149. The Second "Coming" ALREADY HAPPENED!

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We need to get to work. We need to live without fear because the same

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Christ who spoke these words with pinpoint accuracy is the one who rules over every moment of every day of every millisecond of your life.

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He sees the trials that you're facing. He sees the battles that you're fighting. He sees the burdens that you're carrying and he stands ready to strengthen you and sustain you and you can know that his promises are true because he was faithful in Matthew 24.

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Everything that he said came true. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 149. The second coming already happened. Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast.

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This show exists to make the most difficult passages in the Bible clear, to dispel dispensational doom and gloomery and to bring common sense back to eschatology and to prod the church of Jesus Christ to live like our king reigns because he does.

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Like he's in control, like he doesn't want us burying our talents in the sand while pilfering the internet for proof of the mark of the beast that's just around the corner.

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This show exists to dismantle the heresy of dispensationalism and I want to attack it with the force of an atom bomb.

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I want to leave nothing but it's toxic sludge for future generations to sift through it as a cautionary tale to say what in the world were they thinking?

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My aim is to obliterate this view so thoroughly that it becomes nothing more than a footnote in church history, a footnote in a chapter that was not so great, a theological relic that we had to discard in order to faithfully move forward into what

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Jesus has called us to. The doom, the gloom, the depression, the defeatism is a stain and a blight upon the church of Jesus Christ and he doesn't call us to those things.

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He calls us to hope, he calls us to work, he calls us to faith, he calls us to perseverance, he does not call us to sit idly by waiting for a

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Wonkavator rapture to zap us out of here and the broadcast is here to bring that good news especially in the realm of eschatology.

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I am not gonna be arguing on the show that the world is getting progressively worse and worse, that Apache helicopters are just around the horizon and they're gonna be used by a

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European antichrist to mow down the citizens of the world. I'm not talking about eschatological fairy tales,

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I'm not talking about Neuralink, World Economic Forum, I make fun of those things but I'm not talking about those things.

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Instead, this show is about a robust biblical exegesis. It's about seeing what the

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Bible really says about eschatology and understanding that Jesus reigns victoriously now, that he will have dominion, that he will spread his kingdom to the very ends of the earth, that he will use our lives in service to him, building his kingdom with the gifts and the opportunities that he's given us and to accomplish that, we're now 149 episodes in but to accomplish that, more recently, we did a series looking at post -millennialism.

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Post -millennialism is the view of the direction of where the world is heading and the world is heading in the direction of more submitted to Jesus, more joyful, all of that.

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If you want to check out that series and I commend it to you with, there's a playlist on our YouTube channel for it and you can go and find that out.

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Now today, we're continuing in our current series which is a series on Revelation where we're seeking to bring clarity to some of the most challenging passages in all of scripture so that you will no longer fear eschatology but you will see it rooted in its historical setting and you will see how these things have been gloriously fulfilled.

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If you're just joining us, let me strongly encourage you to pause this episode and to go back and to watch every single one of the previous 11 in this series.

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They're essential for understanding what we've been talking about and the foundation that we've built.

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We've shown how the entire book of Matthew and especially chapters 21, 22, 23 and 24 are preparing us not for the end of the world but for the imminent collapse of the

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Jews, of the Jewish age, of Jerusalem, of the temple, of the priesthood, how all of that is gonna come collapsing down.

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And so far, we've seen how the signs that Jesus lists like false messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, tribulations, the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation, all of that point to an already occurring event in history and not an event in the distant future.

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That's what we've done so far in the first 11 episodes. If you haven't watched it, go back and watch it and let me know what you think because this view, while it's not new to church history, is new now.

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For the last 200 years, the newcomer on the block has been dispensationalism and they have taught a false hermeneutic.

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They have taught a false view of eschatology. So you may have never heard about the things that I'm talking about and that's okay.

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We've had over 300 new subscribers in the last month. So if you're brand new, go back and watch those episodes and listen to them carefully, explore the concepts that I'm talking about, be a

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Berean, look into the word and see if these things that I'm saying are true. And with that, if you've been with us the whole time, get ready because today we're going to explore how the second coming, and I'm putting that in quotation marks for a reason, how it has already happened.

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Once you understand what coming actually means, and let me be clear,

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I absolutely believe that Jesus is gonna physically return at the end of human history. I'm not saying that he's never returning, that human history is gonna continue going on ad infinitum with no eschatological event in the future.

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That's not what I'm saying. I believe he's gonna come back. I believe he's gonna come in bodily form. I believe he's gonna raise the dead.

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I believe he's gonna judge the living and the dead. I believe he's gonna establish the eternal state. He's gonna give us perfect, glorious bodies with which to live with him forever.

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I believe all of that. But what Matthew 24 is talking about is not that.

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It's not talking about the future bodily coming of Jesus. It's just not. It's talking about his coming in judgment against a wicked city that had rebelled against God for a thousand years, and now, finally, the eschatological chickens are coming home to roost.

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Jerusalem was gonna be destroyed for her covenant rebellion, and today, I'm gonna give you 12 reasons why the second coming, the coming of Jesus in judgment, actually happened in the first century.

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I'm gonna give you 12 lines of cold, hard biblical evidence from the text, and I'm gonna prove it to you.

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But before we begin, letting a little cat out of a very big bag.

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Of the things that Christians are usually divided over, Jesus's incarnational first coming is not one of them.

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In fact, it's generally a point of unity. We all agree that he was born a few years B .C.,

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which, humorously, might suggest that Christ was born before Christ, a rather ironic blight upon poor

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Dionysius Exigus' dating system. Yet, notwithstanding a Scythian error or two, we all agree that Jesus lived to being less than 40 years old.

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He died a horrific death at the hands of the Jews. He rose again visibly and bodily in the city of Jerusalem where he was murdered.

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He ascended into heaven in the early 30s, that first common era. And his ascension into heaven not only ended his first incarnational coming, but it also ushered in his heavenly reign where he sat down on the throne of God to reign over his kingdom, the church, that continues down to this very day.

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Yet, as clear as his first coming has been, there has been an unbelievable amount of confusion on when the second coming was going to occur.

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For instance, some among the full preterist types believe that everything in the New Testament has already happened and that a future bodily coming of Jesus is either unnecessary or, at the very least, was not recorded in the

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Bible so we cannot expect it. I don't believe that. But then on the other end of the eschatological spectrum, in a view that is wildly popular, is the futurist view.

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Those who tend to quibble over whether Jesus' second bodily coming is going to be pre -tribulational, mid -tribulational, or post -tribulational, whether it's going to be an escape from this generation or whether it's just a little ways off.

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What very few, however, seem to recognize is that there are two kinds of comings in the

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Bible. There are the bodily comings where God takes on human form, like when he walks with Adam or when he passes by Moses or when he dances in the fiery furnace or when he comes as our

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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to the Jews in the first century or when he returns in bodily form at the end of human history.

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All of those we affirm. Those are bodily comings of Jesus. But that's not the only kind of coming that we see in the

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Bible. There's another kind of coming, a divine coming of God, no less, where he doesn't come bodily but he actually comes spiritually.

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He comes spiritually in judgment against a wicked nation that we cannot overlook.

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So if we want to understand what coming means, we have to understand what kind of coming it is. And that is the eschatological cat that I want to let out of this end times knapsack that we're dealing with.

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I want us to dive in today into this idea of what kind of coming is

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Jesus prophesying in Matthew 24. And for clarity, I'm going to provide 12 reasons why

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I believe that his second coming, the one that he talks about in Matthew 24, is not a physical bodily coming at the end of human history but it is in fact a spiritual judgment coming against the people of Jerusalem.

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I'm going to give 12 evidence for that and I'm going to give you the most important qualifier that you're going to need before I begin and that is

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I believe in the physical return of Christ. I believe that he will come back in bodily form, that he will give us new spiritual bodies, that he will usher us into the eternal state.

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First Corinthians 15, I believe that. My contention in this episode is that the coming that Jesus refers to is not the end of human history coming but it is a divine judgment coming against the covenant infidelity of the

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Jews. And to support that view, I'm going to give 12 lines of evidence. But before that,

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I think we should read our passage. But immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of the heavens will be shaken and the sign of the son of man will appear in the sky and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn and they will see the son of man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.

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Matthew 24, verse 29 through 30. Now, let's get into our first evidence which is the meaning of immediate.

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Now, many such as eminent New Testament scholar, D .A. Carson suggest a multiple thousand year gap between verse 28 and 29.

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He believes that all the verses one through 28 happened in the fall of Jerusalem. But when we get to Matthew 24, 29, he and that sort of ilk conclude that our

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Lord is not referring to the downfall of Jerusalem anymore, but that Jesus hopscotched 2 ,000 years forward into the modern era without telling anyone that he was doing it.

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We get to verse 28, all of that's in the past. In verse 29, without any warning,

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Jesus says basically, now, all of that withstanding, let me talk to you about the future.

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That suggestion could possibly be reasonable if there was a single solitary shred of evidence to support it, but there's not any.

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And actually, the evidence is insurmountable in the opposite direction. And while I know that reading those passage that we just read a second ago sound like the end of the world, they sound like things that haven't happened yet, we're going to show how the genre of these texts and what they mean in their original context actually proves that they did happen and they happened in the first century.

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Again, the evidence that I'm gonna be showing you today is insurmountable and it begins with a single word, the word immediately.

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Notice how the passages flow. Verse 27, we're gonna go back to verse 27, which is a couple of verses before 29, obviously.

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This is what it says. For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes even to the west, so will the coming of the

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Son of Man be. Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. But immediately after the tribulation of those days,

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Matthew 24, 27 through 29. Now, if you assume a multiple thousand year gap between verse 28 and 29, show me where it's at.

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Show me where Jesus breaks the text and says, you know what, this, verses one through 28, applies to that and verses 29 onward apply to this.

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Show me where the break is because there isn't one. That would be the scholarly equivalent of trying to sell ice to an

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Eskimo. To say it differently, I think that that would be a tough sell because it doesn't exist in the text. But I suppose that it could be done if there were contextual factors right in the text that would lead us, the reader, to understand that Jesus is consciously intending to wax proleptically.

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But there isn't. That cockamamie thesis falls apart quicker than a house made of dampened toilet paper when you consider what the word immediate actually means.

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Immediate doesn't mean a long time into the future. It means what it means, immediate. Now, in addition to the overwhelming proof in last week's episode that the coming that we're talking about happened in the first century, that Matthew 24, 27 through 28 already happened, i .e.,

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we talked about this last week, that he's coming quickly like lightning against the Jews, that the city of Jerusalem is gonna be turned into a heaping pile of dead bodies, and that he used the

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Romans with their eagle, their fowl -like insides, to complete the city's desecration.

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We talked about that last week. So in addition to that, now we need to show how the phrase immediately after those things applies to the first century.

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And it, but just to be clear, it doesn't infuse a magical multi -year leap into the future.

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If the great tribulation, as we talked about last week, happened in the first century, then verse 29 and 30 must also occur in the first century because that's what immediately after means.

