The end is near! Or at least it was when Jesus prophesied in the first-century. We, 21st-century citizens of heaven, live after the Great Tribulation. In fact, about 2,000 years after those events. These statements may seem a bit troubling to some, so let me make two caveats:

First, affirming the Great Tribulation was a past event does not mean we live in some utopian era. In fact, Covid-19 is a reminder that the repercussions of Genesis 3 will be with us until “he shall come to judge the living and the dead” at the end of history.

And second, affirming that the events in Matthew 24^a is in the past does not negate our responsibility to understand the times in confusing days. In fact, we need more wisdom in these days.

We need a healthy dose of reverent fear in our day; not because we are at the end of history but because in such a time as this God calls us to be extra valiant and courageous to do his will.

Modern-Day Prophets

One of the things I don’t want to do is to give insanity more air-time than necessary. So, I am not going to link these folks and I won’t quote them. The evidence is abundant in any modern crisis. I refer to these prophetic isolationists as thrill-seekers because they remind me of storm chasers who travel around the country in caravans seeking the latest storm. They want to get close to the action. It’s not just twitterdom that offers you a buffet of such cases, but even in the published world, you will find such people.

Some took advantage of the year 1988, the year 2000 and now they left their hibernating stage to offer the world their new and clever view of the Bible. What’s more troubling is that many folks who “specialize” in prophecies reveal in a very brief time their incompetency to understand the most basic principles of biblical prophecy.

For instance, many asserting this is “the beginning of birth pains” (Mat. 24:8) have a history of cutting and pasting texts to whatever flavor of catastrophe consumes the news today. We want to avoid this attitude and embrace the language of the Bible vigorously, even when it may challenge our long-held beliefs. And I have found over the years, especially living in the South, that the belief that Jesus can come back at any moment is crucial to the identity of many evangelicals. In fact, one can have a faulty view of the Trinity, but as long as he espouses some variation of a futuristic end-time scenario, he’s considered safe and may even get a platform to opine about revelations.

Now, context matters. It matters in this Covid-19 era as information is disseminated. And it most certainly matters when we are reading giant portions of the Bible like the Olivet Discourse (Mat. 24). If I look at that passage and see that “famines” will happen in the end and conclude that due to our milk shortage at the local grocery we have ourselves a fulfillment of prophecy, I am hermeneutically blind. That is to say, you should return to your cave.

The Olivet Discourse

Matthew 24 is used for all sorts of events. In my 40 years of life, I have seen it use to support the supposed fulfillment of prophecy in the Gulf War, that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were the antichrists, that the Mayan prophecies were to be fulfilled at Y2K, and currently that Donald Trump is setting the stage for the new world order.

But what some fail to see is that Matthew 24 has a long-established tradition of interpretation; one that avoids such reckless distractions from the text. Now, the question of whether a position or an idea has a long-standing history doesn’t always solve the issue at hand. However, I think it’s important to say that the beliefs you hold grow more in legitimacy if other orthodox Christians have held them for the last two millennia. To be precise, the interpretation of Matthew 24 advocated here is held by most of the Puritans, both Anglicans and Presbyterians, well-known Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and the Reformed.

What is at stake in this conversation is the ability to either think carefully about this Coronavirus scenario or be bogged down by endless speculation when the next virus comes along carried by a vagabond vermin. We need to see that Matthew 24 opens our eyes to see the Bible clearly without dependence on newspaper exegesis^b.

Interpretational Keys

I cannot dissect the entirety of Matthew 24^c in these two articles. But others like Gary Demar have already done a real service to the church in his classic work, Last Days Madness. The book must be in its 20th edition. What I can do is offer a couple of interpretive keys to guide the reader through Jesus’ words in Matthew 24.

The first interpretive key is that Matthew 24 demands context. Again, the temptation is to cut a verse and paste it into our preferred panic situation. But the prophecy of Jesus has something very specific in mind. In chapter 23, Jesus has a full-scale indictment of the Pharisees. When Jesus finished his warnings to the Pharisees, he was going out of the temple and the disciples were pointing out the buildings of the temple. And that is where Jesus makes this remarkable prediction in chapter 24, verse 2:

Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

Early on, we begin to get some indications as to whether these prophecies were referring to the present first-century temple or some rebuilt temple in the distant future. The key is found in one little crucial word, and it is the word here. There will not be left one stone….where? Here. This is a crucial word that we should not overlook. The reason Matthew 24 is referring to that first-century temple and that temple only is because nowhere in the entire New Testament do the authors say one word about a rebuilt temple sometime in the future. Nowhere. The temple under discussion throughout the Olivet Discourse is the one that was standing during the time of Jesus’ ministry, the same temple that would be destroyed some 30 years later by the Roman Army.^d

If the identity of the temple is clear, then any attempt to futurize the words of Jesus are in vain; any attempt to connect Covid-19 to Matthew 24 suffers a thousand deaths. What we are left with are words that apply to something very specific in the early church and ought to be understood only in that way.

Probably stunned from Jesus’ statement, the disciples ask Jesus a series of questions about the present temple and Jesus will take the rest of the Olivet Discourse to answer those questions.^e But what is imperative to learn is that Jesus’ answers to those questions are guided by the principle of context which is very much dependent on the present structures of the first-century.

The second interpretive key is that Matthew 24 depends on its own language. In short, when we hear something strange in the Scriptures, we should compare it with other texts where similar language is used.

We must read the Bible as it is intended to be read. The Bible possesses its own language; its own interpretive guide. We should not allow our feeds to dictate how the Bible should be interpreted. We seek to understand the Bible in its own terms. As we read through Matthew 24 you will quickly discover that the language Jesus uses in his prophecies is not anything new, but it’s the way prophets have been speaking for hundreds of years. Jesus is continuing that prophetic tradition by using the language of the prophets. His words were not meant to be fodder for prophetic thrill-seekers but understood in its own context and its own language.

Closing Words

Matthew 24 is a difficult text. It requires us to look at the bigger picture of redemption to see why Matthew wrote Jesus’ words as he did. The end result is a beautiful picture of the righteous. God has not forsaken his people. His purposes shall prevail. His kingdom shall prevail, even if it means destroying the most sacred space of the Jewish people. God will make all things new.

Jesus was not predicting the end of times for the 21st-century world, but the end of times for the 1st-century religious system that prevailed in the day. Our Lord was not predicting the consequences of a virus coming into the world, but the destruction of the pervasive and venomous religiosity of a system that needed to end. Indeed, that generation suffered the Great Tribulation just as Jesus predicted.

1. we could also add Mark 13 and Luke 21 and a few scattered texts  (back)
2. I believe Greg Bahnsen was the first to use this expression  (back)
3. though I have preached through it; leave a comment with your email if you would like a link to those sermons  (back)
4. Demar, Gary. Last Days Madness, 68.   (back)
5. Again, I deal with them in my sermon series, but an even more academic work is found in Gary Demar’s book  (back)

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