What is the Sign of Your Coming? Matthew 24:3

Open your Bibles with me this morning to Matthew chapter 24. Last time I gave somewhat of a flyover of Matthew 24 and 25, which is one sermon, one message of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the fifth discourse in Matthew; it is the only one that focuses on prophetic themes or eschatology. Eschatology is a term that comes from two Greek words, ESCHATOS, meaning last, and LOGOS meaning things are words or the study of something; so it is the study of the last days, the study of end times. This is Jesus' longest message about the about prophetic events, about the end times, and it is second only in length to the Sermon on the Mount. That's important. Whenever we look at any portion of Scripture that we always asked certain basic questions and those are, who is talking, to whom are they speaking, and are they speaking with reference to only that person are they speaking through that person to a broader audience. That is important when we come to each of these discourses in Matthew and as we have seen in our study of Matthew that the reason Matthew wrote the gospel of Matthew is to teach about the coming of the Messiah and his presentation and offer of the kingdom to Israel. That's a primary theme. Kingdom is the big idea.

And so you have to understand what kingdom means, and what kingdom means from an Old Testament perspective is the messianic rule on the earth of the son of David, the greater son of David, that he would rule from the throne of David in Jerusalem and rule over Israel and rule over all the nations, and that this would be a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity upon the earth as we have a perfect God-Man ruler. When Jesus came at the first coming He came to offer the kingdom. He was preceded by John the Baptist's message was, Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Jesus came had the same message repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He sent his disciples to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not to the Gentiles and state their message was, you guessed it, Repent, for the king of heaven is at hand. That's the gospel of the kingdom.

That's can be important because when we get into a little bit into this message, Jesus talks about the gospel of the kingdom being preached to all the world. The gospel of the kingdom, as we will see, is not the gospel that we proclaim today. The gospel that we proclaim today is related to the description of first Corinthians 15, which focuses on the death, burial, resurrection of Christ is substitutionary payment on the cross. That is the gospel we preach today. It is part of the gospel of the kingdom, but we are not preaching the gospel of the kingdom. Today the gospel kingdom is defined by Matthew as be ready for the coming king and the establishment of the kingdom, that that is about to happen. Because Jesus was rejected, He ascended to heaven; the kingdom plan was put on hold as a pause button God the father hit. And only at the end of the Tribulation after God the Father, according to Daniel seven, the ancient of days gives the kingdom to His Son. Jesus takes the scroll, Revelation chapter 5, and begins to open the seals. Those are the judgments and we will have to review all of this, those are the judgments that that enable Him to open the scroll, which is the title deed to the earth; and then He will return and at that point, establish his kingdom.

Once the Rapture occurs and the church is out of here, then we go back to the offer of the kingdom because that's what comes at the end of the seven-year Tribulation. The emphasis then goes back to the gospel of the kingdom. The kingdom includes the gospel of justification. They are not two opposite gospels, it's that the gospel of the kingdom offers more then, it deals with something in addition to the gospel of justification by faith alone.

All of that sort of summarizes a little bit of the framework of why Matthew has been written. Now we have to bring that to bear on our understanding of Matthew chapters 24 and 25, because Matthew is including what his part of the answer is to these questions from the perspective of what he is talking about. He's addressing church age believers, of course, probably in the early 40s. I believe that Matthew was the first Gospel that was written following the principle laid down by Paul's trips to the Jew first and also to the Greek, that in the early church the church is primarily Jewish and Matthew is answering a critical question, which is, why didn't the kingdom come, what is going on here and how does that relate to our mission today because the kingdom didn't come? That's why it ends with an emphasis on Jesus mandate to the church, which is to go to the disciples to go into all the world and make disciples by baptizing and by teaching. That is what deals with the inner advent age. But as we'll see, there is very little in Matthew that talks about the inter-advent age.

What I mean by the inner advantage is that age between the two advents, between the first coming and the second coming. The first coming ended with the ascension of Christ to heaven, and so that period that started 10 days after His ascension on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended (the first advent of the Holy Spirit), that is the beginning of the church age, and it ends with the rapture of the church. So what is going on in between here is not really addressed by Matthew.

This is a critical chapter two chapters to understand with relation to what happens in the Tribulation period. And that this is not addressing anything in the church age—that's a fundamental assumption. There are a lot of disagreements among even dispensationalists. There are six different views on the first part of the message down through about verse 31. Then there is a second section in chapter 24, starting in verse 32 and going down through the end of chapter 25. I think that is an connected unit. There's a lot of disagreement, I've identified at least three different positions among free grace dispensational futurists on that part. So that makes it really difficult for me as a pastor. Most the time I can look at two or three different resources and commentaries and everybody's in pretty much agreement. But when you look at people within our camp and you see all these different views, and everybody has a lot of different arguments, I have to really spend a tremendous amount of time, because to be a faithful pastor and teacher to rightly divide the word you've got to process each argument, outline the strengths and weaknesses of each person's argument, compare and contrast, figure out what their backgrounds what is within their framework, their presuppositions to lead them in this direction to take this particular view, and who's right and who's wrong. That takes a lot of time.

