140. The Whore, Jerusalem

The church became the new generation, the new people of God charged with the task of taking the gospel to every corner of the globe and establishing this world as a promised land where Christ would be preached, where Christ would be obeyed, and where the law of God would be the law of the land.

Opening the New Revelation Series Through Matthew 24

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 140, The Whore, Jerusalem. Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. We are in a brand new series on the book of Revelation, which is really exciting.

To kick off this new series and to make sure that we understand this most complicated book really well, we're gonna be looking into Matthew 24, which is another eschatological passage, which says roughly the same thing as Revelation, but in a much more straightforward way.

And we've been doing that now for three episodes since episode four. So we've been diving in and today is no different. We're gonna be diving into another very fascinating episode that we have today. But before we do that, I just wanna say welcome to everyone who's been watching the show and to everyone.

If this is your first time, thank you so much. If you've been here for a while, thank you so much. Welcome to all and thank you for all of the ways that you've supported this channel. We've had some great milestones since last time I published an episode.

I took last week off because my parents were in town from North Carolina and I just honestly needed a well-needed rest. We have two episodes this week. Viva La Reformacion is already out. This episode's coming out, obviously, whenever you see it.

But since I've been gone, the podcast passed 250 ,000 views between our YouTube videos and our shorts and all of that. That's a quarter of a million views, which is incredible and it's all thanks to you.

Also, at the time of this recording, we just crossed 1 ,500 subscribers, which is so cool because when we began this year, we had like almost zero subscribers. We weren't using our YouTube channel and I had this big, hairy, audacious goal that if I brought my audio podcast, it was on Spotify and Apple, if I brought it over to YouTube then maybe, just maybe, by the end of the year, we would have 1 ,500 subscribers.

It was kind of one of those goals that you make where you're like, I don't think this is gonna happen but I'm gonna try to see anyway. And now, because of all of you who've tuned into this show and shared these videos and liked and subscribed and all of that, we're about to break our goal two months ahead of schedule, which is incredible.

So thank you very much. Also, last thing, as I mentioned in last week's outro or two weeks ago's outro, we have memberships that are now available so anyone who would like to support this show can now do so in a realistic and tangible way.

Between equipment, lights, subscriptions, licensing costs, software, this show adds up to about $1 ,000 per year for me to be able to produce it and that's okay. I'm not actually trying to make a lot of money off of it.

I'm doing this to help Jesus's church grow up into maturity, up into eschatological purity that throws away the panic and disaster thinking of dispensationalism that I grew up with and instead clings to the victory of Christ as a growing and burgeoning reality and works with all of our energy and effort to see his kingdom built on earth as it is in heaven.

That's what I'm doing this for. That's why I'm so interested in eschatology because eschatology helps us work in the kingdom that Jesus is building, not to hide in our shells like a turtle, like many of the pre-male dispensational types do.

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Now, with that, let us jump in to today's episode. Introduction, if the glove doesn't fit. Now, perhaps the most explosive and prolific trial of our lifetime was the O .J. Simpson murder trial in the early 1990s.

As an 11-year-old boy at the time, I still remember watching in prime time the aerial coverage of the white Bronco lazily loafing down the L .A. freeway with as much agility as a soppy wet sponge and after that, I recall the media frenzy as millions all over the country were tuning in with popcorn and rapt attention to this case that had all the panache and the showmanship of a Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey circus.

But what stands out most memorable out of all of that, at least from my memory, is when Juice's dream team, his head attorney, Johnny Cochran, said this, if the glove don't fit, then you must acquit. And ultimately, that's exactly what the jury did.

They acquitted O .J. Simpson, his successive civil cases raged in court for the years to come. Now, without getting into the weeds of that trial, the point that I'm making is very simple. If the evidence in the case cannot be reconciled to the defendant, meaning if he can't fit his chunky fingers into the glove, then he must be acquitted of the charges.

But if the glove used in the murder did fit the hand, well then a guilty verdict would be all the more reasonable of a conclusion. Now, I want you to compare this example to another homicide that has happened, which is the murder of biblical hermeneutics, where dispensationals have made wild and outlandish claims about eschatology, but they never stop to see if their twinkie-fingered hands actually fit into the proverbial glove.

