52. The Coming of the Son of Man (Mark 13:24-31)

anyway the certainty of the destruction not one stone will be left upon another general upheaval before the destruction nation against nation Kingdom against Kingdom earthquakes famines and so on then he closes in and begins to talk about the upheaval within the community of faith persecution anticipating this destruction you're gonna be hated by all men they're gonna drag you into synagogues put you on trial you're going to stand before authorities and I have to give an account of yourselves then as we saw last week he focuses it even more on the actual events of this destructive moment the horror of the destruction he says it's never been as bad there's never been such suffering since the creation nor will there ever be such a horrific situation we talked about how I think we can say with a straight face that was what was going on there but now we come to this paragraph which I'm calling the judge responsible for this destruction Jesus is not only judged but executioner and at this point he owns that role he's not only the one that has announced the Cataclysm that's going to befall Jerusalem but now takes full ownership of the one who is responsible for it carrying out the terms of his judgment we're also going to look at the next paragraph the timing of the destruction before we're done if I mind by p's and q's verse 24 Jesus says in those days after that tribulation the Sun will be darkened the moon will not give its light well the first thing we notice is Jesus says in those days so on the face of it we have to say the field we get from that statement is it's in the same timeframe not thousands of years in the future he's just talked about a Great Tribulation and then he says in those days after that tribulation but then we go what is this that it says the Sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light you see and that's when our eyes start glazing over and we go how did this make sense the difficulty we have is we read a statement like that as the heirs of Western tradition with a very scientific perspective so when we see the term Sun Moon stars we immediately think of astronomical bodies you know and that's perfectly understandable but the fundamental rule of hermeneutics of biblical interpretation is the first question you ask yourself in any text is what is the most likely sense that the original hearers attached to a particular statement not what sense do I attach to it that's a secondary question what was the sense that those disciples probably attached to it well they are not heirs they are living in an Asian kind of culture in Eastern culture and they are also heirs of an Old Testament tradition in which prophets would frequently speak this way not referring to celestial bodies but actually referring to earthly events but describing those events using a kind of poetic set of categories using terms like the Sun and the moon and the stars it's very common in the Old Testament and these men steeped in Old Testament texts would have attached that meaning to it first of all that would have been the first sense they would have derived from it that Jesus is speaking in the genre of Old Testament prophetic literature so just a couple of examples one of the better-known this is Isaiah Isaiah is predicting the fall politically of Babylon the great enemy of Israel in the Old Testament and Isaiah says quote the burden against Babylon which Isaiah the son of amos saw behold the day of the Lord comes cruel with both wrath and fierce anger to lay the land desolate and he will destroy its sinners from it the stars of the heaven and their constellations will not give their light the Sun will be darkened in its going forth the moon will not cause its light to shine Isaiah's not describing events in the heavens he's describing the collapse politically of Babylon but using that kind of poetic description of a kind of Cataclysm you see something like that in Habakkuk describing the same events the Sun and Moon stood still in their habitation at the light of your arrows they went at the shining of your glittering spear Joel uses that language in Joel chapter 2 the earthquakes before them the heavens tremble the sun and moon grow dark the stars diminish in their brightness later joel gives even more acute kinds of descriptions in a text that's quoted by peter on the day of pentecost and you recall peter explaining to the onlookers what this speaking in tongues means says to them this is what joel was describing and then he quotes a text from joel which describes both great blessing God is going to pour out his spirit on his maidservant and men's servants etc but also great judgment and Peter quotes Joel to refer to the same thing Jesus is referring to in the Olivet discourse namely a time of great Cataclysm but Joel describes it using this kind of celestial terminology so Joel says I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth blood and fire and pillars of smoke Peter quotes this to describe what's about to happen in Israel you see the Sun will be turned into darkness the moon into blood before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord one more example this is Ezekiel and this kind of thing continent takes place fairly commonly in the Old Testament here Ezekiel is describing Egypt Egypt is going to be greatly demoted in its general prestige an ancient civilization it had been a great empire now it's going to become basically a third-rate civilization and and Ezekiel's predicting it and the way he does so is this son of man take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of Egypt and say to him when I put out your light I will cover the heavens and make it stars dark I will cover the Sun