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Now, assuming that you're tracking with everything we talked about last week, I'm gonna now press into the meaning of the word immediate.

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And to do that, I wanna look at the language that it was originally written in, which is Greek. The word immediate in the

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Greek language is eutheos. In verse 29, that word is not ambiguous.

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It means quite plainly that something is going to occur without delay, without pause, without a 2 ,000 -year period of gap.

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That's not up for debate. The word is just, that's what it means. It's used everywhere in the

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New Testament to signify actions that occur directly after a preceding event. For example, in Matthew 20, 34,

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Jesus heals two blind men, and eutheos, in that passage, describes how their sight was restored immediately.

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Imagine if Jesus healed two blind men and he said, wait 2 ,000 years and then you'll get your sight back.

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That's the way dispensationals are reading the word immediate in this passage, and it doesn't make sense.

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Here's another example. Peter denies Christ, and immediately after he denied Jesus, the rooster crowed.

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Imagine if Peter's sitting around waiting for the rooster to crow, waiting for the rooster to crow, and then finally

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Jesus comes back and says, oh, don't worry, it's gonna happen in the future several centuries from now.

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That would make no sense of the word. Every time you see this word, eutheos, it means immediate, it means right after.

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So if we proved last week that the great tribulation happened in the first century, there is no other option than this second coming happening in the first century as well.

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You just can't get around it. But wait, some might say that couldn't immediate mean something like soon in God's timing and isn't to the

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Lord a day like 1 ,000 years? And couldn't it be that soon or immediate could actually bring about this 2 ,000 year gap and God's timing isn't that available there inside the meaning of the words?

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And absolutely it's not. This is a favorite move by the dispensationalists to take a word, a common sense word, and to completely redefine it or flatten it out to mean something that it doesn't mean, and then say that they are the ones who are taking the

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Bible literally. That's not literal. For instance, in Mark 118, when Jesus calls Simon Andrew to follow him, they leave their nets immediately.

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Should we assume that they waited for days, months, years before they followed

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Jesus? Is that the way the word immediately works? Is it that God's timing is different than theirs?

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No, that makes no sense. What about Matthew 8, 3, where Jesus cleanses a leper?

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And the text says that the man was healed immediately. Did his skin regenerate over decades?

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In God's timing, clearly not. In every instance where eutheos appears in the

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New Testament, it does not include a delay. So if I proved last week, which

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I think I did, 14 evidences, but if I proved last week that the Great Tribulation has already happened in the first century, there is no wiggle room here.

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There is no option. Immediately means that it happens in the first century. So that's our first evidence.

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And I'm borrowing from last week's episode to say that if that was in the first century, then so is this.

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Now, let us go to our second evidence. Evidence two, all these things.

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Now, before we get to the meat of verses 29 through 31, I need us to recall the sauce that Jesus gives for us in verses 34 through 35.

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He says this, truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

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Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, Matthew 24, 34 through 35.

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Now, we don't have to know mathematics on the par with men like Isaac Newton in order to understand that the number 34 is larger than 29, 30, or 31.

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And we don't require formal training from men like Noam Chomsky to comprehend that all these things means all these things.

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Jesus, when he's saying in verses one through 28, are a part of the all these things.

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But also, 29 through 33 are also a part of these all these things are gonna happen within a single generation.

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We don't need common sense. The text is sensical enough. We don't need a superior education.

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We don't need a seminary degree. We don't need a mathematical degree. Like we said, what we need is courage.

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What we need is courage to believe the Bible. We need courage like Luther and Calvin and Knox to believe what

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Jesus said, even if it's difficult for us to imagine, and especially if it messes with our theological system.

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Let me say it plainly. Verses 29 through 31 happened in the first century because they happened within that generation.

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They are a part of the all these things that Jesus said would happen within a 40 -year window.

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And we have to believe that if we're going to actually believe that Jesus spoke the truth.

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It's unavoidable. It's an unavoidable conclusion that you must come to unless you want to pretzel yourself into a human pretzel.

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This generation means exactly what it means. The Greek word for generation is genea.

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And it's not a theological wild card that can mean whatever you want it to mean. It consistently refers to a specific group of people who are alive at a specific time and who the text is applying to.

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It doesn't mean us. It doesn't mean a people long into the future. It means the people alive at the time that the text was written.

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Matthew 23, 36 uses the exact same word where Jesus says, truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

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And he's referring to the judgment that's gonna come on the Pharisees of Jesus' day and on the

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Jews of Jesus' day for rejecting him, for killing the prophets. And the judgment is gonna be that their temple's going to be destroyed, which it was.

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In the same way, Luke 11, 50 through 51 says, so that the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be charged against this generation.

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In every instance of genea, it refers to Jesus' contemporaries. It doesn't refer to, it isn't, generation doesn't mean a race of people or some spiritual lineage of people in the future like dispensationalists argue.

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They argue that generation in this passage, just because it doesn't fit their framework, in this passage, it must mean race.

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As if Jesus is saying, this race of people, the Jews, are not gonna pass away until all these things take place.

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That's nonsense. That doesn't even get close to what this passage is saying.

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Jesus is not saying that all these things are gonna happen within a generation, and a generation means as long as the

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Jewish people exist, that's not what it means. There's no biblical precedent for genea referring to a generic race of people and a generic time period.

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If Jesus wanted to refer to race, he could have used genos, which actually means race.

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Instead, he used genea, because he was tying his prophecy to that people standing right in front of him and saying that they were gonna be punished.

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All these signs are gonna happen to them. We have to, you have to be really imaginative and really creative to infuse into the text something like what the dispensationals do and think that they're the ones that take the

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Bible literally. It makes no sense. Now, if that's not clear enough, I want you to consider the parallel passage in Matthew, or sorry, in Luke 21, 32.

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This is what he says. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

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Luke's account, as well as Matthew's, doesn't give us room to cherry pick our ideas.

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The all includes everything in the prophetic timeline, from the false Christ, the wars, the rumors of wars, the earthquakes, the famines, the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation.

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All these things are gonna happen in this generation, which is the generation that Jesus was speaking to.

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Any other interpretation is like theological mushrooms or theological peyote.

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It is ridiculous and laughable and theological sophistry. For further evidence of this, we turn to the early church, because the early church actually confirms that this was the accepted translation or the accepted interpretation of this passage.

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For instance, Eusebius, who was the fourth century historian, he clearly understood that all these things were referring to the events surrounding the downfall of Jerusalem in 70

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AD. This is what he wrote. The whole body of the Jewish people was doomed to destruction, and it was in the generation of the apostles that those calamities overtook the

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Jews. Now, forgive me for laughing. I honestly feel like this is so obvious that I don't know how anybody misses it.

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All these things are gonna happen in this generation. That includes the verses we're talking about today. That includes the coming of Jesus in judgment, and it does not mean that he was coming in the future or at the end of the world.

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That's not what the passage means. That's what the text taught. That's what the apostles themselves believed.

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That's what the first century church believed, and there's great consequences if we misinterpret that.

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For instance, dispensationalists will argue that Jesus intended all these things to be fulfilled in the future, but that can't be true, because the very words that Jesus used categorically preclude a distant future fulfillment.

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The phrase this generation, genea, and the phrase all these things leaves no room, no ambiguity, no eschatological sleight of hand.

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This generation doesn't mean thousands of years, and all these things cannot mean some distant time period.

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Jesus deliberately and explicitly tied the entirety of his prophecy to the first century timeframe.

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And here's the issue that I'm pointing out here. If dispensationalists are correct, and the words that Jesus used were meant for a future time, then the actual words that the

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Bible gives to us become utterly meaningless. If Jesus intended a future fulfillment, but he used language that talked about a first century fulfillment, then either he was intentionally misleading people, or he was incapable of expressing himself clearly.

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If that's the case, and they're right, then we have greater problems than a future antichrist.

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We have a Jesus who can't express himself or who misled his disciples in his own words.

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None of those options are consistent with who Jesus is, with the doctrine of Jesus's infallibility.

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If we say that Jesus got this wrong, or that he was imprecise in his language, and it would take 2 ,000 years of theological gymnastics, and it would take the dispensationalists rescuing us from our confusion, then what we're saying is that Jesus isn't trustworthy.

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That his words don't actually mean what they mean. And if Jesus isn't trustworthy, then he's not divine. And if he's not divine, then he's not

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Christ. This is not a small issue. It is a Christological heresy for the dispensationalists to say that the plain meaning of words don't mean what they mean here, because Jesus meant something else.

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It is a heresy, because Jesus doesn't play tricks with us, and he doesn't confuse us on purpose.

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But let's take it one step further. If Jesus misspoke about all these things happening in that generation, if he misspoke about that, or if he lied about that, and he punted these things into the future, that doesn't rescue him from the charge of false prophet.

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It would condemn him. According to Deuteronomy 18 .22, a prophet whose words fail to come true should be stoned to death as a blasphemer.

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And it would mean that Jesus's execution by the Pharisees was a just death for a criminal.

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I want you to let that sink in for a second. If he died justly, if he died as a criminal, if he died as a liar, if he died as a blasphemer, then there's no resurrection, there's no hope, there's no salvation, and you and I would be damned in our sins.

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If they're right, if the dispensationalists are right in the plain reading of these words that their words don't mean what they mean, then

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Jesus was either a lying prophet, or he was a lunatic, or he was an unintelligent moron who couldn't use very basic kindergarten level

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Greek grammar, and he misled us. There is no third option. Either they're right and Jesus is not

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Lord. That's what I'm saying. Or the text doesn't mean what they think it means, and they need to repent of their hermeneutic.

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That is evidence number two, that all these things had to happen in the first century, whether the dispensationalists like it or not.

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Evidence three, the shift in Jesus's communication. Jesus said, but immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

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Matthew 24, 29. Now in the words of Ricky Ricardo, it looks like we've got some explaining to do.

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If we're positing that all these things happened in the first century, that the sun darkened, the moon stopped shining, the stellar luminaries in the sky literally fell out of the heavens, all within a generation of Jesus's speaking, well then we've got some explaining to do.

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But to be fair, that is what I'm saying, but not completely. Like D .A.

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Carson and other scholars, I also think that a switch has occurred in the text. But unlike them,

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I don't think that a switch has happened in the timing, meaning D .A. Carson says that verses one through 28 happened in the past, and verses 29 through 31 happened in the future.

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I don't see that that's the switch. The switch is not a switch of time. The switch is a switch occurring in the genre.

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Jesus is changing the literary style. He's changing the genre.

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For instance, verses three through 28, Jesus is using the kind of straightforward language that you would use when you're speaking to a friend, dialogical language.

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He's answering their questions in a plain, direct way that the disciples accurately recorded and very much understood.

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That form of communication is direct and it's easily discernible, and it's easily discernible for children.

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But as Jesus continues, he shifts his communication from the dialogical to a communication style known as the apocalyptic.

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It's a genre style that we are almost entirely unfamiliar with in our world, but it was a common genre in the ancient world.

