36. Thirteen Reasons Why The Great Tribulation Already Happened (End-Times Series Part 17)

The Olivet Discourse and the Case for a First-Century Tribulation

Welcome to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This episode 36, 13 reasons the great tribulation has already happened. If failed in time predictions were a category in the winter Olympics, the competition for the biggest loser would be the most competitive event by a long shot from Simon Bar-Giora declaring the world's end as Rome invaded Judea in AD 67 to Edgar Wisenot's 88 reasons why the rapture could be in 1988.

It seems that the Christian church has become an ever growing trash heap of failed eschatological predictions. Now I might be inclined to call it a dumpster fire, but under the circumstances, that seems that maybe giving it too much credit.

Some of the ones among us who always, you know, the positive types say things like, if at first you don't succeed, well then try, try again. Those continue right along in the ministry of failed predictions, unabated, believing that the right combination of news articles, numerology and blood moons is bound to line up.

And it's just around the corner yet amid the echo chamber of eschatological fanaticism, so few actually stop and examine the real reason why these predictions don't come true. And it's quite simply because most of it has already happened.

And what follows today, I'm just, I'm going to be sharing 13 reasons from the text, from history, why the great tribulation has already occurred. Now I will not appeal to nanobots, the next appearance of Haley's comet pandemics or Klaus Schwab and his world economic forum in order to come up with my answers.

I'm going to cite scripture alone with a little bit of history mixed in, and I'm going to prove once and for all why every end time prediction about the coming tribulation is doomed to fail because it already occurred.

My hope in all of this is that Christianity would recover from the gangrenous rot of dispensational madness. And then we would march onward in our mission to disciple the nations for Jesus. So to that end, let us begin.

The Olivet scene. Now, if you're just joining us, this article is a part of a larger series that gives a tremendous amount of context for these events. If you'd like to catch up on any of those episodes or articles, you can go to the website, the shepherds .church, or you can, you can check those out by going to Spotify and Apple and wherever your podcasts are delivered.

But if that seems like a little bit too much effort to satiate your current curiosity, I mean, you are here right now, then here's a three sentence summary of how we ended up here. Jesus, this is sentence one.

Jesus predicted in a variety of ways that the temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed because they rejected him. That's Matthew chapter 22, all the way until Matthew chapter 24. That news of the temple's destruction so deeply unsettled the disciples that they wanted to give, they wanted Jesus to give them more details on how all of this was going to play out.

And then we see that in Matthew 24, three, and then finally, here's the third sentence in passages that are normally perverted by futurists, which Matthew 24, almost in its entirety, Jesus answers their specific questions with some specific evidence showing them that all of these things was going to happen in their lifetime.

Matthew 24, 34 is a great example. And that's where we're going to begin. Reason number one that the great tribulation has already happened is this generation and all these things. When Jesus said in verse 34 of Matthew 24, truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, he is giving his disciples two very powerful criteria for understanding the Olivet discourse.

And if you're not familiar with that term, the Olivet discourse is Jesus's teaching on the Mount of Olives in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. So when Jesus says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, he's giving them two criteria for understanding what he means.

First, he is limiting the scope of fulfillment to about 40 years, which is a biblical generation. He is saying that these things will occur within a single 40-year period. Second, he's affirming that everything that he has said prior to verse 34 and the explanatory verses that follow verse 34 are going to happen in that same 40-year time period.

That means that the rise of false messiahs, the wars and rumors of wars, the earthquakes, the famines, the persecutions, the tribulations, the increased lawlessness, the apostasy, the worldwide gospel proclamation, the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation, the signs and the wonders, and the sun darkened, and the stars falling from the sky, and the heavens shaking, and the tribes of the land in mourning, and the son of man returning in the clouds, and the so-called rapture, all of that happens either prior to verse 34 in Matthew 24, or it's an explanatory note that occurs immediately after verse 34.

But in either case, all these things means that all of them are going to occur in that generation. When Jesus says, some of you will not taste death until you see these things happening, he meant it. Again, when Jesus says all these things, he meant every single one of the things that I just shared with you was going to occur in the lifetime of his disciples.

Further, when our God in the flesh, with infinite maximal wisdom and unlimited knowledge, limits the fulfillment of this prophecy to a single generation, I think that he meant for us to believe him, to lay down our opinions, and to simply submit to his wisdom.

And listen, while there's a phenomenal amount of evidence that supports the view that I've been putting forward, we do not need to understand really any of it in order to adopt a humble, submissive, and faithful posture to Jesus.