with a cloud and the moon shall not give her light all the bright lights of the heavens I will make dark over you and bring darkness upon your land now the thing to notice is the ancient view that earthly civilizations were in a sense sustained and controlled and empowered by heavenly bodies and so in a sense it wasn't the Sun being darkened it was Egypt's Sun being darkened you see it wasn't the mood generally as we think of it it was Egypt's moon Egypt stars Egypt's heavenly powers that are going to lose their status and the implication of that is that Egypt itself is going to lose its status on earth so that's kind of the way that this works in the ancient view of things it's rooted from a biblical point of view in the creation narrative where we hear that the Sun the moon and the stars rule such that their collapse would suggest disorder anarchy and confusion when Jesus says the stars of heaven will fall in the context it's in a sense saying Jerusalem stars are going to fall Jerusalem's power in heaven is going to be shaken because the idea was that the earthly powers were propped up as it were by heavenly powers all of this is pointing therefore in the context to Jesus establishing his kingdom because the kingdom of this world is going to become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ at this point these earthly powers lose their status and the Messiah steps in and becomes the proper ruler of the kings of the world as we read repeatedly in the New Testament the notion of shaking the nation's shaking the powers of the heavens of course is an allusion to the Prophet Haggai thus says the Lord of Hosts once more it's a little while I will shake the heaven and the earth the sea in the dry land I will shake all the nations and they will come to the desire of all nations they will come to the true ruler the true Messiah the true Kingdom the true temple I will fill this true temple with glory says the Lord of hosts so I think we can say with a straight face that even though we have a tendency to look at these descriptions of heavenly bodies scientifically they looked at it poetically it would be almost unthinkable to imagine in fact that they would have thought of Jesus words to be taken in terms of the Sun in the sky literally that's not the way they would have thought about it they would have seen it the way they had been trained to understand the Old Testament all right so far so good I haven't seen a big hook coming out of the ceiling yet so we're just gonna plow on this is this is the toughest one then they will see the Son of man coming in the clouds with power and great glory she's going to give you a little heads up you may know this or you may not but this has been called the most embarrassing verse in the Bible by critics of it around the year 2000 hundred and five 1805 there was a book that was published short book very readable entitled the destruction of Jerusalem in this book the author documents how the events that took place in Jerusalem were actually pretty much in line with what Jesus predicted in the Olivet discourse this book was republished by a scholar named Robert Booth in the year 2001 in his preface to this republication of the book he says quote the controversy surrounding the Olivet discourse focuses on its time frame references what did Jesus mean when he said this generation shall not pass away till all these things are fulfilled what's the timeframe of this generation and what is the content of quote all these things in other words does all these things including include they'll see the Son of man coming in the clouds with power and great glory his point is that critics of the Bible I think it's safe to say have seized on this point more frequently than any other to establish the proposition that Jesus was wrong that the Apostles are unreliable and it gave rise to a certain theory usually called parousia delay the word parousia is the technical word for the coming of Christ parousia delay is a theory that you see an adjustment of eschatology in the New Testament so we have in the New Testament what appears to be an expectation that Jesus is going to come right away to wit all of a discourse you see then the Son of Man will come and it's going to happen right away but then the the the New Testament you know leaders and so on begin to realize well he's not coming back quite yet and they begin to get a little fearful and so they adjust their eschatology and as the documents continue to be generated more and more you see a kind of projection of the parousia into the future into the sort of undefined projected future so that there's a change but the implied in that change is that Jesus got it wrong and the early apostles got it wrong and so parousia delay as a theory stands for the idea that Jesus really didn't know what he was talking about when he said then the son of man is going to come right back you see RC sprawls name some of you know says quote the many New Testament passages that deal with the future coming of Christ none is more important than his own Olivet discourse this discourse is ironic on the one hand it provides the clearest example of predictive prophecy that came to pass with astonishing accuracy now if you've been in this class the last couple of weeks I hope I've persuaded you that that really is kind of amazing that Jesus could predict in 30 ad with a surprising amount of accuracy what would happen over the next several decades then Sproule continues on the other hand it includes predictive elements whose fulfillment remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial aspects of New Testament prophecy because of course it includes they'll see the Son of man coming in the clouds this has given rise to incredible