This Generation Will Not Pass Away

Rather than joining the swarms of skeptics that gather around this text, let's throw our corporate hats into the air, rejoicing in the full certainty that we know of the words of Jesus that can never fail. Skeptics are unrelenting in their attacks on the trustworthiness of the Bible. Before I was a Christian, I ignorantly believed that they'd all but disproven the Bible, and today's text in Luke's Gospel is one place that skeptics point.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham. It's the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and I'm glad you're with us. In Luke chapter 21, Jesus says that the Son of Man will be seen coming in a cloud with power and great glory, and that this generation will not pass away until all has taken place. So did this happen, as Jesus said? How should you respond to the skeptic?

Well, R.C. Sproul will walk us through this text, and he'll help us understand what Jesus was actually describing. Here's Dr. Sproul. This morning we're going to continue with our study of the Gospel according to St. Luke. I'll be reading in chapter 21, and I will be reading verses 25 through 38.

I want to ask the congregation please to stand for the reading of the Word of God. And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of heaven will be shaken, and then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads because your redemption is drawing near. And he told them a parable, look at the fig tree and all the trees.

As soon as they come out and leaf, you see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, that the day comes upon you suddenly like a trap. For it will come upon all who dwell in the face of the whole earth. But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all those things that are going to take place and to stand before the Son of Man.

And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet, and early in the morning all the people came to him in the temple to hear him. You've just heard the words of Jesus, words that He Himself said will never, ever pass away. Everything in this world will pass away, but not His Word. Receive it with its certainty and purity.

Please be seated. Let us pray. Again, our Father and our God, we ask Your help because of the great difficulty of the passage that we are looking at this very morning. Please give to us the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, to illumine this text for us, for we ask it in the name of Jesus.

Amen. Well, again, we look at the scope of chapter 21, which I said before involves what I consider to be the most astonishing prophecy and prediction ever uttered by a human being in all of history. And when I look at the prediction that is recorded here in chapter 21, I consider it astonishing for two reasons. The first is this, that it is a prophecy that would have astounded the original hearers with respect to its content and that no one on the face of the earth apart from Jesus certainly would expect that the destruction of Jerusalem, that the destruction of the temple, the Herodian temple that had been built, and that the Jews as God's chosen people would be dispersed into all the world.

No one would think that such a thing were possible at all. And so those who heard this prediction first would have been turned upside down by its astounding content. The second thing that is, as I said, is so astonishing about this prophecy is the manner in which it was fulfilled with such a degree of accuracy and precision.

Jerusalem was destroyed, that sacred temple was turned to ruins, and the people of God were dispersed into all of the nations of the world. So in light of this tremendous precision and fulfillment of these predictions, as I mentioned before, you would think that this would be all it would take to convince any rational person that Jesus spoke the truth in every prophetic utterance He made, including those statements about Himself, about His being our Redeemer and the Son of God, so that there would be no intellectual excuse for rejecting the truth claims of Jesus and of the Word of God. And yet, as I mentioned, the supreme irony is that this very text is the principal text that is used as fodder by the most egregious skeptics in the land. Bertrand Russell quoted the passage in his writing of the little book, Why I'm Not a Christian, in which he is saying that among those things that Jesus predicted in this passage were not only the destruction of Jerusalem, which was a given, not only the destruction of the temple, which certainly had taken place, and not only the dispersion of the Jews was also manifest, but included in the content of this prophecy was Jesus' prediction of His own return. And he said that He would return within that generation, and Bertrand Russell looks at that and said, this proves that Jesus was wrong. This proves that though He did some good guessing and some extraordinary predictions, nevertheless, in the final analysis, His prophecy failed, the Bible failed, and therefore cannot be trusted. I mentioned to you before that I felt, and maybe it's a little hyperbolic, that every single day that I was in seminary I had this prophecy rubbed in my face as proof that the Bible was not the inerrant and infallible Word of God simply because Jesus was wrong.

