141. Wars, Earthquakes, and Famines (OH MY!!!)

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 141,

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Wars, Earthquakes, and Famines. Oh, my! Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we are now in our fifth episode of this

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Revelation series where we've been going back into the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24 as a kind of a prequel to show how it is saying the same things that Revelation is, but in a much more straightforward way so that we can understand

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Matthew 24, we can understand Revelation, and when we do that, we will realize that these things are not talking about things in the distant future or things that happen in our time period that concern things like the

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World Economic Forum and computer chips that go in your wrist and all of that craziness.

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No, these things are messages from God to his first century people that the end of the

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Jewish age had come and the dawning of the Christian age, the kingdom of Christ had come, and that kingdom, as we talked about last week, will continue until every tribe, every tongue, every nation has come in, and then we will see

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Jesus return to receive his bride. Now, with that, we're gonna move on to our next episode, but before that,

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I wanna remind you that our channel has launched our memberships and you can support us by signing up.

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All of the revenue that we raise in this show is gonna go right back into the show to help us make it better, to help us make it bigger, to help us get the word out to more people, because honestly,

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I started this show because I'm tired of seeing Christians being discouraged and defeated and depressed and dejected and every other

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D word you wanna talk about. I'm tired of seeing the church struggle, believing that we're constantly ready to fall off the cliff into some cataclysmic, eschatological doom.

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I wanna see the church pumped up, excited, ready to live out their faith, ready to build, ready to pick up the hammer and the nail and to build in our generation.

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I don't want our generation to be the one that looks at King Jesus collectively and says, we squandered the legacy of Christendom because we were too lazy and too timid and too afraid to do anything about it.

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I want this show to be a part of reinvigorating and encouraging the saints of God back into doing the work of God once again and to stop gazing at our navels and waiting for an eschatological rapture and all of that.

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So, if you wanna help us, if you wanna help us get this message out to more people, join as a member.

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All of the resources are gonna go to marketing and everything else that's gonna make this show reach more people.

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So thank you for that. And with that, let us continue where we left off last week, which is the disciples who've just recently walked out of Jerusalem and their minds are now spinning with everything

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Jesus has told them. Part one, the walk from Jerusalem.

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As Jesus and his disciples left the Temple Mount Tuesday afternoon, memories of what just occurred 20 minutes later were spiraling and ricocheting in their minds.

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Early that morning, Jesus had cursed a fig tree as a dramatic parabolic display of what was soon gonna happen to Jerusalem.

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Jesus wasn't hangry. He wasn't upset that he couldn't have his figgy pudding that morning because the fig tree wasn't bearing any fruit.

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No, he was using this as a lived out parable of the destruction of Jerusalem.

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Then after he does that and he gives this brief encounter with the Pharisees where they challenge his authority in the temple, he delivers three scathing parables that describe with increasing clarity not only the covenantal catastrophe that is soon gonna befall them, but also how

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Jesus is gonna rip the kingdom out of their hands and he's gonna give it to a people who bear its fruit.

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Remember, he came to a city, rode in the city on a donkey, and all they gave him was leaves. It was a city that was supposed to offer the king fruit, but they only gave him leaves.

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Then he goes to a fig tree that offered him only leaves without fruit. Then he goes to a temple that did not bear the fruit of God and only offered him leaves.

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And then Jesus says that the kingdom of God is gonna be taken away from you,

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Jerusalem and the Jews, and it's gonna be given to a people who are going to bear its fruit.

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Because they didn't give him fruit, he's gonna give it to a people who would bear his fruit forever.

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Now, the Jews, while listening to this national epithet, were getting extremely enraged, as you can imagine, and they're ready in a moment to crucify him, but they listen as he continues on and they receive his parables, however, with about as much grace as a rattlesnake, ready to strike at a moment's notice.

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It was at that point that they challenged Jesus' authority with these questions that they wanted answered and Jesus humiliated them in front of the entire city.

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And then Jesus turns around and asks them questions that they cannot answer.

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And then after this, after he embarrasses them a second time then he declares these seven covenantal woes upon the city.

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These seven Deuteronomic and Levitical woes from Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, where he describes the consequences of covenant infidelity where God is gonna bring the full weight of his wrath and his fury upon those who broke covenant with their

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God. You can imagine how much tension would have been in the moment.

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You can imagine the Jews seething with fury as Jesus is enacting covenant woe upon them.

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And from that moment, as soon as Jesus is finishing speaking, he leaves the

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Temple Mount. The disciples come with him. And as the disciples and Jesus were walking outside of the city through the gate called

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Beautiful and then down into the valley, as they're walking, the temple would have been looming over top of their heads and the disciples with their heads still spinning looked up at the temple that they had adored for their entire life.

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The place where they and their family had offered sacrifices, the center of the Jewish faith. They looked up at it and they hoped with everything within their body that they had misunderstood

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Jesus's words. But after one of them pointed to the temple complex looming over them and said,

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Jesus, look at these beautiful buildings. And remember that he's not pointing them out like Jesus doesn't know what they are.

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He's pointing them out like, really? This Jesus, you said not, you said it's gonna be destroyed.

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It's gonna be left desolate. You said it's gonna be left empty. They thought maybe that they had misunderstood him.

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But when Jesus responded to them with not one stone was gonna be left upon another, they were struck with the piercing finality of his linguistic precision.

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And they realized that the temple was gonna be left utterly desolate. The city was gonna be burned and raised.

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God's redemption of sinful humanity was gonna transition away from priests and temples and sacrifices and feast into a new and a final era where Jesus is the true sacrifice.

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Jesus is the true priest. And the temple is not gonna be a geographical plot in downtown

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Jerusalem. The temple is gonna be the people of God and dwelled by the spirit of God so that you and I, if you and I, or if you're a

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Christian, then you have been made a temple of the living God, a walking, talking holy of holies bought and paid for by Jesus so that now the entire world is being filled with the temple of Jerusalem and no longer just this era of going to the city to offer your sacrifices there.

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A seismic shift in the landscape of redemptive history was happening right before their very eyes.

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And it is not any wonder that the disciples were confused and they were perplexed and they were looking for answers.

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This is why they walked up to Jesus with their three questions. They wanted to know. They said, when are these things gonna happen?

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When's the temple gonna be destroyed? What's gonna be the sign that's occurring that's gonna show us that the destruction is drawing near?

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And what about the end of the age? That's their three questions. Now, last week, we saw that Jesus was tackling their second question first, giving them the introductory signs that were gonna demonstrate to them that Jerusalem was coming to an end.

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He told them that it was gonna be like a woman whose labor pains were increasing as the delivery draws near,

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Matthew 24, eight, which means that the signs that Jesus is going to give them are going to begin at a certain level and they're gonna get worse and they're gonna continue to get worse as the labor pains increase.

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Now, a few weeks ago, we saw the first sign that was gonna grow in increasing intensity, which was the rise of false messiahs and false antichrist, who were gonna lead the city and the people and the nation into ruin and disaster.

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And it was gonna climax in Rome, leveling their city to the ground and plundering the city of Jerusalem and taking all of their wealth back on their boats, back to Rome for a big parade that demonstrated the triumph of Rome and the weakness of everyone else.

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Today, after all of that, we're gonna see the second, the third and the fourth signs that Jerusalem was gonna be shaken down to the dust, which is the dawn of increasing wars and rumors of wars, the dawn of increasing earthquakes and the dawn of increasing famines.

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But first, before we do that, we need to actually talk about what a sign is because we haven't done that yet.

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What is a sign? What does it mean? Why is it so important? Let's do that now.

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In part two, reminder about the signs. Now imagine this, you're living in a world, in the ancient world, without news apps.

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You don't have X and Facebook and everything else. No social media, no daily briefings.

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You don't get to turn on your whatever news channel you watch. When big events happen, there was no instant notification, no pinging on your phone.

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Instead, you got to look around, watch the skies and watch the earth around you to see if the events unfolding in your world could help you understand if something bigger and more dramatic was at play.

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In biblical times, people understood these events as signs. They weren't just miraculous wonders to make you go, wow, look at that.

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They were messages from God in their mindset. There were signposts pointing to something real, something urgent, something for them.

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And God used these astrological signs or signs in the heavens and on earth. He used that to teach his people.

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Now, when God gave signs in the Bible, they were direct specific communications from him so that when the people saw them, they were to obey and listen to him.

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You think about the Old Testament. God didn't send plagues on Egypt as some riddle for the ages gone past.

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He was making a statement front and center. He was telling the Israelites and Pharaoh and everyone else on earth that these plagues were messages that this is what happens when you try to stand against the living

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God, that there's only one God on all the earth and it is Yahweh. That's why he systematically hammered and destroyed the

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Egyptians with these 10 plagues, one after another, demonstrating his majesty. Think about the rainbow at the end of the flood.

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It wasn't some vague symbol for future generations to try and decode it. It was a concrete promise to Noah and to his family and to the generations that followed that God was never gonna flood the earth again.

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Signs and scriptures aren't hidden clues for uncertain future events. They're in your face messages that speak directly to their time and to the people who are looking at them.

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So by the time you get to Jesus, when he burst onto the scene, people started asking for a sign from Jesus because that's what they've looked for all along.

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They're people who look for signs. But they were asking Jesus for a sign for all the wrong reasons.

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The religious leaders didn't really wanna see if Jesus was the Messiah or not. They hated Jesus and they were trying to trap him and to force him to prove himself on demand.

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Why? So that they could catch him in something to kill him. And Jesus doesn't play along with this at all.

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He gives them the sign of Jonah, which is the sign that Jonah went down into the belly of whale and three days later, he was spit back up onto the land.

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So they give him the sign of, he gives them the sign of Jonah telling them that he is going to die and that he is going to resurrect because he has a message to declare to all of the

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Gentiles in the world like Nineveh who were gonna be resurrected in him, who were gonna be saved in him, who's the gospel was gonna bring to life because of him.

