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17

Signs of Christ’s Return—Part 1: Jesus’ Description of the Temple’s Destruction
(Luke 21:5–7)

And while some were talking about the temple, that it was adorned with beautiful stones and votive gifts, He said, “As for these things which you are looking at, the days will come in which there will not be left one stone upon another which will not be torn down.” They questioned Him, saying, “Teacher, when therefore will these things happen? And what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?” (21:5–7)

The Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, came into the world to redeem lost sinners from judgment and hell. Before His birth an angel told His father Joseph, “You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Jesus defined His mission when He said that He had “come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). In Matthew 20:28 He told the disciples that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” When the scribes and Pharisees complained that He associated with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus replied, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31–32). He told the preeminent Jewish teacher Nicodemus that “God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:17). In John 12:47 Jesus said, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world.”

The rest of the New Testament also teaches that Jesus came to redeem sinners. John the Baptist declared of Him, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Paul wrote, “It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all” (1 Tim. 1:15). After He brought salvation to the village of Sychar, the Samaritans declared that Jesus was “the Savior of the world” (John 4:42). In his first epistle the apostle John wrote:

You know that He appeared in order to take away sins. … By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. … We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. (1 John 3:5; 4:9–10, 14)

Christ’s redemptive mission clearly fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, most notably that of Isaiah 53:

But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away; and as for His generation, who considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due? His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet He was with a rich man in His death, because He had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in His mouth. But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; if He would render Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, and the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand. As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied; by His knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as He will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the booty with the strong; because He poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors. (vv. 5–12)

But although He was sent ultimately to redeem the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24), Jesus pronounced judgment on that nation when it rejected Him. At both the beginning (John 2:13–22) and the end (Mark 11:15–18) of His ministry, He struck a blow against Israel’s false religious system by attacking the corrupt operations of the temple during Passover. Further, He upbraided the cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum for their unbelief, and warned that Capernaum faced more severe judgment than Sodom because of it (Matt. 11:20–24). He rebuked the entire wicked generation that rejected Him for refusing to repent, in contrast to the people of Nineveh and the Queen of Sheba (Matt. 12:41–42). He told the disciples that those who willfully reject the truth will be judicially deprived of it (Luke 8:9–18). Though He was moved to tears by the judgment that Israel’s stubborn rejection of Him would bring (Luke 13:34–35; 19:41–44), He gave a blistering denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees and those who followed them and did so with another lamentation over Israel’s (represented by Jerusalem) fate (Matt. 23:37–39).

This section of Luke’s gospel records Christ’s final pronouncement of judgment on Israel in particular, as well as the world in general. This last of His great discourses is commonly known as the Olivet Discourse, because the Lord taught this truth to His disciples while sitting on the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley looking back at the temple (Matt. 24:3).

It was Wednesday evening of Passion Week. All of the scribes’, Pharisees’, and Sadducees’ attempts to publicly discredit and destroy Jesus had utterly failed, and they were forced to silence (Luke 20:40) by His answers. The Lord had preached His last sermon to the crowds, condemning the religious leaders (Matt. 23:1–36) and warning the people of the deadly influence of their hypocrisy. After watching a poor widow give all that she possessed to the apostate religious system, Jesus and the disciples left the temple (see the exposition of 21:1–4 in the previous chapter of this volume) for the mount.

As they were leaving, some of the disciples were commenting on the magnificence of the temple (v. 5). When Christ replied that the coming judgment on the nation would include the destruction of the temple (v. 6), His followers asked Him when that judgment would take place and what signs would precede both it (v. 7) and His return (Matt. 24:3). Jesus’ reply, beginning in verse 8, is the longest recorded answer He ever gave to any question, establishing its importance.

This preliminary section introduces Luke’s account of the Olivet Discourse, and may be divided into two parts: judgment’s coming predicted, and judgment’s timing questioned.