While many will not do that work, that has been my goal so far, is to show the receipts, to show how everything in the book of Matthew, even the parts that are normally associated with the futurist perspective are actually those puffy, overweight fingers that won't fit into the leather glove.

These passages don't align with the futurist schema. They don't align with the premillennial way of doing things. They don't pass the sniff test. They don't meet any reasonable burden of proof. And instead, you have to suspend your intelligence in order to believe them.

Instead, what I've been proving over the last four weeks, and really since this show began, is the preterist view. The partial preterist view is the one that sees that all of these things in Matthew 24, at least, not everything in the New Testament, but all the things in Matthew 24 have already occurred in the past.

And that view, that hermeneutical perspective, is the one that offers the most compelling explanation for what the book of Matthew is all about. Now, to prove that hypothesis over the last several weeks, to make sure the glove actually does, or the hand actually does fit in the glove, I've presented line after line of evidence.

I began by showing how the book of Malachi, the final book in the Old Testament canon, looks forward to this fierce episode of judgment that would be coming when the Christ actually came, when he pours out his wrath upon the Jews.

That's Malachi 3 and Malachi 4. According to that final Old Testament prophet, the great and terrible day of the Lord was coming, and fire from God was coming, either to purify the elect or to scorch the rebels.

That's what Malachi says. That's what John the Baptist also says. He was the final prophet who Malachi was talking about. He's the Elijah figure that Malachi predicted. John the Baptist was the one who was thinking about and preaching about the exact same things as he expected imminent judgment was gonna be coming on Christ, or coming by Christ, in that generation.

Remember, it was John who warned the Jewish aristocracy to flee from the wrath that was coming, and he said that so urgently, in fact, that he said that the ax was already at the root of the tree, meaning that if God swings the ax one more time, then the tree is gonna fall down and be cast into the fire, and everyone in that generation understood that they were in dire trouble when John was speaking.

When everyone heard him, they got the point loud and clear. They did not say, well, this must be talking about a people who live in the 21st century. It's not what they were thinking. They were thinking that, oh, he's talking about me.

Now, this wasn't just the focus of John, but it was also the focus of Jesus. In his miracles, his teachings, his parables, and his confrontations with the Jewish aristocracy in Matthew 21, 22, 23, he deliberately and very clearly is calling down covenant woes and covenant curses upon that rebellious city.

He's promising that the wrath of God, which has been stored up since Cain killed Abel, was about to be poured out on them. With every piece of evidence we've examined so far, it fits only and entirely and perfectly into the preterist interpretation, like a well-fitted glove, and with that, we're gonna move deeper into Matthew 24 this week to show that it continues to meet the smell test, that the evidence continues to align with the perspective that I've been arguing.

And I'm gonna show, with a couple new pieces of evidence, that all of these things definitely occurred in the first century. And today, we're gonna look at how Jesus compares Jerusalem to a woman in labor and how he gives three pieces of evidence that the disciples could look on to be able to say, yes, this was happening.

We'll talk about those three pieces of evidence next week, but with that, we're gonna read our passage, we're gonna look at this woman who's gonna give birth to a baby, and we're gonna see how Jerusalem has become the whore.

So, Matthew 24, six through eight says this. You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for these things must take place, but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places, there will be famines and earthquakes.

But all these things are merely the beginning of the birth pangs, Matthew 24, six through eight. Now, we're gonna begin by looking at what does it mean that Jerusalem is this woman in labor? And that'll lead us to part one, the woman in labor.

The Imminence of Jerusalem's Judgment

When Jesus wanted to explain the coming judgment, he chose the metaphor of pregnancy, which was both a vivid and a very relatable image to his first century audience. Now, forgive me for being punny, but this analogy that he gave was pregnant with meaning.

So, for a few moments, I wanna pull back the layers a little bit, and I wanna look at all of the various nuances and shades of what Jesus was talking about, and I wanna present 10 points from Matthew 24, eight.

10 points about how Jerusalem has become this woman, and what that means for eschatology. So, just for a recap, Matthew 24, eight, Jesus says, but all these things are merely the beginning of the birth pangs.

