A Review of John Murray’s View of the Olivet Discourse — Part 1

Dr. Sam Waldron¹ recently spoke at the Conquering and to Conquer: An Eschatology of Victory conference. The title of the conference piqued my interest in his views on eschatology. I found he accepts Dr. John Murray’s view of the Olivet Discourse as his own (see The Meaning of Matthew 24, Part 1). 

Murray documented his view in a paper, “The Interadventual Period and the Advent: Matthew 24 and 25,” presented to “a School of Theology convened in London in September 1968.” This paper is now in volume 2 of the Collected Writings of John Murray.² Waldron explained his views of Murray’s position in two articles he wrote in 2013 (here and here).

Murray and Waldron’s well-deserved reputations as reformed Christian scholars suggest one should weigh their thoughts carefully. I had not read these articles when I wrote Inmillennialism: Redefining the Last Days, so I was eager to see if they would cause me to change the views I presented there. 

This post will give the first part of my response to Murray’s ideas and Waldron’s explanations.

I like many things in Murray’s work. He holds the Scriptures in high esteem and seeks to harmonize Jesus’ teachings as recorded in the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). His treatment of the phrase “this generation” (Matt 24:34) is honest and accurate.³

Still, Murray’s overall approach is disappointing. He divides the Olivet Discourse into three historical periods: Jesus’ generation, the entire church age, and the end of history. He assigns these periods to sections of the Discourse:

1. Jesus’ generation: the temple’s destruction and the disciples’ questions (Matt 24:1–3)
2. The entire church age: events that would occur between the first coming of Christ and the end of history (Matt 24:4–14)
3. Jesus’ generation: signs of the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem (Matt 24:15–22)
4. The end of history: warnings against being misled about the Second Coming (Matt 24:23–26)
5. The end of history: signs accompanying the Second Coming (Matt 24:27–33)
6. Jesus’ generation: information about the timing of the destruction of the temple (Matt 24:34–35)
7. The end of history: specific information about the timing of the Second Coming (Matt 24:36–51)⁴

Murray develops this outline by comparing Matthew’s account of the Olivet Discourse to Luke’s (Luke 21:5–38).

In this post, I will explain my objections to dividing this passage by chronological periods, either as Murray has done or otherwise. I see unity in Matthew 24: a single subject (the temple’s fall), one audience (the disciples to whom Jesus spoke), and a single period (Jesus’ generation). Murray’s divisions destroy this harmony. 

I prefer to outline this chapter according to markers in the text: 1.) Jesus’ prophecy (Matt 24:1–2), 2.) the disciples’ questions about when this event would happen and the sign(s) that would precede it (Matt 24:3), 3.) Jesus’ answers to their sign question (Matt 24:4–31), 4.) His answers to their when question (Matt 24:32–36), and 5.) His exhortations based on the preceding discussion (Matt 24:37–51).

I discuss these topics at length in my book. Here, I want to focus on my reasons against dividing Matthew 24 into chronological periods.

Continuity of Audience and Subject

My first reason for rejecting Murray’s divisions involves the specified audience and subject. Jesus is speaking to His disciples on Tuesday afternoon of Passion Week, three days before His crucifixion (Matt 27:35). He had entered Jerusalem two days earlier, on Palm Sunday (Matt 21:8). Matthew devotes five chapters (21–25) to Jesus’ words and actions during these three days (i.e., Sunday–Tuesday). During this period, Jesus talked to either the apostate Jews or His disciples, explaining what was coming and how it would affect them.

I will give some representative passages to show the continuity of Jesus’ statements as He leads up to the Olivet Discourse. He uses personal pronouns (you, your, them, and their) to refer to the apostate Jews in the following statements:

1. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’” (Matt 21:13) 
2. Jesus answered and said to them, “I also will ask you one thing, which if you tell Me, I likewise will tell you by what authority I do these things.” (Matt 21:24)
3. Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you. (Matt 21:43) 
4. Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?” (Matt 22:18)
5. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. (Matt 23:13).
6. I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.… See! Your house is left to you desolate. (Matt 23:34–36, 38).⁵

The Pharisees felt the sting of Jesus’ words; they “understood that He was speaking about them” (Matt 21:45). They knew He was foretelling their coming judgment, capped by the temple’s fall.