JUDGMENT’S COMING PREDICTED

And while some were talking about the temple, that it was adorned with beautiful stones and votive gifts, He said, “As for these things which you are looking at, the days will come in which there will not be left one stone upon another which will not be torn down.” (21:5–6)

As noted above, when Jesus and the disciples left the temple grounds, some of the disciples were admiring the temple. The construction of that stunning, magnificent structure, one of the architectural wonders of the ancient world, had been started half a century earlier by Herod the Great, but was still ongoing when the Romans destroyed the temple in A.D. 70. It was built with brilliant white stone, polished like marble, and contained numerous rooms, porticos, colonnades, plazas, and patios, as well as caves, cisterns, and pits for water storage. The highest of its many levels towered hundreds of feet above the Kidron Valley. The eastern wall of the temple’s main structure was covered in plates of gold, which shone brilliantly in the rays of the morning sun coming over Olivet.

The disciples noted in particular that the massive stone block walls were also adorned with beautiful stones, donated by the wealthy as their ancestors had done for Solomon’s temple (1 Chron. 29:8). Votive gifts were given as offerings symbolizing a vow made by the giver. Such consisted of plaques, sculptures, and other artistic treasures (including a nearly six-foot-high golden vine with golden grapes, donated by Herod), found throughout the temple.

It must have seemed inconceivable to the disciples that such an enduring, massive, ornate structure, prized so highly for its magnificence and value, would ever be destroyed. Yet the temple could not escape the coming judgment on the unbelieving nation. “As for these things which you are looking at,” Jesus told them, “the days will come in which there will not be left one stone upon another which will not be torn down.” His words would be fulfilled literally in A.D. 70, when the Romans, the human means of divine wrath, erected scaffolds around the walls of the temple and its buildings, filled them with wood and other flammable material, and set them on fire. The intense heat from the fires caused the stones to crumble. After it was further dismantled and sifted to find all the melted gold, the rubble was thrown down into the Kidron Valley. Only the huge foundation stones remained largely intact. Those stones, however, were not part of the temple itself, but supports for the retaining wall.

The disciples could have remembered from the Old Testament that there would be judgment on Israel’s enemies associated with the Messiah’s coming. In Zechariah 12:8–9 God said,

In that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the one who is feeble among them in that day will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the angel of the Lord before them. And it will come about in that day I will set about to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.

In distinction to the destruction of the nation’s enemies, they would likely have known Israel was promised salvation.

I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn. … In that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for impurity. (v. 10; 13:1)

All that would be followed by the glorious reign of Messiah in the kingdom on earth. “The Lord will be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one” (14:9).

But looking more carefully at Zechariah’s prophecy, it was also predicted that before the time of Israel’s salvation, Jerusalem will be destroyed: “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle,” the Lord declared, “and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city” (14:2). So Messiah’s coming will produce both judgment and destruction as well as final restoration and salvation for Israel.

JUDGMENT’S TIMING QUESTIONED

They questioned Him, saying, “Teacher, when therefore will these things happen? And what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?” (21:7)

In light of the Lord’s prediction of coming judgment, the disciples had two questions: When would the judgment of which He spoke take place? And what would be the sign of His coming (or “presence”; Matt. 24:3), which will usher in the judgment?

They were not completely without knowledge about elements of the coming of the messiah, since the Jewish people had a well-developed system of eschatology, as the following summary indicates:

(i) Before the Messiah came there would be a time of terrible tribulation. There would be a Messianic travail. It would be the birth-pangs of a new age. Every conceivable terror would burst upon the world; every standard of honour and decency would be torn down; the world would become a physical and moral chaos.

“And honour shall be turned into shame,

And strength humiliated into contempt.

And probity destroyed,

And beauty shall become ugliness …

And envy shall rise in those who had not thought aught of themselves,

And passion shall seize him that is peaceful,

And many shall be stirred up in anger to injure many,

And they shall rouse up armies in order to shed blood,

And in the end they shall perish together with them.” (2 Baruch 27.)