Now I've gone through in a flyover manner when we been in Revelation other things, to talk about Matthew 24 and 25, and I have my views, but I haven't had the opportunity to truly drill down into the mass of minutia that is in the text. Now I don't want to go too deep to drive you nuts but it's important to handle some of this, and the reason is, after 30+ years in the ministry I've found that if I say something in a general way without documenting it I will get five or six questions where people say, well, why did you say this and why did you say that and what about this, so it's better for me just to cover the minutia when I'm in the pulpit than have to answer a lot of questions afterward. To some of you it doesn't really matter what the details are, you just want somebody to tell you what it means. And that's fine, but others of you have more profound questions.

So I'm titling this message: What is the sign of your coming? That is a question that is asked in verse three, and we won't get beyond that today because we have to look at some other some other aspects of the what's going on in terms of the context of this discourse. There are seven questions that we need to address. The first is what's the significance of the temple? Because that's the backdrop Jesus has just announced that the temple will be destroyed. Why is that important? Second, we need to answer the question what is the reason for this judgment that He has announced upon the nation. The third question that you may not think is important but is one that is addressed in the time and that is how many questions are the disciples asking? Are they asking for three two, or possibly even one? How many questions are here? Fourth is the focus of this prophecy on events that are completely and totally in the future. Are they on events that are mostly already fulfilled in the past? Or are they being fulfilled as we go through the church age? That first view is called futurism, the second view is called preterism, and present is something called historicism; but understanding those helps us to understand why you run into some different views along the way. The fifth question is, what did the disciples know? What did they already understand? What were they bringing to the table when Jesus starts to talk to them about future things? What is their frame of reference going to be from the Old Testament? And sixth: The question of what are the signs of the times? Is this talking about sign singular or signs plural? The seventh question is the differences between the second coming of Christ and the Rapture. Understanding that distinction is very important.

The first question is, what is the significance of the temple? We have seen that at the conclusion of chapter 23 Jesus announced judgment on the religious leaders of Israel. In chapters 21 and 22 they are examining him, and they reject him as their Messiah, and in chapter 23 he announces his rejection of them as his people. He announces seven—and I said because the textual issue 7+1—woes against the religious leaders, against the Pharisees as hypocrites, as religious leaders who have led the nation astray, and he announces a judgment that will come. In Matthew 23:38 He says see your house [the temple] is left to you desolate, indicating that the temple will be destroyed.

But as we have always seen when God announces judgment, there is always grace with judgment. God doesn't just announce judgment and leave people hanging. There is always a solution, a great solution for deliverance in the midst of divine judgment. Therefore, there is always hope, no matter what happens, even when you're living through a time of national disaster because of divine discipline, there is always hope. And so the solution there is Matthew 23:39: Jesus said you won't see me again until you say, Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. The issue is whether or not you're going to accept, whether or not the Jewish people would accept Jesus as their Messiah.

Then we read in verse one of chapter 24 that Jesus went out and departed from the temple and his disciples came up to show him the buildings of the temple. The action in the Greek verb here is really much more dynamic than the way it talks about; it's the action, you can picture this is a video. Jesus went out of the temple and is walking away. He has made this announcement about the destruction, and He leaves and was going. The disciples are now looking around at these buildings with their mouths hanging open, they can't believe that He has announced this, and that everything that they see is going to be destroyed.

This temple was so magnificent that one of the rabbinical sayings of the time was that if you had never seen the temple in Jerusalem, you had never seen beauty. It was the eighth wonder of the ancient world. It was larger than any temple that was built to any god in any country anywhere in the in the known world at that time. They just couldn't imagine it, just as before 2001 before the events of 9/11, none of us could quite imagine that something would completely take down the twin Towers in New York. It's something that that they just could not fathom, and so his announcement of the destruction of the temple just leaves them with their mouth hanging open. They are coming up to Him. He leaves and is going in the direction of the Mount of olives and they're standing there for a while looking at the temple, trying to process what He has said, and then they run after Him to get an answer.

Here's an artist depiction of what the temple looked like. It was built out of marble. The southern wall was completely covered in gold.

They were just going over to the other side to sit specifically on the Mount of Olives because of what Jesus was going to teach. That's important for understanding the background and the framework.

Now what we see here in verse one are two words, the words for temple and the word for buildings. As Jesus is leaving His disciples come up to him and show him the buildings of the temple. The word for buildings is the word OIKODOME, which focuses on the buildings, not the external retaining walls. The Western Wall that we have today, known as the Wailing Wall, was never part of the buildings of the temple. That was a huge retaining wall built around the temple mount by Herod the Great in order to support the weight of these huge buildings.