If he said everything was going to happen in a single generation, then that really ought to settle it for us. There should not be any further debate. For us to go on insisting that these events inside the Olivet Discourse necessarily must occur in the future just because we can't imagine a scenario where everything that he said is going to be fulfilled would be is not only to challenge the infinite wisdom and intelligence and integrity of Jesus Christ, but it's to set ourself up as a teacher and as a standard that is over him, which, if you're asking my opinion on the matter, sounds like a very foolish and unsafe and unholy thing to do.

Let Jesus speak, and then you be the one who believes it. That's what I say. All these things happen in that generation, check one. Reason two, Jerusalem surrounded. In Luke's account of the Olivet Discourse, he says this,.

But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near. In an age of such rampant confusion, it's vital to actually remember how pronouns work. When he said you, he was talking to them.

That's the first thing. But, in fact, I would even argue that there's another pronoun in here, and really, pronouns all throughout the Olivet Discourse sufficiently prove that the Great Tribulation has already occurred.

For instance, when Jesus says you in this passage, he is not unclear on what he means. He's not flip-flopping his pronouns like a Disney star before a new album release. He knows what these words mean, and he is using you, a second-person plural pronoun, to refer to the men standing right in front of him who were listening to him in the year 30 AD.

You. This is critical. This is absolutely critical for us to understand, because when we know that Jesus is applying the meaning of this passage directly to his apostles and his disciples and not vicariously to us somehow, then any thought that a Great Tribulation must occur many thousands of years into the future, long after the death of his disciples, becomes all the more untenable.

When they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then they would know that his desolation was near. The case becomes even more certain when you notice that Jesus is telling those men to pay attention to the comings and goings of the city of Jerusalem, and it happened.

And it happened. The armies really did surround Jerusalem. They really did come in and desolate the city. All of these things are exactly according to what Jesus said. In summary of point number two, Jesus believes some of his disciples would live to see armies approaching Jerusalem to destroy it.

He believed that when this happened, it would signal the end for the city of Jerusalem and the end of the Old Covenant era and the beginning of a Great Tribulation that would be unparalleled in the history of the world, that would birth the kingdom of God onto planet Earth.

Like in labor, he's already compared it to this. The great tribulations of the womb, the great distress, the great pains that a woman goes through and the travail that she goes through in childbirth, the greatest moment of pain would be eclipsed by the greatest moment of pleasure.

The Great Tribulation in Jesus's mind and in his theology is that all these pains and sufferings were gonna happen in AD 72, Jerusalem, and to the people who rejected him as their Messiah, but that would be the moment of his greatest victory where his kingdom, now untethered from Judaism, now unencumbered by Jewish persecution, would now go out and disciple the nations.

Since no other city on Earth had the religious standing of Jerusalem, possessing the very house of God where the creator of time and space literally promised to live and dwell among his people, we know that the destruction of the city and the temple that Jesus is talking about would be unrivaled in the history of men and would have monumental implications.

Now, all these things occurred when Rome surrounded the city, reducing its buildings to rubble and burning the temple to the ground. That's the second point. When Jerusalem was surrounded, it already happened, which means that we now have two lines of evidence showing that this event already happened.

Fleeing Judea, Rooftops, and the Practical Warnings of Jesus

Reason three, the fleeing Judeans. Jesus says in Matthew 24, 16, then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains. He says in Luke 21, 21, and those who are in the midst of the city must leave, and those who are in the country must not enter the city.

So Jesus is saying, before the great tribulation occurs, Jesus is telling his disciples to be on the lookout. When they, not us, see the Roman army surrounding Jerusalem and when they see the temple being defiled, they, again, not us, must flee to the mountains for safety.

In our day, if Jesus were actually looking past his disciples and talking to us, this would make very little sense. If a world leader, aka Antichrist or Nicolai Carpathia or whatever you want to call it, if that guy brought armies that surrounded Jerusalem with his armies to kill the Jews who were worshiping at a newly rebuilt temple, then it would make very little difference whatsoever if they fled to the city or if they fled to the mountains.

In our day, helicopters would mow them down, tanks would saw them in half, and mortar rounds would rain down on top of their heads, and drones would find them in every little foothill in Judea. There would be no escape in the modern world if an eschatological super beast rose to power and then surrounded the city of Jerusalem.