skepticism in some quarters toward the Bible and its reliability because if Jesus missed it here then one in the world else did he say that was God that was wrong and how how can we have confidence anywhere if this most fundamental point was in fact so far off the mark again booth in the preface I just mentioned says likewise many unbelievers have interpreted the prediction of Jesus and the Olivet discourse regarding his second coming as positive proof that Jesus was simply mistaken and therefore Christianity is false moreover his apostles also looked for Christ's coming in their own lifetime but as the skeptic is quick to point out they too were mistaken and therefore are not trustworthy as a result of this Bertrand Russell cited the Olivet discourse as one of the primary reasons he rejected Christianity so are you with me here you see we've got a problem don't we got a bit of a kind of a ticklish issue that is on the burner because everybody agrees that Jesus predicted the the temple not one stone will be left upon another he predicted the destruction of Jerusalem surrounded by armies the siege in other versions of the Olivet discourse he predicted the dispersal of the Jewish people at that time all of these things happened as advertised but at the same time in the same discourse Jesus speaks pointedly of his own parousia though the critics grant the Jesus prophecy of Jerusalem's destruction was correct they insist that his predictions at the same time in the same context and within the same timeframe of his parousia were manifestly incorrect so what to do hmm well I think I'll go home now so you know I just figured out yeah well that's at least take one more look at it showing how do you resolve the problem well one way is the way that is typically adopted by critics they simply say with a straight face Jesus was wrong the Apostles were wrong get over it they were just viewing things from an unreconstructed ancient viewpoint and let's not you know be too rough on them but we certainly can't view this as the Word of God for crying out loud you see so you got a lot of people who are professionals in the in the in the field who take that view quite casually and if you ask them how you can believe that they will cite number one on their list the Olivet discourse so that's one possibility well people who want to take the Bible more seriously have had to scramble and I'm going to give you some of the scrambling attempts I'm using that somewhat pejorative term but one of them is to redefine the word generation some of you've come across this so that when Jesus says this generation he doesn't mean a generation as in a time frame generation but he means a generation as in a race the difficulty is there's two Greek words both of which are translated by the English word generation one of them is gana ah which always has to do with a time frame a generation of human procreation usually not less than 25 years not more than 40 years the other word is jenos a cousin but not the same word it means a race when Peter for example says you are a chosen generation a royal priesthood in first Peter the word anos is use you're a chosen race in other words there's no timeframe implied there when Jesus uses the word generation however it's the word get a oh and I have to say to you with all due respects it's an act of sheer biblical dishonesty to confuse those two words they are not confusable they are two different words related linguistically but they have quite different meanings so I'm gonna have to say with all due respects strike one we can't get out from under the problem by saying this race this Jewish race won't pass away till all these things are fulfilled well we can solve the problem by decapitation this was how Lindsay's approach and it's typically been the approach and dispensational circles that the entire Olivet discourse is fundamentally about something thousands of years in the future that it's only kind of a warm-up exercise that there was a rough correlation to events in the first century but actually there's going to be a realization of all of these things out in the future in what Hal Lindsey called the fig tree generation Hal Lindsey is a good enough scholar to recognize you can't use that word guinea oughta mean race but he wasn't quite willing to face up to what it actually says so he put the whole thing out in the future and said that there will come a time when a fig tree generation will occur using the parable that we'll look at in a moment in this text Jesus says when the fig tree blossoms its fruit is not far behind Hal Lindsey said well the blossoming of the fig tree so to speak was when Israel was reinstated as a state 1948 therefore the fig tree generation had to end in 1988 and Jesus would therefore have to return by 1988 last time we checked he didn't but at the time some of you were old enough to remember this there was a huge amount of hullabaloo surrounding 1988 there was a book written 88 reasons why Jesus must return by 1988 when 1988 came and went a second edition came out 89 reasons why Jesus must return in 1989 I don't know if he made any more publications but he made a little money on the ones he did produce Suzi well it's a novel theory but in terms of the facial sense of the text it really is not sustainable when Jesus says this generation there is no reason whatsoever to believe that he's talking about a generation thousands of years in the future so strike two Oh strike three now I guess well the other is also a cure by decapitation but in the opposite direction this is a view that sometimes call full preterism some of you may know that term it says no no no the second coming actually happened in the first generation it happened as Jesus said in the