Now, let's look at the evidence. Point one, the imminence of the judgment. By using this metaphor, Jesus was undoubtedly describing things that were going to happen soon, in the same way that a 40-week pregnancy doesn't last for decades.

Thank God for our wives. The 40-year pregnancy of Jerusalem, likewise, has not been limping along for the last 2 ,000 years. That would have been the wrong metaphor. If you're talking about things that are happening 2 ,000 years into the future, pregnancy might not be the right analogy.

I'm just saying. Everything in Matthew 24, and everything that we're going to discuss today, or next week, like the wars and the rumors of wars, the earthquakes, the famines, all concern labor pains that were going to happen to that generation, that the disciples were going to be able to witness, and they would be evidences to them that the end was drawing near.

Jesus did not believe that things were going to become, things were going to steadily decline over thousands of years, but quickly. They were going to quickly increase in intensity, like a woman who's having her labor pains, until that final moment of delivery, when Jerusalem was destroyed.

The very nature of the pregnancy metaphor ensures that Jesus was talking about things in the near term, not in the remote, unknowable future. That's the first thing that this metaphor teaches us, is that the prophecy was imminent.

Forty Years as a Biblical Generation

Point two, 40 weeks and 40 years. Now, alongside the urgency of the pregnancy metaphor, Jesus also gave his disciples a clear timeline for when the events were going to unfold. Think about it this way.

A typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, which are 40 distinct units of time. Well, in a similar way, a biblical generation is 40 years, which is also 40 units of time. And when you understand that 40 in the Bible usually refers to a moment of travail and suffering and judgment, such as when it rained for 40 days and 40 nights in the flood, or when the people wandered in the wilderness for 40 years in rebellion, then you can see that this 40 year window of time is talking about a painful, increasing in intensity kind of judgment and destruction that was coming upon Jerusalem.

When Jesus declared in Matthew 23, that judgment was going to fall on this generation, he was marking the next 40 years as one of intense calamity, intense judgment, which is the second thing we learn, that he lays out a timeline, that timeline is 40 years.

And we know that because he says this generation. Now, that leads us to point three, what defines a generation? Now, perhaps you're saying that makes sense if a biblical generation actually is 40 years, but how do we actually know that?

Only thing you said was that it is just so the case that Jesus said judgment's gonna come on this generation and therefore it must be 40 years. But generations in the modern world are 20 years. So how can we know for sure that a biblical generation really is 40 years?

That's a great question, let me answer it. We know how long that a generation was in the mind of a first century Jew because of how vividly the meaning was imprinted upon them in the wilderness. If you remember, it was God who called them a wicked and adulterous generation, Deuteronomy 135.

And it was God who proclaimed that that entire generation would pass away in the wilderness because of their rebellion, Numbers 14, 33 through 34. That means that all the people who came out of Egypt, who walked around in the wilderness for 40 years were the generation that was going to die in the wilderness.

And that became sort of the deeply ingrained understanding that was imprinted upon the Jewish psyche of what a generation is. A generation is a period of people who exist in a 40-year lifespan that live and die together just like the people in the wilderness generation.

That is why we know that a generation is 40 years. So when Jesus prophesied that this generation, genea, which same word is used in the Greek Old Testament, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, Matthew 24, 34, and that all of God's wrath was gonna fall on that generation, Matthew 23, he was letting his Jewish disciples know that a 40-year countdown had begun just like it had for the rebellious people of old.

That countdown would begin at his resurrection in AD 30. It would continue into the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 when the sands of Jerusalem's hourglass would finally be expired. And the new generation called the church would follow Jesus into the promised land.

That is the third thing that we learn that when Jesus says generation, he actually is referring to a period of 40 years that is going to end in the destruction of everyone who was alive at the time of his crucifixion where they rejected God.

And after those 40 tumultuous years, there's gonna be a new generation that rises up. That's point three. Point four, grammar hammers and this generation. Now, an additional aspect to all of this was how the grammar also proves the interpretation that we're arguing for.

Consider Jesus's choice of words when he says this generation. He did not say a generation at some point in the unknowable future. He didn't say some generation at some point at some time, or he didn't even say concerning that generation way over there.

