What Jesus said would come first

The question on the mountain

The disciples asked Jesus two questions at once, and He answered both together, which is why the sermon on the Mount of Olives needs careful reading.

Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”

“These things” meant the destruction of the temple, which Jesus had just predicted and which happened in AD 70. “The sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age” meant the end of the world. The disciples assumed the two would happen together. Jesus wove His answers so that the fall of Jerusalem became a picture of the end, and the signs He gave apply to both, with the final fulfilment still ahead of us.

The signs that are not the end

The first thing Jesus did was to warn against reading the end into every disturbance.

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.

War, famine, pestilence, earthquake: “the end is not yet”. These are “the beginning of sorrows”, literally the beginning of birth pains, which grow more frequent and more intense as the birth approaches. Every generation has had its wars and plagues. What Jesus describes is not their existence but their intensification, and every honest reader of the last century’s history can see it. But He will not let us set dates by them.

The condition of society

Jesus went on to describe what people would be like:

And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved.

Paul filled in the portrait with uncomfortable detail:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Notice that the list ends inside the church: “having a form of godliness but denying its power”. The last days are marked not only by open wickedness but by religion without transformation. Jesus said the same thing when He compared the end to the days of Noah: ordinary life, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, carrying on as if nothing would ever change, “until the day that Noah entered the ark” (Matthew 24:38).

Signs in the heavens and distress on the earth

“And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

“Distress of nations, with perplexity.” The word means having no way out. Jesus foresaw a world in which the problems outrun the solutions, in which people are afraid not only of what is happening but of “those things which are coming”. A century that has lived under the shadow of weapons that could end civilisation, and now under the shadow of a climate and an economy that nobody seems able to steer, knows what the sentence means.

The sign that is the end

Among all the signs Jesus gave, one stands apart, because He attaches the end directly to it:

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.

Wars and earthquakes are “not yet” the end. The gospel preached to every nation is followed by “then the end will come”. This is the sign that the church has a hand in. In the first century the gospel was confined to the Mediterranean. Today the Bible exists in whole or in part in thousands of languages, and the message of Jesus reaches places that were unreachable within living memory. John saw the same thing from heaven’s side: an angel “having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth—to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people” (Revelation 14:6), with the announcement that “the hour of His judgment has come” (Revelation 14:7). The last sign before the end is not a disaster. It is a message, going to the whole world.

What the signs are for

Jesus did not give signs so that we could calculate. He gave them so that we would not be surprised, and so that we would know which way to look. His own summary is the kindest sentence in the sermon:

Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.”

The believer reads the news differently from everyone else. Where the world sees distress with no way out, the believer sees birth pains, and births end in joy. “Look up and lift up your heads.” The signs are not a reason for fear. They are the reason to expect Him.