📖 Matthew Intensive — Unit 11: The Olivet Discourse

Text: Matthew 24:42

The Olivet Discourse and Three Questions

The burning question about the end of the age has been argued for two thousand years. We all want to know what happens next, and the disciples felt the same. As Jesus and the disciples were leaving the temple, He said that not one stone would be left upon another. On the Mount of Olives they came with three questions (Matthew 24:3): when will the temple be destroyed, what will be the sign of Your coming, and what is the sign of the end of the age? Jesus answered all three, but the answers are woven together so tightly that interpreters still debate which verse belongs to which question. This is the great discourse on the last things, and we should hold it with humility, for it was given less to satisfy our curiosity than to make us ready.

The Temple's Fall

The temple fell in A.D. 70, about forty years after Jesus' prediction, so that part of His answer was fulfilled within a single generation. The Roman legions under Titus surrounded the city and cut every supply line. Inside the walls the people were destroyed by famine, by civil war between rival factions, and by disease. The historian Josephus records starvation so severe that people ate the leather of their shoes and even, in one tragic case, turned to cannibalism. The Second Temple, the heart of Jewish identity, was burned to its foundations; the gold ornaments melted, and soldiers pried apart the very stones to recover it, literally fulfilling the word that not one stone would be left upon another. Hundreds of thousands perished, and tens of thousands were carried off as prisoners, sent to the mines, sold as slaves, or forced to fight as gladiators. For the first-century Jew this was the absolute end of the world as he knew it: the priesthood ceased, the sacrifices ended, and the central place of worship was gone. Today only a portion of the western retaining wall remains, where Jews still come to pray and to place written petitions in the cracks of the stone.

The Signs of the Age

Before that fall and stretching on toward His final coming, Jesus described the character of the whole age. There would be false christs who deceive many, wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes — but these are only the beginning of sorrows, not the end itself. His people would be hated and persecuted, yet "this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14). He spoke of the abomination of desolation and a great tribulation, and finally of the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory, gathering His elect. Interpreters differ over how much of this language pointed to A.D. 70 and how much reaches forward to the final coming, and faithful readers hold different views. What is certain is the lesson of the fig tree: when these things begin, the end is near, and "heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away" (Matthew 24:35).

When Is the End? No One Knows

About the date of His return Jesus said plainly that not even He knew it, but the Father only (Matthew 24:36). That has not stopped people from making predictions for two thousand years, and every one of them has been wrong — every single one. By the Old Testament standard of Deuteronomy 18, a prophet whose prediction fails is a false prophet, so by Scripture's own test these date-setters disqualified themselves. The 2011 prediction of Harold Camping is a modern warning: using an elaborate, homemade numerology to get around the Bible's caution, he convinced thousands that May 21, 2011, would be the day. When nothing happened, he simply moved the date to October. The harm was real and lasting — people drained their retirement savings, abandoned their careers, and suffered deep spiritual disillusionment when the predicted day came and went. Claiming divine authority for a human calculation does not only fail; it wounds the people who trusted it.

The Millennial Positions

Christians who love the very same Bible have long held different views about the thousand years of Revelation 20 and the sequence of end-time events. The premillennial view holds that Christ returns before a coming reign on the earth; the amillennial view understands the thousand years as a picture of Christ's present reign between His two comings; and the postmillennial view expects Christ to return after a long age in which the gospel's influence grows. Sincere, Bible-loving believers have held each of these for centuries, and none of these positions has ever been a test of Christian fellowship. On the central things every view agrees: Jesus Christ will return bodily and visibly, the dead will be raised, and there will be a final judgment. Rather than dividing over the order of events, we do better to stand together on what is certain and to be ready.

What Will Happen on That Day

The first time Jesus came, He came as the suffering Servant of Isaiah — born in a stable, rejected by His own, crucified between two thieves. When He comes again, He will come as a conquering King. The contrast could not be more complete. First Thessalonians 4 gives the clearest picture of that day: the dead in Christ will rise first, then those who are alive will be caught up to join them, all at the sound of the trumpet. The believers in Thessalonica were anxious about loved ones who had died while waiting for that return, and Paul assured them that death is no barrier — those who have died in Christ will not be left behind but will be the first to rise. Scripture also rejects the idea of "soul sleep": the Lord told the thief he would be with Him in Paradise that very day, and Paul says that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. The "sleep" the Bible speaks of is the rest of the body in the grave, not the soul, which remains awake and with God. I remember riding to a cemetery with a funeral director in South Dakota who said proudly, "You know, the crypts we put in the ground last two hundred years" — and I asked him the obvious question: what happens after that? The body is only the mailbox. Once the letter is posted it is already in the sender's hands, and though the mailbox may rust and be replaced, the letter — the real person — is kept safe until the day it is delivered. The trumpet that announces that day carried rich meaning for Jewish ears, for the shofar sounded at Sinai when God came down, at the Jubilee when slaves went free, and at the crowning of kings — presence, liberation, and coronation all at once. C.S. Lewis observed that the second coming splits history into everything before it and everything after, so that this present age is only a kind of preface; we are not yet in the main story.

What We Will Become

There will be astonishing changes when we meet the Lord. We will receive glorified bodies like His resurrection body. He passed through locked doors; He was recognized by His closest friends, and sometimes not, as on the road to Emmaus where two of them walked and talked with Him for miles before their eyes were opened; He ate broiled fish before their eyes (Luke 24:42–43), not because He had to but because He could; and in that same glorified body He was taken up until a cloud received Him out of sight. But something even greater than a glorified body awaits us. First John 3:2 says that when He appears we shall see Him as He is, and we shall be like Him. In the Old Testament no one could look directly upon God; Moses saw only His back, for the glory would have destroyed sinful men. But on that day we will see Him face to face, and I believe we will be able to bear it because we will have been made like Him. Somehow — and this is one of the great mysteries of Scripture — God will make us holy without erasing who we are. He will purify us without deleting us. Our identity, our memory, our freedom: all of it carried through a holiness we cannot yet imagine. How He will do this is a great mystery.

From Humility to Wonder

This is the shape of the whole discourse. It moves from what we cannot know, the date, through what we are promised, the events of that day, to what we can barely imagine, what we shall become. It begins in humility, moves through hope, and closes in wonder. Instead of a date, Jesus gave images of readiness: two men working in the field and two women grinding at the mill on an ordinary day, and in each pair "one will be taken and the other left" (Matthew 24:40–41); they will not see it coming, so He answers not the question they asked but the one they should have asked: Are you ready? And chapter 25 turns it all into one urgent call. The ten virgins teach us to be ready, for the bridegroom was delayed, five had oil and five did not, and the door was shut. The talents teach us to be faithful with whatever we have been given, that we may hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant." And the sheep and the goats show the King judging the nations and saying that whatever was done to the least of His brethren was done to Him. Watch, be faithful, and love — for the King will surely come. As Augustine prayed, "You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You." The face-to-face sight of God is the rest toward which every human longing has unknowingly reached, and the final mystery — that God will make us holy without undoing us — is the wonder we carry home.

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