He said this generation. He pointed directly to the people who were standing right in front of him, and he said that judgment was coming on this generation, which is really important. Why is that important?

Well, anyone familiar with the grammar will notice that the word this is not an accidental phrase here. Like English, Greek grammar designates that the word this and these, which is the plural form of this, is a near demonstrative pronoun.

Now, don't freak out because we're going back to high school English. Follow me here. A near demonstrative pronoun refers to things that are close to the speaker, as opposed to words like that and those, which are talking about things that are further away.

For instance, if you want to talk about things that are near to you, you would say, look at this. But if you were to talk about things that are far away from you, you might say, look at that. Both words are helpful because they tell you how near or how far something is in relation to you.

So when Jesus was looking at the generation that was standing right in front of him, and he uses the phrase this generation, we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's referring to none other than his generation.

Had he wanted to prophesy about us and our generation, he would have used the far demonstrative pronoun, that, and he would have said something along the lines of that all these things are gonna come upon that generation.

But that's not what he said. And there's no ambiguity in what he said. He limited his understanding and his fulfillment to their generation, which is a 40 year period of time, like a pregnancy. And when he does that, we should do that.

We should never come to an interpretation that's different than Jesus. Because if we do, that's probably a bad thing. That's point number four. Point five, the pattern, 400 rejection, 40 and conquest.

The Pattern of 400 Years, Rebellion, and 40 Years of Judgment

Now, even further than this, the use of the number 40 can shed much light on what God is doing in Matthew and in the downfall of Jerusalem. For instance, in the Old Testament, we have another example of a 40 year period of time where judgment is poured out on an entire generation and that whole generation dies.

But there's so much more to the story than that. And so much more to the biblical pattern and story that God is telling. So hang tight with me for a moment, because I need to explain this briefly just so you can get it.

And if you are friends with me on Facebook, I just published a chart tonight, or last night, maybe if you're watching this later, but I just published a chart on my feed that you can follow along with what I'm saying.

So if you want, send me a friend request, send me whatever, but go check out that chart, it's great. Now, picture this. Before the Israelites became their own nation, they were down in Egypt and they spent 400 long years under the oppressive rule of Pharaoh.

That's 400 years of backbreaking labor under a pagan king and even more significant than that, it was 400 years of total silence from God. He didn't speak to them at all from the time that they got down to Egypt until the time that Moses showed up.

And it seemed like God had abandoned them. But just in the moment that it seemed like that God broke his silence after 400 years. And just to get that into perspective, 400 years is longer than America has been a country.

We fought the Revolutionary War like 200 and something years ago. This was 400 years of God not speaking. This was generation after generation after generation, 10 in fact, that rose and died without hearing a single thing from the Lord, but he didn't abandon them.

He actually broke the silence, not by talking to the mighty men of Israel or to the new class of patriarchs, but he broke his silence by talking to women. He said to the Hebrew midwives to spare the Hebrew children signaling the fact that he had not forgotten his promise to his people.

And then right after he speaks to the midwives, God raises up this baby, this deliverer, Moses, who was gonna lead the people out of Israel. Now, you remember, under the backdrop of this, we had this tyrant pharaoh who was meeting his end.

God was bringing his people safely up out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness, and there was this one chance that they had over this wilderness period to follow God. But instead of following him and obeying him and submitting to his law, which is, by the way, what they covenanted to do at Mount Sinai, instead of that, they rebelled.

First, they made a golden calf, and that didn't work out so well for them. Then they complained and they resisted God at every turn. God even says that in the wilderness, they denied him and rejected him 10 different times, whether it be through water or quail or through just everything.

Now, when they had reached the edge of the promised land, you would think that their rejection was over, but no, they flat out reject God then. And they say that we are not gonna go in, we're not gonna conquer these people, we're like grasshoppers to them, and God, how could you dare ask us to go and do this great and heavy thing?

And because of that, God poured out a heavy and devastating punishment on them, essentially divorcing that generation. He said, you will not be allowed to enter into my promised land, you will not be allowed to enter into my rest, you will wander around the wilderness aimlessly in the desert for 40 years until every single one of that generation was dead.

And 40 years wandering aimlessly in the desert and the whole rebellious generation died and they missed entering into the promised land. While their children, however, the next generation did in fact go in.