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This genre employs visionary, symbolic, and metaphorical language in order to reveal truth about significant, earth -shaking events in very hyperbolic, visionary, symbolic ways.

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The word apocalyptic itself is actually quite funny because it means to reveal.

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So the fact is the apocalyptic genre is not meant to conceal truth. It's not meant to bring about some covering, some hiding, some confusion.

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It's meant to reveal truth, and it's meant to reveal it in a very specific way. It does so through a kaleidoscope of cosmic and earthly and biblical imagery that points to what

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God is doing. And while, again, this form of speech was very common to Jesus's contemporaries, the Old Testament prophets wrote in this genre often, it has become so foreign to modern readers and modern people that this is likely why we misunderstand these passages so severely, because we're just not generally equipped to deal with the apocalyptic genre.

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And when we do, we tend to interpret it in a very flat sort of way where we call it literal, but actually we're stripping it of its literal meaning, and we bring about disastrous results when we do that.

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Now, I do wanna address the dispensational critique that they're the ones who read the

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Bible literally. I can already hear them saying, you're not reading the Bible literally. It says that the sun is gonna go dark and the moon's not gonna give its light and the stars are gonna fall from the sky, and you are saying that it's symbolic.

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You are the one who's messing with the text. I can already hear them saying that. But we need to clarify what the word literal actually means, if we're gonna be literal at all.

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The word literal doesn't mean to take every genre of scripture and flatten it out into the same thing and interpret it as if everything in the

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Bible is dialogic language. It means, literal doesn't mean taking poetry and reading it as if it's a law text and reading apocalyptic genre as if it's a conversational dialogic language.

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We can't flatten every genre of the Bible to be the same thing, because that breaks the rules of grammar and it breaks the rules of language.

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The word literal actually means according to the literature.

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That's what the word literally means, according to the literature. So, and if you wanna be literal, then you have to interpret each passage in light of the rules that govern that specific genre.

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When we read prose, we need to follow the kinds of rules and conventions that are normal to prose.

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When we read poetry, we need to read it like it's poetry, with all of its imagery and metaphors and similes and personifications.

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And when we read apocalyptic literature, we need to interpret it through the lens of symbolic, visionary, and often hyperbolic nature, because that is the way the genre is meant to be interpreted.

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Dispensationalists flatten all of that out and read everything woodenly. They flatten every genre into a monolithic style of interpretation, as though poetry and parables and prophecy are all the same kind of literature, and we must interpret all of them in the exact same way.

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The apocalyptic genre uses symbols, visions, personifications, and immaterial realities to represent physical phenomenon that is happening.

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It's communicating literal truths to us through visionary means.

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This means that if you want to understand the apocalyptic genre rightly, you have to embrace the genre with all of its symbolic framework, instead of forcing it into a rigid, overly simplistic mold.

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Let me spell it out. When Jesus describes the sun going dark and the moon not giving its light and the stars falling from the sky, he is not speaking of literal things that are going to happen in the sky.

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He is speaking the language of apocalyptic symbolism. So you need to understand what the sun being dark means.

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You need to understand what the moon not giving its light means. What does it mean when the stars fall from the sky? That's not a weather report from the

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National Weather Service saying, hey, tomorrow we're going to have a chance of the sun falling out of the sky. That's not what it means.

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It's not a weather report. It's vivid. It's symbolic. It is a proclamation of God's judgment.

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First century Jews would have understood this. They would have known that when Jesus is talking about the sun going dark, the moon not giving its light, the stars falling from the sky, that Jesus is quoting from Old Testament passages that were employing apocalyptic literature.

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And they would have understood that you have to, if you're going to understand these passages, interpret them not wittily, not literalistically, but truly, literally, according to the genre.

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They would have recognized that this language was used in the Bible to describe the downfall of nations, the upheaval of countries, the issuance of divine judgment.

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Whenever you see stuff going on in the sky in the Old Testament, like astronomical, what

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R .C. Sproul calls astronomical perturbations, whenever you see that, we're not talking about literal cosmic events.

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We're talking about literal divine judgment. Now, this genre shift that Jesus goes through, again, verses one through 28, dialogical, conversational

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Greek. That's what Jesus is speaking to his disciples. But in 29, it changes.

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And that genre shift shouldn't surprise anyone at all who's familiar with Jesus's teaching style because he uses dynamic language.

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He uses different styles and genres all over the place. He frequently employed hyperbolic language to make a point, emphasizing the seriousness of the situation rather than providing a literal description.

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For example, Matthew 5, 29 through 30, Jesus tells his audience to gouge their own eyeballs out or to cut their own hands off if it causes them to sin.

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Should we take that literally? Hey, dispensational brother, have you ever sinned by lust?

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Why are you walking around with two eyes? Why didn't you gouge one of them out? Have you ever, as a child in a store, saw a piece of bubblegum that you wanted and stuck it in your pocket?

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Why didn't your mother, as soon as you got home, chop your hand off? Better for you to enter into heaven with one hand instead of going into hell with both.

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I mean, that's what Jesus said, right? Of course, Jesus is not meaning that if you lust, that you wanna gouge your eye out.

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He's using hyperbole to describe the radical nature of how offensive sin is to God and how necessary it is for you to repent.

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Here's another one. In Matthew 17, 20, when Jesus says that if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, then you can move mountains.

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I've not seen a single person rearranging the Rocky Mountains lately. Just with enough faith,

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I'm gonna move this mountain over here and that mountain over there. I've not seen anything like that. Again, the point is not about mountain moving.

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The point is about having faith, genuine faith, that believes the promises of God. The same rhetorical style is evident in Jesus' apocalyptic discourse.

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When he says that the sun will darken, the moon won't give its light, the stars are gonna fall from the sky, he's using the cosmic equivalent of cut off your hand and gouge out your eye to tell his people that the judgment of Jerusalem is coming.

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He's using imagery, he's using symbolism, and he's using very, very intense language to show that they need to pay attention because the judgment event is coming.

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The imagery is supposed to be arresting. It's not meant to be taken in a wooden and literalistic way.

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So what we've shown is that every two -eyed and two -handed dispensationalist, while they say they take the

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Bible literally, hasn't. And we've also seen how Jesus was not using these passages to tell us to literally cut off our hands and gouge out our eyes.

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He's using them to prove a point of the significance of those things. Now, for first century

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Jews, this kind of language wasn't uncommon. It was deeply rooted in their cultural and their theological understanding of divine judgment.

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The Old Testament prophets frequently used apocalyptic imagery to describe the downfall of nations.

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For instance, I'm gonna get into this a little bit more later, but I'm gonna give you a teaser now. Isaiah 13 .10 says this, and by the way, just so you know the historical context,

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Isaiah 13 .10 is talking about the downfall of Babylon, which happened hundreds of years before Jesus came.

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This is what Isaiah 13 .10 says. For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their light.

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The sun will be dark when it rises and the moon will not shed its light. Is Ezekiel being literal?

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Did the sun stop shining? Did the moon not give its light? Did the stars fall from the sky when Babylon was destroyed?

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No, there's no historical evidence whatsoever that that actually happened.

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And by the way, if the sun really stopped giving its light when

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Babylon was destroyed by God, do you think the solar system would still be here? Do you think you and I would be alive?

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Do you think photosynthesis would still be happening if the sun had literally stopped giving its light?

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It makes no sense. Here's another example with very similar language that's talking about the downfall of Egypt.

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So here's another country. When Egypt is destroyed, here's the way that the prophets describe it.

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When I extinguish you, I will cover the heavens and darken their stars.

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I will cover the sun with a cloud and the moon will not give its light. Again, when

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Egypt is destroyed, things are happening in the skies. When Babylon is destroyed, things are happening in the skies.

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This is the tradition. This language is what Jesus is employing in Matthew 24.

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He's not saying that the sun's not gonna give its light. Actually, the stars are really gonna fall out of the sky.

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That doesn't make any sense. They're still there. The people of the first century understood that when

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Jesus spoke of the sun darkening or the moon not giving its light or the stars falling out of the sky, he wasn't describing literalistic celestial calamities, but he was talking in a well -known genre, the apocalyptic genre.

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He was signifying that a nation was gonna fall. Every time the sun and the moon and the stars do crazy things in the sky, every time, every time, show me an example where it's not true.

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Every time it's God saying that this nation or that nation is getting ready to fall.

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He does it with Babylon. He does it with Egypt. He does it with Tyre. He does it with Sidon. He does it with Assyria. He does it with Edom. It's like seven times in the

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Old Testament where this kind of language is used. And guess what? The sun didn't literally fall out of the sky seven times.

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The stars didn't fall. And then all of a sudden, after Egypt and Assyria and Tyre, after all these nations were destroyed, they jumped back up.

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That's not what it means. It means judgment day is coming.

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And when Jesus does this language in Matthew 24, he's saying that judgment is coming upon the

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Jews. His words were a warning that the judgment that they had read about in the prophets that had been prophesied for hundreds of years was now coming.

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The trigger was getting ready to be pulled and it was going to hit them. And let me just, before we close off on this point, give you one more example of how

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I'm gonna prove my point. Jesus switches his language in the same way that a husband might switch his language when he's talking to his wife.

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Imagine a husband and a wife are discussing their dinner plans and they're discussing in dialogical communication.

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The husband is going over options with his wife. He's assessing her current mood for various styles of food that exist within their zip code.

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And then after a few minutes of this matrimonial dialogue, the husband finally decides on the appropriate option to satisfy his hunger and to fulfill his wife's wishes.

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All of that was done with very normal wooden dialogical language.

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But then once the decision was made, the husband switches in a moment to a different kind of linguistic genre to make a profound point of emphasis.

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Imagine after they decide which restaurant, he says, great, we gotta go now because my stomach is eating itself.

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That's also normal language for a man to say when he's hungry, but it's not wooden literal language like the same way that dialogical language is.

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He is not, this is not the same kind of language that evaluates the merits of Japanese food over Pad Thai.

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And if his wife astonishingly misses the genre switch, she might be inclined to interpret her words like an average dispensationalist saying, oh no, my husband is literally going through a stomach eating disorder.

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How can we think about food at a time like this? We've got to get him to the hospital immediately. In a moment of real stupidity and neurotic dullness, she would have missed the literal thing that her husband was saying.

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He wasn't claiming to have a stomach munching infection. He was claiming that he's really hungry and he wants to go right now.

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He wants to go immediately, which is exactly what Jesus is doing. The man in this example switched the genre to emphasize the urgency of his mood, to give variety in his speech, which makes language beautiful and rich.

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This is precisely what Jesus is doing in Matthew 24. And this is why dispensationalists kill good language.

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They kill good literature. They murder good genres of literature in order to flatten it all out and make it mean the same thing.

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And they behave just like that dunder -headed wife in the analogy who can't even comprehend that her husband is saying that he's hungry.

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In the same way, they look at what Jesus is saying and they can't even comprehend that he's saying that judgment is coming upon Jerusalem.

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They think that all the stars are gonna fall out of the sky and because that hasn't happened, then clearly his second coming hasn't happened.