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So he gives them the sign of Jonah, showing them that his death and his resurrection was gonna be the judgment that God pours out on them.

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That it was gonna raise God's people like the Ninevites, but it was going to crush and leave them outside the city weeping and gnashing their teeth like Jonah.

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That was the sign that Jesus gives to them. Now it's here where it gets really interesting because while Jesus didn't entertain the

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Jews by giving them all the signs that they were demanding him, he did give signs to his disciples because they weren't doubting looking for a reason not to believe, they were doubting and hoping

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Jesus could give them a reason to hold on to, to believe. And when Jesus' disciples asked him about the destruction of the temple in the end of the

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Jewish age, Jesus gave them signs. He didn't look at them like he did the Jews and say an adulterous and wicked generation looks for signs and wonders.

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No, because they wanted to believe and they wanted something tangible to understand.

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Jesus gave them specific markers like wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes, signs that they were gonna look at with their own eyes.

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They were gonna guide them through this tumultuous period that they were getting ready to walk through. But here is where so many people go wrong today because they look at these signs and they take them as if they were given to us, as if Jesus was talking to some distant, mysterious, end time people thousands of years later and he wasn't actually talking to his disciples.

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Can you imagine his disciples coming up to him and say, Jesus, when is the temple gonna be destroyed? Give us a sign.

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And Jesus says something like, well, in 2024, Donald Trump is going to defeat

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Joe Biden and they're like, what, what's 2024?

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Who's Joe Biden? It wouldn't have made any sense. So he wasn't talking to us, he was talking to them.

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Jesus wasn't giving vague prophecies like Nostradamus that somebody later would have to string together with wild imagination and maybe a bit too much peyote in order to understand he was preparing his followers for their time that they were gonna face in their lifetime.

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A sign without relevance to its audience is not a sign. It's just noise.

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Imagine you're driving and let's say you're driving from Boston, okay, and you wanna go to New York City.

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And as you're driving to New York City, on the way you see a sign, Paris, 7 ,000 miles away.

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And you're like, why do I need to know that? Because I'm not in France and I don't really care if I'm in Paris or not,

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I'm going to New York. See, the sign that doesn't apply to you is not a sign. It's just noise.

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Now, let's take the book of Revelation. People often call this the book of signs and it is, it has many signs, but somehow we've twisted the word sign to mean it applies to us.

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That's not what a sign means. Remember, you're not gonna see a sign to Paris on your way from Boston to New York.

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So don't think that. Just like you shouldn't assume that a Frenchman is gonna have a sign between Boston and New York.

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Revelation's not giving modern listeners signs about what's gonna happen in our lifetime. That's just not what it's about.

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We've twisted it into thinking that it's all about us, all about me, all about my life, all about my situation.

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There's a kind of cultural narcissism that we've applied to the Bible, which means that somehow we think that it was written by the ancients, but it was postmarked to us.

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And we've got to get out of this narcissetical way of viewing the scripture. For John, Revelation was a message to the early church, people who were living in the

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Roman empire, facing real persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the Jews. And these signs in Revelation were vivid and urgent and specific to their situation.

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They were messages to those people who were living at that time about things that were gonna happen to them and their families.

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For instance, take Revelation 12, where John describes the woman and the dragon. Now for us, it might seem like a strange symbol, but to the early

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Christians, it was a picture of Israel and the coming victory of Christ over evil. Or take for instance,

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Revelation 13, where the beast represents Rome, this city on seven hills. And it's this dark, looming creature that's hanging over the scene.

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This wasn't a cosmic mystery for future generations about the United Nations or any of that.

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It was speaking to them about a city, Rome, that was really a city that sat on seven hills.

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And it was a city that was causing massive unrest in the ancient world that God was going to eventually put down, which he did in the 400s.

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These early Christians didn't need decoder rings, and they didn't need the old back of cereal boxes where you played the game and you had the little thing and you had to figure out what the mystery was.

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They didn't need that. They had these signs that Jesus gave them that were giving them hope and assurance and clarity about things that were gonna happen in their lifetime.

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Again, a sign only matters if it's relevant to the people who see it.

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Jesus' disciples needed signs. They asked for signs, and he gave them signs that they could understand in their generation.

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In Matthew 24, when Jesus talks about wars and rumors of wars, he's not talking about the

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Russian -Ukrainian conflict. He's not talking about Palestine and Hamas.

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He's talking to his disciples who are preparing for the invasion of Rome in their country and in their time.

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That's where we need a reality check. Signs in the Bible were not meant to be riddles for us.

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They were meant to be clear symbols of what was gonna happen to them. Now with that, let's read our text for today, and let's look at the first sign that Jesus gives, which is wars and rumors of wars.

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Matthew 24 says this. You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars.

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See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place. But that is not yet the end, for nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.

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And in various places there will be famines and earthquakes, but all these things are merely the beginning of the birth pangs,

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Matthew 24, six through eight. Again, Jesus' words were not about a distant, mysterious future

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Antichrist figure who brings wars on earth now or whenever. They were about a moment in history, a warning to guide his followers through their time.

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Now let's look at sign number one. Sign one, the wars and rumors of wars.

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In addition to the sign of false messiahs and Antichrist, which we've already dealt with, Jesus gives his disciples more evidence that they're gonna see with their own eyes and their own lifetime about the downfall of Jerusalem.

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And they're gonna see how these signs played into the timing of those events and how all of this was going to culminate in the downfall of the

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Jewish age. It was gonna be a massive uptick in the frequency of violent activity in the

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Roman Empire, which he calls wars and rumors of wars. Now, to understand how all of this worked and occurred in the first century, there's something we need to know about the period that Jesus and his disciples were living in, which, as you will see, is very different from our own.

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Section one, the establishment of the Pax Romana. When Jesus addressed his followers, they were living in one of the most unique periods in world history, a period that we now know as the

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Pax Romana, or it's also in English, the Roman peace. This wasn't just a slogan or a bumper sticker that you'd put on the back of your chariot.

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It was a reality that shaped every aspect of life for the people across the empire.

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Rome's peace had been so carefully constructed and built, so powerfully enforced, that most of Jesus's followers could hardly imagine a world outside of it.

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The Pax Romana was born out of incredible turmoil in the first century,

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B .C., actually. Rome was once a mighty republic. It wasn't always an imperial system.

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It was a republic that was led by senators, and that Roman republic fell apart at the seams in the first century,

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B .C., about 50 to 70 years before Jesus was born. Because of relentless internal conflict, political corruption, and power struggles,

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Rome was on the verge of collapse. And then there came a turning point when a man named

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Julius Caesar rose up to power and crowned himself as dictator for life.

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So he usurped the senatorial system, crowned himself as dictator for life, disrupted the balance of power that was in the

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Roman Republic, and consolidated authority underneath himself, which ended nearly 500 years of senatorial rule in Rome.

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But, as you can imagine, his reign was cut short in a very gruesome way.

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He was assassinated on the Senate floor by men hoping to restore Rome to its former glory, if you remember in Shakespeare the famous line, et tu,

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Brute? But instead of restoring peace, the death of Julius Caesar actually triggered a brutal power struggle.

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For over a decade, the Roman world descended into civil war and chaos. Bloodshed swept across the regions as generals and political leaders were jockeying for control and power.

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There was all sorts of threats, and we could go into this a lot. There was all sorts of uprisings and jostling, but Julius Caesar's adopted son,

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Octavian, whom we know in history as Augustus, eventually rose to power in 31

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BC. He defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium and stabilized the empire.

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Now, he didn't just become a leader, he redefined Rome entirely. He ushered in a brand new era, one that saw

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Rome transformed from a republic into a vast empire with himself as its first true emperor and beginning what we know as the

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Judeo -Claudian dynasty. Now, his reign marked the beginning of what would become known later as the

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Pax Romana, which meant that Augustus brought a ferocious and unshakable peace to Rome.

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This peace was built on strict control, strategic military presence.

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Augustus stationed legions throughout the empire to watch over the peoples, to make sure that they didn't break out into war.

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He didn't have the soldiers stationed at the borders hoping to expand Rome's territory by fighting foreign countries.

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No, he put the legions all throughout the Roman Empire to maintain stability within the realm.

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He secured the frontiers, he reformed the government, he invested heavily in infrastructure like Roman roads, aqueducts, public buildings, all of which became symbols of this new era of burgeoning peace.

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The roads that were expertly engineered, you can still find traces of them today in England and Europe, spanned thousands of miles and connected people and goods in a way that the world had never known before.

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With it, Rome brought prosperity and influence and merchants and soldiers and a kind of travel that had never been known.

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And it extended from Egypt all the way to Great Britain. And it brought a sense of safety and freedom and prosperity and wealth and all of these things that would have been unimaginable to anyone in the ancient world.

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It was a marvel to anyone who had ever lived in any other place.

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It would have been unconceivable. For the disciples who were born and raised in that world, the

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Pax Romana wasn't just a political reality. It was actually woven into the fabric of their everyday lives.

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It was the air that they breathed. It was the peace that they felt when they went into their crowded synagogues.

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It was there in the countryside under Roman protection, daily life pulsed with a feeling of security and predictability that was brought about at the iron fist of Rome.

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They probably, the Jews, couldn't have even imagined their towns disrupted by foreign armies or their roads becoming unsafe.

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War was a distant story, something like you would read about in the history books or in the tales of old of your forefathers.

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And yet, standing before his followers, Jesus said, you are going to hear about war.

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To us, that's not gonna hit very hard because we hear about war all the time.

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But to those men, the one standing right in front of him, that would have been shocking and even disturbing to think that the peace and the stability that they were all taking for granted was soon gonna be shaken.

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That would have been difficult and almost impossible maybe even for them to have fathomed. The Pax Romana was as solid and reliable to them as the seasons.

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How could it possibly fall apart, especially in the timeframe that Jesus is giving?

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Picture one of Jesus' disciples sitting in a crowded marketplace in Galilee. All of a sudden, he sees merchants selling goods from as far as North Africa and Asia Minor, Roman soldiers standing guard, maintaining the peace.

