The Olivet Discourse – part 4

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Testament studies from Matthew 24-25.

1. This passage speaks of the significance of the signs.

Verses 32 to 35. The disciples had asked the question in verse 3, “When will these things be?” I suggested last night they confused the destruction of the temple with the Lord’s return, but still they asked the question, “When shall these things be?”

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Jesus answers in two steps. The first step is found in verses 32 to 35. That is the passage we are looking at now which tells us of the significance of the signs. The second passage, verses 36 to 41, tells us no one knows about that day or hour. We shall turn to that passage in a moment.

Verses 32 to 35 often lead interpreters into great difficulty for one simple reason. The words all these things in verse 33 are often taken to embrace not only verses 4 to 28 but also verses 29 to 31. In other words, if all these things includes the Lord’s actual return, then we face some difficulty with verse 34: “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

It is that pressure, then, that tries to force some interpreters to see up to the end of verse 31 only a description of the fall of Jerusalem or the like or to interpret this generation to mean something like “this generation that will be alive at the time” or “this race” or something like that, but I suggest to you there is evidence right in the text itself that Jesus, at this point, does not mean to refer to all of the events including his own return but only all of the events up to the Lord’s return.

In other words, he is describing chapter 24, verses 4 to 28. The crucial giveaway is verse 33. We are told, “When you see all these things, you know that it is near.” That could be it is near (his coming) or he is near (Jesus himself is near). It makes no difference to the argument. “When you see all these things take place, you know he is near.” If all these things includes the Lord’s coming, how can you speak that you know that it’s near if it has already taken place?

To make sense of this paragraph, it is essential to recognize that all these things does not include the Lord’s return itself. In other words, there is a pause in the argument. Verse 32 begins, as it were, with Jesus taking a fresh breath. He says, in effect, “I have told you the general course of this age …” Verses 4 to 28. “… the birth pangs of the Messiah. I have told you all of that, including the one sharp pain that involves the destruction of the temple, and I have told you what takes place immediately after that, the triumphant return of the Son of God on the clouds of majesty.”

He says, “When you see all these things … Verses 4 to 28. “… take place then you know that it [or he] is near.” The coming is near. Jesus himself is near. Unless you preserve the distinction between those two things, the sentence simply doesn’t make any sense, but then suddenly the whole paragraph makes sense.

Jesus tells us, in other words, all of the things described in verses 4 to 28 will take place within the first generation of believers, and they all did. Every single one of them. He does not say they must come to an end within the first generation of believers. He only says they must all take place within the first generation of believers, and they all did.

Nations rising against nations, wars and famines in various places. There was a terrible earthquake, for example, in the Philadelphia area in AD 64. There were famines, certainly, in Jerusalem because of a grain failure in Egypt that ultimately Christians went to Jerusalem with grain to provide for the want for the people there. Moreover, the fall of the temple took place. All of the things described in verses 4 to 28 took place within the first generation. Jesus says, on his solemn authority, “All of these things will take place in this generation.”

It is true the word generation occasionally means race, but not in the context where it is coupled with the word this (this generation). Consider, for example, the force of the argument in exactly the same expression in Matthew, chapter 12, verse 41. Jesus says, “The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here.”

Clearly that does not mean this race. It means this generation who is now hearing the preaching of the one who is greater than Jonah, Jesus himself. This generation in Scripture invariably means, “This generation alive while I am speaking,” and all the torturous explanations in the world cannot escape that conclusion.

Jesus is saying, therefore, the description of the inter-advental period will already be full blown, experienced by the people of his generation, unfolding step by step, but all experienced by them before the Son of Man returns. In other words, this paragraph sets a terminus a quo for Jesus’ return, a time before which Jesus cannot return. It does not set a terminus ad quem (that is, a final time) before which Jesus must return. In fact, that is going to remain open-ended explicitly by verse 36. “No one knows when that time takes place.”

In other words, Jesus now explains the significance of the signs he has indicated in verses 4 to 28. He does not here describe any final outbreak of evil. That is discussed elsewhere in Scripture. He does not describe the Antichrist. That is described elsewhere in Scripture. He describes, rather, what is characteristic of this entire age between the first coming and the second coming of Christ, and all of it will unpack within the first generation and then will continue and continue and continue and continue until Jesus comes.