They did go in and they conquered Canaan and they finally received the land, well, sorta. That whole journey that I'm talking about that unfolds from Exodus all the way until the end of Joshua is really a story of 400 years of waiting, the rebellion that the Israelites give to God at the mountain, their rejection of God at the edge of the promised land, and then 40 years of punishment before a new generation rises up and enters into the land of God's rest.

That is an important pattern that shows up again in the New Testament. And maybe you're asking how? Well, we see this pattern in the New Testament. We see it repeating. We see it giving us a framework on how to understand who the people of God are.

What does God do when God pulls the people out of slavery and sin and chooses them to be his own people? And when we see this pattern in the New Testament, I think it will help us understand what the book of Revelation and what chapters like Matthew 24 are really talking about.

So how? Well, remember the pattern, 400, and then rebellion, and then 40 years of judgment, and then a new generation. Well, let's look at the New Testament. In the book of Malachi, God stops speaking, and it would be another 400 years of silence before God speaks again.

Just like before, when the Israelites were pining away in Egypt, there was no word from God when we get to the end of Malachi all the way to the beginning of Matthew, and it just so happens that that period is 400 years.

And just like the people of old, they were under the rule of the pagan kings, just like they were under the rule of Egypt. But this time, they were under the powerful empires of Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome.

And at the end of God's silence, Rome had installed a petty puppet tyrant king named Herod, who in many ways acted just like the Pharaoh of Egypt, even ordering that all the Jewish baby boys would be murdered.

So he's just like Pharaoh. Now, God not only breaks the silence again, not by speaking to mighty men, but by speaking to two Hebrew women, Mary and Elizabeth, just like he did with the two Hebrew midwives who were named in the book of Exodus.

So he doesn't break his silence to men, he breaks the silence to women, just like he did it of the old. Just like he raised up a new deliverer by birth named Moses, well, he raises up a new savior named Jesus who would free his people, not from Egypt, but from their slavery to sin.

Then soon after Herod dies, Jesus returns. And then after Jesus returns, he leads his people through many years of ministry. But again, at the end of his life, the people rejected God. So the New Testament begins, just like the Old Testament story did, with 400 years of waiting, then a new deliverer is born named Jesus.

He has a clear call from God, then he leads the people to follow God and they end up rejecting God. So this pattern repeats itself in the New Testament. This pattern of silence, deliverance, rebellion, and a new generation repeats itself throughout both the Testaments and it gives us a understanding of God's overarching story.

But there's more to the story than this, there's even deeper layers. So for instance, just like Israel was punished with 40 years of wandering for rejecting God's rule at the mountain, Jesus announced another 40 year period of punishment for those who rejected him at Calvary.

That's what Matthew 24 is all about. Matthew 24 is the symmetrical event in the New Testament to God cursing the former generation in the wilderness. When God said that you will not enter into my land, that you will wander around for 40 years until you die in the desert, that's what Jesus is doing in Matthew 23 and Matthew 24 with the first century Jews.

He's saying you're not gonna enter into God's rest, you're not gonna be God's people, you're gonna wander around this city aimlessly for 40 years and you're going to die in the sands of the desert. It wasn't just a punishment, it wasn't just a ban, it was a wilderness where the people were gonna enter into increasing judgment for those who clung to their old ways and rejected Christ just like the people of the Old Testament wilderness before.

This new 40 year wilderness began the moment Jesus prophesied it in Matthew 24 and it came to an end in AD 70 when Jerusalem fell. Judgment came upon those who refused to listen, who refused to turn to Christ and God himself turned Jerusalem into a wilderness of rubble and ash where all signs of life were utterly uprooted and destroyed but that's even not the end.

In fact, just like the Old Testament where one generation passed away and died in the wilderness but a new generation rose up who was gonna go in and take possession of the land and those two generations actually lived simultaneously which means at the same time, the old generation that was dying, the new generation that was rising lived simultaneously.

This exact same thing happens in the New Testament. After judgment falls on the people of Jerusalem, a new people have been raised up simultaneously, side by side with that old generation but instead of dying like the old generation, they would rise up and take possession of the land but it's even more remarkable than in the Old Testament because this time it wasn't just one nation that they were gonna take possession of.

