In Matthew 24, the disciples ask Jesus, “…when will these things be, and what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”
The first part of Jesus’ answer has to do with bad things that will happen, but which are not in themselves signs of the end. The signs that are not signs are: false messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, persecutions, apostasy, and false prophets. It is easy to give many examples of these from the early years of Church history. But that is not the point. The point is that false teachers, natural disasters, persecutions, forsaking of the faith by many, and false teachers will characterize history. We will always have these things. They are painful, and Jesus likens them to “the beginning of birth pains,” but they are not signs that the end of the world is near. These things existed in the disciples’ days, and they have existed in every age of Church history up to and including our own. Indeed, some of them have taken a great deal of time to develop – nation rising against nation and the Gospel being preached throughout the whole world, for instance. But the followers of Christ are not to be deceived by false teaching on this subject: “The end is still to come.”
The destruction of Jerusalem is a particularly terrible example of the birth pains Jesus is predicting, and He discusses it in detail, for its own sake – it would be a time of unprecedented suffering – and because of the special significance of Jerusalem in biblical history.
There was to be a warning sign of this calamity: when “you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel.” Those words occur four times in Daniel, where they seem to refer to the desecration of the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes in 168 B.C. Antiochus erected an altar to Zeus over the altar of burnt offering and sacrificed a pig on it, which was the worst possible affront to Judaism, a true “abomination.” But Jesus was not referring to this past event in Matthew 24. He was referring to something like it that would happen before the fall of Jerusalem and would be a warning to His followers to flee the city.
The destruction of Jerusalem would be terrible, but this would still not be the end. Jesus Christ is God. Jesus is the Lord of history. He is the God of detailed circumstance. Nothing has ever happened that has not flowed in the channel that God has dug for it. There have never been any events that have flamed up in spite of God to leave him astonished or confused. The sin of man has reduced the world to an arena of passion and fury. Men tear at each other’s throats. Yet in the midst of the history of which Jesus Christ is Lord, each individual who has believed in Him as the Savior will know the power of His resurrection and will learn that events, however terrible, cannot separate us from the love of God.
This is our God, and this is the word of our God. Wars have come, and they will come again. People will suffer. Men will die. But instead of dismay, we are to serve Jesus faithfully even in the midst of these bad things – until He comes again.
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org