He would wipe them out, especially given the reality of nuclear warfare. Yet, this is the way that dispensational thinkers imagine Matthew 24, 16 is going to play out. Now, for us, instead of comic book eschatology, I want us to think about what this passage is actually saying.

Jesus is telling his disciples to be on the lookout for a ancient first century Roman invasion that began in 66 AD. At first, we know from history that the Romans concentrated their power in Galilee and then were conquering one town after another, which motivated the populations of those cities to run to the next town because when their town got set on fire by the Romans, they fleed to the next town and then to the next town.

And eventually, as the Romans systematically were wiping out one town after another, everybody eventually who was left and who was alive ended up in Jerusalem. By the time the Romans arrived at Judah's largest city, the population of the Jews had swollen to unsustainable proportions from taking in refugees and country folk who were seeking refuge in the city.

Now, at that time, that was not an uncommon practice. That's simply what you did. When an army, especially a massive army like the Romans could muster, when they attacked your nation, then you went to the highest and most fortified citadel where the largest amount of resources could be amassed.

Usually, this would be your largest city with your greatest fortification around it, like in walls and stuff. And in the case of Judah, this would have been Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a city top fortress that armies could not conquer easily.

This is especially true when you consider that Jerusalem also boasted an underground water supply, which meant that it would have, under normal circumstances, been an ideal place to wait out an enemy siege, especially if they could muster a fairly large food supply, which normally they could.

Yet, because Jesus knew that this was not a normal event, he warned his disciples to abandon conventional wisdom and, instead of fleeing to the city, to flee to the countryside. Instead of going to Jerusalem, which would have been certain death, they would have been told to seek shelter elsewhere, which people would have laughed at them.

They would have thought that they were foolish and stupid. There's nowhere stronger than Jerusalem. And yet, Jesus' words make perfect sense in the ancient context to which they were given, not in a modern world.

Now, you ask the question, could it be that these things truly were only applicable to the ancient world and they have no bearing today? Well, I think the ancient people who heard these prophecies took them very seriously, and I think that there's good evidence to think that the application is not universal in its scope, but really was applied to them.

For instance, why do you think the first Christians sold their property in Jerusalem in Acts 4 .34? Remember, they sold their property, they brought the proceeds to the apostles, they laid it at the apostles' feet.

Why did everyone sell their property and basically adopt a mobile lifestyle if they didn't believe that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed and what was the point of owning property? If everyone knew in the year 2028 that a meteor was going to hit your town and that it was going to affect basically a third of the country, then who among us would not sell our property and move to the other side of the nation?

We would all do that. Well, in the same way, Jesus told the earliest disciples that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. Those who owned land in the city sold it, gave it to the apostles for the building up of the kingdom of God and the church because they knew that it was going to outlast Jerusalem, and that's what they did.

I think the reason that they did it was not just that they wanted to be a socialist commune led by some first century version of Bernie Sanders. No, they wanted to obey what Jesus said, live light, live mobile, and get rid of property that was going to be destroyed anyway.

I think all of that makes sense with the context. This is also why the Christians in history, there's not a single Christian that's recorded dying in the city of Jerusalem during the Roman siege. Why is that?

Is it because that the Christians were lucky? Is it because that the Jews would let them into the city? No, it's because while we do not have record of Roman armies killing any Christians, we do have record that the Christians left the city just as Jesus told them to.

They preached the gospel faithfully like Noah in a city that hated them, and they did that for 40 years, which is exactly what Jesus told them to do, and that ended with all kinds of innumerable persecutions in the service of Christ to that wicked generation, but before the greatest of all sufferings occurred, before the Roman armies came in and set everything on fire and killed and maimed all of the survivors, before that happened, we have record that the Christians got out.

They got out of the city, just like Jesus said, and they did not suffer the fate of the Jews. That alone is an excellent proof that the great tribulation that Jesus prophesied has already occurred. The disciples believed him, and because they believed him, their lives were spared.

Reason number four, rooftops and backpacking. Matthew 24, 17 says, whoever is on the housetop must not go down to get the things that are in the house. In the same breath that Jesus used to tell his followers to flee the city before the great tribulation, he also warned them with a very peculiar and very ancient example that does not apply very well in the modern world.

He told them not to go down from their rooftop patios in order to collect their belongings within the house. Today, this would be almost meaningless since no one lounges, congregates, or spends any meaningful time on their rooftop.

You've never ridden down a city in any town that you live in in America and seen the vast majority of people hanging out on their roof. You've never seen that because that is not a part of our customs in the modern world.