Olivet discourse there is no more future there is no second coming because it's already done and all of the prophetic material in the New Testament has been realized and now history is just kind of going on full preterism or sometimes called consistent preterism I say this gently and kindly is heresy it confident and I say it because it's technically heresy it contradicts the accepted classical Creed's of Orthodox Christianity every one of them in every branch of the Christian movement down through history when we say on Sunday mornings in the Apostles Creed he sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty from whence he will come to judge the quicken the dead that ain't just poetry we believe is God's people that Jesus is coming back at some time in the future it may be in our lifetimes it may not but one thing is clear history is going to have a culminating moment and it didn't already happen in the first century so strike four we're not going to be full preterists because the New Testament does teach and your Sunday school teacher believes and I hope that most or all of us in this room believe that there is a great blessed hope of the church still in our future and we look forward to it and we can pray come Lord Jesus to that end so it doesn't really solve the problem it doesn't see probably the most technical and resourceful attempt to deal with this and the one that has been adopted by some of the best scholars is to try to distinguish what Jesus says here from the rest of the context and this usually involves rather subtle and highly nuanced readings of certain Greek words demonstrative pronouns this as opposed to that these as opposed to those I'm not going to labor this because I have to say in my opinion at least it involves a huge amount of special pleading a huge amount of really working too hard to make a case for something that on the face of it is just manifestly not credible Jesus says perfectly pointedly this generation will not pass away till all these things take place and he says that virtually in the same breath with what he's saying right here is we're going to see in just a moment and so I think it really does leave us in a kind of again exercise and dishonesty to try to take that one statement and lift it out and make it something other than part of the overall context so what to do well I think that Jesus actually said what he meant and that what Jesus said they will see the Son of Man come in the clouds that that's precisely what happened again as I said earlier we need to hear this the way the disciples would have heard it when Jesus first uttered the words it's the only fair way to have an objective standard of interpretation how would the disciples the original hearers have understood this phrase and I'm gonna tell you it's not likely they would have taken this as a reference to the second coming in a great future of the human race they would have seen it much more in terms of the kind of language that they were accustomed to the word coming itself does not always mean the second coming it often simply means God coming in judgment in some form or other and that kind of thing happens many times you see throughout the history of the redemption of God's people we read in Psalm 98 let the sea roar and all its fullness the world and those who dwell in it let the rivers clap their hands and the hills be joyful together before the Lord for he is coming to judge the earth with righteousness he so judged the world and the people's with equity he's coming well he doesn't mean coming at the end of time here he means coming as God would sometimes come in judgment defeating the enemies of Israel vindicating her interests and so on Psalm 96 for he is coming he's coming to judge the earth he'll judge the world with righteousness and his peoples with truth the idea of God coming breaking into history from time to time and vindicating his people and defeating their enemies is taken for granted in the Old Testament and certainly the disciples would probably have heard it in that sense more importantly however this phrase the son of man coming now if you've been sleeping till now I beg you wake up for this one that phrase is taken virtually verbatim from Daniel 7:13 The Book of Daniel was widely read deeply studied in the first century because the folks who were living at that time realized that Daniel himself had kind of set a time frame that pointed emphatically to the era in which they were living the so-called 400 years the 70 weeks of Daniel tipped down to the timeframe in which these people were living and they knew it Daniel was a very popular book and it was responsible in many ways for the kind of Messiah fever that was part of the experience of Jewish people at that time one of the most famous verses in Daniel is Daniel 7:13 listen to it I was watching in the night visions and behold one like the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven the only time you ever see the phrase in the Old Testament the Son of Man coming is Daniel 7:13 and Jesus is made clearly alluding to that and that's exactly what the disciples would have heard well what's going on in that text that's the text you probably know from Daniel where there's these four great beasts you know it's apocalyptic the first beast is a lion it's Babylon the second beast is a bear it's Persia you know the third beast these are Gentile powers that are being pictured for us poetically apocalyptically Greece's the leopard and finally have this great iron beast Rome and the people who were reading Daniel at the time of the Roman domination of the world took it that way they were living under the great iron beast of Rome and then Daniel says in that time during that period I saw the