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Nearby, you see a group of children playing by the roadside, laughing and carefree, while travelers and traders from distant lands pass by on the famous Roman roads, completely confident in Rome's power to protect them.

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And then suddenly, this disciple hears about an uprising, a rebellion within the empire, something that would have been unthinkable in his lifetime, he hears rumors about now.

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And it wasn't just a vague warning. It was reality crashing in, like the start of a storm breaking over the calm

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Galilean Sea. Jesus' words, once a cryptic message to the disciples, are beginning to make sense as time goes on.

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After his resurrection and ascension, as you get down the road, it was beginning to make more and more sense as wars were starting to break out.

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The peace of Rome was not as invincible as it once seemed. For instance, we're gonna go into more of this in a little bit later, but just for instance, in 66

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AD, a Jewish revolt broke out against the Roman occupation. Against the guards that Augustus had staged all throughout the land of Judea, a

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Jewish insurrection broke out, and Judea became a battleground, such that by 70

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AD, the very city Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish world, was now destroyed. To these early

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Christians, this wasn't ancient history. It was happening right in front of them.

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They were seeing Jesus' prophecy, and you imagine, Jesus told this to 12 men, but these 12 men told it to their families, they told it to their friends, they told it to any

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Christian that they met. This was a part of their sermons on Sunday morning. Hey, everybody, remember,

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Jesus said within 40 years that the city of Jerusalem is going to fall. Be on the lookout. If you hear anything about wars and rumors of wars, come back and tell us next week so that we can be prepared.

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This would have been what they talked about at their dinner table. It would have been what they talked about, like I said, in Sunday morning.

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It would have been what they wrote letters to each other about. Have you heard about the wars yet? Have you heard about the rumors of wars?

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They were feeling the coming terror that crouching upon them, and they would have been talking about it all the time because they were watching their world and waiting for signs that it was fracturing because they believed in the words of Jesus.

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And here's where Jesus' words become even more powerful. His prophecy wasn't just a prediction of war.

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It was an invitation for his disciples and for us to see beyond the temporary peace that human empires can achieve.

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The Roman peace, though remarkable and unrivaled in any era of human history before or after, it was still a human peace.

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It was impressive, but it was ultimately fragile because it was made of human might and human warmongering and all of that.

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Rome's stability depended on soldiers and roads and decrees and weapons.

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Jesus knew that that kind of peace wasn't going to last. You remember in Isaiah, it says that the extent of his government and the increase of his peace will know no end.

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What an incredible thing that Jesus was born into the era of Roman peace, and yet Isaiah says that the increase of his peace would know no end because why?

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God knows that Rome's peace would know an end. Jesus' warning to his disciples was a call for them to place their hope in something far more than political human power.

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He was calling them and us to look beyond the kingdoms and the presidents and the parties that can be shaken to a kingdom that can't be shaken.

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While the Pax Romana would one day fall, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom that he proclaimed is unbreakable.

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It's built on the eternal promises of God and it cannot be shaken.

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So what's that mean for us? Like Jesus' disciples, we can be tempted to find our identity and our security in what's going on in our world today, whether that's political stability, economic prosperity, technological progress, or the like.

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Today is just a few days after the election and it's really easy for conservatives right now to be chest bumping and gloating and really easy for the liberals to be on TikTok screaming their guts out like lunatics because orange man bad got elected to a second term.

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Jesus is inviting us to lift our gaze above human political movements to place our hope in something that is better, deeper, stronger, and unbreakable into a kingdom that doesn't depend on earthly power, one that offers peace that no empire, government, or ruler can ever take.

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And as history has shown, even the mightiest empires crumble, but the kingdom of God established by Christ has lasted and will continue to last forever.

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And the peace that Jesus is bringing will continue to spread until there is no more war.

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Now that we summarized this wars and rumors of war period that Jesus described, now

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I wanna dive into a little bit more of the details and I wanna look at how this piece of Rome eroded.

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I wanna see how it fell apart and I wanna see exactly what Jesus was predicting because we've talked about it generally, now

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I wanna talk about it specifically. So section two, the war Jesus predicted.

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When Jesus warned his disciples, you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, he was speaking into a world where tension was building even against this burgeoning peace.

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And it was reaching a boiling point, especially in Judea. To understand the gravity of this prophecy, we need to immerse ourself in the first century political and cultural landscape, particularly in Judea, where it was a powder keg and everything was like almost ready to blow up.

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Where conflict had been simmering for years, it had been fueled by deep seated resentment towards Roman rule and things were, like I just said, about to literally blow up.

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First century Judea was a providence that was caught between fierce loyalty to the Jewish customs and the powerful unyielding grip of the

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Roman Empire. So they were caught in between those two things. Between their temple customs, their Jewish customs, their legal customs and Rome.

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Rome had extended its empire across the entire Mediterranean region through relentless military conquest and with a power, and with that kind of power came formidable control over the conquered lands.

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Roman peace or Pax Romana came at a price. It was there to maintain stability, often imposed with heavy taxes, which paid for the stationed troops in the most volatile regions.

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And while many provinces eventually did adopt Roman governance, Judea was different.

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The Jewish people never fully acquiesced to Rome. They never fully assimilated into Rome.

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And they had, with their deeply rooted religious and cultural convictions that were centered around the temple and centered around the law of God and all of these things, they believed that they were the chosen people and everyone else on earth needed to back off.

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They believed that they were bound into a covenant with God that set them apart from all the other nations.

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That's why the Jews became so racist in the first century to where they hated Gentiles, hated

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Samaritans, and hated anybody who was not them because they believed that God had this special covenant with them and they were special and they were the best and they were the greatest and they were gonna rise up in power over everyone.

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The Jews went to sleep at night dreaming of revolt, dreaming of overthrowing

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Rome and dreaming of subjugating Rome under the

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Jewish kingdom. That was what they were thinking about, dreaming about, salivating about, like it were a steak on their plate.

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For the Jews, Roman rule was more than just a political inconvenience.

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It was an affront to their identity and their faith and everything.

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To them, bowing down to Rome was almost a betrayal to their covenant status with God.

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And this tension, even though we know God allowed Rome to conquer them and God was allowing these calamities to befall them because they thought that they were covenant keepers, but as Jesus told them, they actually had become egregious covenant breakers.

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But the tensions continued to grow around to new heights around 6

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AD. This is after Jesus was born, when Rome took direct control of Judea.

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Roman governors were installed and they began overseeing local matters. You think about guys like Pontius Pilate, he would have been one of those.

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This happened in 6 AD. The tax burden was increased sharply. Because why?

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Judah was constantly rebellious and because they were rebellious, they needed more Roman troops there to maintain the peace.

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More Roman troops meant higher prices because you had to pay the troops to be there. Higher prices meant higher taxes.

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And their heavy taxes fueled resentment and rebellion, especially among the lower classes of people who were constantly being whipped up into a frenzy by the aristocracy.

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These weren't minor taxes. Rome's demand were so severe that many struggling Jewish families were struggling to make ends meet.

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Farmers were burdened by taxes, were forced to sell their land to pay for Rome's taxes.

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It created an entire growing class of landless, homeless, poor people.

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And it created a volatile underclass of Jews with very little to lose and every reason to resent

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Rome. On top of this, the puppet king that Rome installed, named

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Herod, was also taxing them to build his elaborate palaces. On top of this,

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Jewish people were selling out in order to become tax collectors so that they could make ends meet, so they were taking money from their own people.

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And on top of that, the Pharisees, through their money -changing practices in the temple and through many other things, like Jesus says that they're lovers of money and they're lovers of money because they knew that money was power and money was influence.

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So if they wanted to rebel against Rome, they needed money and they needed all, so they're putting their trust in that. So on top of that, the average citizen of Judea would have been squeezed in every direction and they would have, there's estimates that I've read that they would have paid an upwards of 60, 70, or maybe even 80 % of their money in taxes to all the various different streams that were taking from them.

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Alongside of the economic strain, religious tensions were boiling over. Roman governors like Pontius Pilate and later

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Gessius Florus were notorious for their insensitivity to the Jewish way of life.

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Pilate, for example, infamously brought Roman standards like an eagle, bearing the images of the emperor and of this golden eagle into Jerusalem, images that the

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Jews saw as idolatrous and a violation of their commandment against graven images.

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And when protests erupted, Pilate's response was brutal, ordering his soldiers to disperse the crowds with force, igniting fury across the region.

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Like you've seen these riots today where the police come in with the batons and they're beating citizens.

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That's sort of what this looked like. And it wasn't just the governors who intensified resentment.

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Herod the Great, though he was appointed by Rome, he was not a Jewish king, but he tried to curry favor with the

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Jews by expanding their temple. His reconstruction effort was a magnificent project.

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It took 40 something years to complete. It was one of the marvels in the Roman world, but his allegiance to Rome was never in doubt.

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The temple being constructed was a carrot in front of the Jewish people, but sometimes he brought the stick.

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While some saw Herod's renovations as a gift to the nation, others saw it as Rome's attempt to manipulate and paganize their temple and their worship.

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After Herod's death, his kingdom was divided among his sons, but Judea fell into political instability.

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When one of Herod's sons proved unable to control the pesky Jews of this region, Rome stepped in with a far heavier hand than they ever had before, sending governors who were often out of touch with their

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Jewish customs and culture, which only exasperated and widened the divide.

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By the time Jesus began his ministry, multiple Jewish factions were vying for influence, each with a different approach to Rome's presence.

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You think about today, we have the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans are trying to win the country over by one way, and the

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Democrats are trying to win the country over by another way, and there's this ongoing tug of war. Well, there were four parties in early

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Judaism, especially during the time of Jesus, and they were all vying for ascendancy.

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There was the Pharisees, who emphasized strict observance to the law, hoping that God would bless them by sending the

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Messiah if they would just remain pure and obedient. This is the sect of Jews that was the closest aligned to Jesus, and even they were so far removed from what

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Jesus was saying. Then you had the Sadducees, who were the liberals of their day, who controlled the temple.

