Could Jesus Come Today?

Published by Stanley Pouw in 2015 · 8 February 2015

God’s Word to us this evening is from Matthew 24:32-35, “Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. 33 So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near—at the doors! 34 Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.”

The hope of every Christian is the second coming of the Lord Jesus. The Bible says we are looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God and waiting for the redemption of the body. The day when the saints (believers) shall also judge the world, when we shall all be changed and we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

We look back to the cross where our souls were redeemed. We look forward to the second coming where our bodies will be redeemed. And we long for the day when Satan will be defeated. It is in that day that saints and all creation will be liberated and that sin and death will be eliminated. Matthew 24 and 25 is Jesus’ own sermon on His second coming. So we are finding wonder after wonder as we hear the Savior tell them that this is not the end, but He will return in glory and power to establish His kingdom.

Now, tonight we come to this short portion in which our Lord gives the parable of the fig tree. But in order to understand it, we have to look at the context. Jesus sits down with His disciples after climbing the Mount of Olives. And this happened after Jesus final word to the Jewish people in Matthew 23:39, “Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord,” when He introduced His coming in the kingdom that was promised by the prophets of old.

Then Jesus answers the disciples’ question: What are the signs? And beginning in Matthew 24: 4-14 He describes some general signs that would occur immediately prior to His second coming. And those signs were called in verse 8 birth pains. Then in verse 15, He said there is one thing that triggers these general signs and it is the abomination of desolation. Verse 21 calls it the great tribulation in which the birth pains take place.

Then Jesus gave them the specific sign in verse 29, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun is dark and the moon doesn’t give its light, the stars fall from heaven and the powers of the heavens are shaken.” It’s the disintegration of the universe. “And then appears the sign in verse 30-31, “When you see the Son of Man in heaven, then in all the tribes of the earth there will be mourning and you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. 31 He’ll send out His angels and with a great sound of a trumpet, they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”

After giving them those things as indicators, Jesus knows in their mind they still have many questions. Like how long it does last until the kingdom is established? How long until the Son of God reigns as King of kings and Lord of lords? How long do the birth pains last? How long is it from the sign in heaven to the kingdom on earth? And to answer the “when” question, He gives them this parable and its explanation in verses 32 to 35.

First, this is a simple analogy – verse 32, “Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near.” Parables were given to make things clear to just the disciples. When Jesus gave a parable to the religious leaders and never explained it, it was a riddle to them.

But our Lord wants the disciples to understand what He says. Notice what He says, “Learn this parable.” In other words, don’t just listen but get the message, let it sink deeply into you. Paul uses the same verb in Philippians 4:11 where he says, “I have learned in whatever state I am to be content.” Something that he learned deeply through experience, it sunk into his heart.

So here is the explanation: “When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near.” What does that mean? When the tree buds, it is spring, and spring means summer is near and summer means harvest. And when the Lord in Matthew speaks about harvest, He is speaking about the time to separate the good from the bad, of judgment. In Matthew 3:11 John the Baptist said, “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” And that fire is the fire of judgment.

So this leads to an application in verse 33, “So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near!” Well, when you see all the things that Jesus just talked about, the birth pains of verses 4 to 14, the abomination of desolation of verse 15, the need to flee because of great tribulation in verses 16 to 28. And then the sign of the Son of Man in heaven as the sky goes black and Jesus appears in all His glory, you know that it is near.

What is near? Luke 21:31 says, “So also when you see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is near at hand.” It is the end of man’s day, and it is the beginning of God’s day. The Millennial kingdom of Revelation 20:4-5 is in view here, when Jesus Christ reigns with His redeemed saints for a thousand years upon the earth and Satan is bound.

This is the glorious kingdom promised to Israel when Israel will be back in its land and will be preserved from all its enemies and become the servants of the Most High God, the time when Gentiles will be led by the Jews who will take them to God that they may know the true God. It is the time promised by all the prophets of old, that great kingdom.

And then in verse 34, further application, He says, “Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place.” Now, the question immediately is: What generation is He talking about? What generation is not going to pass, to die, to come to an end? And there are a lot of different answers. Let us examine some answers and see what the right answer is.

View number one suggest that this generation refers directly to the disciples, that what Jesus is saying is: “You disciples will not die before the second coming.” But that’s not true, right? And those people who hold that view say Jesus was simply wrong. They say we should not be surprised that He was wrong because He even admitted that in Mark 13:32 that the day nor the hour knows no one, not even the Son of Man. So they say Jesus even confessed His own ignorance.

What Jesus confessed there was that in His incarnation, being a human He said He did not know. He chose not to have that knowledge. But it’s one thing to choose not to have knowledge, it’s something else to propagate something that isn’t true. And Jesus never lost His connection with the truth. Jesus is not wrong. And it is unlikely that this generation means “this group of disciples” because if that’s what He meant, He could have said, “You will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled.”

View number two is that it refers to the disciples, but Jesus is talking about the fulfilling of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. In other words, this doesn’t describe the second coming. And many commentaries hold this view, that this whole thing is a description of the destruction of Jerusalem and that Jesus is saying, “You, this generation now, you disciples and the people of your time are going to be here in 70 A.D. when all this will take place.”

That also is unacceptable because you cannot confuse the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. with the second coming of Jesus Christ. The disciples did not ask Him about the coming of Romans, they are asking about the coming of Christ. When they said in verse 3, “What shall be the sign of Your coming?” They didn’t ask, “What’s the sign of the Romans coming?” And when He answered them, He answered their question and their question had to do with His coming.