That means, brothers and sisters in Christ, when we see earthquakes and famines and international rivalry, when we see persecution and apostasy and also witness the preaching of the gospel to the far corners of the earth and discover everywhere false prophets of the sort we described last night, we should take them to be typical of this period and adumbrations of the Lord’s return. These all point to his coming.

This is what the Messiah said would take place throughout this period. They do not indicate his return is a little closer or a little farther away. They are characteristic of this entire period. We should expect it and see that Jesus’ triumphant return is heralded even by these events in the strange period between D-Day and V-E Day. The authority of the Lord Jesus stands behind these words (verse 35): “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” This is the same authority of God himself.

2. This passage speaks of the suddenness of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Verses 36 to 41. Some interpreters try to link verse 36 with the preceding section, but for powerful reasons it should be linked with what succeeds, with verses 37 and following. Verses 37 and following constitute an exhortation to vigilance precisely because the hour is unknown, and it is the unknownness of the hour that is stressed in verse 36.

In other words, these verses refer to the cataclysmic coming of the Son of Man. “But of that hour, no one knows the time.” No one knows, we are told, the day or the hour, and may I suggest in passing that it is the merest quibbling to say we may not know the day or the hour but we may have a sneak preview of the month or the year, as some eschatological watchers argue.

“No one knows that hour, not even the angels, nor even the Son, but only the Father.” There are two things that need to be explored there. One is a christological issue concerning the confessed ignorance of the Son and the other is the precise force of this, what it means for our understanding of the Lord’s return.

May I take a small excursus away from eschatological matters to describe the Son of God’s professed ignorance? Does this ever bother you? Some point out the text is a variant here. That is true, but it’s stable. In Mark 13:32 there is the same, not even the Son. So we find Jesus himself confessing his ignorance.

What then does this do for his deity? Is it not an attribute of deity that he should be omniscient? What, then, of other passages where Jesus, according to texts, marvels or is surprised? Does that not testify, too, to a certain kind of ignorance, or are we to say the text is stretching the language … Jesus acted surprised but wasn’t really surprised? How can omniscience ever be surprised?

What shall we do with Luke 2:52 that insists Jesus grew in wisdom and in understanding and in favor with God and man? While we are at it, what shall we say when we read of God himself, “He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,” and Jesus, we find, is in a boat asleep? What shall we say when the texts find Jesus insisting, “My Father is greater than I”?

There are really only two ways within biblical orthodoxy of handling those questions. The one tries to ascribe all such self-confessed limitations to the human Jesus while preserving no limitation in the divine Son of God. In a sophisticated way, that was what Warfield did, although he had many caveats to qualify the argument.

The danger with that explanation, it seems to me, is that you are very close to ending up with two Christs, a human one and a divine one, instead of one God-man thoroughly God and thoroughly man. That is not, of course, what Warfield wants to do, but I do not quite see how you can escape it.

There is another approach which equally insists on the deity of Christ and on the humanity of Christ and it is suggested most strongly, I think, by the gospel of John. In that gospel, above all gospels, the deity of Christ is emphasized. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” At the climactic confession, Thomas bows down before the resurrected Christ and says, “My Lord and my God!”

It is sheer blasphemy on the part of Jehovah’s Witnesses to take that merely as some kind of oath as if Thomas were saying, “My Lord! My God! What have we here?” That is sheer blasphemy. No Jew in the first century would ever have said that. Then he says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and “Before Abraham was, I am.” The Jews understood by some of his claims he was making himself equal with God. No gospel is clearer than John on the essential oneness of the Father and the Son.

Yet interestingly enough, it is also John’s gospel which most stresses the dependence of the Son on the Father. Again and again we are told in John’s gospel, “The Son can do nothing but what the Father gives him to do. The Son can say nothing but what the Father gives him to say. In fact, the Son judges only as he hears.”

There is a tremendous stress on a kind of functional subordination of the Son to the Father in John’s gospel. Always the Father commands the Son; never does the Son command the Father. Always the Son obeys the Father; never does the Father obey the Son. What kind of dependence is this?

Let me bring in one other strand of biblical thought and then try this together. We may ask, “What does the Son abandon or change? How is he transformed when he takes on human flesh? What does it mean?” There are some, of course, who have argued what the Son abandons is his deity, but then, of course, he is no longer God. That, of course, was the strong form of the kenosis theory at the turn of the century.