In fact, in most of the world, pointed and pitched rooftops would be dangerous to climb on, much less to do life on. Yet at that time, houses became insufferably hot during the day so that congregating on a flattened roof would actually have been the most comfortable until the home cooled off in the evening.

So they constructed their homes to have flat roofs as opposed to the way that we construct our homes now to have these steep, pitched, shingled roofs. It's just not the same. This means that meals would have occurred on the top of the roof.

Parties, family gatherings, many other significant occasions in life would have all taken place on the rooftop of the house instead of inside of it, and they would have done life up there until the evening time when the house finally cooled off enough to where everybody could go down and congregate in the lower part of the home and then mostly do their sleeping.

You see, you would sleep inside the house. You would store supplies and possessions and spend your cooler moments, which were very rare, inside of the house. But that's about it. The rest of life would have been done on the rooftop, which is not true today.

But that was certainly true back then. And if you add to the fact that a lot of the houses in Jerusalem were built into the structure of the wall so that the outer wall of your house was also the outer wall of the city of Jerusalem, then you can imagine that when an army surrounded the city, that homeowners who were escaping the sweltering heat in the middle of the day would have had a perfect view of the advancing troops, and they would have been able to warn the city folks that, hey, there's an army coming.

And in that, they would have probably been scared, and they would have had every reason to want to go down in their house and to pack their bags and to get their rolling pin and everything else. And Jesus is saying, don't waste your time packing your bags.

Flee immediately, because if you don't, it's going to be too late. That warning makes perfect sense in a world where the houses had flat roofs and they were built into the structure of the city of Jerusalem, and it makes no sense whatsoever of the pitched roofs that are strewn about in suburbias all over the world, and that's the way that we live today.

So yet again, another proof that Jesus is speaking to that culture in their situation and in their time. And let's be honest. If Jesus wanted to speak in such a way that made sense to us, He could have befuddled His disciples by saying something that made more sense to our context and our culture if we were the recipient of this passage, but we're not.

He gave specific details that make sense in their culture, and gosh, we should look at that and say, huh, I'm assuming that He meant for it to apply to them, because it does. So that's reason four. Reason five, hey, farmer, don't go get your coat.

Matthew 24, 18 says, whoever's in the field must not turn back to get his coat. This is the fifth reason that Jesus gives that we can know that this passage occurs in that time period, and He's saying, farmers, don't go get your coats.

Now, this is a similar warning to the one before. Jesus tells the farmers not to go to His house, not to go inside, and not to get His coat. Why? Well, this made great sense in an agrarian society where the majority of the Judean landscape outside the city of Jerusalem was filled with farmers who all cared very deeply about their cloak.

At that time, a good coat actually said something about you. You remember Joseph and his coat of many colors. We also have biblical examples of bloodthirsty men who are gambling to have an expensive and desirable coat after its owner was crucified.

You remember Jesus. At that time, a coat said something about you. It could actually be considered one of your most prized possessions. Jesus even says to His disciples, if someone asks for your coat, give it to them.

That would have been such a revolutionary thing to say because at that point, it's like I'm giving them my greatest possession that I own. Today, a coat is not normally one of the most prized possessions that you have in your arsenal of material objects.

A few people would actually run into a burning building in order to get their coat or their pullover or their cardigan, but at that time, people thought about that particular clothing item a little bit differently than we do today.

The same is true of farming. When Jesus gave this warning, it would have applied to the majority of the population who were blue-collar workers extracting resources from the land and seed through tremendous labor and energy.

Judah at that time was dominated by farmers and shepherds and fishermen who were poor and who probably their greatest possession was a nice coat, but that's not the case in modern-day Israel today. The geographical region that Jesus was referring to back then, once the home of blue-collar tradesmen and poor people who were just trying to eke by an existence with fishing and farming, well, today, that same geographical area is filled with sprawling metropolises that have been filled to the brim with high-tech industry.

Instead of farms that are filled with plants and crops, now the landscape is dominated by server farms, by cybersecurity operations and information and communication technology firms and various research and development enterprises, all which comprise the majority of modern-day Israel's economy.

Sadly, farming doesn't even contribute meaningfully at all to modern-day Israel's life or their economy, making this warning that Jesus is giving totally irrelevant to the modern-day Israelite. This plain and simple fact is that this way of speaking that Jesus is doing is a specific warning to people who are living in the first century on how to avoid a great tribulation that was going to happen to them.

