A friend asked me to develop a 15-page summary of inmillennialism, my framework for the interpretation of biblical prophecy. This post is the third part of that summary.1 The next two posts will provide the rest. I plan to then post a downloadable PDF of the entire document.
We started building our model of prophecy in Matthew’s account of the Olivet Discourse. A previous post (here) showed its structure. Jesus foretold the destruction of the Temple. This post looks at Jesus’s answers to the disciples’ two questions about that event.
Jesus’s Answers
Jesus answered the disciples’ questions. He did not embed revelations about a different subject. We do not need special interpretive devices—like elastic time, dual fulfillment, or prophetic perspective—to understand his responses.
The Answers to the Sign Question
We will put Jesus’s signs into four sets. The first set of signs (Matt. 24:4–8) characterized the period between the Olivet Discourse and the Temple’s destruction. These signs were not signs of the end of the (Mosaic) age. They would happen, “but the end is not yet” (Matt. 24:6).
The second set of signs (Matt. 24:9–14) affected the disciples’ ministry during this period. The New Testament shows they suffered Jewish persecution (v. 9; cp. Acts 9:23; 12:3, 11; 13:45; passim). It confirms they saw the apostasy Jesus predicted (vs. 10–13; cp. 2 Tim. 1:15). And, it shows they preached the gospel to all nations (v. 14; cp. Rom. 16:26, et al.).
Jesus’s third set of signs described events closer to the Temple’s fall (Matt. 24:15–26). They included the “great tribulation” (Matt. 24:21). The New Testament does not show the fulfillment of these signs, but reliable historians (Josephus, et al.) confirm they occurred.
Roman armies invaded the land of Israel and produced 3-1/2 years of “great tribulation” (AD 66–70).2 They compassed Jerusalem as Jesus predicted (Luke 21:20). This fulfilled his abomination of desolation prophecy (Matt. 24:15–20). The Lord had told his disciples how to escape this devastation (Matt. 24:22–26). Josephus describes the events that allowed them to obey his commands.3 William Whiston, the translator of Josephus’s works, says the “Jewish Christians fled to the mountains of Perea, and escaped this destruction.”4
Jesus’s use of the superlative degree does not show a change of subjects. He said the “great tribulation” would be “such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Matt. 24:21). Jesus’s “language . . . is appropriated in substance from [Dan. 12:1], and may be regarded as hyperbolical.”5
E. W. Bullinger defined hyperbole as a figure of speech where “more is said than is meant to be literally understood, in order to heighten the sense.”6 Jesus did not expect his hearers to understand him literally.
Such hyperbolic language is a standard prophetic tool. Speaking of God’s judgment in his day, Joel says, “the day of the LORD is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains a great and powerful people; their like has never been before, nor will be again after them through the years of all generations.7 (Joel 2:1–2, ESV; emphasis added)
Moses described the suffering that God would bring in the Exodus. “There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more” (Exod. 11:6).
Jesus’s use of hyperbole was fitting. The Jews suffered to an almost indescribable degree. Josephus provided an eyewitness account of what happened when the Roman armies destroyed the Temple in AD 70. He described the massacres—Jew on Jew, and Roman on Jew—in great detail. He used almost the same language Jesus had used forty years earlier:
It is therefore impossible to go distinctly over every instance of these men’s iniquity. I shall therefore speak my mind here at once briefly:—That neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness that this was, from the beginning of the world.8
Jesus did not mean the “great tribulation” would statistically exceed all other catastrophes. He was using a recognized literary tool to describe suffering in the highest degree. His use of hyperbole does not show he has changed subjects. He is still giving the signs the disciples requested about “these things.” By ignoring hyperbole, existing prophetic models make Scripture contradict itself. There cannot be multiple events that produce the greatest suffering in history.
Jesus’s fourth set of signs (Matt. 24:27–31) focuses on the Temple’s fall itself. They show the covenant significance of this event through standard prophetic imagery. The prophets used lightning (v. 27) to portray God’s judgment against his enemies. When God judged Egypt, the voice of his “thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook” (Psa. 77:18; emphasis added). David used this imagery to describe his deliverance from Saul’s men. God “sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and discomfited them” (2 Sam. 22:15; emphasis added. Cp. Psa. 18:14). In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus applied this imagery to God’s judgment of the Temple.
This judgment would end the Mosaic Age and establish the parousia (Presence) of Christ during the Messianic Age (v. 27). This sign reflects the disciples’ original question—“what shall be the sign of thy parousia?” (Matt. 24:3). The traditional view of existing prophetic models—that parousia means the point-in-time “second coming”—is out of place here.
