ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 12 · Matthew 24:1-34; Luke 21:20-24; John 2:18-22
Jesus calls his body the temple and dates the destruction to this generation. In AD 70 Titus burns it. The Second Coming is still ahead.
At the first Passover of his ministry Jesus drove the traders and money changers out of the Temple courts, and the authorities demanded a sign of him. He gave them one they could not use: Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (John 2:19). They took him to mean Herod's building. John tells us what he meant: he spake of the temple of his body (John 2:21).
Everything the Temple had been for, God dwelling among his people, sin atoned for, prayer heard, was standing in front of them in a man. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The Greek word John uses for dwelt is the word for pitching a tent. It is the tabernacle word.
On his last visit to the Temple his disciples pointed out the buildings to him, and Josephus says some of those stones ran forty-five cubits. Jesus said, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down (Matthew 24:2). Across the valley on the Mount of Olives they asked him when, and what sign would warn them.
He told them of wars, of false christs, of persecution, of the gospel going out to all the world, of the abomination of desolation Daniel had spoken of, and of a flight from Judea into the hills. And he told them when: Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled (Matthew 24:34). Luke's account of the same discourse has the sign in plain words: when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh (Luke 21:20).
A great many Christians read Matthew 24 as a description of the end of the world, still ahead of us, and the case for reading it so deserves a hearing. The chapter speaks of the sun darkened, the stars falling and the Son of man coming on the clouds (verses 29-30), and that sounds like the last day. The disciples had asked about his coming and the end of the world in the same breath (verse 3). Teachers whose names are honored in every church have held that the whole passage waits for the end.
What settles it is the time Jesus himself gave. Everywhere else Matthew uses this generation (11:16, 12:41-45, 23:36) it means the people standing in front of him. A darkened sun and falling stars are how the prophets spoke of a nation's fall: Isaiah said it of Babylon (Isaiah 13:10), Ezekiel of Egypt (Ezekiel 32:7). Coming on the clouds comes from Daniel 7:13, where the Son of man comes before the Ancient of Days to receive a kingdom, and Jesus told the high priest who was condemning him that he, Caiaphas, would see it (Matthew 26:64).
Forty years on, it came. The Jews rose against Rome in AD 66. The governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus, marched on Jerusalem, surrounded it, and then for no reason anyone has explained pulled back. Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, says the Christians in the city took that as their warning and left for Pella across the Jordan. Vespasian came with four legions, and when he went off to be emperor his son Titus finished the work. Josephus, a Jewish commander who had gone over to the Romans and watched the siege from their lines, writes of famine inside the walls, of Jewish factions murdering each other in the Temple courts, and of so many crosses outside the city that the Romans ran short of wood.
In August of AD 70, on the tenth of Ab by Josephus's reckoning, the same day of the year on which the Babylonians had burned the first house, a Roman soldier threw a burning brand through a window of the Temple. Josephus says Titus wanted the building saved. It burned to the ground. Afterward the soldiers prised the stones apart to get at the melted gold, and the Arch of Titus in Rome still shows the menorah being carried in his triumph. No Jewish temple has stood on that hill since, and no sacrifice has been offered there for nearly two thousand years.
The letter to the Hebrews was written while the Temple still stood and the sacrifices were still going on. It quotes Jeremiah's new covenant and adds: Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away (Hebrews 8:13). Those sacrifices never could take away sin. Christ, who had lived the one perfect life, offered one sacrifice for sins for ever and sat down (Hebrews 10:12). The old house did not fall by accident. Its work was done.
AD 70 fulfilled what Jesus said about that generation. It was not the end of the world, and it was not his coming again. The angels at the ascension promised that this same Jesus would return the way the disciples had watched him go (Acts 1:11). The dead in Christ will be raised (1 Thessalonians 4:16), and he will appear the second time without sin unto salvation (Hebrews 9:28). Of that day and hour, he said, no man knows (Matthew 24:36).
Every judge in this story died, every king failed, and two houses of God went up in flames. The King Israel turned down in 1 Samuel 8 came to them in the flesh, and they turned him down again, and he rose from the dead. He is building a temple now out of living stones (1 Peter 2:5), and he is coming back for it. Judges asked at the beginning who Israel's king was going to be. The question has not changed. Who is yours?