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You fool. That's not what Jesus is saying and I hope that you see it now.

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He's shifting away from straightforward prose to apocalyptic imagery, not to confuse you, but to emphasize the magnitude of the judgment that is coming, the urgency of the judgment is coming.

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The sun, the moon, and the stars are not literally gonna fall out of the sky. They are literally telling the story of Jerusalem's downfall.

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We are watching in the heavens in Matthew 24. Them share the story that Jerusalem is doomed.

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That is evidence number three. Evidence four, the biblical use of sun, moon, and stars as apocalyptic imagery.

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Now, building on the back of what we just said in the evidence before, we're gonna take it now a step further and show how when

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Jesus uses apocalyptic imagery, he's talking about the downfall of Jerusalem. We're gonna show from the

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Old Testament more examples just so that I can really press this home because I don't want anyone to be confused.

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I do laugh and make fun of the sort of literalistic hermeneutic of the dispensationalist, but at the end of the day,

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I hate the theological system. I love the person. I want you, if you're a dispensational watching,

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I want you to understand the truth. That's why I'm doing this. I make fun of the system of interpretation.

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I'm not making fun of you. I want you to understand. So that's why I'm gonna lay on the evidence here just a little bit thick, and we're gonna begin with how

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Jesus talks about this in Matthew 24. When he employs apocalyptic language in Matthew 24, he's not innovating.

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He's drawing from a long standing tradition of prophetic judgment.

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Language of the stars falling and the sun being darkened and the heavens shaking would have been immediately recognized by his audience as symbolic markers of national judgment.

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And they probably would have even known because they knew their Bibles better than we do exactly which verses that Jesus was quoting from.

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They would have known that he's saying that covenant judgment is coming upon Jerusalem in AD 70. That would have been so clear to his disciples.

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This is again, Jesus is not predicting cosmic disaster. He's not giving modern futurist an excuse to buy a telescope so that they can watch for these events to happen in the stars.

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He's talking about the language of judgment. He's using the rich imagery that is used all throughout the scriptures to declare that judgment is coming on the rebels.

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And in that case, the judgment is ultimate because now God is signaling into the heavens.

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When God threatens judgment upon a nation, sometimes that nation can repent and then God will relent or God will forgive them like Nineveh.

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Nineveh was a nation that God was going to destroy and he sent Jonah the prophet.

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Jonah eventually did go and preach the gospel and then God forgave them. But when

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God signals the judgment in the heavens, there is no room for repentance.

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It's over. You've now passed the point of repentance. You can't repent. It's going to happen.

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Now that doesn't mean that some of the Jews couldn't repent and be saved. They were, but all I'm saying is that the judgment

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God prophesies here in the flesh in Matthew 24 is now certain.

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Jerusalem, which was the center of God's old covenant promises was going to fall.

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Now, second thing I want to describe in this section is the theological role of the sun, the moon, and the stars because I think we can get what

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Jesus is saying here in Matthew 24, but we also need to understand what the sun, the moon, and the stars actually are in the

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Bible. Because if we understand that, then it will give us such a clearer view of why.

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Why does God show the destruction of nations in the sky? Why does he apocalypticly describe it through the sun not giving its light and the moon not giving its light and the stars falling from the sky?

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Why does God describe it that way? Well, we need to understand the theological role of the sun and the moon and the stars.

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In the first chapter of Genesis, God established a cadre of rulers. Rulers who were going to rule over various different realms that he had given to them.

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For instance, he installed the sun and the moon and the stars to rule over the heavens, the birds to rule over the sky, the fish to rule over the seas, and man to rule over the land.

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These spheres of rulership were endowed by God. And even though the birds and the fish and the celestial objects do not contain the same kind of moral reasoning as human beings, they're nonetheless called rulers.

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They're given authority to rule over particular spheres and they're expected to obey

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Yahweh in the way that they rule over their spheres. The sun and the moon and the stars are supposed to obey him in the heavens and the birds are supposed to obey him in the skies and the fish are supposed to obey him in the waters and the man is supposed to obey him on the dry land.

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And when it comes to obedience, the heavens, the cosmic kings and queens, the sun, the moon, and the stars, they obey

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God. The sun always keeps its orbit. The moons always keeps its orbit.

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On day four, God filled the cosmos with these celestial rulers, these kings, and he gave them authority to govern both the day and the night and they obey him.

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They're not independent agents. They obey the sovereign order that God gave them. They obey everything that he said.

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Now, when you think about the birds, they always obey him. They fly and they do their bird stuff. If you think about the fish, they do what

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God said for them to do. They do their fish stuff. But when it comes to Adam, the man, he's the only ruler that God installed who did not obey him.

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The sun, the moon, and the stars obeyed the counsels of God. The birds and the fish obeyed the counsels of God.

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But Adam, who was designed to be the chief ruler of all the rulers,

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Adam was designed to be the king of the kings, he doesn't obey

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God. Now, in addition to Adam's disobedience, which is an important point that all the other rulers obeyed

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God, but he didn't. We'll come back to that in a moment. It's also important to point out really quickly that the

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Bible describes these planets, these suns, these stars, all of them, describes them as children, as people, describes them as sons of God.

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It gives them human personalities and it describes them as being zealous for the things of God.

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And with that, what happens when humanity, the pinnacle of God's creation, rebels against their creator?

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Well, all the other rulers turn against him. Is it any wonder that the animals now begin turning on man and attacking man?

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Is it any wonder that the fish and the birds turn on him and are afraid of him? Is it any wonder that the sun and the moon and the stars now despise man?

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Because they always obey God, but man doesn't. And when human civilizations become so corrupt, so immoral, so despicable, where God is ready to destroy them, in the apocalyptic genre, their anger, their frustration, their vengeance against man is that they turn away from him.

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The sun refuses to shine his light on them. The moon allows humans to live in utter darkness.

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The stars run away from man. Why? Because the sun and the moon and the stars always obey

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God. And when human societies and civilizations rebel against God, the skies get angry.

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They don't shine their light and they don't give their photons and the stars literally run away because they are signifying judgment.

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The sun doesn't give his light because he's saying, you have now been abandoned to God. I obeyed

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God, you didn't, I'm gonna abandon you. The moon not giving its light is abandoning people in their darkness.

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The stars running away from humans in the sky, metaphorically speaking, is the stars saying, you are damned and I refuse to help you.

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This is a symbolic description of judgment. All the other rulers of God were created to obey him and they did, but when humans disobey, they abandon us.

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They turn their back on us. They quit shining on us. They run away from us. That is why the sun and the moon and the stars in apocalyptic literature go dark because they're abandoning us to our destruction.

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Now that we understand that and we understand that Jesus's words in Matthew 24 is using the exact same kind of language, talking about the exact same kind of cosmic anger and cosmic abandonment.

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Now we need to look at the prophets and show how they repeatedly use the same themes, how they describe these powerful human nations that are falling under God's judgment through astronomical perturbations.

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This pattern shows up repeatedly in the Old Testament and it's always connected to God acting decisively to destroy a human people.

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The celestial rulers described in Genesis as sun, moon and stars are the servants of Yahweh and they will not aid and abet in human rebellion.

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All right, example number one, Egypt. In Ezekiel, God uses powerful imagery to describe the judgment that is gonna come on Egypt.

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Sun, moon and stars and all of that. This is what he says, when I extinguish you, I will cover the heavens and darken their stars and I will cover the sun with a cloud and the moon will not give its light.

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Ezekiel 32, seven through eight. There you have the darkening of the sun in connection with the downfall of Egypt.

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Isaiah echoes this exact same sentiment when we're talking about Egypt. He says, behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and is about to come to Egypt.

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The idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence, Isaiah 19. The picture here is not of God surfboarding down from heaven on top of a cloud.

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The image is one of God coming in fury, God coming in a disaster, in a dramatic way.

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God is coming in judgment against the rebellious nation, Egypt, the cosmic kings in the heavens have turned their back on the kings and queens of earth and Egypt will meet its doom.

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That's one example. Now, let's look at another example in the nation of Assyria. Assyria's downfall is described with equally dramatic language in the book of Nahum.

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This is what it says. The mountains quake because of him and the hills dissolve. Indeed, the earth is upheaved by his presence,

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Nahum chapter one, verses three through six. What it's saying is, imagine that you are an empire that thinks you're so strong, that you're so unshakable like a mountain, yet God is gonna bring judgment so strong that all of the mountains quake and all of the hills dissolve before him.

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This is not literal language. This is saying, you Assyrian king, you think you're so strong,

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I'm the one who can snap my fingers and make the mountains plains. We have no history of actual literal earthquakes that happened at the downfall of Assyria.

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We have no evidence of actual mountains being flattened down into valleys, and we have no evidence of hills actually melting.

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God is saying these things in an apocalyptic way. Of course,

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God could do these things literally, but the mountain ranges are still there. The hills are still there, but Assyria isn't.

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And that ought to teach us something about what God is saying. He's saying it in a very poetic way, that Assyria is coming before the almighty

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God who is going to destroy her. The same thing happens when we talk about Babylon. Babylon, which was one of the greatest empires in history, this is what

01:00:56

God says about her. For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their light.

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The sun will be dark when it rises. The moon will not shed its light, Isaiah 13, nine through 10. Babylon's dominance is described as light, a light for the world, and yet God's judgment is gonna bring their light to an end.

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Here, the celestial kings, the sun, the moon, and the stars are withdrawing their light from Babylon because God has abandoned her to destruction.

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Their refusal to shine in a way like Nebuchadnezzar had before, where they're shining for the glory of God, their refusal to do that has shown

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God that they are disloyal and that they are rebellious and God is going to bring them to disaster.

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Babylon's world was over and even the heavens are joining in in the declaration of God's judgment.

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Here's another nation, Edom. Edom's destruction is described with the exact same apocalyptic language as well.

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In Isaiah 34, four through five, it says, all the hosts of heaven will wear away and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll.

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All their hosts will also wither away, Isaiah 34, four through five. We know for a fact that Edom was destroyed.

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We know when it was destroyed, why it was destroyed, how it was destroyed, and who destroyed it. But what we don't see is when

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Edom was destroyed, that God literally rolled up the sky like a scroll and put the sky on a bookshelf.

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That would end human life. What we have here is apocalyptic imagery.

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Edom is falling and the stars in the sky are showing her judgment in the heavens apocalypticly, not actually.

01:02:49

Because if you hold to the fact that these are actual events, then they didn't happen.

01:02:55

When Edom was destroyed, the sky was not rolled up like a scroll. When Assyria was destroyed, the mountains did not melt.

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When Egypt was destroyed, the stars did not fall from the sky. These are apocalyptic symbols that are demonstrating the downfall of these nations, not communicating physical, literal phenomena.

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That's evidence number four. Evidence five, Jesus quoting Joel and Amos.

01:03:26

The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 was not just another tragic event in an otherwise normal history.

01:03:32

It marked the climax of God's covenant judgment upon a covenant people who were defying the covenant terms.