Son of man coming well where did he come then he came to the Ancient of Days Ancient of Days is in Trinitarian terms God the Father we would say so they brought him the son of man before him the Ancient of Days then to him the son of man was given Dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples and nations and languages should serve him his Dominion is an everlasting Dominion which shall not pass away his kingdom is one that shall not be destroyed what Daniel is scribing here is not the coming of the son of man at the begat the end of human history he's describing the coming of the Son of Man at the beginning of messianic history to him is given a kingdom of which there will never be an end the verse that Jesus virtually cites at this point when he refers to what they will see is a celebration of the establishment of God's kingdom in Christ which is exactly what he was doing that very week in Jerusalem and it was going to happen within the next three or four days and that establishment would culminate when the edifice of the Old Kingdom was finally dismantled finally and ultimately in the destruction of the temple and the dismantling of Jerusalem itself so what they heard him say knowing Daniel was not the end of history it was the beginning of a new chapter of history under the regime of Messiah now let me strike you as a new and rather strange idea especially if you come from a background such as I did which took any reference like that to be the second coming booth who I mentioned earlier says now this may sound like a novel idea to many who've never heard it yet it is in fact a very old idea the belief that Jesus was speaking about events 2,000 years or more in the future turns out to be historically the new idea in fact as it is taught in many evangelical churches it's an idea that's less than 200 years old some of you were in the class I did a few years ago on the apocalypse in space and time I tried to work out that a little bit more at that point booth continues prior to the mid 19th century and early 20th century it was commonly understood that the events Jesus spoke of in the Olivet discourse had already occurred including this one if this is the case then many Christians are now like a man who's waiting for a train that's already left the station you see because they've missed entirely the whole point that's being established here he will come in the clouds you know in the Old Testament clouds are the common theophany referring simply to the power of God you read it again and again well then I saw found in second Samuel says he made darkness canopies around him dark waters and thick clouds of the skies there's no one like the God of gesture on Moses rights who rides the heavens to help you and his excellency on the clouds clouds mbola emblem eyes the glory of God the power of God being displayed to his people glory and power in this case standing for the authority and honor of the Sun now both Luke and Matthew were very likely written after Mark and both of them appear to be trying to clarify something here I don't want to push this too hard but Matthew in the parallel text to this one says this and I'm giving you these words in the precise order that they're found in the Greek text then will appear the sign name Lee the proof of the son of man in heaven that is to say that he's now ruling in heaven and then all the tribes of the land will mourn so Matthew sort of clarifies that what's going to be seen is in a sense the proof that the Son of Man is in heaven ruling which I think helps us understand the sense of the text generally Luke even makes it more clear and fearful signs and great signs shall be from heaven they'll be from heaven but some in some cases visible on earth they're a proof of the Son of man in heaven a proof of his glory and the clouds of glory that surround his rule and yet the signs themselves may be signs that are visible on earth the question we have to ask is were there any such signs did we find something like that and of course the best place to go is our friend Flavius Josephus and I'll just say as a preamble to this little discussion Josephus is not a Christian he's not trying to prove anything about the Olivet discourse at all he's a Jewish person he is a highly respected source a credible detached objective source of information and is highly regarded and respected and referred to again and again by folks and he writes what he's about to say here as surprising as it may to some of us at a time when anybody could have refuted it because a lot of other people were there to either witness it or deny it you see but he gives a list of seven things that happened which he takes to be extraordinary hardly believable and yet he reports them in a sober kind of way insisting with no connection that he admits to they'll all of a discourse it's simply indicating that the things that we're taking place now had to be nothing less than God's judgment on this city there's seven of them I'm only giving the salient quotes this goes on for several pages in detail and spare you I'm just going to give you kind of the highlights number one quote a media resembling a sword hung over Jerusalem during one whole year number two on the eighth day of the month at the ninth hour of the night there shone round about the altar and the circum chastened buildings of the temple a light equal to the brightness of the Sun which continued for the space of half an hour number three quote as as the high priest was leading a heifer to the altar to be sacrificed she brought forth a lamb in the midst of the temple number four about the sixth hour of the night the eastern gate of the temple was seen to open without human assistance this gate was very heavy it took