We don't know much about what was going on on Mount Moriah from the time Genesis 22 until the time at the end of Samuel when God identifies the location where David will build the temple and a plague that comes upon Israel. What David does to stop the plague is to offer sacrifice and God indicates that the place of that is on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, and that is the site on Mount Moriah. So this is been a threshing floor for threshing the wheat and privately owned but was purchased by David for the location of the temple. In 586 that first temple was destroyed and then it was rebuilt, starting with the return of the Jews in 536, but they had a lot of trouble pulling it all together and it wasn't until 516 that the second temple was consecrated under Zerubbabel who was the governor at the time, and Joshua the high priest. That is known as the second temple. There are two periods to the second temple. We might break it down that way. One is the Zerubbabel temple, and it wasn't very large; not nearly as large as the expanse of the Herodian temple. Herod expanded it much further south. He expanded the east wall a little further out to the east, and he expanded the North Wall and also built a fortification for Roman soldiers located on the northwest corner.

In order to complete this massive remodeling project Herod had to work closely with the priests, because only they could build the temple. They were very suspicious of him that he might want to destroy the temple so he had to build everything before they would allow him to tear anything down. They had to make sure that the replacements were there before any of the walls or anything else was taken down. He doubled the area of the temple from what it was before, increased the length of the Temple Mount from North to South. He expanded it so that the average length of the outer side was about 600 cubits or 900 feet.

Originally the Temple Mount was intended to be 1600 feet wide by 900 feet broad and by nine stories high. This was the original plan for Herod, but never quite was completed. What he had to do in order to support the weight was build an enormous foundation. This is such a massive project, and Jesus announced this destruction with even more detail saying, ^NASB “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down.” He is referring to the buildings; He is not referring to the walls. But of course some of the upper walls were destroyed.

All of this is this important point because the temple was the dwelling place of God in the midst of his people. Originally, you had the tabernacle, and the term tabernacle in the Hebrew is from the root verb from which comes the word Shekinah. It means to dwell. The temple is the dwelling place of God in the midst of his of his people. That is why the temple was important. And so the temple signifies something, and the destruction of the temple signifies something: it signifies divine judgments.

The second thing we want to look at in terms of understanding this passage is the reason for the divine judgment on the nation. This had already happened once before in Israel's history. In 586 BC Nebuchadnezzar the ruler Babel and invaded Israel for the third time. He first invaded in 605, then around 593, and now in 586 he invades, and this time he destroyed the temple. He just about wiped out the city and he took numerous captives back to back to Babylon; it was for 70 years. They returned in 536 and then the Jews rebuilt. In 63 BC Pompeii conquered the Levant area and so Israel and Judea came under Roman authority and remained under Roman authority, even though there were many different revolts during the peer that period of time. This culminated in the great Jewish revolt, which occurred in AD 66, some 33 years after the crucifixion of Christ.

The occasion was of the Roman governor confiscated 17 talents of gold from the temple treasury, and in reaction Jewish nationalist seized the temple stopped the daily sacrifices that were being carried out in violation of the Torah—they were in tribute to the Roman Emperor—and this led to a four-year revolt. Vespasian was the general at the time and he conquered much of Judea and surrounded Jerusalem, but then Nero died and he was appointed Caesar, so he had to go back to Rome. There was a pause in the assault and it was during that time that all of the Christians left, and that was on the great causes for hostility between Jews and Jewish Christians. The Christians were viewed as traitors because they wouldn't stay. As we saw in Luke 21 they left because Jesus said, "When you see the signs, when you see Jerusalem surrounded by an army then you are to flee." So they fled because they knew that judgment was inevitable.

A similar kind of thing had happened back in 586 BC and maybe earlier in 587. The leaders of the people came to Jeremiah and said, "We will do whatever God says to do". God said, "Give up; surrender to Nebuchadnezzar and you will all live. You will survive and you will go to Babylon and everything will be great; you all have families and children, and I'll protect you until you return to the land." And they said, "We won't do that". They stayed there and fought, and hundreds of thousands were killed by the Babylonians. This time the Christian Jews knew what happened before they remembered what Jesus said, so they left. They fled to a area called Pella across the Jordan River and that's where they stayed during the during the Jewish revolt.