Now let's pick it up in the second half of the prophecy and see what we read. We read here in verse 25, There will be signs in the moon, in the heavens, in the sun, the stars, and on the earth, distress of nations, and in perplexity because the roaring of the sea and of the waves. And of course, the picture is this, that people will be fainting with fear and worth foreboding for what was coming on the world.

Imagine the language that is used here in the text. Astronomical signs, astronomical perturbations will be so terrifying and the fear of people will be so gripping. There will be such an intense sense and feeling of foreboding that massive destruction was coming and coming soon on the world. So that's the milieu that Jesus describes for this particular atmosphere. And then it says, the powers of heaven will be shaken and then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And when these things begin to take place, look up because your redemption will be drawing near. Now when you look at prophecies in the Old Testament, in the very genre of the case of predictive prophecy, frequently you see the language of prophetic utterances cloaked in vivid and intense imagery and symbols, and almost always that imagery and symbolic content that predicts catastrophic events at the hands of God, that those images include astronomical shake-ups, that the moon will turn to dripping blood or whatever.

And so as I said, the prediction of astronomical perturbations that accompany biblical prophecy is a normal character of the literary genre of such. And here Jesus uses the same traditional type of approach when He describes this calamity that is coming. But when we look at this prediction as it was given originally, the principal question that was raised by those who heard the prediction by the apostles and disciples themselves was not, how is this going to take place, not where is it going to take place, because Jesus already told them where it was going to take place, and He hinted as to why it was going to take place, but the major question, the operative question was the question, when will all of these things come to pass? Now for us to understand this text, we have to understand the force of that question. You're telling us that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, that not one stone will be left upon another on the temple, that our nation is going into captivity for an indefinite period of time until the fullness of the Gentiles be fulfilled? Jesus, when will this all take place? Now the word when is a question of time.

It is a time frame reference. And the problem with the text that becomes so excruciatingly difficult and the ground for so much skepticism is when Jesus comes to this one sentence, if this one sentence weren't in the text at all or in Matthew's description of the olive discourse, there'd be no problem with skepticism. We would just look back and say, isn't it incredible that all the things that Jesus predicted came to pass precisely as He said they would? Then you get to this problematic statement. Verse 32, truly I say to you that this generation will not pass away until all, the other translations of the other synoptic gospels, all these things, bonta tauta, that all these things shall have taken place.

Now that's the problem. Now Jesus doesn't say, well, I don't really have a crystal ball. I know that someday God is going to visit judgment on the world. There will be a time of visitation. There will be a day of darkness with no light in it, but I have no clue as to when that will actually take place.

But let me give you for your benefit an educated guess. As I read the signs of the times, maybe it will then, maybe it will then, and maybe it will be past then. No, no, no. There is no hesitation driven by ambiguity or by uncertainty. Listen again how Jesus makes this pronouncement about the timeframe. Truly, amen, amen, verily, I say to you, you can take this to the bank. This generation will not pass away until all these things have come to pass. That's the sentence.

If it weren't there, we wouldn't be having this discussion this morning because there would be no problem. But notice how emphatic Jesus is about the timeframe. I truly say to you, this generation, this generation will not pass away until everything takes place. Now there are two other occasions where Jesus gives timeframe references with respect to future prophecies.

Let me read them to you briefly. We look back in Matthew 16 in verse 28, truly, again emphatic, I say to you, there are some standing here, people right now, standing right here, who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom. Now I have a concern that so many Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, and that's a redundancy because if you're not evangelical, you're not a Christian, and if you're a Christian, you are evangelical. But in any case, so many Christians just don't seem to feel the weight of this problem. They dismiss it out of hand. No wonder the academic skeptics look at us and say how naive we seem to be, obscurantist and in the extreme, when we just fluff this off as if it were nothing. But here Jesus said, some of you standing right here, right now, will not taste of death.

What does that mean? You're not going to die until you see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom. Let me give you a description of the gymnastics that scholars use in terms of special pleading to try to get Jesus off the hook for these short-term references. Oh, well, Jesus isn't referring here to His coming. Jesus is referring here to the manifestation of His power and the coming of His kingdom, obviously in the transfiguration or the resurrection or the day of Pentecost, because on Pentecost, they saw the kingdom of God coming in power.