several men pushing with all their might to move that thing it opened above its own accord according to Josephus number five soon after the feast of Passover in various parts of the country before the setting of the Sun chariots and armed men were seen in the air passing round about Jerusalem number five number six quote at the subsequent feast of Pentecost while the priests were going by night into the Inner Temple to perform their customary ministrations they first felt as they said a shaking accompanied by an indistinct murmuring and afterwards voices as of the multitude saying in a distinct in earnest manner let us depart hints and finally seven probably the most gripping one of all concerns a man whose name was Joshua you'll see if his rights but what is still more terrible there was one Joshua the son of an honest a plebeian and an husbandman who four years before the war began the Jewish war at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity came to that feast where on it is our custom for everyone to make Tabernacles as the feast of booths you know to God in the temple and began on a sudden to cry aloud quote a voice from the east a voice from the West a voice from the four winds a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house a voice against the bridegroom's and the brides and a voice against this whole people Josephus says this was his cry as he went about day and night in all lanes of the city and he kept doing this every day they finally got a little tired of it they arrested him they beat him they did everything they could to prevent it but he would go right back out on the streets with this lament finally they turned him over to the civil authorities Josephus says here upon our rulers supposing as the case proved to be that this was a sort of divine fury in the man brought him to the Roman procurator who had him whipped till his bones were laid bare yet he did not make any supplication for himself nor shed any tears but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible and every stroke of the whip his answer was woe woe to Jerusalem this cry of his was the loudest at the festivals and he continued this ditty for seven years and five months without growing hoarse or being tired therewith until the very time that he saw his priests aged in earnest fulfilled in our siege when it ceased for as he was going around upon the wall he cried out with his utmost force woe woe to the city again and to the people and to the holy house and just as he added at the last woe woe to myself also there came a stone out of one of the siege engines and smote him and killed him immediately and as he was uttering the same priests age he gave up the ghost it's a remarkable story of the kinds of things that a sober observer of the events reports to us accompanying what was taking place in Jerusalem I think we can say with a straight face that it became evident to the people living then that the Son of Man was ruling in heaven and this was in fact an expression of his judgment as he had himself promised when he stood in open court in the temple forty years earlier and said your house is left to you desolate goes on then he'll send his angels and gather together his elect from the four winds from the furthest part of Earth to the furthest part of heaven I'll just simply remind you the Greek word angle oaths often translated angels is also often translated simply messengers that's a little confusing because we see the angels and we think of heavenly angels but the word itself the Greek word simply means a messenger and often means that for example when Luke describes John the Baptist he says behold I send my angel Anglo's but it's translated messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you Paul speaks of a messenger an angel from Satan you see when he talks about a thorn in the flesh that was given to him the point is the word can go either way it's the translator that has to make the judgment unfortunately are they translators have a assume that this must be angels like you know angelic beings but many critical examiner's of the text have realized that that would not necessarily be the case what are these messengers do they gather his elect this is of course the entire thesis of the New Testament that God's people go into all the world they preach the gospel they make disciples of the nations the gospel must be first first preached to all the nations Jesus himself said and we have evidence that in fact that all took place and in it it took place with rising frequency toward the end of this timeframe well the the language about coming from east and west north and south again taken from the Old Testament especially Isaiah who speaks of a great in gathering of God's people from all corners of the earth and to the ends of the heaven he talks using that kind of language Jesus on one occasion says they'll come from the east and the west the north and the south sit down in the kingdom of God and there are those last who will be first and the first were last in other words the whole statement really sort of resonates with the idea of the gospel going to the world and God's got like being gathered into his kingdom and that this is part of what's being triggered as it were by the events being described here alright we're gonna take this last paragraph in the last few minutes from the fig tree learn its lesson as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves you know that summer is near so also when you see these things taking place you know that he is near at the very gates I tell you this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away that's a pretty weighty exclamation point don't you agree at the end of what he's just said here so I'm