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Jesus Did Not Try to Trick Us

Let’s get one thing out of the way. When you encounter a scripture passage with clearly literal elements mixed with symbolic or allegorical elements, you interpret the literal parts literally and the allegorical parts allegorically, not the other way around. Second, everyone recognizes symbols in scripture, including those who shout the loudest about not interpreting the scripture symbolically. Third, you interpret the bible’s symbols using the bible’s symbols, not your modern spin on those symbols. These three points will take you a long way toward interpreting the bible, not only correctly, but also much more intelligibly.

At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus makes a very concrete predictive statement about a physical building, a statement which was fulfilled historically only a few decades later. Why we would ever think that he could possibly mean something that would happen thousands of years later is beyond me. But we do it anyway. In verse 1, Jesus’ disciples comment about buildings of the temple, to which He replies: “See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Matthew 24:2.

First, we need to understand how radical and final a statement this was to the Jewish mind. Jesus not only foretold to his disciples the destruction of the center of the worship of the true God, the most revered physical manifestation of their national and religious existence, the thing that distinguished the Israelites most visibly from the Gentile world, and the building that they would defend above all others against any attack. The loss of the temple in the Jewish mind was an event that the loss of the U.S. Capitol could not even approximate. It was not just the physical and religious center of the nation, it was the hope of the world to them. The physical and national calamity such destruction represented is incalculable. And what about the psychic effect? The Jewish psyche thought of the temple lasting forever. They’d lost the temple once in the Babylonian captivity. Never again? They counted on the prophecies that the temple was eternal. And what about the human toll? The loss of the temple would mean the loss of the nation, the loss of many lives, the loss of their society as they knew it.

Second, don’t focus only on the humanistic view of this predicted event. The City of Jerusalem and its associated temple was truly God’s chosen center. It was the only place to which the Israelites were to come to sacrifice. Deuteronomy 12:5-14. For centuries, it had been a house of prayer for all nations, the location to which the Jews and even those from the Gentile nations could pray. Isa. 56:7; I Kings 8:41-3. The predicted destruction was not spoken by a Gentile ruler or an enemy of the Jews; it was spoken by Christ, a Jew Himself. Therefore, Christ, God’s representative and prophet on the earth, was speaking a judgment upon His own people of momentous proportions.

Third, He spoke it with great finality – “one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” He didn’t make the statement in any way that would allow for hope, as if there were some prophesied method of avoiding it. There was no “except they repent” or “if they continue in unbelief.” No, this event was set in stone so completely that Jesus the compassionate left no wiggle room for anything but total annihilation by His Father in heaven of His chosen people on earth. What hypocrisy, what crime, what idolatry could create an even greater disaster than that experienced when Nebuchadnezzar had invaded a few hundred years before and destroyed Solomon’s temple?

Notice the disciples’ first question. Timing. “Tell us when shall these things be?” Matthew 24:3. They wanted to know the timing. Did Jesus tell them? Or did he fool them by referring to something that would happen thousands of years later when answering their question? If He wanted to prophesy about something to occur so much later, why didn’t He just do that at another time? He’d had three years with them. It’s not as if He had had no time to make such points. Of course, the question would also arise about a prediction of events millennia away – why would they care? Why would He pick this particular time to deceive them, to lead them on with a particularly cruel statement about their beloved temple?

All the above questions point out the absurdity of the futurist view. Of course, He didn’t want to trick them or deceive them. Of course, a prediction about events thousands of years later would mean little or nothing to these disciples in the first century. He wasn’t speaking about the long distant future. He was telling them what was coming in their generation. Would knowing that this disaster was coming soon, was right at hand, even right at the door, change the disciples behavior? You betcha. In several ways as you read the book of Acts. So what about Acts?