01:03:40

Jesus drives this home in Matthew 24 by quoting the prophetic judgment language of Joel and Amos, tying their warnings directly to his generation.

01:03:53

For instance, Joel chapter two speaks both of judgment and of restoration, the outpouring of God's spirit in the new covenant, which was fulfilled at Pentecost, and the destruction of the covenant -breaking nation, which was fulfilled in AD 70.

01:04:07

Joel 2, 10 through 11 describes cosmic upheaval as symbolic of God's judgment.

01:04:12

This is what he says. The earth quakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and the moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness.

01:04:22

Now, Jesus is applying this imagery in Matthew 24, 29 and declaring it directly to his contemporaries by saying this, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky.

01:04:35

Again, not literal, not cosmic, not actual, but symbolic language of God's judgment.

01:04:41

The heavens trembling reflects the collapse of the old covenant order. And just so we know, and gosh, we don't have time to get into it right now, but Joel is explicitly talking about the destruction of Jerusalem.

01:04:54

Isaiah was talking about the destruction of Babylon and Assyria. Ezekiel was talking about the destruction of Egypt.

01:05:02

But Joel is a post -exilic prophet who was talking about the destruction of Jerusalem.

01:05:08

The whole book is about Judah. The whole book is about what's going to happen to Judah. And if you read chapter two, it is astounding because in one breath, the prophet says that this event is going to happen when the spirit of God is poured out on men.

01:05:28

And Peter in Acts chapter two says that that happened at Pentecost, that the spirit of God was poured out on men.

01:05:34

So therefore, he even tells the people that Joel's prophecy is coming true right in front of their very eyes.

01:05:40

But if you keep reading in Joel, it's not just about the spirit being poured out on the elect.

01:05:48

You see that he's talking about armies that are surrounding the city, tearing down the walls, climbing over the walls, bringing their swords into the city, killing the

01:05:57

Judeans. Joel chapter two is saying that cosmic things are happening in the sky because the old covenant people

01:06:06

Judah are gonna be destroyed by God. But just before that happens,

01:06:12

God's gonna save his elect. And the evidence that he's gonna save his elect and the evidence that he's going to damn the reprobate

01:06:20

Jews is the spirit of God being poured out on his people.

01:06:27

He was marking his people or the one that have the spirit, the others, the

01:06:32

Jews, that God was abandoning to destruction. The ones that the sun wasn't gonna shine their light on, the ones that the moon was gonna ignore, the ones that the stars were gonna run away from, those

01:06:41

Jews of the first century were doomed. That is what Joel is saying. To say otherwise is to ignore the message of Joel.

01:06:49

But Jesus doesn't just quote Joel. He also alludes to Amos 8, 9, which is a proclamation of judgment upon Israel.

01:06:57

Amos says this, it will come about in that day, declares the Lord, that I will make the sun go down at noon and I will make the earth dark in broad daylight.

01:07:08

Again, all of these passages that we're reading is not that the sun left the sky seven or eight different times in the

01:07:17

Old Testament. It's just showing us that God, when he destroys Israel, when he destroys

01:07:22

Tyre, when he destroys Sidon, when he destroys Edom, when he destroys Babylon, when he destroys

01:07:28

Assyria, when he destroys Judah, he signals it in the heavens. And Jesus deliberately and explicitly quotes from Joel and alludes to Amos 9 when he makes this prediction, which means that Jesus is telling his contemporaries that what

01:07:46

Amos and what Joel prophesied about concerning the people of Israel and Judah was going to happen in that very generation.

01:07:56

That's evidence number five. Evidence six, the shaking of the old Jerusalem and the rise of the new

01:08:02

Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 was not just a historical whoopsie.

01:08:09

It was the ultimate shaking of the old covenant world to bring about a new covenant world.

01:08:17

It was God shaking almost like if you've ever been to one of those little places that has the little water trough and you get the sieve and you put the dirt in it and you shake it and all of the dirt falls out and the little gold or pyrite and all of the precious stones that they secretly stuff into the bags, it's what remains in the sieve and everything else falls out.

01:08:43

God is going to shake Jerusalem and all of the sand, all of the dust, all of the chaff is gonna fall through the sieve's screen holes, but his people are gonna stay and they're gonna remain and they're gonna be his.

01:09:02

He is going to shake things up in the first century, which is why

01:09:07

Jesus in Matthew 24 even mentions that shaking language. This language is clear and it divides and this language is clear and it points all the way back in redemptive history, marking the end of the temple, the end of the sacrifice, the end of the priesthood and the beginning of Jesus's unshakeable kingdom and the beginning of the new covenant world and the end of the old covenant order.

01:09:31

And we see this in the book of Hebrews. To understand the significance of this event, we have to turn to Hebrews because it's the clearest passage in the

01:09:40

Bible that talks about these things. Hebrews talks about the explicit shaking that happened in the old covenant world when

01:09:47

God descended down upon Mount Sinai and quaked and shook and moved the earth in Hebrews 12, 26 through 28, the author of Hebrews says this, and his voice shook the earth.

01:09:59

Then, that's Mount Sinai. But now, he has promised saying yet once more,

01:10:08

I will shake not only the earth but also heaven. This expression yet once more denotes the removing of those things which can be shaken as of created things so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.

01:10:21

Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude.

01:10:26

What Hebrews is saying and what Jesus is saying in Matthew 24 with the shaking of the heavens is that he is come again to shake the earth.

01:10:35

That's what his purpose was. Just like God, when he descended down on Mount Sinai, when the Israelites became

01:10:41

Israelites, when they were brought into covenant relationship with Yahweh, when they were turned from rebels and vagabonds and wanderers into covenant people was at Mount Sinai and there the earth quaked and the earth shook and the mountain itself trembled.

01:11:00

Why? Because God was shaking covenantally so that those things that would remain would be his and those things that fell through would not be his.

01:11:10

Like the tribe of Korah who fell through the earth instead of staying atop

01:11:15

God's covenantal sieve. Well, in the same way, Hebrews is saying that the same way

01:11:23

God shook the earth in the Exodus at Mount Sinai is the same way that he's shaking the earth now.

01:11:33

Hebrews is pointing to a greater shaking, a shaking that is gonna remove the things of old. It's gonna remove the things which can be shaken, which is the old covenant temple, the old covenant sacrifices, the old covenant worship, the old covenant priesthood.

01:11:46

All of those things were temporary. They were pointing forward to Jesus, but they were never meant to be permanent.

01:11:52

They were shakable things and they got shook. The shaking culminated in those things that could not last forever falling away, which is why the temple fell away because it gave way to a better temple.

01:12:10

It's why the sacrificial system fell away because it gave way to a better sacrifice. It's why the priesthood fell away because it gave way to a better priest.

01:12:18

In Jesus, this is the whole point of the book of Hebrews. In Jesus, the true and better has come.

01:12:25

And all those old temporary things now fall down through God's covenantal sieve.

01:12:32

That is why Jesus in Matthew 24 says that he came to shake the world.

01:12:40

Jesus predicted this shaking in Matthew 24, 29 through 30, when he said, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

01:12:56

And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the tribes of the earth will mourn. Jesus is picking up on Sinaitic language.

01:13:05

He's picking up on the language that he will inspire the writer of Hebrews to eventually write. This covenant shaking has come.

01:13:13

Isaiah 13, 10, Joel 2, 10, which symbolically described the end of the old covenant world, it has come.

01:13:21

The sun, the moon, and the stars representing the governing authorities of the old covenant, the priests, the rulers, and the elders, they were going to be shaken.

01:13:30

The Jerusalem temple, shaken. And the only thing that was left is what was unshakable, which

01:13:38

Hebrews says is the kingdom of Jesus. The kingdom of Jesus is that thing that cannot be shaken, that will last forever.

01:13:46

It is the full and permanent expression and vehicle of God's redemption on earth.

01:13:54

And we have come into that kingdom, a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a kingdom that cannot collapse.

01:14:02

When Jesus says in Matthew 24 that he came to shake the heavens and shake the earth, he meant that he came to destroy the old covenant and to replace it with a covenant that can not be shaken.

01:14:15

Brothers and sisters, that is where we live in today. We're not waiting for a seismic earthquake to happen in the sky, where that's a symbol of somehow of the end of the world.

01:14:30

The skies shook, the sun, the moon, and the stars fell because God was shaking the old covenant system away.

01:14:40

Evidence seven, the ancients' understanding of astronomical perturbations.

01:14:47

Now to grasp the meaning of Jesus's words in Matthew 24, 29 through 30, we have to situate them within the context of the second temple period.

01:14:57

This is a period that began when Ezra and Nehemiah in that era where the temple was rebuilt, remember the first temple, the

01:15:05

Solomonic temple, was destroyed in 586 BC. After the exile, they rebuilt the temple, that was the

01:15:11

Ezra -Nehemiah temple, and that temple, along with some upgrades that Herod brought to it in the first century, was the temple that Jesus and his disciples worshiped at.

01:15:22

It was that temple that had lasted for 500 years that eventually was destroyed in AD 70.

01:15:29

It was this period from BC 400 to AD 70, that's called the second temple period.

01:15:37

And this period of time is a period of rich Jewish writings, like First Enoch and the

01:15:43

Sibyllian Oracles and some others, that are filled with apocalyptic imagery. They're filled with the same things that we saw in Isaiah and Ezekiel and Nahum and all of those other passages.

01:15:54

They're filled with these passages of things that are going on in the heavens and things that are going on on the earth.

01:16:01

Now, what we're gonna see is from a few examples, I'm gonna quote

01:16:06

First Enoch, I'm gonna quote the Sibyllian Oracles, I'm gonna quote Josephus, I'm gonna quote Philo, I'm gonna quote, and I'm even gonna point to what the

01:16:13

Romans believed at that time. What we're going to see in this particular section is that not only did the ancient way of viewing it in the

01:16:23

Old Testament and in Genesis and in Matthew 24 and all these biblical writings,

01:16:29

I'm also gonna show in this section how this was just the way that the people thought about the world.

01:16:36

They thought that when the signs were happening in the skies, it was portending doom upon the earth.

01:16:44

So that's what we're gonna accomplish here and I wanna begin with First Enoch. In First Enoch chapter 80 verses four through seven, we read about the luminaries in the sky that are altering their courses.

01:16:56

This is what Enoch says. "'Many chiefs of the stars shall err "'and these shall alter their orbits and tasks "'and not appear at the times prescribed to them.'"

01:17:07

In the context of this passage, Enoch is talking about judgment. He's saying that the skies are going to actually be altered in their, or sorry, the planets and the sun and all of those things are gonna be altered in their orbit because judgment is coming to a particular people.

01:17:23

Now, the book of Enoch was widely circulated, a favorite book among Jewish people in the first century.

01:17:28

It was one of those books that everyone had a copy of. The book of Jude actually quotes, 2 Peter alludes to it.

01:17:34

It is a very popular book in the first century and it's using the same kind of astronomical phenomenon that we've seen in Isaiah and in Ezekiel and in Nahum and in others.