There would be “quakings of places, tumult of peoples, schemings of nations, confusion of leaders, disquietude of princes.” (4 Ezra 9:3.)

“From heaven shall fall fiery words down to the earth. Lights shall come, bright and great, flashing into the midst of men; and earth, the universal mother, shall shake in these days at the hand of the Eternal. And the fishes of the sea and the beasts of the earth and the countless tribes of flying things and all the souls of men and every sea shall shudder at the presence of the Eternal and there shall be panic. And the towering mountain peaks and the hills of the giants he shall rend, and the murky abyss shall be visible to all. And the high ravines in the lofty mountains shall be full of dead bodies and rocks shall flow with blood and each torrent shall flood the plain. … And God shall judge all with war and sword, and there shall be brimstone from heaven, yea stones and rain and hail incessant and grievous. And death shall be upon the four-footed beasts. … Yea the land itself shall drink of the blood of the perishing and beasts shall eat their fill of flesh.” (the Sibylline Oracles 3:363 ff.)

The Mishnah enumerates as signs that the coming of the Messiah is near,

“That arrogance increases, ambition shoots up, that the vine yields fruit yet wine is dear. The government turns to heresy. There is no instruction. The synagogue is devoted to lewdness. Galilee is destroyed, Gablan laid waste. The inhabitants of a district go from city to city without finding compassion. The wisdom of the learned is hated, the godly despised, truth is absent. Boys insult old men, old men stand in the presence of children. The son depreciates the father, the daughter rebels against the mother, the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law. A man’s enemies are his house-fellows.”

The time which preceded the coming of the Messiah was to be a time when the world was torn in pieces and every bond relaxed. The physical and the moral order would collapse.

(ii) Into this chaos there would come Elijah as the forerunner and herald of the Messiah. He was to heal the breaches and bring order into the chaos to prepare the way for the Messiah. In particular he was to mend disputes. In fact the Jewish oral law laid it down that money and property whose ownership was disputed, or anything found whose owner was unknown, must wait “till Elijah comes.” When Elijah came the Messiah would not be far behind.

(iii) Then there would enter the Messiah. The word Messiah and the word Christ mean the same thing. Messiah is the Hebrew and Christ is the Greek for the Anointed One. A king was made king by anointing and the Messiah was God’s Anointed King. It is important to remember that Christ is not a name; it is a title. Sometimes the Messiah was thought of as a king of David’s line, but more often he was thought of as a great, divine, superhuman figure crashing into history to remake the world and in the end to vindicate God’s people.

(iv) The nations would ally themselves and gather themselves together against the champion of God.

“The kings of the nations shall throw themselves against this land bringing retribution on themselves. They shall seek to ravage the shrine of the mighty God and of the noblest men whensoever they come to the land. In a ring round the city the accursed kings shall place each one his throne with his infidel people by him. And then with a mighty voice God shall speak unto all the undisciplined, empty-minded people and judgment shall come upon them from the mighty God, and all shall perish at the hand of the Eternal.” (Sibylline Oracles 3:363–372.)

“It shall be that when that the nations hear his (the Messiah’s) voice, every man shall leave his own land and the warfare they have one against the other, and an innumerable multitude shall be gathered together desiring to fight against him.” (4 Ezra 13:33–35.)

(v) The result would be the total destruction of these hostile powers. Philo said that the Messiah would “take the field and make war and destroy great and populous nations.”

“He shall reprove them for their ungodliness,

Rebuke them for their unrighteousness,

Reproach them to their faces with treacheries—

And when he has rebuked them he shall destroy them.” (4 Ezra 12:32, 33.)

“And it shall come to pass in those days that none shall be saved,

Either by gold or by silver,

And none shall be able to escape.

And there shall be no iron for war,

Nor shall one clothe oneself with a breastplate.

Bronze shall be of no service,

And tin shall not be esteemed,

And lead shall not be desired.

And all things shall be destroyed from the surface of the earth.” (Enoch 52:7–9.)