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They cooperated with Rome. They were in bed with Rome, trying to maintain their power, and they were trying to avoid conflict at all costs.

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They were basically compromisers. Then you had the Essenes, who were a separatist group, kind of like the

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Amish people today. They retreated from society, and they believed that the Messiah was only gonna come if they could get away from the world and become pure, and once they did that, they believed that he would return and he would lead them into Messianic joy.

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Then there was the Zealots. The Zealots was the most extreme faction.

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Maybe you would call them ancient Antifa. The Zealots were a group that believed liberation from Rome was not only desirable and possible, but it was divinely mandated.

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They were convinced that God would support any effort, any sinful, disgusting, murderous rampage in order to overthrow their oppressors, and they didn't hesitate to use violence every step of the way in order to make their political point.

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Now, this cauldron of political, economic, and religious cacophony, these four groups vying for ascendancy, was nearing a boiling point when you get into the 60s

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AD. This is 30 years after Jesus is risen from the dead. A series of events happened in the 60s that tipped the scales.

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Anti -Roman sentiment reached fever pitch under the rule of the Roman governor, Gessius Florus, who we mentioned just a moment ago.

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He was known for his brutality and his corruption. Florus openly stole money from the temple treasury, which infuriated the

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Jews. It says some sources say that he even stole 17 talents of silver, which is a massive sum of money, and it outraged the entire

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Jewish population. Protests were erupting around the streets of Jerusalem, but Florus responded with shocking croyalty.

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He ordered the massacre of multiple Jewish citizens, and it was under his leadership that tensions rose to the point of full -blown revolt in AD 66.

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Jewish zealot rebels attacked the Roman garrison in Jerusalem. They killed soldiers, and they declared their independence from Rome, which was probably the most devastating and foolish thing that they did.

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The war that Jesus predicted was now on, and it was set in motion right then and there in 66.

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When word of the rebellion reached the imperial palace, Emperor Nero knew that this was more than just a local disturbance.

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Judea was now in open defiance, and for Rome, allowing a revolt like this to go unpunished would signal weakness, and then you would have wars breaking out all over the

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Roman empire. So Nero appointed General Vespasian, who was a seasoned and a very brutal commander, to gather up his troops and to travel all the way down to Judea in order to crush this rebellion.

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And Vespasian was not a stranger to conflict. This was a man who built his career upon methodical and ruthless suppression of uprisings.

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By AD 67, Vespasian arrived in Galilee with his legions, and he launched a fierce campaign.

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With his son Titus in tow, he led one brutal march after another, systematically dismantling city after city in Galilee.

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Town after town was set on fire and fell to the Roman forces. Their resistance, the

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Jewish resistance, was crushed. Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Vespasian's forces that they stormed the hills and the strongholds, leaving devastation in their wake as they subdued the providence with methodical precision.

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Vespasian's strategy was clear. No mercy, no compromise. The Romans would leave a scorched trail between every city that they bounced back and forth in Judea as they raised them all to the ground and as it left citizens of those cities scrambling, running to the next town and then running to the next town as everyone then eventually ran to Jerusalem and locked themselves inside the city for one final stand, which brings us to AD 70.

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After all the towns had been destroyed in Judea and everyone had fled to Jerusalem, Vespasian's son

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Titus led the final assault on the city of Jerusalem. The siege was one of the most harrowing and horrifying events in all of ancient history.

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It's, I'd like to eventually, let me know in the comments what you think about this. I would like to eventually do a series on the book of the

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Jewish Wars by Josephus and talk about all of the details, every bit of it.

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All of the horrifying, if it were a movie, it would be rated

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R or NC 17 probably. It is unbelievable. I'd like to make a series about that just to expose people to the kind of tragedy and horrific nature of it.

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So tell me in the comments if a series on the Jewish War after we finished Revelation would be good.

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I'd love to do that. But the city which had swollen with all of its pilgrims for Passover, swollen with all of the refugees from all of the cities that had been destroyed became an absolute death trap.

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Roman forces encircled it and set up a siege where no one could escape the city.

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Josephus, a Jewish historian who witnessed these events, he was captured in Galilee and taken hostage by the

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Romans. And they used him for negotiation between himself or between Rome and the

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Jews. He wrote down everything. He talks about the horrors that were inside the city walls where people were fighting over scraps of food.

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Mothers were roasting their infants in the fire and eating them. Families turned on one another.

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Men were looking in dumpsters for food and eating actual human feces.

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Desperation led people to unthinkable acts. There were people inside the city raping each other and killing each other.

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In the Jewish War, he recalls that children pulled food from their fathers' mouths. Mothers stole from their infants.

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Hunger and violence and despair was consuming the city as siege warfare waged on.

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The Romans built massive siege works, towers, battering rams to breach the walls. And when they finally broke through,

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Titus ordered that the city should be burned. The temple itself, the heart of the Jewish identity and worship, accidentally went up in flames.

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Titus didn't intend to burn it down, but it caught on fire. And then his forces broke the temple apart, one stone after another, leaving nothing but ash and ruin.

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Do you know why that he did that? Because as the temple was burning, all the gold melted and it molded into the cracks of the stones so that they broke the stones apart to get the gold.

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Fulfilling Jesus's prophecy that not one stone of this temple will be left upon another. The very few survivors that were taken into slavery were shipped down to Egypt.

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Others, most everyone else was executed and then some were taken to Rome as trophies of war. Josephus estimates that over a million people died in the siege of Rome, which is a far greater tragedy than any other tragedy that had ever happened to the

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Jews in history. More Jews per capita died here than anywhere else at any other time.

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For the Jewish people, it was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. It was the end of their temple centric worship.

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It was the collapse of their identity. It was the downfall of their culture, their systems, the things that they love.

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They lost everything. This was the war that Jesus was talking about.

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A generation before he told them, not one stone will be left upon another. When you hear about wars and rumors of wars, just know they're coming and they came.

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And you can imagine back in those days, one Christian looking at the other saying, the

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Romans are coming. I see it. We've got to go. This is what Jesus was talking about. And then the other one saying, no,

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Jesus was talking about stuff that was going to happen thousands of years from now. No need to worry. Let's just go back into our houses.

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Everything's okay. Nothing to see here. Well, the one who left would have survived.

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The one who didn't take Jesus's word seriously would have died. That's why

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Jesus told them. As they saw the temple from a distance, wafting its way to heaven through smoke clouds, because it had been set on fire.

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They would have understood with chilling clarity that Jesus's prophecy had come true.

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The Jewish state was being eradicated from the earth. The zealot uprising was being crushed.

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Rome's message was unmistakable that you will not rebel against us.

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And they wiped them completely out. With the temple gone, the

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Jews had to transform their religion into a non -biblical religion. That's why I've said multiple times on this channel that there is no such thing as Judaism anymore.

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Judaism died in 8070. Judaism died with the temple being destroyed. Judaism died with the downfall of the line of the priest and the

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Levites. Judaism died with all of that. There is no biblical

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Judaism on earth today. There's no one on earth who believes and practices biblical

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Judaism. It doesn't exist because they don't have a temple. They don't have a priesthood. They don't have sacrifices.

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They don't have an operational festival calendar that centers on Jerusalem. They don't have it.

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So they had to invent a new religion, a Talmudic religion. And if you know anything about the

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Talmud, which says that Jesus is in hell, roasting in his own feces and semen, you'll know that the

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Talmud is wicked and evil. And people who believe in that book believe in things that are wicked and deplorable.

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There is no such thing as ancient biblical Judaism today. There is a satanic counterfeit that keeps people away from Christ, just like it did in the first century.

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For Christians, the downfall of Jerusalem was not an event to celebrate, but it was confirmation that the age of temples had ended.

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That the kingdom Jesus was speaking about had come. A kingdom not bound by walls or borders or temples, but a kingdom that was gonna spread throughout the entire world.

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That it was gonna take over all the nations like the Jews were supposed to do. This kingdom under the reign and the

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Lordship of Christ is going to take over the world and bring his blessings and his peace to the nations.

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So when Jesus told his disciples about wars and rumors of wars, he was preparing them for an event that was gonna happen in their time.

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And he was also pointing to us, telling us to be reminded to stop looking for this sign to be fulfilled in our lifetime and to start picking up the hammer and the nails and getting to work.

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We are in the kingdom of Jesus. He is reigning now. He is on his king now.

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He put down that old rebellion then so that you and I can live in the kingdom where his kingdom is expanding brothers and sisters.

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Stop looking for signs that have already happened and get to work in a kingdom that is being built now.

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Now, before we continue on to our second sign, which is earthquakes, I do wanna talk about one other aspect of this because we've talked about what happened in Jerusalem and Judea.

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But Jesus prophesied that you'll hear of wars and rumors of wars. The wars were what the

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Jews saw, but they probably would have been hearing about things that were going on in the Roman empire as well.

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Because we talked about earlier that Vespasian was a Roman general who had seen war.

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Well, you can only see war if there's an outbreak of war in the era of peace.

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So there were rumors floating around that there was wars happening. And one in particular, which is the civil war of Rome would have been particularly interesting.

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And it gets picked up in the book of Revelation. So we need to talk about that before we continue. For nearly a century,

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Rome has been the heartbeat of stability, an empire that was held together a sprawling and diverse range of people through sheer strength, political maneuvering, lots of wealth and finances to make this unbreakable peace that we now know as the

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Pax Romana. It was a golden era that was established by Augustus. And it came tragically to an end in 68 and 66 with the

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Jewish war. But it also came to an end because of Roman civil wars. And those began in 68

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AD. So you remember Nero sends Vespasian and his troops to Jerusalem in 66 or to Judea in 66.

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Two years later, Rome undergoes a absolute collapse.

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Now to understand the chaos of this time, we need to start with Emperor Nero who was as controversial as they come.

