Redemption Draws Near

Continuing our study of the Olivet Discourse, we begin today’s study by noting that Jesus gives one of the reasons that we should read all of Luke 21:5–28 as a reference to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70. Jesus says in verse 32 that “this generation”—which almost certainly means the people then living when our Savior delivered this discourse—would not pass away until the things He describes take place. A biblical generation lasts about forty years, so Jesus must have been talking largely about events to occur within four decades or so of His death in about AD 30. The fall of Jerusalem to Rome fits this time exactly.

Jesus’ inclusion of great signs in the heavens may be one of the reasons that many people have been hesitant to read all of the Olivet Discourse as being fulfilled by AD 70. We have already seen, however, that sometimes prophets used images of cosmic upheaval in a figurative way to describe a change in empires or an advance in the history of salvation. Isaiah 13, for instance, pictures a shaking of the cosmos when the Babylonians fell to the Medes, though such phenomena did not literally happen. This imagery was used because in the ancient Near East, the consequences of the fall of one empire to another were so significant that people felt as if the entire universe was trembling. Religiously speaking, the end of the temple represented a decisive shift in God’s dealing with His people, with the passing away of the sacrificial system necessary for the full establishment of the new covenant order. Matthew Henry comments, “The destruction of Jerusalem was in a particular manner an act of Christ’s judgment, the judgment committed to the Son of man; his religion could never be thoroughly established but by the destruction of the temple, and the abolishing of the Levitical priesthood and economy, after which even the converted Jews, and many of the Gentiles too, were still hankering, till they were destroyed; so that it might justly be looked upon as a coming of the Son of man.”

Luke 21:28 records Jesus’ statement that when His listeners saw the signs of Jerusalem’s fall, they should know that their redemption was near. The fulfillment of His prophecy would confirm the truth of His words about everything, especially salvation. Jerusalem’s fall would also mark redemption in an earthly sense, for the Jewish authorities that persecuted the church in its earliest decades would no longer have power to assault the church.