01:17:46

All I'm pointing out here is that this was common ways of speaking in the first century.

01:17:53

Similarly, the Sabellian Oracles, which is a collection of prophetic texts that were influenced by both

01:17:59

Jewish and Roman sources, uses the same language as well. This is a first century text.

01:18:04

For instance, in Sabellian Oracles, chapter three, verse 83 through 92, it says that the stars are going to abandon their courses.

01:18:13

Same theme. The earth is gonna quake and God's wrath is going to be poured out on a people. These are descriptions that are far from literal predictions but they're communicating gravity and they're communicating divine judgment and we're seeing it over and over and over again in the first century because this is a first century way of communicating.

01:18:31

This apocalyptic genre is not weird, it's not novel, it is common and it was used all the time which lets us know why

01:18:39

Jesus is using it. He's not talking about the astronomical phenomenon in the sky, he's talking about covenant collapse of a covenant people who's gonna experience national ruin for their sins against their

01:18:51

God. Now, we've referenced Josephus, who's an eyewitness to the events that were leading up to Jerusalem's downfall.

01:18:57

He saw the Roman army surrounding the city, he saw the temple burned, he saw the dead bodies piled up, he saw all of that.

01:19:03

We've quoted him a lot in the series because he's so valuable for understanding what's happening in Jesus's prophecy.

01:19:11

He is gonna give us all sorts of compelling symbolism, things that are happening in the heavens that actually he's the first source we've examined so far who said these things were physical phenomenon in the sky.

01:19:23

All the other ones I think are using these as apocalyptic phenomenon. The sun's not literally falling out of the sky or the stars aren't really falling out of the sky, but Josephus is seeing real things in the heavens that he can't explain in the wars of the

01:19:38

Jews. He's recounting extraordinary signs that are preceding the Roman siege, which to him were omens of tremendous judgment.

01:19:47

For instance, last week we talked about these, but I'll recap them quickly. There was a star that hung over the city of Jerusalem that looked like a sword that he says was there for an entire year and it freaked him out.

01:19:58

He said, this is definitely judgment from God. There was a comet that flew over the night sky and he says that that also was a sign of judgment.

01:20:07

You remember that there was this bright light that shone in the temple at midnight. It should have been pitch black dark and yet here it is, almost noonday intensity of light in the temple courtyard and Josephus said that while everyone was celebrating how this must be a sign of God's favor,

01:20:24

Josephus knew that it was a sign of God's wrath. He told us about a cow who gave birth to a lamb, which is not a sign that happens in the heavens, but it's weird and I don't even know what to do with it other than to take

01:20:36

Josephus at his word that it happened and that it signified Judea's destruction.

01:20:43

But he also tells us about, he looked up in the sky and he saw chariots and armies riding around on the clouds and he said that this vision of chariots and armies in the sky, vision of chariots and armies was seen in the cloud, that this vision of chariots and armies in the sky was an example of God bringing judgment on Jerusalem.

01:21:05

He said that it was as if the heavens armies were preparing to invade

01:21:10

Jerusalem. Josephus did not treat these as coincidences. He didn't treat these as just mere spectacles.

01:21:18

He treated them as divine disaster was coming. Divine initiated disaster was coming to Jerusalem.

01:21:25

All of this aligns with Jesus's language of sun, moon, and stars and it reinforces my point and our point that this kind of language was normal.

01:21:35

When you read Josephus, when you read all of these different writers, you will see that Jesus is using very common language at the time to not predict physical calamities in the sky but to predict the downfall of Jerusalem.

01:21:51

Now another example of this is the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria who also used the same kind of cosmic imagery to signify divine judgment.

01:22:01

For Philo, the eclipses, the earthquakes, and the other things that were happening in the heavens were another example of God's judgment and while Philo did not write about the destruction of Jerusalem, he gives us the same kind of language in his book which tells us that this is a very common phenomenon in that time.

01:22:23

It was just the way the Jews thought. They thought when things happened in the heavens, things were getting ready to happen on the earth.

01:22:29

Destruction was coming and they were not the only ones. For instance, Tacitus, Suetonius, they both talk like this.

01:22:38

Even Emperor Nero thought like this. It wasn't just a Jewish thing, it was an ancient way of thinking.

01:22:45

Nero, for instance, when Halley's Comet flew overhead in 66 AD, Nero looked up and he saw the comet and he realized at that time that the gods were judging him, that the gods were going to destroy him and what does

01:23:00

Nero do? Nero goes and kills himself because of Halley's Comet over the skies.

01:23:07

Now modern people would look at that and say, well that was crazy and Nero was crazy but my only point is the ancients were much more well -connected to the heavens and what was going on in the heavens and the constellations and the way the planet was moving or the way that the stars were moving.

01:23:25

They were much more connected to this so that when they saw things happening in the skies, they knew that bad things were getting ready to happen on earth which is why the prophets, which is why

01:23:35

Jesus, which is why Josephus, which is why the Sabellian Oracle, which is why all of this that we've been talking about is saying the same thing.

01:23:44

If you're a dispensational, then what you have to do is you have to say that Jesus ignored the very common way of talking in his time.

01:23:52

He ignored the genre of the apocalyptic genre. He ignored the way that people were speaking. He ignored the prophets.

01:23:58

He ignored all of these different Jewish literatures. He ignored all of that to speak to us in a very flattened out, wooden, literalistic way.

01:24:07

It's to say that Jesus completely ignored his surroundings, his context, his time, and his people so that he could speak to us.

01:24:15

And oh, how special are we that we get Jesus to ignore everything that was happening around him to talk to us about the sky in our day because why, we're so special because Jesus didn't care about his disciples.

01:24:30

He was waxing eloquently and talking past them so that he could talk to us. Foolishness.

01:24:37

Jesus is the God -man who loves the people of the first century, who spoke to the people of the first century, and oh, by the way, he used their genre of literature to speak to them in a way that they would understand.

01:24:53

We've proven it now from the Old Testament. We've proven it from the New Testament. We've proven it from the extra -biblical sources like Philo and Josephus and Nero and all of them.

01:25:04

How much more evidence do we have? Well, I'm glad you asked. Now let's go to evidence eight, the sign in the sky.

01:25:14

When Jesus said in verse 30, and then the sign of the son of man will appear in the sky, we have several issues that we need to unpack so that we can understand what

01:25:24

Jesus means. Now we talked about some of those so far in verse 29. Now we're in verse 30.

01:25:30

So the first thing that we need to unpack here is the timeframe hasn't changed.

01:25:36

It hasn't changed. So from 29 to 30, in the same way that from 28 to 29, the timeframe has not changed.

01:25:43

When Jesus says, and then the son of man will appear, he's not signaling a 2 ,000 -year gap.

01:25:50

He's signaling a logical and chronological sequence of events that happen one right after the next.

01:25:57

After 40 years of signs and wonders and false messiahs and earthquakes and famines and things happening in the sky, after 40 years of that, then

01:26:07

Jesus is promising that he will return. The sign of the coming of the son of man will occur.

01:26:14

So after 40 years of all that evidence, which is Matthew 24, three through 28 and 34, now one of the final signs that's gonna be shown in the heavens is

01:26:23

Christ coming in judgment against Jerusalem. So there's no gap here.

01:26:30

That's my point. Second, there are linguistic challenges in this passage that must be addressed in order for us to fully understand the passage's meaning.

01:26:40

For now, I want us to focus on the first challenge, which is the translation of the word sky. In modern

01:26:47

English, it appears as though the son of man will physically appear in the sky, which is above us, which we have to look up in order to see, that he's gonna physically appear in the sky and he's gonna come down to us because we have to look up to the sky, so therefore he has to come down.

01:27:05

Now, if you read further, it seems like the entire world of earth is gonna see him coming on the clouds.

01:27:14

All the people of the earth are gonna mourn over what they've done and they're gonna see him, which dispensational types love to point this out and they want you to believe that this is the faithful translation of the text, that Jesus is coming from the sky, he's coming down, and the whole world is gonna see him.

01:27:35

And there is a lot wrong with the translation of sky and world.

01:27:41

So let's begin with sky. The word translated as sky, here's the Greek word for heaven, which is ouranos.

01:27:49

That word doesn't mean the sky that we look up to, it means the spiritual realm where God lives.

01:27:56

It's not the physical atmosphere, it's not the air, it's not things that are up and higher than us, it's not something that you can build a rocket to and travel to, it is the spiritual space where God inhabits, it's the heavens.

01:28:11

It's where God's throne room is, which is not up, because if it were up for us, it would be down for the

01:28:17

Chinese people who live on the opposite side of the world. And by the way, as our world is spinning, up can become meaningless.

01:28:25

Heaven does not have a physical address at some interstellar crossroads in the cosmos where we would go up in order to see it.

01:28:33

It exists entirely in a different plane of reality, one that overlaps with ours and yet is immaterial, which means that heaven is not up, heaven is overlapping space with earth.

01:28:45

Wherever God appears or disappears, whether in bodily form or in divine form, he doesn't travel up or down in spatial ways, he just shows up in visible and invisible ways.

01:28:58

For instance, Jesus, when he vanished in front of the crowds who were seeking to kill him, he didn't go back up to the heavens, he literally stepped out of physical space and into spiritual space so that no one could see him, because physical and spiritual are overlapping dimensions.

01:29:15

He didn't go anywhere, he simply stepped out of spatial reality.

01:29:22

The same thing happens at his transfiguration. He doesn't go somewhere, he pulls back the material curtain and reveals the spiritual reality that is existing up under and in it.

01:29:35

In this sense, heaven is not a location to which we can travel, but it's a dimension where God may enter and exit at will.

01:29:46

The only exception to this rule is in Christ's ascension upward into heaven, which carries massive theological implications that we are going to address momentarily.

01:29:56

He had to go up in that sense to fulfill Daniel seven, we'll talk about it. For now, suffice it to say that heaven is not up, heaven is an immaterial reality, it's not a physical space, it's not something you can travel to, it's something that is, it's overlapping with earth.

01:30:14

Understanding that is crucial to grasping what Jesus is talking about in this sign.

01:30:21

Now, if the sign appears in the material sky with Jesus riding a literal cloud like a surfboard down to earth, then dispensationals might have a point.

01:30:29

However, this interpretation ignores the fact that there's a genre switch, that Jesus is switching from the dialogical genre to the apocalyptic genre.

01:30:39

So we should expect symbolism, here's what I'm saying. Their understanding of him coming out of the sky, coming out of the clouds misrepresents the context, it misrepresents the genre, it takes this passage as a spiritual meaning, and it purports it as physical.

01:30:58

This is just part and parcel for what dispensationals do. They take passages like this, they flatten them out as flat as they can, like a pancake, and then they hand them to us, and yet they have none of the benefits of a pancake, because at least pancakes taste good.

01:31:13

Dispensationalism leaves you nothing but sad and miserable, and yet people are addicted to it. Now, when

01:31:18

Jesus switches the language, everyone who's standing there would have gotten it, and you and I get it when it happens to us. For instance, if a

01:31:25

Wall Street broker says to us, wow, this stock is amazing. Okay, we get what he means, this is a great stock.