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It is reported in ancient history that Nero has sexual relations with his mother in a chariot in front of an onlooking crowd.

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There's evidence that he dressed up as an animal and came into a room with naked people and either kicked or bit or beat their genitals.

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It's known that he set Christians naked on fire in his gardens to light them up at night.

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This was one of history's most maniacal and crazy lunatics.

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He was a man who barely sat upon the throne and ran the government. But he was more interested in public performances.

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He was an artist. He was an actor. He dressed up and acted in theater and hoped that the people of Rome would cheer for him.

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This was a man of great mental illness probably and too much power and instability to actually bring about any health or any peace.

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This was a madman. Now to the horror of Rome's elite, Nero loved to sing and act and race chariots far beneath the dignity of an emperor in the eyes of the

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Senate and the Roman nobility. And Nero was on thin ice. Most of his reign, his theatrics became legendary in a sense.

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And he was even known at times in the Roman world as a beast, which is pretty interesting.

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We'll get to that later. But he quickly became infamous for his brutal treatment of Christians and his suspected political enemies, which increased his erratic behavior and his insatiable appetite for luxury.

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The turning point in Nero's reign came in 64 AD with a great fire that was set in Rome and it blazed and burned for days and it destroyed vast sections of the city.

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And rumors spread like wildfire that Nero was the one who started the fire in order to clear space for his grand architectural expansion, which would have benefited him.

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It was a personal palace that he wanted to build. The Domus Aurea or the golden house that he wanted to build and did end up building after the fire.

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Now, whether that was Nero or it was someone else to blame, he blamed the Christians.

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He scapegoated believers and the persecutions that followed were gruesome. Again, as I already mentioned, he set them on fire and made them into human torches for his gardens.

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He crucified and threw them to wild animals in the Colosseum. The brutality of these actions shocked even the

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Roman public and deepened the sense of unease and hesitancy about this man's rule.

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But on top of that, his spending was becoming out of control, reckless. He drained

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Rome's coffers with lavish projects. He ran up their national deficit, which is something we can relate to today.

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And he even sent agents to loot temples of other foreign gods so that he could fill them back up with gold so that he could go and spend them again.

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He was using all of this money to fund his exploits. He imposed severe taxes on provinces like Judea to make up for the excess spending and lavish lifestyles that he was doing, making everyone miserable.

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For many in Judea, the taxes and the heavy -handed Roman governance felt like salt in a wound, fueling their resentment and their rebellion.

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Nero's recklessness didn't go unnoticed, however, by Roman power brokers. By the late 60s, military commanders and governors around the empire were becoming fed up.

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And the situation exploded when the governor of Gaul, whose name is Julius Vendix, openly rebelled against Nero, which would have rallied other providential leaders to stand against him as well.

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This was crazy because you're in an empire that was filled with peace and yet you've got this madman who's running the country and now one of his famous Roman generals is openly rebelling against him.

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Rumors of war. That was a dangerous move. But it struck a chord.

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And when the governor of Hispania heard about this, he also rebelled. His name was

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Galba. And Galba went even a step further and declared himself emperor while Nero was still on the throne.

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And the Senate actually approved of this and said, no, we're going to accept you as emperor, which meant

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Nero was now an enemy of the state. And he was facing betrayal on all sides.

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So what does he do? He flees Rome. There's this comet that's in the air, Halley's Comet. He interprets it as a sign of great doom and he takes his own life.

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He kills himself, leaving the empire without a real official ruler and plunging

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Rome into chaos. Now, without an emperor, Rome descended into one of its most chaotic years, the year of the four emperors.

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The mighty Roman Empire, which had seemed invincible, was now suddenly fractured. Its fate was hanging by a thread as generals and provinces and legions were scrambling to fill the power void.

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First came Galba, who was a tough, no -nonsense military man, and the Senate quickly confirmed him as emperor.

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But Galba's support was shaky at best. He refused to reward the ones who backed his rise to power and he tried to restore discipline.

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But instead he alienated the very people that he needed to build a coalition to secure his reign.

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And within months, Galba was overthrown by Otho, who was a friend of Nero and now had ambitions of his own.

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Otho ascended as the second emperor in like three months, but his brief reign was turbulent at best.

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He was challenged by Vitellius, who was a powerful Roman general from Germany, who commanded fierce loyalty from his troops.

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And Vitellius declared himself emperor and then marched into Rome and clashed in a bloody clash against Otho and his forces, which

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Vitellius ended up winning. Otho ended up taking his own life, hoping to prevent former bloodshed.

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But this act of mercy didn't end the turmoil. Vitellius, now the third emperor in less than a year, took control, but he proved to be a weak leader.

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He indulged in excesses and another contender emerged. All the way in Judea, fighting against the

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Jews, Vespasian. The seasoned Roman general who had been sent to crush the

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Jewish rebellion was now being called back to Rome by the Senate in order to become the new emperor.

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And he did. He was supported by legions in Egypt and in the Eastern provinces.

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And Vespasian came back to Rome and ended the chaos and actually saved the

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Roman empire from ruin. With control now over Rome's grain supply,

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Vespasian held a crucial advantage. His supporters rallied behind him and in a swift move, they marched on Rome and Vitellius was captured and executed, finally ending the year of bloodshed, the year of four emperors.

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By December of AD 69, Vespasian was firmly seated as emperor and the

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Flavian dynasty now began. But Rome was shaken and it was scarred by months of civil war and the people were left questioning the strength of their empire.

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Think about this. This is the Pax Romana ending right before their very eyes with a period of infighting and rapid changing in civil war and conflict in Judea and in Rome.

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It was a shock to the entire world. The famed stability of the empire, the one who had been the envy of the world was being crumbled right before their very eyes.

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Roman historian, Suetonius called it a season of strife and bloodshed where authority rested not with the

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Senate or with the people, but with the general who commanded the strongest forces. The once unassailable empire was demonstrating its own vulnerability and its fate swayed by the ambitions and the betrayals of carnal men.

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Meanwhile, back in Judea, this chaos must have looked like the empire was coming to an absolute end.

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This is where Revelation says the beast has the mortal wound and then resurrects Rome, who will get to in the book of Revelation is described as a beast.

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Gets a mortal wound through the suicide of Nero and it looks like the empire is being plunged into a chaos that they cannot be revived out of.

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And then miraculously, it seems Vespasian comes and resurrects the empire and brings it back to life.

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His son, Titus is the one who's left in Jerusalem to finish the siege.

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Now, the Jewish historian, Josephus witnessed these events while dealing with his own people struggles against the

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Romans. And he wrote this, the empire was shaken to its core and even the gods seemed troubled by the strife among men.

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The rumors of wars that Jesus had spoken about had erupted in both

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Judea and Rome signaling the end of the era.

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Jesus prophesied it and it absolutely came true. That's the first sign, wars and rumors of wars.

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The second, the shaking of the earth. Now, before we look at Matthew 24 and the evidence for this second sign, which is earthquakes that and the uptick of earthquakes in the ancient world,

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I want you and I to see that when Jesus came to the world, he intended to give it a good last days shaking.

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Whatever remained from that shaking would be left for him. And whatever fell away would be like chaff devoured by a scorching east wind.

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For instance, in Hebrews chapter one, the author plainly tells us that we're living in the last days,

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Hebrews one, one through two. To him, the last days represent the entire era of the new covenant redemption, i .e.

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the church. After he drops that bomb that we're living in the last days now, the last days of the

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Jewish era and the rise of the new era, this 40 day window of time, that's the last days.

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After he drops that bomb, he describes how the era of priests and temples and animal sacrifices are about to be rolled up like a scroll,

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Hebrews one, 10 through 14. And that long chapter was finally closed.

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And now the chapter of human redemption had come through Jesus' son. Now, near the end of the book, after Christ has replaced the

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Old Testament types and shadows, the old covenant vestiges, the author of Hebrews gives us a vivid picture of what is going to happen to finally end all of that old covenant stuff.

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And not surprisingly, it ends, the old covenant ends the same way that it begins with a covenantal shaking.

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In the Old Testament, the old covenant began at the foot of Mount Sinai when an earthquake broke out and shook the mountain.

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The people put their faces in the dirt and they said, God, let Moses talk to you and not us.

01:08:57

We're too terrified. Moses goes up and gets the 10 commandments, the covenant, the law, and the rest is history.

01:09:03

They enter into a covenant with God, but it started with an earthquake at Mount Sinai. Now, in the new covenant era, the entire world and all of the heavens need to be shaken because this isn't just a covenant with one nation.

01:09:19

It's a covenant with the entire world. Hebrews 12, 18 through 19 talks about this.

01:09:25

And while this shaking is clearly spiritual and covenantal, we shouldn't be surprised when the rocks are crying out, when the fault lines are trembling, and when we see the earth actually shaking in the first century.

01:09:40

The rocks and the fault lines often see things more clearly than we do. The unleashing of earthquakes.

01:09:48

Now, in modern day prophecy, charlatans read the words of Jesus that says in various places, there will be famines and earthquakes, but all of these things are merely the beginning of the birth pangs,

01:09:58

Matthew 24, seven through eight. They assume that Jesus is talking about phenomena that will necessarily plague the modern world.

01:10:08

When this ilk of newspaper scholars and charlatans spy a random earthquake in California, or they hear tale of a famine in the

01:10:17

Middle East, they're the first one to dust off their heavenly suitcases and prep their underground bunkers for an inevitable tribulation.

01:10:25

It's as if they believe that we're the only people in human history who've ever felt the earth tremble beneath our feet, or we've ever seen plants die in a dusty scorcher.

01:10:36

It's essential, however, for all of us to remember that Jesus is responding to specific questions concerning first century events that were going to happen to his disciples.

01:10:48

Remember, Rome's Pax Romana brought in more than just peace.