Forcing this into a modern world is just simply to accept the ridiculous. These things don't make sense in our world, but they make perfect sense in the world that Jesus' disciples were living. That's point number five.

Pregnancy, Sabbath Travel, and Days of Vengeance

Point number six, winter pregnancy and zealous Sabbatarians. Jesus says in Matthew 24, 19 -20, but woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days, but pray that your flight will not be in winter or on the Sabbath, Matthew 24, 19 -20.

If you were planning to flee your ancestral homeland when Vespasian, the Roman general, brought his Roman legions right to your very doorstep, then you would have appreciated Jesus' warning here. Beyond not going home to get your cloak or coming down from your roof to get your rolling pin, it would have been a good idea to know what other travel hindrances might afflict you.

For instance, if speed was of the utmost importance and it was a critical component of your flight and staying alive, then being pregnant would certainly slow you down when the Roman armies are surrounding the city.

Jesus is just saying, man, it's going to be really hard for you if you're pregnant in those days. If you're nursing, stopping to nurse an infant while you're frantically running for your life would not only be inconvenient, but any crying baby would risk revealing your position to the Roman armies.

Think about it like this. Winter travel would have made your flight miserable. Judea is muddy and wet and even cold in that time, so you'd have been exposed to the elements. And with all of the hardline zealots who were running the city of Jerusalem at that time, trying to do anything on the Sabbath would have probably gotten you killed.

All of this applies brilliantly to a group of ancient refugees who were leaving Jerusalem in 70 AD, but it doesn't apply very well to a world where temperature-controlled automobiles, heated runways, and hospitals are on every corner so that you can go and have a baby, and there are scant few hardliners who are paying attention to your comings and goings on the Sabbath.

These words in today's context lose their meaning. But, you know, if the disbees are right and a future Antichrist wages all that war on Israel, then still, even if that happens, being pregnant, nursing, and traveling in the winter or on the Sabbath is just not going to impede you in the slightest.

This is yet another proof how these words find their perfect fulfillment in that generation, in that time period, and in that social context, and that really gives us at least now six indications that the Great Tribulation was a first-century event that Jesus was warning them about for them.

So that's reason six. Reason seven, these be days of vengeance. Luke 21 -22 says, because these are days of vengeance, so that all things which are written will be fulfilled. Again, Luke 21 -22. Now, to break this one down, I want to go back to my lackluster elementary school career, where at some point, I cannot remember even which grade it was in, I was introduced to the concepts of near and far demonstrative pronouns.

Now, this sounds like a complicated thing, but it's actually a fairly easy thing. A near demonstrative pronoun describes things that are close in relationship to you, whereas a far demonstrative pronoun identifies things that are far away from you.

So, for example, if I had an apple in front of me, I could say, I will eat this apple, because it's right in front of me. But if I look up at the TV and there's an apple on the TV and I say, I want to eat that one, well, then that's far away from me.

I would have to travel through airwaves in space and time in order to get to the place where that apple was filmed and hope that it's not rotten by the time that I get there. That silly example is kind of proving my point.

We use words like this and these and that and those to describe things that are either near in relation to us or things that are far in relation to us. Knowing this, Jesus says that these days, which is a near demonstrative pronoun, are the ones where God's vengeance would be poured out.

He's not speaking in far demonstrative terms about distant years that are way off into the future, like if he was, he could have said that year or those years. He's talking about this year or these years, which are immediately in the purview of his disciples.

By using the word these, it seems clear that Jesus is limiting the fulfillment of this prophecy to a timeframe that's very near to the disciples' experience. If multiple thousands of years were in the future in Jesus's mind, then his sentence would not have said in these years, it would have said in those years.

And again, by pushing this out to 2 ,000 years, we're making this grammatically meaningless. In addition to just basic elementary grammar, Jesus cites the fulfillment of Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 63, Daniel 9, and Hosea 9 as reasons that the Great Tribulation would occur in that very generation.

He alludes to these passages in what he says to his disciples. Case in point, I want you to notice how Hosea speaks about the punishment that's coming and why God is going to bring it. These things are things Jesus is alluding to in Matthew 24 and Luke 21.

This is what Hosea says. Verse 7, the days of punishment have come. That's exactly what Jesus said, the days of vengeance, the days of retribution have come. Let Israel know this. That's what Jesus is doing.

He's letting Israel know. Then it says, the prophet is a fool, the inspired man is demented because of the grossness of your iniquity and because of the hostility, your hostility is so great. Now go down to verse 17.

