The Times of the Gentiles

The followers of Jesus were not caught off guard by the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70. After all, our Savior had predicted the city’s fall in the Olivet Discourse. He told His people that they would know that the end of the city was at hand when it was surrounded by armies (Luke 21:20), a prediction of the Roman siege of the city during the First Jewish-Roman War. The Jews in the Roman province of Judea began an uprising in AD 66 after the Roman governor took some of the funds from the temple, and the war continued until AD 73, when the last group of Jewish rebels committed suicide in the fortress at Masada rather than surrendering. In the middle of this war, the Roman general Titus captured Jerusalem, destroying the temple and carrying off its treasures to Rome.

As Jesus predicted, the city became a desolation. Our Savior foresaw the absolute terror of the siege. He pronounced a woe on pregnant women and nursing mothers, for even they would not escape if they remained in the city and the country instead of fleeing to the mountains (vv. 21–23). He warned His listeners that the people would “fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations” (v. 24). After the fall of Jerusalem, the Jews in Judea were scattered throughout the Roman Empire, joining the Jews who had never returned to the Holy Land after the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC. This Jewish Diaspora has lasted until the present day, for even though there is now a Jewish-led state of Israel governing the ancient land of Canaan, the vast majority of the world’s Jewish population lives outside the modern nation-state of Israel.

In Luke 21:24, Jesus says that Jerusalem will be trampled by the gentiles until the times of the gentiles are fulfilled. Many people have argued that the modern nation of Israel’s retaking of Jerusalem in 1967 signaled that the times of the gentiles are at an end and that Jesus’ return is at hand in our generation. This need not be the case. The trampling of Jerusalem by the gentiles does not have to refer to the roughly 1,900 years in which the Jews did not control the Holy City. Perhaps Jesus just meant that the Romans would control Jerusalem until they would control it no longer. Also, we do not know that the retaking of Jerusalem by modern secularized Jews constitutes the end of the city’s being trampled by gentiles. It seems unwise, therefore, to speculate too much regarding what the existence of the modern state of Israel might mean in God’s plan.