For example, was the sun darkened, the moon not giving its light, the stars all falling out of heaven and the Son of Man appearing in heaven in gathering the elect from the four corners of the earth? When at that particular time did all the tribes on the face of the earth mourn? That did not happen, no way. And in 70 A.D., it was the Romans against the Jews, it wasn’t nation rising against nation and kingdom rising against kingdom and earthquakes and pestilences all over the world. No.

The third view is that it refers to the Jewish race, not generation. He’s saying, “This generation of Jews, this Jewish people, they will not die until all these things come to pass.” In other words, He is predicting the survival and continuity of the Jewish race until the second coming. Now, that’s true. But again, that’s not a good interpretation here for a couple of reasons. It doesn’t say “Israel,” and if the Lord was talking about Israel, surely He would say “My people.” To call them “this generation” seems to be a rather indifferent way to speak of the covenant people.

There is a fourth view, that is by “this generation” it means “God rejecting, Christ rejecting, kinds of people”. In other words, the kind of people that we have been talking to all day in the temple that hate what I stand for, these phony, religious people are going to be around until the second coming. So don’t expect things to get better. But it is vague and not consistent with the issue in the hearts and minds of the apostles. They’re not concerned about whether evil people are going to survive until the second coming, they’re concerned about when all that is going to happen.

There’s a fifth view, and that is that the fig tree is Israel. Jesus didn’t say that. So now you have stopped the analogy and you have got an allegory. And you have to explain what the elements of the allegory refer to. So we say then that the fig tree is Israel and when it puts forth its leaves, maybe that is the statehood of Israel in 1948. Okay, that’s sort of a popular view. But in the first place, Jesus didn’t say that, and secondly how in the world the disciples would have ever perceived the statehood of Israel in 1948 is pretty far- fetched.

Remember, Jesus is illustrating the things He has been teaching them. He is not trying to say something that is so obscure that it could never be perceived by anybody who lived before 1948. Plus, if the tree was Israel and it started to have leaves, we would assume that it was life coming into Israel that would be spiritual, not physical, and Israel, though alive today, is one of the most secular nations on earth.

Now, there is a sixth view, which is, when you see all these leaves, what are these leaves? The birth pains, right? The sign in heaven, all the things Jesus has been describing through the whole chapter of Matthew 24. When you see all those things, you know that judgment is near. And this generation – what generation? The “this” has to modify the people who see all those signs. This generation that sees all those things will not end until the rest is fulfilled.

We learned that it is a period of seven years called the time of Jacob’s trouble (Jer. 30:7), but the real tribulation period lasts three and a half years, 1260 days, or 42 months, and that’s reiterated again and again by Daniel and John. And the generation that is alive when it begins is going to still be around when it ends because, it lasts just three and a half years.

Now, who is this generation? Among Christians, there are two main views. Some say the church will be there, that is a post-tribulational view. They will be taken out of the world after the Tribulation. So some of the Christians will get slaughtered in the process. We will go through it and we will go up and meet the Lord in the air and come back down for the kingdom. Other Christians believe in a pre-tribulational rapture, which means, before any of this, we are taken out and we spend the time with the Lord and come back at the end of the seven years tribulation.

Reason number one: The church appears as the theme in Revelation 2 and 3. And our Lord speaks to the church and purifies the church and writes letters to them and sends messages to the church and then ends that at the end of chapter 3 with Him standing at the door, knocking ready to come in. In Revelation 4 and 5 the church is in heaven. In Chapter 6, the Tribulation breaks out on earth, and from chapter 6 through 18, the whole story of the Tribulation, there is never one mention of the church. This absence is quite significant, especially when the church has been on earth in 2 and 3 and they are in heaven in 4 and 5.

Reason number 2, there is nothing in the New Testament to instruct the church about how to endure the Tribulation. The church is also not mentioned in Matthew 24, and there’s no warnings about the Tribulation and how to deal with it and how to handle the antichrist as a church. In fact, the only church found during that period is called the mystery harlot, Babylon, the false church which is to be destroyed.

Thirdly, the Rapture is described in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 where we are caught up to be with the Lord in the air and ever are we with the Lord. Why does Paul make such a great point about the Rapture if the church after the Tribulation goes up to meet Jesus and then comes right back down again?

Fourthly in Revelation 3:10, it says, “Because you have kept My command to persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of trial which shall come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.” That is a promise to those who have kept the Word of God by faith in Christ that they will be rescued from tribulation.

In John 14:3, it says “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.” So Jesus is preparing a place in the Father’s house which is up there in glory. And that’s where we go in the Rapture and remain for those years until we return for the glory of the kingdom and all that it promises.

Let us look at verse 35, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.” Wow! Heaven and earth shall pass away. The earth that we know, the heaven that we know, will be no more, and in their place is going to come a new creation. Then Jesus said this: “but My words will by no means pass away.” That is an unchanging authority. We believe all this will happen exactly as it says.

Are you ready for that? To go with the Lord’s raptured people to be in His presence or do you find yourself staying for the tribulation that follows? Seeing that you know all these things, what kind of person ought you to be, Peter said. You ought to be holy and faithful looking for the coming of the Lord Jesus. Let’s bow in prayer.