But the reason there's this judgment is outlined in the Old Testament, and that's part of the background to understand this. God had established a covenant with Israel. We refer to it as the Mosaic covenant, or the Sinai covenant and at the end of the covenant there's a list of covenant blessings and judgments. And that would be true in many contracts or covenants of this kind. There's an outline of what the king will do for a vassal. In this case, the king would be God in Israel, the vassal nation. And then at the end of the document there is a statement that if you're obedient these are the extra things I'll do for you; if you're disobedient then I'm going to do these horrible things to you. In the first 13 verses of Leviticus 26 we have a list of the blessings, and the highest blessing is in Leviticus 26, 11 and 12: "I will set my tabernacle [dwelling place] among you, and my soul shall not abhor you." This is God speaking. "I will walk among you and be your God and you shall be my people." If Israel is obedient God promises that He will dwell with them and bless them. But then starting in verse 14 He starts to outline five cycles of judgment or discipline, and the ultimate one comes down in verses 27 to 33. I'm just going to start reading in verse 27. He says, "After all this, if you do not obey me but walk contrary to me, then I also will walk contrary to you in fury at judgment, and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins." Each successive cycle is harder than the one before, and then in verse 29 He says, "You shall eat the flesh of your sons and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters because you're surrounded in a siege. You will not have any food, you will cannibalize your own children," and that is what happened. It happened in 586 and it happened in the time of the Jewish revolt.

In verse 30 God says, "I will destroy your high places, because you created an abomination out of all the worship places, and created your own idolatrous worship places." God said, "I will destroy your high places cut down your incense altars and cast your carcasses on the lifeless forms of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you,"—as opposed to what we read before, "that my soul shall not abhor you". "… I will let your cities waste, I will bring your sanctuaries to desolation …" That would be the temple. "… and I will not smell the fragrance of your sweet aromas"—the end of the sacrifices. So this is announcing this judgment. It happened in 586; it's going to happen again in AD 70. "… I will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it and shall be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations." This is the fifth cycle discipline. "Not only will I destroy everything that you have in the land I will take you out of the land".

So Jesus functioning as an Old Testament prophet has announced those seven woe judgments on Israel. They have their foundation back in the Torah in the in the Mosaic Law. He has announced God's judgment against them and so He's functioning like a Moses like a Mosaic profit. And that is indeed what we would expect because in Deuteronomy 18 where we have an outline of the roles: how do you tell a true prophet from a false prophet? There's the prophecy that God is going to send another prophet like Moses. Deuteronomy 18:15 ^NASB “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him." That's the order you listen to him. [17] "The Lord said to me, 'What they have spoken is good. [18] ‘I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. [19] ‘It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require {it} of him'. "That's that judgment that will come.

And then He goes on to say in that passage, "The prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name which I have not commanded him to speak or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die". The death penalty was for anyone who claim to speak for God, and didn't and the way you would know it is verse 22 ^NASB “When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him."

What happens in the Olivet Discourse is that Jesus gives prophecy that has a near fulfillment. It is fulfilled 33 years later. So if that came true precisely as he predicted, then we know that what He says about the long-term prophecy, which is the lion's share of what's in the Matthew Olivet Discourse, will certainly come to pass. So this is the significance of the temple and the significance of the judgment that Jesus is announcing.

The next thing before we get to the third point that the disciples understand a couple things and that Jesus is doing here. First of all, they know that Jesus is more than a prophet. They know that He is this prophet that Moses has predicted that He was God and so they knew that He knew the future and that He could accurately answer their questions about what would take place in the future, that this wasn't guesswork. He is the prophet like Moses.

Second, since He is the prophet like Moses His statements about divine judgment were true and would certainly come to pass. And then for us by way of application, this means that we can relax and trust God even when we're in the midst of judgment, just like the disciples could. They knew this judgment was coming, but they could relax and trust God because God is still in the control when that happens. And we should understand that no matter what the crisis is, no matter what happens, whether its personal, whether its national, whatever it is; our job as believers is to fulfill the mission. What's the mission? To be a testimony, to be a witness of the Lord, to be a audible verbal witness of the gospel, for we are to engage in that same mission that was given to the disciples to go into all the world, making disciples, by baptizing and teaching. So this is the mission, and we are not to be distracted by the crises that may occur or that does occur around us. We have to keep oriented to the mission of the presenting the gospel, and also on personal spiritual growth.

We only got through two of the seven questions but these are important because it sets the stage so that we can understand what Jesus is talking about and what He is not talking about. Because what happens is so many people come along and say, What are the signs of the times? Is 'signs' a plural word there? What does the text say? What is the sign? The sign is one sign what's the sign. There aren't signs of the time any more than the book of Revelation is the book of revelations. You often hear people say that. It's sort of like fingernails on a chalkboard to me when I hear somebody say revelations. Its singular, and sign is singular; there's one sign. But what we hear here, in this within the structure of what Jesus is teaching His disciples, is that there's a judgment coming.

But believers today have a different mission because, remember, the Olivet Discourse is Jesus last words to the Jews. He's addressing a Jewish audience. It's the last word to the Jews. And it's going to be the next night that He is going to address the church and church age doctrine

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