The Messiah will be the most destructive conqueror in history, smashing his enemies into utter extinction.

(vi) There would follow the renovation of Jerusalem. Sometimes this was thought of as the purification of the existing city. More often it was thought of as the coming down of the new Jerusalem from heaven. The old house was to be folded up and carried away, and, in the new one, “All the pillars were new and the ornaments larger than those of the first.” (Enoch 90:28, 29.)

(vii) The Jews who were dispersed all over the world would be gathered into the city of the new Jerusalem. To this day the Jewish daily prayer includes the petition, “Lift up a banner to gather our dispersed and assemble us from the four ends of the earth.” The eleventh of the Psalms of Solomon has a noble picture of that return.

“Blow ye in Zion on the trumpet to summon the saints,

Cause ye to be heard in Jerusalem the voice of him that bringeth good tidings;

For God hath had pity on Israel in visiting them.

Stand on the height, O Jerusalem, and behold thy children,

From the East and the West, gathered together by the Lord;

From the North they come in the gladness of their God,

From the isles afar off God hath gathered them.

High mountains hath he abased into a plain for them;

The hills fled at their entrance.

The woods gave them shelter as they passed by;

Every sweet-smelling tree God caused to spring up for them,

That Israel might pass by in the visitation of the glory of their God.

Put on, O Jerusalem, thy glorious garments;

Make ready thy holy robe;

For God hath spoken good for Israel forever and ever,

Let the Lord do what he hath spoken concerning Israel and Jerusalem;

Let the Lord raise up Israel by His glorious name.

The mercy of the Lord be upon Israel forever and ever.”

It can easily be seen how Jewish this new world was to be. The nationalistic element is dominant all the time.

(viii) Palestine would be the centre of the world and the rest of the world subject to it. All the nations would be subdued. Sometimes it was thought of as a peaceful subjugation.

“And all the isles and the cities shall say, How doth the Eternal love those men! For all things work in sympathy with them and help them. … Come let us all fall upon the earth and supplicate the eternal King, the mighty, everlasting God. Let us make procession to His Temple, for He is the sole Potentate.” (Sibylline Oracles 3:690 ff.)

More often the fate of the Gentiles was utter destruction at which Israel would exult and rejoice.

“And He will appear to punish the Gentiles,

Then, thou, O Israel, shalt be happy.

And He will destroy all their idols.

And thou shalt mount upon the necks and the wings of the eagle

(i.e., Rome, the eagle, is to be destroyed)

And they shall be ended and God will exalt thee.

“And thou shalt look from on high

And see thine enemies in Gehenna,

And thou shalt recognize them and rejoice.”

(Assumption of Moses 10:8–10.)

It was a grim picture. Israel would rejoice to see her enemies broken and in hell. Even the dead Israelites were to be raised up to share in the new world.

(ix) Finally, there would come the new age of peace and goodness which would last forever. (William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, rev. ed. [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975], 194–198; cf. Emil Schürer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ [New York: Scribners, 1896], 2:154–178)

But that general knowledge did not provide the disciples with the answers they sought to their specific questions, so Jesus gave them a detailed answer in verses 8–36. The truths He presented regarding His coming are critically important. The end of history is the reason for history; the consummation is the reason for the creation; the story that began in Genesis reaches its glorious climax in Revelation. In the next several chapters of this volume we will learn from our Lord Himself the reasons that necessitate His coming, the preliminary signs and events leading up to His coming, and how believers are to prepare for His coming.

Indifference to our Lord’s eschatology is unacceptable, and so is ignorance. The end of the story matters for our comfort and God’s glory. And it is not vague or unclear. We must hold to the precision of sound doctrine on this subject as we do on any category of divine revelation in Scripture.

The book of Revelation, the most comprehensive prophecy of the end times, begins with a call to such understanding and blessing:

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His bond-servants, the things which must soon take place; and He sent and communicated it by His angel to His bond-servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near. (Rev. 1:1–3)