Others have argued he does not abandon his deity when he becomes a man; he abandons the attributes of his deity. The difficulty with that is if you have an animal that looks like a horse and smells like a horse and runs like a horse and has all the attributes of a horse, you have a horse. If you take away the attributes of the horse, at what point do you stop having a horse?

It is very difficult to disassociate the being of God from the attributes of God. Some have argued he did not abandon the attributes of deity; he abandoned the use of the attributes of deity. But do we not read, “Who can forgive sins but God alone”? Jesus forgave sins with that ultimate and absolute sanction that belongs to God alone, so he, at least on occasions, certainly exercised the attributes of deity.

Some have suggested a little closer to the truth, I think … that he abandoned the independent use of his divine prerogative. Rightly understood, that is very close, I think, to what I have just described from John’s gospel. There is a sense in which in eternity past the eternal Son never acted independently of his Father. Never.

They were always one. We do not have three Gods. There is but one God with one will, but in eternity past, when the Son enjoyed (to use his own language from John 17:5) the glory he had with the Father from before the world’s beginning, his obedience to the Father, even in his commissioning to come to this world, was in a state of unshielded glory but now, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see.”

Now robbed of that glory by his self-humiliation, the glory he gains again by his accession to the right hand of the Father, he now operates as God-man exercising his prerogatives as deity only as the Father gives him leave to do, explicitly in the context of his ministry. It is in that sense, I think, we can make sense of many passages in Scripture.

Consider, for example, the temptations of Christ in Matthew 4 and Luke 4. How is it a temptation for Jesus to turn stones into bread? That is not a temptation to me. I have never been tempted to turn stones into bread. It is a temptation to him, however. It is a temptation to him, for it would mean arrogating back to himself the rights that were his but which he had voluntarily set aside for the sake of his self-identification with us.

Not one miracle does he perform in his own behalf, save where the Father gives him explicit leave to do so. He does only what the Father gives him to do. He says only what the Father gives him to say. He judges only as the Father gives him to judge. Somehow in the mystery of the incarnation, the Son lays aside any independent use of his divine prerogatives except where the Father explicitly, in the context of this incarnation, gives him leave to know, to do, to judge, to speak. So great is the mystery of the incarnation.

That is why the sign of the angels in Luke, chapter 2, is not, “You shall find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger, and when you go in to him he shall sit up in his crib and explain to you the mysteries of predestination.” Because, you see, baby Jesus couldn’t speak. He had to learn to speak.

In his growing in wisdom and knowledge, never, ever was his understanding marred by error, but that is not the same as saying the infant Jesus in his practice as the God-man as he lay in the crib was articulate omniscient. He grew in wisdom and understanding, and here he confesses his ignorance even of his own return. So great is his humiliation.

If this is so, the words of Broadus are extremely compelling for our age. “How cheerfully,” he asks rhetorically, “should we, [Christ’s] followers rest in ignorance that cannot be removed, trusting in all things to our heavenly Father’s wisdom and goodness, striving to obey his clearly revealed will and leaning on his goodness for support.”

We do not know when Christ is coming back, and it is almost blasphemous to try to set the time if the Son of God himself confesses ignorance. Indeed, the force of verses 37 to 39 here is most compelling. The analogy of the days of Noah. It begins with the word for, in the original. “For as it was in the days of Noah …”

“Let me give you an explanation,” he says. “For as it was then, so shall it be now. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

Many understand this passage to be an analogy along the lines of the life and times of Noah. Was not Noah’s day characterized by evil, by licentiousness? Was it not climaxed in judgment? True, all true. And completely irrelevant. It is simply not the point here. The point here is very simple. Evil or not, climaxed in judgment as it was, what was characteristic of Noah’s day that will be characteristic of the day when the Lord returns is the ordinariness of the day.

Men are eating and drinking. They’re marrying and giving in marriage. They’re living. They’re dying. They’re going to work. They’re buying. They’re selling. They’re making money. They’re starving. They’re fighting. There are wars. There are famines. There are earthquakes. There is preaching. Life goes on. It just goes on.

In fact, the terrible things described in verses 4 to 28 do not mean that, suddenly, all marriage stops, all life desists while we get on with the next international rivalry. We may have a Hundred Years’ War and still there is marriage and giving in marriage. Life goes on. There were all kinds of marriages in World War II. If there is a World War III, there will be marriages then as well. Life goes on.