Jesus’ words to the apostate Jews in the last passage above form a transition between conversations. He foretells how they would persecute His messengers. Then, in the Olivet Discourse, He addresses those messengers (His disciples) about the coming judgment and how it will affect them.

This passage continues the subject Jesus introduced in Matthew 21—the judgment of Israel. It also exhibits continuity of audience—the disciples—a fact Murray’s approach ignores. As Gary DeMar says, Murray’s paper does “not mention Jesus’ use of the second person plural (you) throughout the discourse.”⁶ This is a significant omission.

Here are some examples that show audience continuity:

1. Jesus said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” (Matt 24:2) 
2. Jesus answered and said to them: “Take heed that no one deceives you.… And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled.” (Matt 24:4, 6)
3. Therefore when you see the “abomination of desolation,” spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place … then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. (Matt 24:16)
4. Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There!’ do not believe it.” (Matt 24:23)
5. See, I have told you beforehand. “Therefore if they say to you, ‘Look, He is in the desert!’ … do not believe it.” (Matt 24:25–26) 
6. So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near—at the doors! (Matt 24:33) 
7. Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. (Matt 24:34) 
8. Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming. (Matt 24:42)

In each of these verses, Jesus speaks to the same group. He is teaching His listening disciples what to expect. His personal pronouns create a robust and unifying bond for the passage that is hard to ignore.

Still, Murray alters this continuum. He says Jesus first speaks to and about the disciples standing in front of Him (v. 2), then about those living throughout the church age (vv. 4, 6), then to those who heard Him (v. 16), then to those at the end of history (vv. 23, 25–26), then to those in His generation (v. 34), and then to those at the end of time (v. 42). 

I protest. Nothing in the text shows these changes. Murray takes this approach because of his assumptions about Jesus’ statements (which I hope to discuss in my next post). I suggest a better approach is letting the text’s continuity guide our interpretation.

Sign Sequence

My second objection to Murray’s divisions involves the sequence of the signs Jesus gives. Attempts to divide it into parts, making some refer to AD 70 and others to the end of history, are misguided. This becomes apparent when we encounter the same signs in other passages but in a different order. 

Let’s begin by selecting five signs common to Matthew 24 and Luke 17. The following table⁷ lists them in the order in the texts and gives the time slot in which Murray places them in Matthew 24. “AD 70” refers to signs Murray puts in Jesus’ generation, and “EOH” refers to those he places at the end of history.

In Murray’s divisions of Matthew 24, the housetop saying pertains to AD 70. However, in Luke 17, Jesus speaks of His coming as lightning, and as in the days of Noah—end-of-history events per Murray—then says, “In that day, he who is on the housetop … let him not come down …” (Luke 17:31). 

Luke’s arrangement places one of Murray’s AD 70 signs at the end of history. This is a conflict of signs between two accounts of the same events. No disharmony exists, however, if we take all the signs in both passages to speak of the same events in the same period, as in inmillennialism.⁸

This and That

This discontinuity of audience and subject also appears in Murray’s discussion of Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question about when the temple would fall. They had said, “Tell us, when will these things be?” (Matt 24:3). After giving his list of signs, Jesus says, 

So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near—at the doors! Assuredly, I say to you, this (Gk. houtos) generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away. But of that (Gk. ekeinos) day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. (Matt 24:33–36)

According to Murray, Jesus speaks of two distinct and chronologically distant periods in back-to-back sentences.