01:10:54

It brought in prosperity. It brought in stability. So Jesus is saying the wars are going to attack

01:11:01

Rome's peace, the earthquakes are going to attack Rome's stability, and the famines are going to attack

01:11:08

Rome's prosperity. Everything you were standing in and resting in is going to be taken as the era of world empires led by human despots is ending, and the era of Jesus's empire led by him is beginning.

01:11:27

They wanted to know, the disciples, when they asked Jesus these questions, when's the temple going to be destroyed?

01:11:33

And what's going to be the sign that these events were going to be drawing near? And how would all of this bring about the end of the

01:11:39

Jewish age? Well, it seems likely that the disciples, if they were asking those questions, were probably indifferent to modern day seismology.

01:11:51

They would have been pretty eager to hear about signs occurring in their lifetime, and probably would have been pretty annoyed if Jesus started going off on how there's going to be an earthquake in modern day

01:12:03

California. Now, with that, we need to talk about the biblical evidence for earthquakes.

01:12:12

As the life of Christ drew to its climactic conclusion, he said that there would be an uptick, an increase in earthquakes, and that actually happened.

01:12:22

The earth itself responded to the death of Christ. Just a few days, or just a few moments later, even,

01:12:30

Jesus is arrested, he's brought before Pilate, he's crucified on top of Calvary's hill, and then as soon as he dies and gives up his spirit, the earth started shaking.

01:12:41

The earthquakes began right then and there. The disciples who, the disciple,

01:12:48

John, who was standing there, watched Jesus die, watched Jesus give up his spirit, and watched the earthquake.

01:12:53

That disciple remembered Jesus's prophecy that there would be earthquakes in various places.

01:12:59

Right there it was, on Mount Calvary, at the top of Jerusalem. As Jesus hung on the cross, breathing his final breaths, an unnatural darkness descended upon the land, and he cried out, my

01:13:12

God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Then he said, it is finished. He gave up his spirit, and the earth convulsed like it had epilepsy, tearing the temple curtain from top to bottom, and the once inaccessible holy of holies now lay exposed to the world.

01:13:29

A demonstration that the old covenant was ending, and the new covenant was coming. Stones were splintering, rocks cracked open, and in the scene, as chilling as it was, miraculous tombs were giving up their dead, like Matthew describes in Matthew 27, and some of Jerusalem's saints were appearing and walking around the town, appearing too many.

01:13:51

Even a seasoned centurion, a man who was accustomed to seeing all sorts of violence, and a man who was not afraid, a man who was courageous, fell into terror.

01:14:02

He was shaken to his core, and he said, as the earth was shaking beneath his feet, truly this man must have been the son of God.

01:14:11

As he and the soldiers stood stunned in reverence, Jesus's prophecy was being fulfilled before their very eyes.

01:14:18

Three days later, a second earthquake rocked the landscape. As dawn broke, and Jesus rose from the dead,

01:14:27

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary made their way to Jesus's tomb, and their hearts were heavy with grief.

01:14:32

They were ready to finish wrapping the body of Christ for burial, but as they arrived, the ground started trembling beneath them more fiercely than it even had before, and an angel descended and rolled the massive stone away from the tomb's entrance, and like lightning was his clothing as white as snow.

01:14:52

The guards who were stationed by the temple, who were trained and who were fearless Roman soldiers, were overwhelmed by terror.

01:14:58

They were overwhelmed. They collapsed. They were paralyzed in fear as the women stood there watching the earth breaking in front of them as Jesus rose from the dead.

01:15:09

Matthew 28, 2 through 4. This earthquake was a declaration that death had been conquered, that the stone could not seal him out, and that the son of God had come back just like he said, and the earthquake was absolutely a fulfillment of the prophecy of Christ, and more than just it being a sign of his resurrection, it was a sign of the downfall of Jerusalem, as he said in Matthew 24.

01:15:37

This pattern of earth -shaking events continued following Jesus's prophecy that such signs would accompany the end of the

01:15:45

Jewish age. Some years later in the city of Philippi, Paul and Silas were found in a dark, dank prison cell after being beaten by a mob, and after all of that, they were inside the prison singing hymns, and as their voices were mingling together, and then at midnight, the ground underneath them began to shake, and that tremor was so intense that the prison walls actually broke down, their chains snapped, the cell doors burst open, freeing every single prisoner inside that prison.

01:16:18

And awakened by the earthquake, the jailer rushed in, thinking that the prisoners had escaped, and he was going to have to kill himself because his

01:16:26

Roman overlords were going to kill him, and overcome by all of that, he heard

01:16:31

Paul and Silas cry out that we're still here. He went in in front of them, and the moment was so big that he repented right then and there and believed in Jesus, and his whole household came to faith in Christ that very night,

01:16:44

Acts 16, 25 -34. That's a third earthquake that the New Testament has recorded in less than a few years.

01:16:53

These quakes were not just natural phenomenon, but they were evidence that Jesus' world -shaking prophecy was coming true.

01:17:04

And even beyond the biblical records, historians of the day were recording unusual increases in seismic activity.

01:17:13

Josephus, a Jewish historian, described frequent earthquakes that were happening in Judea, which many of the people took as ominous signs of destruction, as did the

01:17:23

Roman historian Tacitus, who noted that earthquakes were unsettling the regions of the Roman Empire.

01:17:29

These earthquakes were signaling a shifting reality in time and in their place, where the peace and stability of Rome was evaporating.

01:17:38

As Jesus foretold, the signs were not abstract. They were not distant. They were present.

01:17:45

They were felt. They were seen. And they were noticed by the disciples. And the New Testament records it.

01:17:52

Now, I want to look at what secular historians said about this era, because I think that this era is filled with all sorts of signs of increased earthquake activity.

01:18:04

And I want to look at that now in section two. Section two, the extra biblical evidence.

01:18:12

In the decades between Jesus's crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem, history also tells us of unprecedented increase in earthquake activity, seismic tremors so frequent and intense that they seem to cry out to the world with a kind of vivid and unavoidable warning that judgments were coming.

01:18:34

For those living in Judea and across the Roman Empire, these tremors, these storms and disasters weren't just inconveniences.

01:18:41

They felt like a message from God. Warnings that something bigger was dawning.

01:18:47

And as historical records show, the years between Jesus's crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem were filled with frequent and intense earthquakes that are revealed to us in the pages of history by all sorts of different people.

01:19:03

Remember Matthew, or Jesus says in Matthew 24, there will be earthquakes in various places.

01:19:09

Well, the New Testament, as we've already talked about, mentions three significant earthquakes in this period that were called great earthquakes.

01:19:17

Well, across the empire, historians, philosophers, skeptics, unbelievers, people who hated

01:19:23

Jesus, they're all saying the same thing. And they're treating all of these earthquakes as omens of something ominous that's looming upon the horizon.

01:19:32

The extra biblical evidence that I'm gonna show you reveals that these signs already happened, that they're not for us in our future, that they have already occurred.

01:19:41

They're signs of impending judgment that shook the unknown world of the first century.

01:19:47

These earthquakes struck regions like Crete and Smyrna and Miletus and Chios and Samos and Laodicea, Hierapolis, Colossi, Campania, Rome and Judea.

01:20:00

All of them were being hit multiple times over by earthquakes. Ancient cities that had not experienced seismic activity in centuries suddenly found themselves collapsing under the weight of these violent tremors.

01:20:15

One of the most famous earthquakes struck Pompeii in 63 AD, nearly leveling the city and causing widespread panic.

01:20:25

Pompeii would be most famously destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. But this earlier quake was so severe that it left the city in ruins for years afterwards.

01:20:38

That wasn't an isolated incident. Across the Mediterranean world, tremors were leveling buildings.

01:20:43

They were creating a climate of dread, especially in regions that were unaccustomed to earthquakes.

01:20:49

The devastation in cities like Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossi around 60 AD left lasting scars in the community.

01:20:56

Their citizens famously rebuilt their city without relying on imperial aid, which is a testimony to the wealth and the resilience of the people of that region.

01:21:05

But it was also a sign that widespread earthquakes were happening. And they weren't common in that region.

01:21:11

It had been decades, if not centuries, since the last earthquake had happened. But within a few decades of Jesus's prophecy, now they were being riddled with these sorts of shakings.

01:21:23

Several prominent Roman writers at the time mentioned this increase in earthquakes, and they described them in ways that show a mix of fear and foreboding and awe.

01:21:33

For instance, Tacitus, a Roman historian, recorded that the year AD 50 alone was marked by many prodigies, signs or omens, including repeated earthquakes.

01:21:48

For Tacitus, who usually took a very practical approach to historical events, these weren't just natural disasters.

01:21:54

They were omens. They were signs, like Jesus said, that something was deeply wrong in the empire.

01:22:03

Pliny the Elder, in his natural history, that earthquakes became so frequent and common during this period, particularly in Asia Minor and around Italy.

01:22:14

Pliny observed that tremors in cities like Laodicea and Hierapolis led many to believe that the quakes were divine messages from the gods' warning of impending catastrophe.

01:22:25

Suetonius, in his biography of the emperors, mentions earthquakes, fires, and other natural disasters as omens of doom, marking the reigns of figures like Nero and Galba and Vespasian.

01:22:39

During Nero's reign, earthquakes struck Rome, which was an unusual event, and left the city and its people uneasy.

01:22:47

Suetonius noted that these events contributed to the growing sense of dread surrounding Nero's increasingly unstable reign.

01:22:54

The people of Rome were watching Nero crumble as they watched their city crumble, and they were tying the two events together.

01:23:02

Seneca's apocalyptic writings in his book, he writes one of the most remarkable accounts as a stoic philosopher and tutor of Nero, and he's known for his sort of emotional detachment from events.

01:23:15

But he wrote about the earthquakes with a sense of dread that breaks from his usual restraint and makes him look like he's actually in panic.

01:23:24

He laments the frequency and the severity of these quakes, saying how often have cities in Asia and how often in Achaia been laid low by a single shock of earthquake?