God was promising Matthew 28, 18 through 20 that they were now gonna take possession of the entire world. The church became the new generation, the new people of God charged with the task of taking the gospel to every corner of the globe and establishing this world as a promised land where Christ would be preached, where Christ would be obeyed and where the law of God would be the law of the land.

So that's what we're seeing here is a pattern that's working itself out from the Old Testament to the New Testament. We see a cycle of silence, deliverance, rejection, judgment and renewal that's working itself out from Canaan all the way to the New Jerusalem.

The church's mission now spans to the ends of the earth, a new conquest of the kingdom of God, not by sword, not by bow, not by chariot but by the word, the spirit and truth. And only when we see this pattern between the Old and the New Testament do we understand why post-millennialism and partial preterism is the only eschatological systems that fit so naturally with what the Bible is saying.

If you believe that the church loses, then you believe that we're just like the wilderness generation that died in the desert. But that's not what our job is. Our job is to go in and take possession of the nations, being led by the true and the better Joshua.

Did you know that Jesus's name in Aramaic is Yeshua, which is Joshua. We call him Jesus because that is a Greek, that's a Latin translation of the Greek into English. Jesus's name actually in his language was Joshua.

So think about this, a new generation rises up being led by Joshua to go and conquer the nations. That is what the story of the New Testament is all about. It is showing us how God's promises and his judgment and his faithfulness to build his kingdom has come through Christ.

And through his faithfulness, we are now called to build and to work and to labor and to inherit the world. That is point five. Now, point six, Jerusalem's pregnancy and her passing away. Now this is where the analogy of pregnancy becomes so powerful and it comes back into focus because it represents the same 40 year period of punishment that the Old Testament Jews endured.

Jerusalem as the Mother Who Brings Forth the Church

That means that Jerusalem is the woman who became unexpectedly pregnant with the wrath of God and now only would her travails increase but they would lead also to certain covenantal death. Think about it like this, long before a woman tragically loses her life in a complicated pregnancy and that does happen especially in the ancient world, there are early signs that she may be pregnant and that she may not even fully discern.

So think about it this, for instance, in the early days of pregnancy, the signs are very subtle. Before the baby bump and maybe even before the morning sickness or the bloating, there are a few weeks where nothing really noticeable has happened.

It's in this season when many women are still unsure about whether or not they're actually pregnant. This is why pregnancy tests exist so that they can verify whether they're pregnant or not. Imagine what it would have been like back in the old days when those things didn't exist.

Well, this early period of time where you're not really sure if you're pregnant or not, this is especially true if you're prone to having irregular periods or complications and things like that. I'm not a doctor but those are things that happen.

But what I do know is that just because you're having complications or an inability to discern whether or not you're pregnant doesn't actually make you not pregnant even if the signs are very subtle. Now, with that sort of explanation in view, think about Jerusalem who was like the woman in her early stages of pregnancy.

She could not discern the pain that was soon going to overtake her. Like many women, she didn't comprehend the smaller signs with very much clarity at all. When false messiahs were coming, she didn't see that as like the morning sickness before the big labor that was coming.

She didn't understand the whispers of unrest in society or the scattered rumors of upheaval and civil war that were happening in the far remote stretches of the Roman world. The Jews were not connecting the dots and they were limping along ignorant of what was coming.

But as any mother knows, those early symptoms eventually fade into the undeniable evidence when the belly ends up growing, when the pants don't fit anymore and when the pains of labor eventually come.

As the months passed, then Braxton Hicks contractions began and then real contractions began. And then your water breaks and the contractions become sharper and more relentless to the point that no one in their right mind can deny what is happening.

Well, in much the same way for Jerusalem, the signs were gonna get worse, they were gonna intensify like wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes and famines and all of that. But unlike any sane woman who ever showed up at a hospital ready to give birth to her baby, Jerusalem persisted in her ignorance.

She denied what was happening to her while she slipped into a kind of madness. I mean, think about this. Imagine a clinically insane woman going into an ER with a nine month belly, full on contractions that are verifiable by sonogram and then she tries to pass it off as the common cold.