) In Three Views on the Rapture, ed Gleason Archer, p192. See also Carson, p493. Mark 14:62, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 and Revelation 1:7 would be good examples. Mark 14:62 is a particularly interesting parallel because its wording is so very similar to Matthew 24:30, and there it certainly seems that the Son of Man is seated first at the right hand of God and then coming to earth on the clouds of heaven; ie, contra Tom Wright, His destination is downwards, not upwards as in Daniel 7:13. (This observation is Blomberg’s, in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, ed Carey Newman, p33.)
(16) It must be admitted that the end times do not feature explicitly in the disciples’ question that triggers the Luke 21 discourse. But the flow of thought there may be that although Jesus’ first priority is to teach His disciples to grasp that the prophecies and the ‘wars and revolutions’ of Luke 21:8-11, and even the destruction of the temple itself, do not mean that the End is ‘right away’, nevertheless the End is something relevant (v9) that they want to hear about (as we know from Matthew 24:3), and which He therefore proceeds to teach about from verse 25 onwards.
(17) Cf Carson, p493.
(18) One way of dealing with the many problems verses 29-31 pose for this view is to argue, as we noted above, that ‘these things’ in verse 33 don’t include the second coming of verse 30 itself, and so conceivably there is a jump of thought here: a jump from AD70 in the preceding verses up to verse 26 into a digression about the second coming in verses 27-31, a digression to make clear that they should not listen to the false prophets of verse 26, because when Christ indeed returns it will be very obvious. But as we noted, the big snag with this is surely the ‘immediately after the distress of those days’ in verse 29 (‘in those days’, Mark 13:24), which seems to make clear that verse 29 follows directly after the ‘distress’ of verses 21-22.
(19) Finally, bearing in mind Tom Wright’s assertion that the second coming isn’t in view even in Matthew 24:36-51, it is worth looking at the parables that immediately follow chapter 24, and noting that the first and third at least are surely not about AD70 but about the second coming as normally understood, along with the ‘wedding banquet’ of Revelation 19 and the final judgment of the nations. Dale Allison, in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, ed Carey Newman, p135, makes the further point that this discourse resembles Jewish apocalyptic literature, which is usually understood as being about the end times.
(20) C E B Cranfield, The Gospel According to St Mark, p402. This is also the conclusion of Riddlebarger, pp187, 190, 198-99 – significantly, because Riddlebarger is a standard-bearer for what I have called the more ‘non-literal’ approach to prophecy. Hendriksen, from the same viewpoint, argues likewise that the judgment of AD70 is ‘a type, a foreshadowing or adumbration’ of the events of the End (Matthew [Banner of Truth, 1973], p851). From the opposite point of view, the more ‘literally minded’ scholars would usually be very comfortable with the ‘dual fulfilment’ approach; Moo, for example, writes that ‘Jesus “telescopes” AD 70 and the end of the age in a manner reminiscent of the prophets, who frequently looked at the end of the age through more immediate historical events’ (in Archer, p192). And see also G E Ladd, Presence of the Future (Eerdmans, 1974), pp322-28: ‘It is precisely this tension between the imminent historical and the indeterminate eschatological which is the genius of the prophetic perspective … The important point is that these two events … are in fact one redemptive event in two parts.’ He quotes Cranfield on this: ‘The foreshortening, by which the Old Testament sees as one divine intervention in the future that which from the viewpoint of the New Testament writers is both past and future, is not only a visual illusion; for the distance brings out an essential unity, which is not so apparent from a position in between the ascension and the Parousia.’ Ladd adds, ‘The thread which binds the Old Testament books together … is the sense of participating in redemptive history … This is where the Gospels leave us anticipating an imminent event and yet unable to date its coming … Logically this may appear contradictory, but it is a tension with an ethical purpose – to make date-setting impossible and therefore to demand constant readiness.’ That is to say, issues of timing did not matter so much to the prophetic mindset: the unity of the kingdom’s manifestation did.
(21) This is a point emphasised by proponents of a pre-tribulation rapture as an event separate from the open second coming, so that Christ’s return is in two phases. One could imagine people saying to Isaiah about his fifty-third chapter, ‘Surely you don’t expect the Servant to divide his coming into two phases or appear twice, once to go to the grave for our transgressions, and yet separately and long afterwards to divide the spoils with the strong?’
(22) See, for example, Hendriksen, p846.
(23) Christ chose as part of His incarnation to share our ignorance of how long it would be before His return (Matthew 24:36). Is it irreverent for us to wonder whether it follows from this that He Himself would not be definite about whether there were two sets of events and, if so, at what distance? Being God Incarnate, full of the Holy Spirit, everything He said about this would have been 100 per cent accurate. But is it possible that His reply to the disciples’ questions gave something of a composite answer, which did not differentiate clearly between the two fulfilments? Might that be reflected most in Mark’s version?
(24) Cf Darrell Bock in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, ed Carey Newman, p124: ‘What the Israelite king represented in microcosm, Jesus represented to a heightened, cosmic, decisive degree. What the judgment of the unfaithful nation represents in a smaller form is what the heightened, decisive judgment of all nations and people will be like. The Jewish story has such patterns in it that permit repetition of the type in a way that links the event to a previous pattern. It can do so and speak as if the event is one, linked by the pattern set up by the correspondence.’
(25) Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah (Inter-Varsity Press, 1993), p289.
(26) Note how the prefiguring is expressed in the way the phrasing of Daniel 11:31, about Epiphanes, both flows into 11:40ff which is about the End, and also parallels Daniel 9:27; but 9:27 is certainly not about Epiphanes.
(27) Cf David Wenham’s argument that ‘a version of Jesus’ sermon … longer than that preserved in any of the three Synoptics, lies behind the gospel accounts of the discourse of Christ, and that all have excerpted and rearranged that account in various ways’ (Blomberg’s summary in The Historical Reliability of the Gospels [Inter-Varsity Press, 1987], p142).
(28) And alongside this, the ‘good news’ of God’s kingdom (v14) that is already being preached (cf Luke 16:16) is surely that, despite all the evil, this kingdom is breaking in to a very substantial extent now; as, for example, the opening chapters of Mark demonstrate. It’s not that there is trouble now, and then will come the ‘kingdom’ that we should be looking out for. This is the mistake of much dispensationalism. Note how the kingdom is the theme of Acts in its opening – ‘kingdom’ 1:6, ‘power’ 1:8 – and also in its final verse, 28:31; the Jews may have rejected that kingdom by then, but nonetheless it’s breaking into our world now! (See also Luke 17:20-21.) There is a far grander, much more complete coming to follow, but the kingdom is coming in now; now is the significant time, the time we should pay most attention to. And because it’s for us that the ‘birth’ comes, therefore it’s primarily the challenges we will face, not wars or earthquakes in the outside world, that we need to be alerted to (Matthew 24:9-13; cf Luke 21:12).
(29) I simply cannot understand how non-literalist Riddlebarger can read verses 21-23 – which explicitly speak of a specific, limited time – as describing ‘the suffering of God’s people throughout the interadvental period’ from the resurrection through to the second coming (pp201-02).
(30) Hendriksen, p863.
(This is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my A Guide to the End of the World, available on Kindle or in book form from https://instantapostle.com/books/a-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world/ )
