Christ Coming in Glory

In Mark chapter 13, Jesus said He's coming back soon. And if you look at the plain sense of this Scripture when Jesus said, I can tell you it's going to be within this generation. I don't know the day.

I don't know the hour. But you people better be ready at all times because sometime within this generation I'm coming, and I'm coming in clouds of glory. Jesus' prediction about His return has caused many to question His deity. He said it would happen within a generation, but it's been more than 2,000 years. How should we think about this passage?

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul helps us decipher what Jesus meant and why it matters that we interpret the Bible correctly. If you remember when we began our study of chapter 13 of Mark, I introduced it by saying that it contains some matters that are of critical importance in church history, and particularly in recent times with respect to the question of the trustworthiness of sacred Scripture and with respect to the trustworthiness of Jesus. We know that in the Old Testament, when a prophet gave a prediction of future things that if what he predicted did not come to place, as he foretold that that one would then be regarded as a false prophet. I said the irony of this chapter is that it contains some of the most incredible future prophecies ever given by Jesus with respect to the coming destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and of the destruction of Jerusalem itself, as well as the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world.

Which things no normal prognosticator could on his finest day have guessed would be so shortly forthcoming? And yet despite the uncanny accuracy of Jesus' future prophecy that He included within the context of that prophecy a pronouncement of His coming in glory and power, and all of these things of which He spoke were included within a time frame of one generation, those who dismiss the deity of Christ, His omniscience, or at least His infallibility in His teaching, and who dismiss the infallibility of Scripture point to this chapter and to those time frames that our Lord gave as exhibit A for rejecting the authority not only of Jesus but of the entire Bible. And so in the first two messages at the beginning of chapter 13, I showed how many biblical scholars have indicated that the things that Jesus said in response to His disciples' inquiry, when will these things take place? And Jesus talked about signs of His coming, the signs of the time of tribulation, of wars, rumors of wars, famines, and that sort of thing. We noticed that all of those warnings that Jesus gave did in fact take place between the time of His uttering this prophecy and the fulfillment of at least the part of the prophecy with respect to the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. So within forty years, almost all of the things that Jesus predicted in fact took place within that time frame that He said they would take place.

But the glaring absence, of course, was His coming in glory. And that's why I mentioned that the biblical scholars have said that the early church had to adjust their theology and adjust their future hope to allow for a thousands of years interim between this announcement on the Mount of Olives and the final fulfillment of it. And I mentioned that there have been several attempts to get around the difficulty, first of all by saying that when Jesus said all these things will take place within the generation, that we'd have to exclude from the all these things His coming in power and glory. The problem with that, as the finest New Testament and Orthodox scholars indicate, is that requires a torturous approach to biblical interpretation because the text seems unambiguously to include Jesus' prophecy of His return in power and glory within that phrase all of these things. Now in further attempts to get around the difficulty, interpreters have come at this text by a couple of different ways. One is by dividing the language of the text between those things that are spoken that are to be taken literally and those things that are to be taken figuratively.

Now there's a little difficulty in that distinction. I've tried to point this out to you before that when somebody asks me, do you take the Bible literally, my response to that always is the same. I never say yes, and I never say no. No. When someone says, do you take the Bible literally, my standard response is not yes, but of course.

Like what other way is it to take it? The Bible is a literary document. It is a written document, and the rules of literary interpretation apply to it as a written document. And Luther of course in the sixteenth century advocated the biblical method of interpretation by seeking what he called the sensus literalis, the literary sense of the Bible. What that means is the literal sense is the sense in which it was written. So poetry is interpreted as poetry, metaphor is metaphor, simile is simile, historical narrative as historical narrative. That's what it means to take the Bible literally. However, in today's jargon what literal interpretation has come to mean to many people is that you interpret it not in any figurative way or metaphorical way, but all things are taken in a kind of crude wooden literalistic fashion. Now when you get into this text that we're looking at, you see a mixture of writing. You have some writing that is highly graphic, following the standard literary structure of what we call apocalyptic literature, like the literature found in the book of Revelation, found in the book of Daniel, found in the book of Ezekiel where these brilliant images are given and used in a symbolic manner. There's no dispute among biblical scholars that chapter 13 of Mark contains a significant amount of symbolic language. The problem is it also contains within it straightforward, normal, indicative language, what we would call in the modern sense literal language. So here's the solution. If we want to save this passage, save the integrity of Scripture, save the integrity of Jesus, we're going to have to do basically one of two things.