Now think about that for a minute. This is either a question of days or merely weeks before Pentecost. And Jesus says to them in answer to their question, when will these things be? Well, I can tell you this, that some of you are going to live to see it, not that you're just going to be in heaven and look down from heaven and see the fulfillment of this prophecy. But you'll be right here in this place right now. Some of you will not taste death.

That is, in the next few weeks, we may lose Judas, but the rest of you or at least some of you will still be alive in order to see it. Does that make any sense to you whatsoever? If you know anything about logic and the truth tables and the laws of necessary inference, you know the distinctions between universal negative propositions and universal positive propositions and particular affirmations and particular negations, you know something about those truth tables. Maybe you've never heard of the truth tables.

That's okay. But there are certain inferences that you can draw based on these principles of logic. If Jesus said not one of you is going to die until these things take place, that would be a universal negative proposition. If He says some of you will not taste death until you see the coming of Christ and His kingdom in power, now the inference that can be drawn is this. Some of you will taste death. Some will die. Some won't die. Now, if you're talking about a period of time that's going to take place in the next few weeks, how likely it is that Jesus is going to say some of you are actually going to be able to live to see it. But if we're thinking about an event that's going to take place 40 years after this time, now it makes sense to say in the next 40 years there's going to be a significant rate of dying among you. But some will survive.

Some will live long enough that they won't taste death until all of these things come to pass. Does that make sense when He's using that kind of timeframe? Otherwise, He says in Matthew 10, you will not go over all the cities of Israel until you see the kingdom of God coming in power. Now, does that sound like a prophecy for the future of 2,000 years?

I can guarantee you that the missionary enterprise of the Christian faith reached the borders of Israel very early in the first century. It didn't take the church 2,000 years to preach the gospel to every city in Israel. Again, the timeframe reference of what Jesus was speaking there in Matthew was clearly within the lifetime of one group of people. Now, if that's not clear, we go back now to the salient passage, this generation will not pass away till all of these things come to pass. What do we mean? What did Jesus mean when He said this generation?

Now, here's the complexity. The word that is translated generation in New Testament Greek can mean more than one thing. One way in which it is used is to describe a type of person. And Jesus frequently uses the adjectives to describe this type of person as a wicked and perverse generation, that is a particular type of person that is described and characterized by a peculiar element of perversity and of evil. And so many of the commentators come to this text and say that this type of wicked person will continue until the time of Jesus' return. Namely, there will be unbelieving, perverse, and evil people up to the very moment that Jesus returns at the end of human time.

Now, in the first instance, that's hardly an answer to the question when. If it's true that wicked and perverse people have been around since the fall of Adam and Eve and will continue to be here until the return triumphantly of Christ and the consummation of His kingdom, that's hardly much of an indicator of what this timeframe will be. On the other hand, if you argue simply that the meaning of the term for generation refers to that particular and wicked generation that was singularly wicked during the days of Jesus' earthly ministry because that generation was described in terms of its peculiar perversity because of all the generations that have ever lived upon the earth, there was none more wicked than those who were contemporaries of Jesus because here He came in the full light of His power in terms of the miracles that He gave, the teaching that He made, and He said Himself that He came to His own, but His own received Him not. So if there were ever a wicked and perverse generation of Jewish people, even though it included such saints as Joseph and Mary and Zacharias and so on, Simeon, nevertheless, the vast majority of that group of people, we talk about people today who generation X, the millennials, the baby boomers, Jesus is talking about the wicked and perverse generation that denoted this particular group of unbelievers during His lifetime. But again, if we use the term generation to refer to a type of people, we still get a timeframe reference here when He says this peculiar generation of wicked people won't end until all these things are fulfilled. So whether we use the term generation to refer to a time group, it applies just as powerfully in this definition as it does in the other, and the primary meaning of generation in the New Testament is not a type of person. It can mean that, but the primary meaning is for a particular age group, and that term of generation usually defines a period of approximately 40 years. And that's the way most critical scholars interpret this text as some try to wiggle away from it by using the term generation to apply to a type of person.