01:23:36

How many towns in Syria? How many in Macedonia have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of destruction laid

01:23:43

Cyprus in ruins? How often has pathos collapsed? Not infrequently are tidings brought to us of the utter destruction of entire cities.

01:23:55

For a stoic who's trained to avoid their emotional reaction, Seneca's language here is charged and almost apocalyptic.

01:24:02

He speaks of cities that are being swallowed up and laid low, painting a picture of devastation that echoes the same prophecy that Jesus gives in Matthew 24.

01:24:13

Seneca, a man who believed in accepting the natural order, was shaken to his core by these unnatural events.

01:24:22

Josephus talks about the quakes in Judea. He provides a haunting account of an earthquake that struck

01:24:28

Judea right at the outset of the Jewish -Roman War. This quake wasn't just a tremor, according to Josephus.

01:24:34

It was a terrifying display of nature's fury against that city that had divine judgment looming over top of it.

01:24:41

Josephus writes this. For by night there broke out a most dreadful tempest and violent strong winds with most vehement showers and continual lightning and horrid thunderings and prodigious bellowings of the shaken earth so that it was manifest that the constitution of the universe was confounded for the destruction of men and anyone might easily conjecture that these things portended no common calamity.

01:25:10

The Jewish War, Book 4, Chapter 4, Section 5. Josephus saw this earthquake as a cosmic disturbance, so much so that he thought the very fabric of the universe was unraveling.

01:25:23

To him, this earthquake was a harbinger of doom a signal that Jerusalem and Judea were under the wrath of Yahweh's doom and they were about to be destroyed.

01:25:35

Now, these earthquakes weren't the only signs across the empire. People were recording other strange phenomenon that was happening.

01:25:42

Comets in the sky, stars, unusual weather patterns. Josephus even describes a star that hung over the

01:25:50

Jerusalem sky that was in the shape of a sword. He recorded a comet that blazed for a full year over the sky.

01:25:57

These sorts of strange sights and signs in the heavens were freaking people out.

01:26:03

The people of the first century who were steeped in an atmosphere of supernatural expectation were watching the heavens and wondering what on earth was about to happen.

01:26:15

In Natural Questions, it's a book written by Seneca. He even questions whether or not the earth itself was nearing its end.

01:26:22

The collapse of the world as if the planet was on the brink of some cosmic catastrophe. The Roman historian

01:26:29

Cassius Dio records other prodigies and strange events in Rome, including a series of portents, such as judgments on the moral corruption of the empire.

01:26:39

These strange occurrences added fuel to the fire and they intensified the belief that the empire was under the judgment of Almighty God.

01:26:46

Furthermore, reflecting on this period, biblical scholar Charles Eliot notes, perhaps no period in the world's history has ever been so marked by these convulsions as that that intervenes between the crucifixion of Christ and the destruction of Jerusalem.

01:27:05

The entire empire was being shaken. Earthquakes seemingly happening year after year after year, which was bringing this kind of doom and foreboding alarm to all the citizens of the

01:27:18

Roman world. They believed that they were being shaken and that the judgment was coming and the

01:27:24

Jews especially should have looked to the heavens and known. All the Roman citizens were seeing this as signs of judgment.

01:27:30

The Jews were not. They were seeing these as some sort of signs of their success or signs that they were on the right path or signs that God was favoring them.

01:27:43

Taken together, these seismic disturbances, these famines, these strange sightings in the sky and the widespread social upheaval painted a picture that God had turned on Jerusalem and Jesus's prophecy wasn't abstract.

01:27:59

It was happening in real time. Both ancient writers and Christian, non -Christian and believer were noting this abnormal frequency and intensity of earthquakes and they interpreted them as warning.

01:28:14

The earth was being shaken. It was crying out and it was signaling the end of the

01:28:20

Jewish era. The New Testament writers captured this truth well.

01:28:26

The writer of Hebrews especially said, yet once more, I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.

01:28:34

And for 40 years, the ground beneath their feet was unstable. Kingdoms were crumbling all around them.

01:28:41

The world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. And for those in the first century who were paying attention to it, it was clear

01:28:49

Jesus's prophecy was unfolding right before their very eyes.

01:28:55

That's the second sign. The third sign is that there would be increase in famines, which we will look at now.

01:29:03

Sign three, the withering of the land. Just as the ground had shaken with warning beneath the

01:29:11

Roman people's feet, now the land was going to withhold its abundance from them and it was gonna lead to widespread shortages that brought hunger and desperation on everyone.

01:29:21

The witnesses of these events, whether they realize it or not, were seeing the fulfillment of Jesus's words playing out in real time across the empire.

01:29:30

And for a moment, I want us to look at both the biblical and the extra biblical evidence that these things did occur in the first century.

01:29:38

So with that, let us look at first the biblical evidence. The New Testament gives us a compelling instance of famine prophesied and fulfilled by Christ in the early church.

01:29:49

The prophet Agabus, who was known for his prophetic gift in the early church before the gift of prophecy waned, he warned of an impending scarcity that was gonna break out in the entire

01:30:01

Roman world. It was gonna be called a great famine. And Luke, the author of the book of Acts, meticulously records what

01:30:10

Agabus says. Acts 18 .28 says this, one of them named

01:30:15

Agabus stood up and began to indicate by the spirit of God that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world.

01:30:24

And this took place during the reign of Claudius. Sorry, I laughed for a second because it occurs to me just now that the amount of evidence that we're presenting for this is so overwhelming.

01:30:42

Like in the last section, when I'm reading all of these pagans who are freaking out because the earth is shaking in a way they've never felt before.

01:30:49

And now this man named Agabus in the early church is predicting a worldwide famine that happened.

01:30:57

Luke tells us it occurred during the reign of Claudius, which happened in the first century.

01:31:03

As I'm thinking about all of this evidence, it is shocking to me that people still believe that we are waiting for earthquakes and famines and wars and rumors of wars.

01:31:12

These signs already happened and they happened overwhelmingly. So much so that atheists and Stoics and pagans believed that something bad was happening and they got it.

01:31:25

The only people who didn't get it were the Jews. And because of that, they were fueled in a kind of madness that led them to their downfall.

01:31:32

Now, Agabus' warning was given under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and it would soon be fulfilled and it would impact the entire

01:31:41

Roman world or the world as Luke describes it in the original Greek term oikomene.

01:31:48

Oikomene just means the Roman world. It means the Roman era, the place where the boundaries of Rome are.

01:31:55

It doesn't mean the entire world like cosmos and it doesn't mean the earth as in Gaia.

01:32:00

It means the Roman world. There in that Roman civilized empire, famine was going to strike and it did strike during the reign of Emperor Claudius whose rule was from AD 41 to AD 54.

01:32:16

And it just so happens to coincide with Jesus's prophecy. Within 40 years, he said that all of these things were gonna happen and they did.

01:32:27

It's recorded that food shortages happened, crop failures happened, granaries were empty, children are starving.

01:32:34

This crisis hit Rome, it hit the whole Roman world and it hit Judea especially hard, leading the early

01:32:41

Christian church to take decisive action in order to support their needy brothers and sisters.

01:32:47

Now, as you read in the New Testament, you see that the early Christians are supporting each other and feeding each other.

01:32:53

You should not think that this is somehow isolated from the context. There is a worldwide famine happening and Paul is writing in scripture to encourage believers to give money so that other people in Jerusalem which was really bad hit by this famine, other

01:33:13

Christians especially, would have food to eat. The depth of this famine's impact hit

01:33:19

Jerusalem especially hard and this is why Paul highlights the urgency of the situation and he uses the church's organization to respond.

01:33:28

Paul, better than FEMA, doesn't tell people to rely on the government. He's ever aware of the needs in his community and he's organizing the church in order to meet the needs and contribute to the relief efforts of those who are suffering.

01:33:43

And he urges, I'll give you a few examples of this. He urges the Corinthians to set aside resources in order to send to Jerusalem.

01:33:50

He says this, now about the collection of the Lord's people on the first day of every week, each of you should set aside a sum of money.

01:33:58

1 Corinthians 16, one through two. To the Roman church, he echoed the same appeal and he affirmed his intention to bring the aid from Macedonia and Achaia to Jerusalem, Romans 15, 25 through 28.

01:34:13

Paul's exhortation to give wasn't without its challenges. There are people who were already struggling and already poor and already hungry who didn't have a lot of money to give but if we look at the way that they did actually give, it's unbelievable.

01:34:27

The spirit of God was inspiring them to sacrificial generosity that defined the early church.

01:34:36

Though they themselves were enduring all kinds of hardship and the famine was certainly bad in their lands as well, people from the area of Macedonia and Corinth were giving out of their poverty.

01:34:47

As Paul recounts in 2 Corinthians 8, they were showing a depth of love and care for their

01:34:53

Judean brothers and sisters who were enduring this agony alongside of them and they were giving to people so that they could eat in this famine that Agabus has prophesied.

01:35:05

Even in his letter to the Galatians, Paul is recalling that the apostles encouraged him to remember the poor.

01:35:11

Why would they say that? In a general way, make sure you remember the poor. Well, that works well for your liberal social justice

01:35:18

Bible scholars who make that more important than truth but that's not actually what

01:35:23

Paul is doing there. Paul is saying that we need to especially remember the poor believers in Jerusalem because the famine was affecting the city of Jerusalem unimaginably.

01:35:34

Or the response to this famine fulfilled Jesus's warning that earthquakes, famines, wars and rumors of wars were coming and they did.

01:35:43

Now, that's the biblical argument. Now we're gonna look at the extra biblical argument for this empire -wide famine and it is substantial.

01:35:54

Section two, the extra biblical evidence. As Jesus prophesied in Matthew 24, famine was one of the signs that would signal the end of the

01:36:04

Jewish age. And history shows us that in the years following those very words, brutal and unprecedented waves of starvation and famine and hunger accosted the

01:36:16

Roman empire and it struck fear into the heart of Judea and it just proves

01:36:23

Jesus's words over and over and over again. For instance, one of the first extra biblical attestations of Claudius's famine comes during his reign, a time when food shortages reach crisis level and the

01:36:37

Jewish historian Josephus provides, I think the earliest account of empire -wide famine, especially as it relates to Judea in the late 40s.