There are other options which I will mention later, but fundamentally it comes down to two options. One is that we interpret Jesus' language about His coming in a figurative sense and interpret the timeframe references in a direct literal sense. Or we can take the language of the timeframes and see them as figurative or metaphorical and then have a literal expectation of what happens astronomically when Jesus comes back with the heavens turning to blood and being rolled up like a scroll and all the other images that are added to this by the other gospel writers in their version of the Olivet Discourse.

Do you see that option? Either the language of the return is figurative or figurative or the timeframe references are figurative. Now the major way in which orthodox evangelical Christians have treated this text is by looking at the timeframe references as being figurative, that when Jesus says this generation will not pass away before all of these things come to pass, that there Jesus was using the term generation in a figurative manner.

He wasn't giving a timeframe. He wasn't saying all of these things will be fulfilled in the next forty years or so. Whereas to the Jewish mind, the concept of one generation means a period of approximately forty years. Now the way this has been treated figuratively is when He says this generation will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled, that what He meant by that is that this type of person, this type of unbelieving character that we have to do have to deal with every day in the preaching of the gospel, that those people will still be around up until the time that this prophecy is fulfilled. Now that's a very common approach to the text, to save it from criticism. I have to say to you in all candor that I believe it's that kind of treatment of the text that pours gasoline on the fire ignited by critical scholars.

That's what gives them fodder for considering orthodox Christians as being naïve or obscurantist because that tortures the text as well. But a response I hear all the time from Christians is, well Jesus wasn't saying it was going to take place in some kind of timeframe of forty years because He goes right on and says of the day and the hour knows no man, not the angels, not even the Son of Man. And so He certainly can't be held accountable for giving a timeframe for His return when He explicitly says here that even He doesn't know the day and the hour.

And so the problem is wiped away. Now if I say to you, forgive the analogy, that sometime in the next forty years the Pittsburgh Steelers will win another Super Bowl, okay, which may be wishful thinking, but if I said to you, in the next forty years they're going to win a Super Bowl, that's the thing I say first. And then I say, I don't know for sure which year it's going to be, what day it's going to be, what week it's going to be, only that it's going to be within the broad framework of forty years. Would you take my qualification at the end where I said, I can't tell you the exact year or the week of the day, do you think that that would therefore negate what I say at the beginning, that it will be sometime in the next forty years?

Of course not. And if you look at the plain sense of this Scripture when Jesus said, I can tell you it's going to be within this generation. I don't know the day.

I don't know the hour. But you people better be ready at all times because sometime within this generation I'm coming, and I'm coming in clouds of glory. Now other aspects of this, if we put all of the information from the Olivet Discourses, mention is made of Jesus coming at the end of the age. And inevitably when people read that text of Jesus saying He will come at the end of the age, the assumption that is made is that what He's referring to here is at the end of human history, the end of human age. But in the Scripture itself, the Bible makes mention of the end of the age of the Jews and the beginning of the age of the Gentiles. In Luke's version of the Olivet Discourse, he says, he gives you this added detail, that Jerusalem will be trodden underfoot until the age of the Gentiles is fulfilled. Chapter 11 of Romans, Paul talks about the fullness of the Gentiles coming in before the final consummation of the kingdom of God. And so the age of the Gentiles stands in bold relief to the age of the Jews, which runs up until the beginning of the New Testament era as Paul in chapter 10 of 1 Corinthians speaks to his contemporaries of living during the time of the end of the ages.

The end of what age? Not the end of human history, but the end of the Jewish era. And what happened, dear friends, in 70 AD that we know for sure is that after the destruction of the temple, after the destruction of Jerusalem, no longer was Christianity viewed as a subset of Judaism. But now after 70 AD, the Christian church emerged as the covenant community of the people of God that fulfilled the Scriptures. So that time was of critical redemptive historical significance for all of Christian history. Now what about this language of the heavens rolling up like a scroll and all of that and Jesus coming?

