Understanding Jesus' Prophecies: Context and Credibility

In our study of the crisis of eschatology in our day we have placed great emphasis on the criticisms that have been launched against the Bible and against the credibility of Jesus with respect to unfulfilled prophecies that Jesus, as well as the apostles, made with respect to the coming of Christ. [00:00:06]

Now, I labor this point for this reason: I'm not convinced that evangelical Christians really do feel the weight of this problem, and that's part of the problem of ignoring higher criticism and simply preaching to the choir and talking among ourselves and not really listening to this criticism that is raised, and we have to give an answer to these critics that have devastated Scripture and the person of Christ. [00:02:36]

And so, I think it is our obligation as Christians who believe in the deity of Christ and the inspiration of the Scriptures to feel the weight of this burden and to address it as we encounter it. Now, there are many scholars who feel that the escape-hatch from all of this difficulty is found in verse 32 of Mark 13. [00:03:09]

Now, that verse 32 is one of the most controversial verses in all of Mark's gospel; because, among other things it's a verse in which Jesus puts a limit on His own knowledge when He said that the day and the hour knows nobody, not even the angels, not even the Son, just the Father. [00:05:01]

And, that's provoked all kinds of Christological debate, but obviously Jesus is referring here to His human nature, and the human nature is not omniscient. It would be heretical to assert that the human nature of Christ knew everything. The divine nature did, of course; but the human nature knows only what a normal, ordinary human being could know or a human who is informed by the divine. [00:05:21]

Now, again this business of passing away we're assuming that it refers to the death of those who are alive. Now, that is consistent with the other timeframe reference that Bertrand Russell used to refute the New Testament and to refute Jesus when Jesus said, "Some of you will not taste death until you see the Son of Man coming in power and so on." [00:09:27]

Now, more commonly the generation that is described as a type or sort of people refers not to the righteous or to believers but to unbelievers, those who were of a wicked sort, a wicked generation. And Herman Ridderbos, whom I've already talked about who gave us the 'all ready and not yet' timeframe approach to the kingdom of God teachings in the New Testament; Ridderbos takes the view that the Greek word here, 'genea' that is used to interpret -- or to translate a generation, is a description not of timeframe but of mind-frame. [00:15:02]

But the usage of it in the New Testament overwhelmingly and consistently refers to a group of people who are alive at the particular time. And I want to take some time now to look at some of these passages. The first passage we look at is in Matthew 23, verse 36. Now, in this context Jesus is giving His final address that He gives presumably on the very same day that He gives the Olivet Discourse, and He said, quote, "All of these things shall come upon this generation." [00:16:50]

Now, if we understand the biblical context in which our Lord makes these statements, He's clearly talking about the decisive point in redemptive history where God has visited the nation of Israel in the person of His only begotten Son. And it was that generation that was alive at that time that had on the one hand the unspeakable privilege of seeing the Messiah come in the flesh, and yet at the same time it was that generation who were convicted of the greatest guilt in Jewish history because that was that generation that rejected the One who had come to their own, and they received Him not. [00:19:41]

And so Jesus again and again in the New Testament warns that existing generation about the severity of judgment that will be on their heads because their judgment will be far greater than those earlier generations in antiquity such as were seen in the days of the Queen of Sheba and in other periods, because the decisive crisis point has been reached with the coming of the Messiah. [00:20:24]

In fact, apart from the use of this word 'genea' (the generation), that we find in the Olivet Discourse there are 38 other references to this word in the New Testament, and every one of them refers to a contemporary group of people that were then alive. Now, it's possible linguistically that 'genea' could mean sort or type, or as Ridderbos suggests a mind-frame rather than a timeframe. [00:21:15]

But what if the end of the age has come? What if what Jesus is talking about here is not the end of history but the end of the Jewish age? What if Jesus is talking about not His final consummate coming to fulfill all prophecy about the final renovation of heaven and earth, but what He's talking about is His coming of judgment on Israel, which is manifested in the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem. [00:22:54]