01:36:47

This is what Josephus reports. There was a famine in the land that overtook them, that's the

01:36:52

Jews, and many people died of starvation. Josephus, Antiquity of the Jews, book 20, chapter two, section five.

01:37:01

Josephus gives us a picture of deep suffering in Judea where men and women and children are dying from hunger in numbers that people had not seen.

01:37:11

That is the famine that Agabus is talking about that was worldwide, empire -wide, but especially ferocious in Judea where he gives this prophetic warning that was fulfilled with devastating accuracy.

01:37:24

Now, there's more. The Roman historian Suetonius says roughly the same thing. When he's describing the famine that happened during the reign of Claudius, he says this, there was a scarcity of food which was the result of bad harvests that occurred during a span of several years.

01:37:40

Suetonius, the 12 Caesars, Claudius, chapter 18. Suetonius highlights repeated years of poor harvest, a prolonged period of agriculture and economical hardships that led to soaring food prices and food rationing that happened all across the empire.

01:37:57

In Rome itself, food shortages became so extreme that grain distribution had to be carefully controlled so that the food supply did not run out.

01:38:07

And James Stewart Russell and others even record that rioting broke out in the streets because people were starving to death in Rome of all places.

01:38:17

Like I said, biblical scholar James Stewart Russell says or elaborates on this saying this, during the reign of Emperor Claudius, there were four seasons of great scarcity.

01:38:29

In the fourth year of his reign, the famine in Judea was so severe that the price of food became enormous and a great number perished.

01:38:39

The Parousia, James Stewart Russell, page 59. Russell's account underscores both the duration and the intensity of this famine that drove food prices to extreme levels, leading to starvation of many, especially in Judea.

01:38:54

Tacitus also picks up on this as the years progressed, the situation grew even bleaker. For instance, by the year 51

01:39:00

AD, Tacitus, another Roman historian, described the worsening conditions that were happening, noting the connection between the natural and the supernatural, saying this, the year, this year witnesses many progenies, including repeated earthquakes and the shortage of corn resulting in famine.

01:39:21

It was established that there was no more than 15 days supply of food in the city of Rome.

01:39:28

Only heaven's special favor and a mild winter prevented our catastrophe.

01:39:36

The Annals, chapter 12, paragraph 43. Tacitus words revealed the precarious state of Rome.

01:39:43

The city's food supply had fallen to dangerous levels, which had never happened before, but it did then.

01:39:50

And with only a few days of food supply and left, the kind of scarcity was unthinkable. The heart of the empire was shaking.

01:39:57

People were in the streets, panicking and rioting. And there was all sorts of people wondering, was this the end of the

01:40:06

Roman world? His reference to prodigies indicates that the people didn't just see this as a bad economic year.

01:40:13

They saw this as a dark omen that was hanging over the Roman world. And things got even worse in Jerusalem.

01:40:23

As if the famine on an empire -wide scale wasn't bad enough, the suffering was going to reach its tragic climax in the city of Jerusalem just before its collapse.

01:40:35

You'll remember that Nero sent his armies to Judea in 66 AD and Titus, after his father left to become emperor, is now surrounding the city in 68

01:40:46

AD. You need to know something about what a Roman siege is in order to understand how bad things got.

01:40:53

A Roman siege is when you surround the city and you block people from going out and coming in, which means that they can't go out into the fields to get more grain.

01:41:04

They can't go out and get more animals. They can't go out and get food. It would be like armed soldiers standing outside of your home with AK -47s waiting for your food supply in your house to deplete until you starve to death.

01:41:20

And if you go out, they shoot you. So you have to choose which kind of death that you want.

01:41:26

Are you going to be shot by soldiers as you try to flee your home? Or are you going to die of starvation in your home, hoping that they leave you alone?

01:41:36

That is what Jerusalem was facing in 68 AD. They encircled the city.

01:41:43

They cut off all the food supplies and they created a hellish scenario for the people who were trapped inside the city.

01:41:51

And what unfolded in that city defies belief because you and I have never faced anything like this.

01:42:00

Never. Josephus tells us one of the most chilling accounts of the famine's effect in the city because the city actually had fallen into madness.

01:42:11

Think about this. In that example that I gave just a second ago, if you're in your home, the last thing that you would expect to happen would be mom to poison the water supply and out of anger, dad would burn all the food in the living room floor, basically making it to where no one would have any food to eat.

01:42:32

You would work together, right? The mom would work with the dad and they would feed the children and they would try to make it as long as they could before they died.

01:42:41

Well, that's not what happened in Jerusalem. Jerusalem's people started turning against one another and then factions and infighting started happening in the city where they were fighting for dwindling resources.

01:42:54

In a catastrophic display of self -sabotage, warring factions of Jews destroyed their own food supply and they poisoned their own water supply, basically weakening their ability to survive.

01:43:09

Josephus describes the madness like this. Then did the famine widen its progress and devoured the people by whole, whole houses and families.

01:43:21

The upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aging.

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The children also and the young men wandered about the marketplaces like shadows, all swelled with the famine and fell down dead where so ever their misery seized them.

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The Jewish War, Book 5, Chapter 12, Paragraph 3. This isn't historical exaggeration.

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This was a city that was in the grip of absolute despair because God had allowed them to go into straight up madness.

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Josephus talks about it, Titus talks about it, that the people weren't acting in their own best interest.

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No one would have ever poisoned the water supply if you're in a siege warfare. No one would have ever burned the food supply.

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They were acting as if they were irrational animals. It wasn't because they weren't intelligent.

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It wasn't because they didn't have street smarts. It was because God was pressing down upon them a kind of madness to ensure their destruction that is unrivaled in human history.

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They went crazy inside that city until they all perished.

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Titus himself looks at it. He's never seen anything like it.

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And he says that clearly their God must have turned against them. Women and children dying in the streets, the elderly perishing alongside of the infant, their body strewn across the streets.

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And there wasn't anyone strong enough or well fed enough to pick them up and go bury them.

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Imagine walking through the streets of Jerusalem before the Roman armies ever came in and lifted a finger.

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You would be hopscotching over dead bodies trying to get to a marketplace that no longer had food.

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Children in the streets with their bellies puckered out from starvation were wandering through the marketplaces like ghosts collapsing in the streets as hunger was tightening its relentless grip like a noose around their neck.

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The scene that Josephus described was beyond ordinary suffering of wartime.

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This was some of the grossest and most horrific scenes of warfare that have ever been recorded in human history.

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The famine became so severe that he said that it was an omen from almighty

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God. So what we've seen today is that Jesus predicted wars and rumors of wars and they happened.

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Jesus predicted earthquakes and they happened. Jesus predicted famine and it happened.

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All of them with paralyzing intensity. All of them began in the 30s and like a woman in labor increased in intensity until Jerusalem was no more.

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How much more evidence do we need to substantiate that this prophecy was fulfilled with paralyzing accuracy in the first century?

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And with that, let us now go to our conclusion. As we wrap up today, it has become abundantly clear that the fat fingered hand that the futurist and pre -millennials are trying to stuff into the glove just won't fit.

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As dispensationals have told us that all these signs are about a future era we have seen over and over and over again that they happened with unbelievable accuracy and intensity in that first century.

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Jesus predicted a unique period of 40 years where these signs would increase in intensity like a pregnancy and it happened.

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Where the painful toil continued to increase as the event drew near except this time, instead of a mother holding her baby out of joy, the mother was

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Jerusalem who gave birth to the church and she died during the pregnancy of her baby and it was

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God, the Father and the Holy Spirit who would raise that baby into a woman who would become a royal queen who would be made ready for her husband,

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Jesus Christ. After a period of false messiahs and antichrist and wars and rumors of wars and famines and earthquakes and all of that, the whore

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Jerusalem was put away. And for the last 2 ,000 years, this woman has been being made ready for her husband and that day one day will come when she's been made ready and all of her preparations have been completed and she is a royal queen ready to receive the love from her royal king and he will return.

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Jesus will return one day to receive a faithful bride. He is not going to return to rescue a bruised and a beaten bride.

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What does she have left to do on earth? Well, she has left to disciple the world to bring the nations into conformity to Christ to spread his peace all throughout the world as Isaiah says, so that his peace will know no end.

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The peace of Rome must be eclipsed and replaced by the peace of Christ. His kingdom must come on earth as it is in heaven.

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The obedience of Shiloh must go to the nations. The world must be brought into conformity to the true and better Adam who is going to make it and subdue it and bring it under his dominion.

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Every promise that God gave like to Abraham that all the families on earth will be blessed because of him, because of Jesus.

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All those things are a part of the preparations of the bride. She is going to labor until every family on earth is under the reign of Jesus.

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She is going to labor until the mustard seed grows to fill the entire garden. She is going to labor until every enemy of Jesus Christ is put underneath his feet.

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And then when she is ready, when that happens, the king will come and cover her with his, with the skirt of his garments and he will enter into and she will enter into their eternal love forever.

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Today, we saw another proof that these things are going to happen. And if you look into the book of Revelation, which is where we're heading, you will see that all these things do happen.

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Revelation talks about famines, talks about wars, talks about earthquakes, all happening at the exact same time of Jesus's prophecy in Matthew 24.

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And as we get to the book of Revelation soon in the near future, you're going to see that those earthquakes, those wars, those famines are talking about the exact same thing.

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But until then, we're going to conclude our episode today with that. I hope you've been blessed.

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I hope you've been encouraged. I hope you continue to work and build and fight in Jesus's kingdom.

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Don't get discouraged by the things that are happening in this world. Yeah, we just had a great election season, but Trump is not the answer.

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The church of Jesus Christ is the answer that the world needs. So go and build and fight and labor.

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And I'll see you again next week on the broadcast. God bless you. Now get out of here.