01:31:31

But if he says, wow, this stock is amazing, it's going to the moon. We don't believe that a little stock climbs down off the stock market shelf, gets into a rocket, and flies to the moon.

01:31:44

We know what he means. We know that he means that the stock price is expected to rise dramatically, that it's going to pay a lot of money to its investors in a bull market, which also is not about a literal bull.

01:31:57

Again, we get this. Jesus, likewise, switches to the figurative and the apocalyptic genre to enhance his point, to emphasize the truth that he's saying.

01:32:07

He is not claiming in this passage to be physically and bodily coming back again in the first century.

01:32:14

He's not claiming that. He's communicating in an apocalyptic way. He's communicating in a way that he's saying, things are happening in the sky, boys, so you better realize that things are getting ready to go down upon the earth.

01:32:30

We've already shown how the sun and the moon and the stars represent this kind of phenomenon in Matthew 24, 29.

01:32:35

Now, we're looking at this happening where Jesus is coming in the clouds, not actually physically standing on a cloud and coming down to earth.

01:32:44

We're talking about coming on the clouds as in coming in judgment. Therefore, interpreting sky as the physical atmosphere is woefully inadequate and entirely misleading.

01:32:57

And it's worth pausing here to mock one of the more absurd dispensational claims before we continue, that this prophecy refers to Jesus returning on the clouds and every eye of every person on earth seeing it.

01:33:12

And wow, the reason that this can happen, and it couldn't have happened in 1800, couldn't have happened in 1600, couldn't have happened in 1400.

01:33:19

The reason why the whole world can see the return of Jesus riding on a cloud like a skateboard in Los Angeles, the reason that we can see it is because now we have the internet and now we have television so that every person on earth will be sitting in their living rooms and watching as the son of man returns to the earth on a cloud.

01:33:44

According to the dispensationals, the prerequisite that would allow this prophecy to happen was the invention of television and global broadcast.

01:33:56

According to them, there's gonna be people on earth who are watching, maybe CNN, maybe

01:34:02

Fox, maybe social media, maybe a smartphone. They're gonna be watching Jesus return.

01:34:07

And the question I would say is really, do we really believe that Jesus' apocalyptic discourse in first century common language, in language that made sense to his original audience is dependent upon the invention of the internet and smartphones in order for it to be fulfilled?

01:34:28

The sheer absurdity that Jesus would need that sort of technological foundation in order for his prediction to occur.

01:34:37

And again, remember, verse 34 says all these things are gonna happen in this generation is ludicrous.

01:34:45

All of that is absolutely ludicrous. Jesus was not predicting a future where satellite dishes and Wi -Fi are going to make possible his return, like a digital

01:34:57

John the Baptist paving the way for his second coming. That's not what Jesus is saying.

01:35:03

He's saying that his first century coming, his coming in judgment was a spiritual coming on the clouds, just like Isaiah 13 and Ezekiel says that when

01:35:16

God comes on the clouds to judge those Old Testament nations, in the same way

01:35:22

Jesus is gonna come on the clouds to judge Judah. And not every eye on earth is gonna see it.

01:35:28

That's not what the passage says. The passage actually says that all those who are in Judea are gonna mourn because they're the very ones who pierced him.

01:35:37

How do I know that? Well, we need to go to evidence number nine. Evidence nine, all the tribes on the earth will mourn.

01:35:48

Jesus continues, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, Matthew 24, 30b.

01:35:56

This is a massive mistranslation of this verse. And it's produced massive confusion and speculation among people who are trying to understand what the

01:36:06

Bible says. The translators of this passage got it wrong. And I'm not saying that the Bible translators have gotten a lot wrong.

01:36:13

And I'm not saying that you can't trust your English Bible. That's not what I'm saying. But they got this one wrong.

01:36:18

The word here is not world. The Greek context and the Greek language doesn't allow for this to happen.

01:36:25

For instance, the issue lies with the word that is translated earth here, which is gay.

01:36:32

In modern English, the word is often misunderstood to refer to the entire planet.

01:36:37

We talk about the planet earth, but that's not what the Greek word gay comes from Gaia actually means.

01:36:44

It actually overwhelmingly refers to a specific local region most commonly in the

01:36:52

Bible, the land of Israel. There's three words, three basic words for world. There's cosmos, which means the entire world.

01:37:00

There's oikamene, which means the inhabited world. And then there's gay or Gaia, which refers to a geographic region of the earth or the land that people actually live on.

01:37:12

It's associated with a specific people who live there at a specific time. It is not the entire planet earth.

01:37:20

For example, I'm gonna give you a few New Testament examples to illustrate the point here. Matthew 2, 20 through 21 says this, arise, take the child and his mother and go into the land of Israel.

01:37:33

Now, this passage doesn't say arise and take the child and his mother and go into the earth or the planet of Israel.

01:37:41

It means land. It means the place where the Jews live. Here's another one, Matthew 4, 15.

01:37:47

The land, Gaia, of Zebulun and the land, Gaia, of Naphtali, Matthew 4, 15.

01:37:55

This is not the earth or the planet of Zebulun and this is not the planet of Naphtali. Sounds like we're talking about Star Wars or some other one of those movies.

01:38:04

It's talking about the land, it's talking about the region, it's talking about the place where the people of Zebulun live, it's talking about the place where the people of Naphtali live.

01:38:11

Here's another one. It would be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment.

01:38:18

That word land there is gay, Matthew 10, 15. Here's another one. When they had crossed over, they came to the land at Gennesaret, Matthew 14, 34.

01:38:28

Here's another one. There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when a great famine came over all the land.

01:38:34

This is not a famine that came over the entire earth, but a famine that came over the land during the time of Elijah.

01:38:40

The people of Israel experienced a famine in their land, Luke 4, 25. Here's another one.

01:38:46

Leave your country, gay, and your relatives and come into the land, gay, that I will show you,

01:38:52

Acts 7, three through four. Not the world. Here's another one, Hebrews 11, nine.

01:38:57

By faith he lived as an alien. It's talking about Abraham. By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise as in a foreign land.

01:39:06

Hebrews 11, nine. Over and over and over again. The word gayah refers not to the entire world, but to a specific region, a specific place where people live.

01:39:16

When paired with the word tribes, which is fulai, the meaning becomes even clearer.

01:39:23

The tribes are related to a tribal people. There was one particular tribal people who gained their land through tribal allotment in the

01:39:34

Bible. It wasn't the ancient Chinese. It wasn't the ancient Africans. It was Israel. They were a people absolutely divided by 12 tribal divisions who lived in a land, who lived in a covenant land, organized under the

01:39:49

Mosaic covenant nonetheless. No other nation in the ancient world was a tribal people like them.

01:39:55

Not Rome, not Greece, not any of them. Now, when you see that all the tribes of the land are going to mourn at the coming on the clouds, now you have been equipped with the tools to be able to understand what this is actually saying.

01:40:16

Jesus is coming on the clouds like God came on the clouds against Egypt. You can look that up in the Old Testament. God came against Egypt on the clouds.

01:40:23

Jesus is coming against Judah on the clouds. So it's judgment language. All the tribes,

01:40:29

Judah, of the land, Judah, are going to mourn because of what they did.

01:40:36

What did they do? They crucified Jesus. They killed his church. They martyred his saints. They did all manners of unspeakable evil.

01:40:43

They killed the prophets before them. They shed the blood of the innocent. They were a covenant -breaking, murderous people, and now

01:40:50

God is coming against them on the cloud against the land, not the whole world.

01:40:57

The whole world is not gonna see that coming in Matthew 24 because it was targeted at a particular covenant -breaking, rebellious people, the

01:41:06

Jews. The word there, tribe, proves it, and the word there for world proves it.

01:41:12

Again, the word gay, which is in the Greek, you can look that up in the Greek New Testament, it's there, and it doesn't mean planet

01:41:19

Earth. It means the land of Judah. That's evidence number nine.

01:41:26

Evidence 10, Jesus coming on the clouds. Now, we've already talked about this a little bit, but Jesus continued, and he said this, and they will see, that's the

01:41:35

Jews, they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory,

01:41:42

Matthew 24, 30, part C. Now, what does it mean for Jesus to come on the clouds?

01:41:48

Well, we've already talked about that a little bit, that in the destruction of Egypt, God came on the clouds. So we've already talked about that a little bit.

01:41:54

But it also has another meaning. Dispensationalists insist that this refers to a physical global descent of Jesus in the future, which we've already dismantled.

01:42:05

But when we examine the biblical use of clouds and the prophecy that Jesus is quoting, we see that their interpretation collapses, and we also see what the true meaning of the passage actually is.

01:42:17

To understand it, we need to unpack the rich imagery of clouds in the Bible and recognize that Jesus is quoting from Daniel chapter seven.

01:42:27

Remember earlier I said we're gonna come back to this. When we understand that, and only then are we gonna understand the true meaning of this passage, that Jesus coming on the clouds is about his enthronement in heaven, and then it's about his judgment upon Jerusalem.

01:42:40

Both of these things are coming into view. For instance, clouds are not just meteorological phenomenon that just float around in the sky, according to the ancient view.

01:42:51

They're symbols of God's glory. They are divine manifestations of his presence.

01:42:59

When God comes on the clouds, it signifies either his active presence to bless or his active presence to judge whatever people.

01:43:09

There's many Old Testament examples of this. For instance, God's glory and presence went with his people in Egypt in a pillar of cloud.

01:43:18

Exodus 13, 21, Numbers nine, 17 through 22. God descended in a cloud in order to speak with Moses and the people,

01:43:27

Exodus 19, nine, and Exodus 33, nine. He dwelled with his people in a glory -filled cloud that hovered over and in the holy of holies of the tabernacle, which was a manifestation of his

01:43:40

Shekinah glory, Exodus 40, 34, and First Kings eight, 10 through 11. And while the cloud manifestation definitely demonstrates his loving presence with his people, it also demonstrates

01:43:55

God's judgment on the wicked. For instance, we've alluded to this already. When God judged

01:44:01

Egypt in Isaiah 19, one, this is what it says. "'Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud "'and is about to come to Egypt.'"

01:44:10

This was not God coming to Egypt to say hello. This was not

01:44:16

God coming to Egypt to reconnect with a people that he hasn't seen in a while. God is coming on the clouds, apocalyptic language of him destroying

01:44:25

Egypt. Whenever God comes on the clouds against his enemies, they are doomed because clouds signified his wrath to his enemies, but his love and his presence to his people.

01:44:40

You think about the flood. The clouds hovered over the sky. The clouds blotted out the sun.

01:44:47

The clouds stopped the sun from shining. When you see that, it's not only that the clouds were there to rain.

01:44:55

Actually, if you think about it, most of the water that was on the earth wasn't from the rain. It was from the fountains of the deep bursting forth.