My God, this is in the voice of the true prophet, and I think it's in the voice of Jesus even, Hosea's prophetic voice is sort of capsulating what Jesus is gonna say. My God will cast them away. That's the Jews, because they have not listened to him.

They've not listened to Messiah. And they will be wanderers among the nations, Hosea 9, 7 and 19. Now, that verse perfectly has been fulfilled in the first century. The Jews did not listen to Jesus, and because of that, God made them wander all over the face of the earth.

And that's been the case for the last 2 ,000 years. I don't wanna keep beating the same drum, and I certainly don't wanna beat the horse until it turns into a puddle, but like, this has already happened.

And we see it all over the place. That's seven examples so far. We've got six more. Reason number eight, land distress and people wrath. Luke 21, 23 says, for there will be great distress upon the land and wrath to this people.

After our lesson just a moment ago on near demonstrative pronouns, you're probably well qualified to see the point Jesus is making. Great distress is gonna fall upon the land. The land is a common reference to the geographical territory of Israel.

But he says that great wrath is gonna fall upon this people. He's not saying those people over there, and he's not saying that people in the future. Wrath is gonna fall on that people. He's saying it's gonna fall on this people, the people who are alive right now and who are rejecting the Messiah, just like Hosea 9, 7 said.

This is the generation that great distress and great tribulation will inevitably fall upon, and that generation was in the generation of AD 30 to AD 70, that 40-year period that Jesus perfectly predicted.

That's reason eight. Reason nine, an unprecedented event. Matthew 24, 21 says, for then there will be a great tribulation such as not has occurred since the beginning of the world until now or nor ever will.

Now, I just wanna make clear here from Matthew 24, 20 to Matthew 24, 21, there is no hint. There is nothing in the text that gives us any exegetical warrant to say that Matthew 24, 1 through 20 was talking to the disciples, and then all of a sudden Jesus switches to be able to talk about us 2 ,000 years later.

There's nothing in the text that says that. Jesus says, for, which connects it back to verse 20 and beyond, for then, after these things, then there will be a great tribulation. Not 2 ,000 years later, but immediately after that.

That's the first thing I would say. So I would say, apparently, Jesus believed that immediately after the Roman army showed up and surrounded the city that a great tribulation was going to occur and that was gonna bring about such intense and complete ruin that it could be said that it's never happened before nor would ever happen again.

He says, then, meaning after the army show up, a great tribulation with manifold calamities is gonna befall the people, and it happened just like that. We know that from the history. After Rome showed up, set up camp, began chopping down trees in the Mount of Olives to build their catapults and siege ramps, the Jews inside the city were driven to a kind of insanity that fueled needless turf wars, factional infighting, food poisoning, and everything else.

It left thousands of Jews butchered, innocent, robbed, and pillaged. It left the temple defiled, the food supply compromised, and all of this brought about such intense pain, starvation, and misery that mothers resulted to roasting their own babies in the fire, and dignified, wealthy, well-to-do men were eagerly feasting on animal excrement that they found in the city's sewer system, Jewish Wars 5, 13, 7, and 6, 3, 4.

Josephus, our eyewitness historian to these events, barely had words to describe the horror and the atrocity and calamity and misery that was brought upon the Jews. He tells us this in the preface of his history.

He says,. But if anyone makes an unjust accusation against us, meaning against him, when we speak so passionately about the tyrants, he's talking about the zealots that took over the city and ruined everything, or the robbers, or sorely bewail the misfortunes of our country, let him indulge my affections.

For it appears to me that the misfortunes of all men from the beginning of the world, if they were to be compared to these of the Jews, are not even considerable as they were. Jewish Wars Preface, paragraph 4.

Listen, while Josephus was not a believer, and there's no evidence that he ever heard or read the prophecy that Jesus gave in Matthew 24, 21, he is saying the exact same thing that Jesus said. He is corroborating the testimony that these tremendous devastations that befell the Jews were unlike anything that any people had ever experienced ever before.

Josephus is saying from the beginning of the world until now, there has never been a people who have suffered so greatly as these. That is an astounding statement from a non-Christian Jew. And it makes all the more sense when you consider the fact that there's no nation on earth that was the covenant people of God.

There's no nation on earth where Yahweh promised to make his presence dwell. There's no place on earth that had a temple where God actually lived inside of it. So for that nation to fall and for that nation to experience utter calamity and ruin is unlike any downfall that has ever happened in the history of the world.