The normal meaning of the text is an age group. So in translating the text, what it means is this. You ask me when, I'll tell you when, sometime in the next 40 years, because this generation is not going to pass away until all of these things are fulfilled.

Alright, so now here's the question. Was Jesus accurate in answering that particular timeframe view? Again, in Matthew's gospel, we are told in the Olivet Discourse after Jesus had talked about this generation shall not pass away, then Jesus goes on to say, nobody knows the day or the hour when the Son of Man will come. Therefore, be vigilant, watch out, read the signs of the times, when you see this, when you see that, and the wars and rumors of wars and so on. But I can't tell you the day and the hour because nobody knows the day or the hour, not the angels, not even the Son knows the day and the hour. So this is another way people try to get Jesus off the hook. They're saying, well, Jesus really didn't predict a timeframe because He said He didn't know the day and the hour. Right.

So far, so good. But He did say, I can't tell you which day. I can't tell you what time, whether it's going to be in the morning or the afternoon or the evening. I don't know what month it's going to be. I can't even tell you the exact year it's going to be, but I can tell you this, it's going to be within the next generation, so that those details about day and the hour do not relieve any of the difficulty of this text of being a prediction of a timeframe of one generation.

Well, it boils down to this very simply. Either Jesus made a prediction that didn't come to pass and therefore was false, or as so few people ever even are willing to ask the question, maybe, just maybe, it did come to pass. Maybe He wasn't wrong about the timeframe. Maybe we've made too many assumptions that when we talk about His coming here in this text, we think that what He's referring to is His ultimate final consummate appearance at the end of the age when He brings His kingdom to pass.

And I don't think He was talking about that. He was talking about the days of vengeance. He was talking about His coming in judgment on the nation of Israel. That was the warning He gave, and that was the prediction that was fulfilled in spades with a vengeance on steroids in 70 AD. In 70 AD, Jesus came in judgment. He destroyed the city. He destroyed the temple. He dispersed His people, and He came to judge them and in the meantime begin the age of the Gentiles where the church was now established, not simply as a Jewish community, but was now expanding to the whole world and would then finally, after the age of the Gentiles, be finally and fully fulfilled with His return at the end of time. But in the meantime, in between time, He did come.

And there were astronomical perturbations. The Jewish historian Josephus records in his Jewish Wars as an eyewitness and with those who were there when 1.1 million Jews suffered the Holocaust in 70 AD under Titus, that people looked into the sky and they saw, saw with their eyes visibly chariots in the air, and they heard with their ears physically voices out of the heavens saying, we are departing thence. Just as in antiquity when the glory of God visibly left Jerusalem over the west wall or the east wall, they saw Ichabod, the glory depart, and judgment fell in calamitous terms. Now, the thing that we know that Jesus says here is Jerusalem will fall, the temple will be destroyed, the Jews will be dispersed, calamity upon calamity will occur. People's hearts will fail within themselves. They will be confounded. They will be terrified.

They will be perplexed. And heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away. He said it, He meant it, and it happened just as He said it would do. Rather than joining the swarms of skeptics that gather around this text, let's throw our corporate hats into the air, rejoicing in the full certainty that we know of the words of Jesus that can never fail. Jesus' words can never fail, and today's reminder from R.C. Sproul gives me confidence, and I hope it does for you, too, as we seek to live faithfully in this corrupt age.

I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and you're listening to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Today's sermon highlights the importance of deep study in God's Word, and to help you do that, we're offering Dr. Sproul's verse-by-verse commentary through Luke's Gospel for your donation of any amount. When you give your gift at renewingyourmind.org, you'll receive digital access to this expositional commentary.

You can put it on your phone or your tablet so that you can study the Gospel of Luke wherever you are. So give your gift today by visiting renewingyourmind.org. No one likes a traitor. Well, next time, R.C. Sproul will introduce us to the traitor of traitors, and what he calls the most pernicious betrayal in the history of the world. That's next Sunday, here on Renewing Your Mind. .