01:45:02

That's what the Bible says. So the clouds were there to cover the sky and to blanket the earth with the judgment of God because he was coming in the clouds against the wicked people of Noah's day,

01:45:16

Genesis 9 .14. When God judges the nations, he comes in a cloud -like form often, for instance,

01:45:24

Zephaniah 1 .15 says, it is a day of clouds and a day of thick darkness. When Zephaniah's describing judgment in his book, he describes it as clouds and darkness.

01:45:34

Why? This is common ways that Jewish people spoke. When God comes in the clouds, it's either to bless his people or to utterly surround, choke out and destroy his enemies.

01:45:47

The context determines whether or not the clouds are bringing comfort or whether they're bringing terror, but this is common ways that Jews spoke about God and his presence and clouds.

01:45:59

So when Jesus is speaking about coming on the clouds and coming with power and great glory, he is adopting a well -known biblical pattern of speaking.

01:46:11

He's not describing a literal coming on the clouds, riding, standing on vapor.

01:46:19

He could do that, but that's not what he's saying. He's talking about, I'm bringing my presence in judgment.

01:46:26

I'm bringing my presence in judgment against the enemies of God. Who are the enemies?

01:46:31

The first century Jews. This becomes clear when we consider the context.

01:46:40

Jesus is prophesying the destruction of the temple, Matthew 23, he's called down seven covenantal woes,

01:46:45

Matthew 23, he said their house is gonna be burned, Matthew 22, 14, he said that he's gonna take the kingdom away from them and give it to a people who bears its fruit.

01:46:54

He went toe to toe with the Pharisees and said, I'm gonna render you over to Caesar. The entire meta context of these passages from 21 all the way to 24 is

01:47:05

Jerusalem is doomed. So when he talks about coming in the clouds, our ears should perk up and say, oh my goodness.

01:47:17

After the great tribulation, after the temple was burned, after the dead bodies were heaped up on top of them,

01:47:25

Jesus will descend in spiritual judgment coming presence and he will come to cut them and sever them out of the covenant permanently and forever.

01:47:37

That is what Matthew 24 is talking about, that Jesus returns to cut them totally out.

01:47:47

And that is what he means when he says he's coming with the clouds and that is evidence 10.

01:47:53

When you understand coming in the clouds biblically from a Jewish standpoint, then you understand that this is not a good thing.

01:48:01

This is not a coming on the clouds where everybody sees him and is in awe of him. This is a judgment coming of Jesus where he's wiping them out.

01:48:11

The Roman armies that obliterated Jerusalem in 80, 70 were the visible instruments of Christ's invisible wrath.

01:48:19

Now, one other thing before we get past evidence number 10 that I have to point out because I said that I was going to, cloud coming can mean two things.

01:48:28

We've already said that. Cloud coming is disaster for God's enemies, but it's also glorious and beautiful and good for God's friends,

01:48:38

God's people. Jesus here is quoting Daniel 7 .13, which is why I said that we need to cover this because Jesus isn't using just generic

01:48:47

Old Testament cloud imagery. He's directly word for word quoting Daniel 7 .13

01:48:52

when Daniel says this, I kept looking in the night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man was coming and he came up to the ancient of days and was presented before him.

01:49:06

Daniel 7 .13. Now I want you to notice what's happening here in Daniel's vision.

01:49:12

The son of man is not descending to the earth like dispensationals would have us say. Daniel is saying that the son of man is ascending.

01:49:20

So what is happening here? What dispensationals have done in Matthew 24 is they've said that this compares to Daniel 7 .13

01:49:30

and this is when Jesus descends from heaven at the end of human history. This is when he descends in order to make war.

01:49:37

That is not what Daniel's saying. Daniel 7 is saying that the son of man will ascend up to heaven.

01:49:46

Jesus is saying that after 40 years from that event, he's gonna descend with the clouds, which is judgment language.

01:49:55

Daniel is talking about Jesus ascending up to heaven to receive his kingdom, a kingdom that will never end, that no one will take away from him.

01:50:03

And then Jesus is saying in Matthew 24, after his ascension to heaven, 40 years later, he's going to finally, totally and permanently destroy the

01:50:14

Jewish people. He's gonna cut them out of his covenant and they're going to be cut out viciously and violently.

01:50:23

That's what he's saying. He goes up to the clouds of heaven on behalf of the elect so that he can rule over the kingdom that we belong to.

01:50:31

And he comes in the clouds against the Jews, which is a sign of judgment. One cloud coming is for his people and for their good.

01:50:39

One cloud coming is for his enemies and for their doom. That is what

01:50:45

Jesus is saying when he says he's coming on the clouds. And that is evidence number 10.

01:50:52

Evidence 11, two kinds of comings. Now I've decided not even to do all 12.

01:50:59

I'm just gonna do 11 because I think we fully proved it. And this one, I just wanna summarize because we've covered it basically the entire time so far.

01:51:07

Much of the confusion that's surrounding eschatology is because we don't understand that the

01:51:13

New Testament is talking about two comings of Jesus. This theological misstep has fueled so much misguided futurist speculation and theological embarrassment of the dispensational types.

01:51:29

And yet clarity emerges when we grasp this simple truth that there are two comings of Christ or two kinds of comings of Christ.

01:51:39

We have a physical bodily coming, which happens at the end of human history when

01:51:45

Jesus comes back and he ushers in eternal state. And then we also have a spiritual judgment coming, which happens against Babylon, Assyria, Tyre, Sidon, Edom, Egypt, and Judah.

01:52:01

This distinction is not a distinction without a difference. It's not a mere academic exercise.

01:52:07

It's the linchpin that brings all of this to life and shows you what

01:52:12

Jesus is talking about, shows you why he switches to the apocalyptic genre. Because in verses one through 28, he proved it in dialogical form.

01:52:22

He said, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. There's gonna be famines, there's gonna be earthquakes, there's gonna be wars and rumors of wars, there's gonna be false messiahs, there's gonna be an abomination of desolation.

01:52:30

He said all of that in a very literal way. Then he switches to the apocalyptic genre where he says, and then there's gonna be things that are happening in the heavens, judgment, and there's gonna be,

01:52:39

I'm gonna be coming in the clouds, judgment, and the skies are gonna shake, judgment. Every single aspect of this has an

01:52:47

Old Testament reference. It's baked into Jewish thinking. Josephus and Philo and everyone else talks like this, and yet dispensational types are so disoriented that they can't even see their own nose in front of their face.

01:53:04

This understanding of two comings breaks open this passage and clarifies everything that is confusing about it, and it shows us that it is about a first century judgment coming against the

01:53:20

Jews for their crimes against God, and not an end of human history,

01:53:26

Jesus surfboarding down from heaven. Now, with that, I think we've well proven our point, and instead of me continuing to take a victory lap, which

01:53:38

I could because we've proven it, we've proven it completely, dispensationals are still not gonna hear it because they have scales over their eyes, but instead of that, let's end today's episode with a conclusion.

01:53:55

Conclusion. In today's episode, we've uncovered the astonishing truth of Matthew 24, which is what we've been saying all along, that Christ's words are true, that his words are trustworthy, and that they were fulfilled in exactly the same way that he promised.

01:54:13

The destruction of Jerusalem in 8070 is not just a historical event, it's proof that our

01:54:18

Lord speaks truthfully, that he reigns supremely, that he is faithful, that his word can be trusted, and this helps us understand that the

01:54:28

Bible really can be trusted in everything that it says, and the way that we've interpreted this passage today is the way that Jesus wanted us to interpret it, it's the way his first century apostles interpreted it, and it's the right way to interpret it.

01:54:43

And if you're a dispensational, I know that this changes everything about the way that you view this passage, but it also changes everything about the way you live.

01:54:52

Here's what we've talked about today means for us, we're free, we're free from the chains of fear that grip the hearts of people like the dispensationals who believe that we're just waiting for the world to get worse, we are free from that fear, we're free of the fear of an impending apocalypse, we're free of the fear of defeat, we are free of thinking that history is slipping out of control and moving ever closer to a catastrophe, we're free to see that all of that calamity happened to the

01:55:28

Jews of the first century, and that Jesus established a kingdom, as Daniel 7 says, that will never end, that will continue to advance, that will continue to grow like a mustard seed until it fills the entire garden, that will continue to grow like the little pebble that turns into a mountain that fills the world, that will continue to grow like the leaven that leavens the entire lump, that we are free to be optimistic, we are free to be hopeful, we are free to see the reality of Christ's fulfilled prophecy in the first century that is proven in history that is not leading to a world that's spiraling out of control and into chaos, but it's unfolding now under the sovereign hand of Jesus as his kingdom expands.

01:56:13

We no longer need to panic and fear and weep over the state of the world, we need to get to work, we need to live without fear, because the same

01:56:26

Christ who spoke these words with pinpoint accuracy is the one who rules over every moment of every day of every millisecond of your life, he sees the trials that you're facing, he sees the battles that you're fighting, he sees the burdens that you're carrying, and he stands ready to strengthen you and sustain you, and you can know that his promises are true because he was faithful in Matthew 24, everything that he said came true.

01:56:52

I want you to let Jesus' faithfulness and fulfilling every aspect of Matthew 24 remind you that his promises for you are certain.

01:57:04

You don't walk alone, you don't labor in vain, you don't fight for a kingdom that's going to collapse like a sinking ship,

01:57:15

Christ is with you, he crushed his enemies, he's continuing to crush his enemies, and you are a part of that kingdom that we talked about today that will never be shaken.

01:57:29

Don't stare at your navel, don't stare off at the clouds, get to work, have confidence in the truthfulness of what

01:57:39

Christ has said, confidence to live boldly, to take risks for Jesus, to work faithfully, to stand courageously amid all the struggles that we go through in this life.

01:57:51

If Jesus' words about the judgment that were so precise in the first century can be trusted, and they can, then how much more can you trust that his promises about redemption and his promises about victory and his promises about the ultimate triumph of the church are also going to come true with perfect clarity?

01:58:13

The kingdom of God for 2 ,000 years has been advancing, it hasn't been retreating, and you know why?

01:58:21

Because Christ reigns, not the world, not the devil, not the demons, Jesus reigns.

01:58:27

The church is his bride who's conquering, not collapsing. So brothers and sisters, rise up, live like citizens of that victorious kingdom, pour yourself into your family, pour yourself into your work, pour yourself into your church and into your community and into your government, and know that everything that you do for Jesus is not done in vain.

01:58:53

C .T. Studd once said, all things will soon be past, only what is done for Christ will last.

01:59:03

I want you to let that truth propel you forward into your day and into your morning and into your evening and into your week and into your month and into this year and into your life.

01:59:14

I want you to see how Jesus' fulfilled prophecy that is fulfilled with utter clarity means that it's utterly trustworthy, his word is utterly trustworthy for you, and he will be utterly victorious in the world.

01:59:29

Don't live in defeat, don't believe the lie that the church is losing, we're not bystanders, we're builders, we are soldiers, we are ambassadors, we are kingdom people, not trailer park chumps.

01:59:44

Take these truths, press forward, unshaken, unwavering, and full of hope, and I'll see you again next time on the broadcast.