Murray explains this interpretation, in part, by appealing to the contrast between verses 34 and 36:

In interpreting verse 34 it is a capital error to overlook the sequence of verse 36 and to fail to construe verse 34 accordingly. This would have made clear to the disciples the distinction between the destruction of Jerusalem … on the more proximate horizon … and the day of his advent, on the other.⁹

Waldron amplifies this observation: “People do not appreciate the contrast that Jesus intends in these verses.” He then appeals to another kind of pronoun:

The contrast in the two different demonstrative pronouns used in verses 34 and 36 respectively must not be overlooked. “These” [houtos] is the immediate demonstrative pronoun used to designate something relatively near at hand. It is appropriately used to describe the relatively near occurrence of all the things associated with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. It is so used throughout the passage (Matt. 23:36; 24:3, 8, 33). “That” [ekeinos] is the remote demonstrative pronoun used to designate something that is relatively distant. It is appropriately used to designate the day and hour of Christ’s coming in glory.¹⁰ 

These analyses do not account for an essential distinction between the things to which “this” and “that” refer: one is a more extended period (generation), and the others are shorter periods (day, hour). The longer could be near, and the shorter could still be remote. 

Consider the following hypothetical conversation:

Jack: When did the Atlanta Braves last win the World Series? In 2022?
Jill: I know it was in this decade, but I’m not sure it was that year.

The decade under consideration was near for Jack and Jill, but the year was remote. This doesn’t mean the remote time was in another era.

I’m no linguist or son of a linguist, but I suspect we can generalize this situation into a rule. When we encounter a “this-that” construction where the “this” is much larger than the “that,” we should assume that the “that” object is part of the “this” object:

Jack lives in this country but not in that state.
Jill shops in this store but not in that department. 

Further, when the objects are similar in size, time, or some other characteristic, we should assume the objects are mutually exclusive:

The Braves won this year, not that year.
Jack lives in this country, not that one.
Jill shops in this store, not that one.

I will be happy for some grammarian to set me straight if this is a false conclusion or needs refinement. And, if it is true, point me to some authority for documentation! 

I assume this tentative rule is true in the Olivet Discourse: the more extended period (generation) was near for the disciples—they were living in it! Still, the unknown shorter periods (day and hour) were remote to them. This doesn’t mean the day and hour were at the end of history, just that they were remote compared to the day and hour in which the disciples were then living. 

The disciples’ writings support this view, for God later revealed the hour to them. John said, “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). The unknown hour Jesus mentioned to the disciples in the Olivet Discourse had come in their generation.

The contrasts between verses 34 and 36 do not support Murray’s proposed divisions for the Olivet Discourse.

Conclusion

Murray and Waldron use other arguments for their divisions of the Olivet Discourse. I will not attempt to address them here. My present purpose is to show that their result—alternating between events in Jesus’ generation and those at the end of history—is untenable.

In my next post, I plan to discuss the assumptions that put Murray and Waldron in a position where they are “compelled to construe”¹¹ these divisions.

1. Waldron is the Academic Dean and Professor of Systematic Theology at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary.
2. John Murray, “The Interadventual Period and the Advent: Matthew 24 and 25,” in Collected Writings of John Murray, vol. 2 (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth, 1977).
3. Murray, “The Interadventual Period,” 391–93.
4. Stan Reeves provided help with the basic structure of this outline.
5. Jesus sometimes addressed His disciples in this section (e.g., Matt 21:21; 22:9). The context makes this audience change clear.
6. Gary DeMar, here and here, has discussed many of the points I will make in the following paragraphs. After writing this and the following post, I became aware of Gary’s excellent discussion of Murray’s paper in Gary DeMar, Prophecy Wars: The Biblical Battle Over the End Times (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2014), 41–73.
7. The idea for this table came from one by Edward E. Stevens, What Happened in A.D. 70? (Bradford, PA: Kingdom Publications, 1997), 18–19. I used it with permission in Michael A. Rogers, Inmillennialism: Redefining the Last Days (Tullahoma, TN: McGahan Publishing House, 2020), 198.
8. Please consider becoming familiar with the inmillennial view of prophecy. You can read a summary version here or tackle the book-length version here.
9. Murray, “The Interadventual Period,” 394.
10. Sam Waldron, “The Meaning of Matthew 24, Part 2,” https://cbtseminary.org/meaning-of-matthew-24-2/
11. Murray, “The Interadventual Period,” 388.