calling this now the timing of the destruction and of course the language that's most important this generation he refers to all of this using the parable of the fig tree there was a species of fig tree that Jesus has in mind here which was rather remarkable in that it would flower and then almost immediately produce fruit I have a cherry tree in my backyard it flowers and then I wait around for a couple of months and go out and pick cherries and they have worms in them invariably you know it's a wonderful experience but I kind of like where a little protein in there it's fine him but anyway these fig trees were a lot more quick on the draw and so the flower was almost just within a few days you would have fruit ripe fruit and Jesus uses that to warn them when you know when you look at the fig tree and see the flowers you know that summer is right around the corner that the fruit is just about there ready to be picked the whole thing stands for the idea that when you begin to see the things I'm describing the abomination of desolation Jerusalem surrounded by armies signs etc all of this when you begin to see you need to take you need to do what I told you earlier head for the hills get out of town don't wait around because this is all going to happen with rapidity that will be breathtaking as indeed it did you know five years before Jerusalem was a pile of rubble no one would have ever believed it five it'd be like looking at New York City and someone saying in five years this is going to be rubble it'd be hard to believe because Jerusalem was a city on that scale not that big but in the ancient world that scale you see it was about an thinkable and yet a scant five years later it was over Daniel speaks of the wing of abominations a wing stands for rapid you know movement and that really was what was happening here so he warns them of this and then he gives them this final assurance this generation will by no means pass away it's introduced with the word a main main I say to you this generation this gained a ah this time frame limited generation up to forty years and it was exactly forty years will by no means pass away pass from the scene of history till all these things how could he make it any more clear how can he say it any more frankly or in it there's nothing obscure about it there's nothing here to interpret it speaks for itself so the verse requires in my opinion an honest interpreter and many have been honest interpreters I'm not the only guy it's come along and given this story but I realize I'm in quite a minority so I you know feel that pressure but nevertheless the honest interpreter must regard all the proceeding as haven't taken place within that generation as indeed it did Jesus adds heaven and earth will pass away my words will by no means pass away that generation passed away John says the world is passing away and all its lusts but he who does the will of God abides forever Jesus says my words will by no means pass away the words of your Sunday school teacher are going to pass away within a few minutes words that we speak to each other just pass away don't they the world is full of words most of them are passing away the the amazing thing about Jesus of Nazareth is he is what one commentator called the eternal contemporary his words don't go away they've never been relegated to the ash heap of history Aristotle has been shown to be wrong multiple times on multiple points Jesus keeps hanging around his words don't pass away I tell you I don't know of anyone except God Almighty who could say such a thing and make it stick one commentator said so the heavens of Jesus time and later times have passed away the Ptolemaic heavens a new heaven has taken their place and men's thought a Copernican heaven of galaxies and immeasurable space the old earth has passed away with its period costumes its clothing and ideas but Jesus words have not passed away the long parade of history has only served to validate them in the beginning was the word the Word was with God and the Word was God and Jesus words haven't passed away either on the subject of jury the judgment that befell Jerusalem or on the subject of how we should live our lives in obedience to him my friends all right Sunday School lesson some see the Olivet discourse as cause for skepticism but it's really cause for confidence that Jesus word is utterly reliable Jesus word is reliable when he said in the Olivet discourse this generation will not pass away his words are reliable when you can your cares upon him because he cares for you his words my friends are reliable trust them it's the word of Christ it's the word of God if Jesus promise of strength and protection to his first followers was reliable his promise to all his followers is equally trustworthy thus it follows that disregard of the word of Christ saying something as blasphemous as oh Jesus got it wrong obviously he just didn't know what he was talking about he had a misconceived idea of the parousia and it was really parousia delay and all of this nonsense is going to be tough to explain for people who stand before the lord of heaven and earth before whom every knee will bow and if I ever have any critical scholars listening to this particular lecture I hope you take that to heart but obedience to the Word of God to the word of Christ means lasting citizenship in his kingdom eternal blessing in his presence and indescribable joy beholding his glory [Music] you

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 7,021

Rating: 4.8195491 out of 5

Keywords: Gospel of Mark, Olivet Discourse, Parousia, Parousia Delay, Bruce Gore, Mark 13, The Second Coming

Id: 9FAc9Vc4gsE

Length: 48min 32sec (2912 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017