Understanding Jesus' Prophecy: Judgment and Vigilance

"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. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." [00:17:46]

"Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life that the day comes upon you suddenly like a trap. For it will come upon all who dwell on the face of the whole earth. But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all of those things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man." [00:74:40]

"The second thing that as I said is so astonishing about this prophecy is the manner in which it was fulfilled with such a degree of accuracy and precision. Jerusalem was destroyed. That sacred temple was turned to ruins and the people of God were disbursed into all of the nations of the world. So, in light of this tremendous precision and fulfillment of these predictions, as I mentioned before, you would think that this would be all it would take to convince any rational person that Jesus spoke the truth in every prophetic utterance He made including those statements about Himself, about His being our Redeemer and the Son of God, so that there would be no intellectual excuse for rejecting the truth claims of Jesus and of the Word of God." [00:263:06]

"Bertrand Russell quoted the passage in his writing of the little book, “Why I Am Not A Christian” in which he was saying that among those things that Jesus predicted in this passage were not only the destruction of Jerusalem, which was a given, not only the destruction of the temple, which certainly had taken place, and not only the dispersion of the Jews, which was also manifest, but included in the content of this prophecy was Jesus' prediction of His own return. And He said that He would return within that generation. And Bertrand Russell looks at that and said this proves that Jesus was wrong. This proves that though He did some good guessing and some extraordinary predictions, nevertheless, in the final analysis His prophecy failed, the Bible failed, and therefore cannot be trusted." [00:353:40]

"Now, when you look at prophecies in the Old Testament in the very genre of the case of predictive prophecy, frequently, you see the language of prophetic utterances cloaked in vivid and intense imagery and symbols, and almost always that imagery and symbolic content that predicts catastrophic events at the hands of God that those images include astronomical shakeups, that the moon will turn to dripping blood or whatever. And so, as I said, the prediction of astronomical perturbations that accompany biblical prophecy is a normal character of the literary genre of such. And here Jesus uses that same traditional type of approach when He describes this calamity that is coming." [00:536:28]

"Now, there are two other occasions where Jesus gives time frame references with respect to future prophecies. Let me read them to you briefly. We look back in Matthew 16 in verse 28, 'Truly,' again emphatic, 'I say to you, there are some standing here,' people, right now, standing right here, 'who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.' Now, I have a concern that so many Christians, and particularly, evangelical Christians (and that is a redundancy because if you are not evangelical you are not a Christian, and if you are a Christian you are evangelical) but in any case so many Christians just don't seem to feel the weight of this problem. They dismiss it out of hand. No wonder the academic skeptics look at us and say, how naïve we seem to be, obscurantist in the extreme, when we just fluff this off as if it were nothing. But here, Jesus said, 'Some of you standing right here right now will not taste of death.' What does that mean? You are not going to die until you see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom." [00:858:84]

"Now, if you are talking about a period of time that is going to take place in the next few weeks, how likely it is that Jesus is going to say, 'Some of you are actually going to be able to live to see it'? But if we are thinking about an event that is going to take place forty years after this time, now it makes sense to say in the next forty years there is going to be a significant rate of dying among you, but some will survive, some will live long enough that they won't taste death until all of these things come to pass. Does that make sense when He is using that kind of time frame?" [00:1114:56]

"Now, does that sound like a prophecy for the future of two thousand years? I can guarantee you that the missionary enterprise of the Christian faith reached the borders of Israel very early in the first century. It didn't take the church two thousand years to preach the gospel to every city in Israel. Again, the time frame reference of what Jesus was speaking there in Matthew was clearly within the lifetime of one group of people. Now, if that is not clear, we go back now to the salient passage, 'This generation will not pass away till all of these things come to pass.'" [00:1165:50]

"The normal meaning of the text is an 'age group.' So, in translating the text what it means is this. You asked me when. I will tell you when, sometime in the next forty years because this generation is not going to pass away until all of these things are fulfilled. Alright, so now here is the question. Was Jesus accurate in answering that particular time frame view? Again, in Matthew's Gospel we are told in the Olivet Discourse after Jesus had talked about this generation shall not pass away, then Jesus goes on to say, 'Nobody knows the day or the hour when the Son of Man will come. Therefore, be vigilant, watch out, read the signs of the times, when you see this, when you see that, and the wars and rumors of wars, and so on. But I can't tell you the day and the hour because nobody knows the day or the hour, not the angels, not even the Son knows the day or the hour.'" [00:1486:14]

"Well, it boils down to this very simply. Either Jesus made a prediction that didn't come to pass and therefore was false or (and so few people ever even are willing to ask the question) maybe, just maybe, it did come to pass, maybe He wasn't wrong about the time frame. Maybe we have made too many assumptions, that when we talk about His coming here in this text we think that what He is referring to is His ultimate final consummate appearance at the end of the age when He brings His kingdom to pass. I don't think He was talking about that. He was talking about the days of vengeance. He was talking about His coming in judgment on the nation of Israel. That was the warning He gave and that was the prediction that was fulfilled in spades with a vengeance on steroids in 70 AD." [00:1608:12]

"In 70 AD Jesus came in judgment. He destroyed the city. He destroyed the temple. He dispersed His people and He came to judge them. And in the meantime, begin the age of the Gentiles where the church was now established, not simply as a Jewish community, but was now expanding to the whole world and would then finally after the age of the Gentiles be finally and fully fulfilled with His return at the end of time. But in the meantime, in between time, He did come and there were astronomical perturbations. The Jewish historian, Josephus, records in his Jewish Wars as an eyewitness and with those who were there when 1.1 million Jews suffered the Holocaust in 70 AD under Titus, that people looked into the sky and they saw, saw with their eyes visibly chariots in the air and they heard with their ears, physically, voices out of the heavens saying, 'We are departing thence,' just as in antiquity when the glory of God visibly left Jerusalem over the West Wall or the East Wall, they saw ichabod, the glory depart, and judgment fell in calamitous terms." [00:1679:82]

"No, the thing that we know that Jesus says here is 'Jerusalem will fall. The temple will be destroyed. The Jews will be dispersed. Calamity upon calamity will occur. People's hearts will fail within themselves. They will be confounded. They will be terrified. They will be perplexed. And heaven and earth may pass away, but My words will not pass away.' He said it. He meant it, and it happened just as He said it would do. Rather than joining the swarms of skeptics that gather around this text, let's throw our corporate hats into the air rejoicing in the full certainty that we know of the words of Jesus that can never fail." [00:1787:10]