This language is characteristically used by the prophets in the Old Testament in a symbolic way to warn the people of the judgment of God. Let me just read a passage to you from the book of Isaiah, chapter 13, verse 6, Wail, for the day of the Lord is at hand. It will come as destruction from the Almighty. All hands will be limp, every man's heart will melt, and they will be afraid. Pangs and sorrows will take hold of them. They will be in pain as a woman in childbirth, and they will be amazed at one another.

Listen to this. Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with both wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate. He will destroy its sinners from it, for the stars of heaven and their constellations will not give their light. The sun will be darkened in its going forth, and the moon will not cause its light to shine.

That is common. You can find it in Jeremiah. You can find it in the prophecies of the destruction of Tyre and Sidon, where when God's judgment is announced that it was coming, that that judgment was described in terms of graphic, astronomical, cosmic upheaval. Now if there is a biblical precedent for figurative use of language with respecting of the coming judgment of God upon nations, and you have to choose between the timeframe references or the description of the coming as to which one is figurative, the biblical answer is clear. You be consistent with how the Bible uses language.

Now if you're not satisfied with that, two points quickly. One other possible alternative here is that in the Olivet Discourse, Jesus gives a prediction of something that comes to pass the past in a proximate sense now and in the ultimate sense later. We see that in the Old Testament where prophetic predictions take place in one sense in the immediate generation, but in its fullest sense later on in history. But even if we do that, we have to say there's some sense at least that Jesus did come at the end of this period, and it describes a judgment coming, which Jesus warns His contemporaries about the impending judgment of God upon the house of Israel for having rejected the Messiah.

Now finally, the other thing. In the year 70 A.D., contemporary historians of the day did report viewings of astronomical perturbations, particularly of a comet that streamed across the sky, which meant to the contemporary people a sign of the coming judgment, this comet that was described as a star shaped as a sword. And then of course, the most surprising, almost bizarre record we have from history is found in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. Let me read this to you for what it's worth. I'm reading from a Jewish historian who gives us the eyewitness view of the destruction of Jerusalem in great detail. However, he's not writing sacred Scripture. I don't plead any case for the infallibility of Josephus, but here is a historical record. Take it for what it's worth. Besides these, a few days after that feast on the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared.

Listen to this qualifying statement. I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable were it not related by those that saw it and were not the events that followed it of so considerable of the nature as to deserve such signals. For before the setting of the sun, here's what people said they saw.

Chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running around among the clouds and surrounding the cities. And moreover, at the feast, which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner court of the temple, as their custom was to perform their sacred ministrations, they said in the first place they felt a quaking, and then they heard a great noise. And after that they heard and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude saying, Let us remove hence. So the testimony of the Jewish historian was at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, multitudes of people saw in the skies chariots and armored soldiers moving around the clouds.

Stop for a second. Think of Ezekiel. Think of Dothan with Elisha when he prayed that his servants had their eyes opened, and when their eyes were opened, behold, they saw what? Chariots of fire surrounding Elisha. Throughout the Old Testament, the vision in the sky of a chariot invariably meant to the Jews a visible appearance of God coming in wrath and judgment, involving a departure of His glory, even as the glory of God was seen by the prophet in the Old Testament leaving the city of Jerusalem by the east gate. All of those descriptive images focus on a judgment coming of God upon His people. I personally believe that what Jesus was talking about in the Olivet Discourse was not His final coming at the end of the age, which I believe in, which has not yet happened. But I think He was talking about His coming in power and in judgment upon His own people, which occurred in 70 A.D. If that's the case, then His Word is vindicated, and He is vindicated as a true prophet and not a false one. Now, there are other ways that we can approach that.

I'm certainly not the last word on this question. But one thing we know for sure about Jesus' future prophecy will be promised to be with His people when He spread His table before them. Such a helpful explanation of that passage. We're making our way through Mark's Gospel here on the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and we're glad you've joined us.

When we reach difficult passages like this one, Dr. R.C. Sproul's careful verse-by-verse exposition makes it clear, and that's why I think our resource offer today will be a great addition to your library. When you contact us today with a donation of any amount, we'll provide a digital download of Dr. Sproul's commentary on the Gospel of Mark. It's a book that will help you understand every verse in this gospel.

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