No. 2.
Our blessed Lord was sitting on the mount of Olives. It was a peculiarly affecting moment. His loving heart felt it deeply. His own favored nation given up to judgment, and the beautiful temple doomed to desolation, because they would not be blessed and sheltered under His outstretched wing, made it a very solemn point in Israel’s history. We know how truly these things were fulfilled, and that to this day Jerusalem is a city of poverty and wretchedness, literally lying in heaps, and trodden down of the Gentiles.
The disciples were evidently pondering the Lord’s words. They therefore came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world (or rather age)?” Three questions are thus proponed. The first, alluding to the destruction of the temple, is not answered here; but the second and third points are gone into, and especially as to the end, or completion, of the age. The last questions are answered pretty much together, because the coming here referred to is not till the end.
The expression, “the end of the age,” is found only in Matthew’s gospel, because no one who was ignorant of Jewish prophecies could enter into it. The Jews had been taught, especially by Daniel, of a time when the age would be fully run out, and Messiah’s kingdom be established. “The end of the age” might be the end of the condition of things in which Israel then stood, as under the old legal covenant, which would be succeeded by Messiah bringing them into the “new covenant.” The famous prophecy of seventy weeks, recorded in Dan. 9, as to Daniel’s people and the holy city, must run its course. We are told that the city and sanctuary shall be destroyed, but that the end thereof shall be with a flood; and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. Messiah’s being cut off and having nothing, took place after sixty-nine weeks; then we get another period to complete the age, the last or seventieth hebdomad or week, in which the abomination that maketh desolate is set up, until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate, or desolator (margin). A Jew might also have learned from Jeremiah that the old legal covenant would come to an end, and be succeeded by a “new covenant,” which Jehovah will make with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, in which there would be such blessing that all shall know Jehovah, from the least to the greatest. (Jer. 32:31-3431For this city hath been to me as a provocation of mine anger and of my fury from the day that they built it even unto this day; that I should remove it from before my face, 32Because of all the evil of the children of Israel and of the children of Judah, which they have done to provoke me to anger, they, their kings, their princes, their priests, and their prophets, and the men of Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 33And they have turned unto me the back, and not the face: though I taught them, rising up early and teaching them, yet they have not hearkened to receive instruction. 34But they set their abominations in the house, which is called by my name, to defile it. (Jeremiah 32:31‑34).) It was natural then to a Jew to be occupied about “the end of the age;” but we get no such subject given in any of the epistles in relation to the Church of God.
The rejection or cutting off of Messiah has postponed, if I may so say, the accomplishment of this seventieth week. Israel being set aside for the time as a people, and Christ having ascended into the heavens, the Holy Ghost is sent down, and baptizes into one body the believers in the rejected Son of God; and until that body is complete, and caught up to meet the Lord in the air, Israel, in God’s judicial dealing, will be under blindness, and scattered over the face of the earth, and Jerusalem will be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.
But there is another point of view in which Scripture bids us consider the end of the age. There is a line of truth called “the kingdom of heaven,” very distinct from another line which treats of the Church of God, though both are painfully commingled as to practice and testimony. That is, that the form the Kingdom now takes is not as it was in Solomon’s day, nor as it will be in millennial times, but the kingdom in a mysterious form which prophets did not prophesy of. (Matt. 13:1111He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. (Matthew 13:11).) A people on earth who own allegiance, professedly and outwardly at least, to One in the heavens―as when a man calls himself a Christian―characterizes the kingdom of heaven. We find that Jesus taught, in Matt. 13, that this kingdom condition of things will go on to “the end of the age” too, when the Lord will come in judgment, and cast out of His kingdom them that offend and do iniquity.
There is also another line of truth which takes us on to “the end of the age,” I mean the times of the Gentiles. Daniel gives us full instruction on this point. Four monarchies succeeding each other are there set before us, terminating in ten kingdoms, and then at the end a stone cut out without hands falling upon the image in judgment, and becoming a great mountain, which fills the whole earth. All these different lines of instruction show us that “the end of the age” specially refers to things of earth, and not to the Church, and that, from Daniel’s prophetic testimony, an instructed Jew would have been more or less familiar with the subject. Nor were the minds of the disciples whom our Lord addressed occupied with higher thoughts than the restoration of the kingdom―a time of blessing on the earth in connection with Israel’s king.
An intelligent Jew, therefore, would have known from the prophets that a time would come when the age would be fully run out, and be followed by the establishment of Messiah’s kingdom. Nothing could be nearer to the heart of a Jew than this hope. The questions proponed to our Lord embrace the two points, the end or completion of the age, and Messiah’s coming, and both are connected in Old Testament prophecies. Our Lord, as we have noticed, had previously spoken of the end of the age, and now of His coming, and the disciples wanted further instruction upon both these points.
When Jesus took His farewell of the nation, He gave hope of His coming, only in connection with the people’s repentance, when, instead of going about to kill Him, they will welcome Him with joy, and say, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.” The disciples, accustomed as they were to think of signs, were anxious to know what the sign of this coming of which He had spoken would be; and hearing of the desolation that was at hand, naturally associated the thought in their minds with the end of the age. We can easily understand therefore what sorrow and disappointment must have filled their minds at being told that the temple would be a ruin, and that instead of the immediate restoration of the kingdom, the expected blessing would be postponed until the people repented.
It is clearly, then, the Lord’s coming to Israel that is here set forth, and not His coming for us; His coming to the earth, and not His coming to meet us in the air. It is very important to see this. The blessed Lord had been received by these disciples as the Messiah. So deep was their impression that He would presently set up the kingdom, that they said, “We thought He would have redeemed Israel,” and asked Him, alter He was risen from the dead, “Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:66When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? (Acts 1:6).) Thoughts of the kingdom filled their minds; and though afterwards, at the descent of the Holy Ghost, they formed a part of the Church the body of Christ, the platform on which they were then was that of the kingdom. The Church was not then set up; the mystery was still hid in God. (Eph. 2:15, 3:9.)