Jesus said, “Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather” (Matt. 24:28, ESV). The prophets often used this imagery to describe God’s judgment of apostate Israel. Ahijah (1 Kings 14:11), Hosea (Hosea 8:1, ESV), and Jeremiah (Jer. 34:2, 20) did so. Jesus continued this practice in the Olivet Discourse.
Israel’s world would collapse when the Temple fell. Jesus said, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken” (Matt. 24:29). This is also traditional prophetic imagery. “Nearly every expression will be found used of the Lord’s coming in terrible national judgments: as of Babylon (Isa. 13:9–13); of Idumea (Isa. 34:1, 2, 4, 8–10); of Egypt (Ezek. 32:7, 8); compare also Ps 18:7–15; Isa. 24:1, 17–19; Joel 2:10, 11, &c.”9 God had established Israel’s heavens and earth during the Exodus (Isa. 51:15–16). He would obliterate them when the Temple fell.
Jesus said the tribes of “the land of Judea”10 (Gk. gē) would “see” the coming of the Son of Man (Matt. 24:30; cp. Luke 21:23). In Scripture, “seeing” is not just a physical sense. It often means “to understand” or “to perceive” (cf. Isa. 6:10).
The prophets used this “seeing” metaphor in contexts like the Olivet Discourse. Of the end of Egypt’s world, Isaiah said, “Behold, the LORD rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt” (Isaiah 19:1). “Behold” is “an interjection demanding attention, ‘look!’ ‘see!’”11 The Egyptians could not look into the sky and “see” the Lord with their physical eyes. But, they could “understand” that God was there because of the physical phenomena they saw. Their nation lay in ruins. In this manner, the Jews would “see” the Son of Man in the clouds. They would “understand” Jesus had executed vengeance upon them.
As the Temple fell and the Mosaic Age ended, the Son of Man would send forth his angels (Matt. 24:31). The promised Messianic Age gathering would ensue (cf. Gen. 49:10; Psa. 50:5; Isa. 40:11; et al.). Christ would accomplish it through “men-angels, or messengers, the ministers and preachers of the Gospel, whom Christ would call, qualify, and send forth into all the world of the Gentiles, to preach his Gospel, and plant churches there still more, when that at Jerusalem was broken up and dissolved.”12 This gathering would continue throughout the new age of Christ’s parousia.
So, Jesus answered the disciples’ request for signs leading to the Temple’s fall. He did so systematically, starting with general signs and ending with traditional prophetic images to describe the event itself. Nothing shows he changed the subject—all his signs related to the end of the Mosaic Age and the beginning of the Messianic Age. The Temple’s fall would be the distinct demarcation between them.
The Answers to the When Question
Jesus also answered the disciples’ when question (Matt. 24:32–36). The signs he provided would show the approach of the Temple’s fall (Matt. 24:32–33). This event would occur in their generation (Matt. 24:34). This part of his answer provided a broad time boundary. The Jewish heaven and earth would end when the Temple fell (Matt. 24:35). Jesus said he did not know and could not reveal the specific “day and hour” for these events (Matt. 24:36).
Nothing in this answer shifts the subject away from the Temple’s fall.
Conclusion
We have reached the end of the question-and-answer part of the Olivet Discourse. The remainder of Matthew’s account contains Jesus’s warnings based on what he has said so far. Nothing has expanded the subject of conversation beyond the destruction of the Temple and the implications of that event.
The Scriptures also teach us about the resurrection, final judgment, and ultimate redemption of God’s creation. We will show how these events fit into inmillennialism in future posts.
Footnotes
- Part 1 is here, part 2 here.
- Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, trans. William Whiston (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1974).
- Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 2:19:7.
- Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 2:19:6, note.
- Milton S. Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics: A Study of the Most Notable Revelations of God and of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 235.
- E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible Explained and Illustrated (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968), 423. Bullinger did not list Matt. 24:21 as an example of hyperbole.
- The time indicator reads, literally, “till the years of generation and generation” (YLT).
- Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 5.442.
- Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown, Matthew–John in vol. 3 of A Commentary, Critical, Experimental and Practical on the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 194.
- John Gill, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments in The Baptist Commentary Series (Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 1989), 7:294.
- R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament 2 vols. (Chicago: Moody, 1980), 220.
- Gill, “Exposition.”, 7:295.