If in one sense you may look at this period as a period of apostasy recurring, of persecutions, of famines, of the preaching of the gospel (cataclysmic, important, devastating events), it is also a period of the ordinary, and it is the ordinary that may deceive us. The very ordinariness of the days may deceive us.

For who except the chosen eight understood in Noah’s day that doom was approaching? They were too busy getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs, and then the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the time of the coming of the Son of Man.

Finally, there are two vignettes here. Verses 40 to 41. The two men in the field are probably father and son or a father and a close hired hand. The two women grinding at a hand mill … Do you know how they did it in those days? They sat down before a bottom stone (one on one side and one on the other) with a little handle sticking out of the top grinding stone. The big mills, of course, were pulled by a donkey. The small hand mills were usually run by two women.

One would reach over in a squat position and grab the handle on the other side and pull it around 180 degrees. Then the one on the other side would reach around and grab the handle and pull it around another 180 degrees. The stone was too heavy to push, so you had two pullers: one on one side and one on the other. There they go. Pull. Push. Pull. Push. Pull. Push. Around and around and around.

In fact, that sort of work was likely to be done by a mother and her daughter or a mother and a daughter-in-law, two very close people. But when the end comes, one is taken and the other is left. It is that sudden. The point here is not to establish whether this means taken in judgment or taken to be with the Lord.

I don’t know which it is. In fact, I don’t care. The result is the same. The point in this context is the suddenness of the cleavage. Even close family members will be completely disassociated from their environment in this sudden catastrophe. In other words, the suddenness of the Lord’s return is emphasized powerfully by the text.

3. This passage speaks of the need to be watchful.

Jesus gives us a therefore. Verses 42–44. A short parable. “Therefore, keep watch.” In the light of the suddenness of the coming of the Lord, we are enjoined to be careful, to be watchful, for we may understand this: “If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.” There are two points that are crucial.

A) The unexpectedness of the Lord’s return is here emphasized again by a parallel carefully drawn between a thief and Jesus.

The parallel is not on the plane of deception or of the moral value of the action. The parallel is drawn at one level only: unexpectedness.

Nobody would be broken into if you had a warning in advance when the thief was going to arrive, and we, likewise, will not have a warning in advance when Christ is going to come. It will be unexpected. Therefore, if you have valuables in your house and you fear you might be broken into, you must take security precautions all the time, and if you expect the Lord to return when you’re not expecting it, you must take precautions all the time. That’s the force.

B) Notice the willingness of the church to call Jesus, “Lord.”

Even this particular christological title, which is so central to our thinking today, is mandated for the first time by Jesus himself. “You do not know on what day your Lord will come,” an expression the Jews reserved almost exclusively, except for certain salutations, but certainly when they spoke of the Lord, for Yahweh, but Yahweh comes in the person of his Son. There is dominical sanction for addressing Jesus as Lord. This is the fountain of the church’s cry, Marana tha (“Come, O Lord”).

I return, then, to questions of expectation of imminency. We have seen three things. First, the New Testament focuses here on the soonness of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ while refusing to specify some any-second kind of notion; second, Jesus insists upon the unexpectedness of that event; and third, in the light of the unexpectedness of that event, he exhorts us to constant vigilance.

What goes into that constant vigilance is not here described, but the kinds of waiting that must take place are unpacked in four further parables to which we shall return tomorrow night. I am persuaded, however, that some in this room have come out of strong dispensational backgrounds or they have been taught by strong dispensational teachers, while perhaps others of us have not come from that background but we have been exposed to some less-controlled flights of fancy than others have been exposed to.

As a result, we have become so suspicious of eschatological speculation, perhaps rightly so to some extent, that we seldom preach about the Lord’s return at all. We have a great place for grace, and so we should. We can expound the doctrine of the justification of the saints, and so we must. We can exhort our people to holiness of life, and so we ought.

How often do you and I hold out before them the blessed hope of the church which permeates the entire New Testament Canon? How often in our pastoral prayers do we lead our people in a fervor not only of exaltation of Christ but of anticipation of Christ? Do we join the church throughout all of its generations in the magnificent cry, “Even so, come Lord Jesus,” or are we so afraid of being branded fanatics that we prefer to deal with D-Day than V-E Day?

God help us to achieve the balance of Scripture for his glory and our people’s good. Amen.