Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (22 page)

Because of its complexity, we will focus on Matthew’s account. It is a long passage, encompassing all of Matthew 24 and 25. There are slight variations from Matthew in both Mark and Luke, but once Matthew is understood, the other two are not difficult to understand. We will borrow an insight from Mark or Luke when it sheds further light on Jesus’ meaning, but I will leave it to you to investigate the other two passages further.

C. S. Lewis was a former agnostic who became one of the most eloquent apologists of the twentieth century. His books on Christianity have helped thousands; I am one of them. I first read Lewis in college, and over the years his books have helped me answer many questions.

Lewis defended Christ and God’s Word when most intellectuals scoffed. But when it came to the Olivet Discourse, Lewis was embarrassed by some of Jesus’ predictions. Of Matthew 24:34 he wrote, “It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.” (“World’s Last Night,” 1960 essay in
TEL
, 385).

What in the Olivet Discourse could embarrass a faithful Christian apologist such as Lewis?

The Olivet Discourse contains Jesus’ answers to two very short questions asked by the disciples: “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the close of the age?” (24:3).

In response, Jesus predicts many signs and events. About halfway through this long passage, Jesus promises the coming of the Son of man within a generation by stating, “They will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of Heaven with power and great glory.… Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place” (24:30, 34).

This was the source of Lewis’s embarrassment. He believed that Jesus had not kept His word to return within a generation. As far as Lewis could tell, the signs and the coming that Jesus had predicted did not occur within His generation either. Lewis believed that Jesus was God, but that in this case He was showing the “man side” of His personality. Lewis could not understand how Jesus could be anything but wrong in this case.

With all due respect to Lewis, I believe that his view of the Olivet Discourse insults Christ. But Lewis was not the only person who found the promises of Jesus to be ingenuine. In his book
Why I Am Not a Christian
, Bertrand Russell cited the Olivet Discourse as one of the reasons Jesus could not have been God. Russell pointed to what he considered the obvious fact that the “coming” that Jesus foretold had not happened within a generation. To make matters worse, Jesus did not stop at predicting certain signs and events within a generation. To add emphasis, Jesus continued, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but
my words will not pass away
” (24:35). Jesus seemed certain these events would transpire before His disciples all passed away.

Perhaps without knowing it, Russell was actually using the Old Testament criterion recorded in Deuteronomy for determining the trustworthiness of a prophet. “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has
not
spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you need not be afraid of him” (18:22). Russell was right to hold Jesus to the same standard. In fact, he was being more consistent than was the Christian apologist Lewis.

But that leaves the issue unsettled. Was Russell correct in his conclusion? Was Jesus a false prophet? Or is this an unfair insult? You probably know what my answer will be, but we need to work our way through the evidence.

We will look at two ways of handling Lewis’s embarrassment and Russell’s skepticism. The first is the rapturists’ method. Rapturists agree with Russell that the events Jesus foretold in the Olivet Discourse did not come to pass within the generation of the Apostles. This is in spite of Jesus own words: “This generation will not pass away till all these things take place” (24:34).

They squirm out of the situation by claiming that Jesus did not mean
exactly
what the Gospels record Him as saying. They usually take one of two mutually exclusive tacks. Rapturists propose both of them in the hope that you might find one or the other plausible.

Both tacks can be found in the
New Scofield Reference Bible
, in a footnote under Matthew 24:34. “The word ‘generation’ (Gk.
genea
), though commonly used in Scripture of those living at one time, could not mean those alive at the time of Christ,
as none of ‘these things’—i.e., the worldwide preaching of the Kingdom, the tribulation, the return of the Lord in visible glory, and the regathering of the elect—occurred then
. The expression ‘this generation’ here 1) may mean that the future generation which will endure the tribulation and see the signs, will also see the consummation, the return of the Lord; or 2) it may be used in the sense of race or family, meaning that the nation or family of Israel will be preserved ‘till all these things be fulfilled,’ a promise wonderfully fulfilled to this day” (emphasis mine).

First, rapturists claim that the “generation” of which Jesus was speaking is not the one that heard Him say these words. Jesus gave various signs to warn His followers of a tribulation about to break over them. Rapturists say that the generation Jesus refers to is the one that first sees the signs Jesus has described.

Most rapturists today believe that this generation began when Israel was formed as a modern state in 1948, although some maintain 1967 is a more likely date. They call the people who saw this event the “final generation” or the “generation of the fig tree.” This expression comes from this same passage: “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near” (Matt. 24:32). Rapturists unequivocally claim that we, the people of the early twenty-first century, are the final generation.

This solution has its problems. The reinterpretation of the word
generation
is just plain dishonest and inconsistent with the Greek word’s meaning. Jesus uses the phrase “this generation” many times, as does the rest of the New Testament. The word
generation
is used thirty-four times in the New Testament, and the phrase “this generation” is used twenty times. Without exception, it always refers to the people who were alive, listening to the speaker. In fact, Jesus uses this same word just a few verses before the Olivet Discourse to refer to His own generation. No one tries to reinterpret the meaning of this word on that occasion (Matt. 23:36).

Further, the word
generation
is not used in a vacuum. Jesus continually speaks during the discourse in the second person,
you
(Matt. 24:9, 15, 20, 25, 32, 33, 34). He obviously meant the generation of those hearing Him. One of these references within the Olivet Discourse is particularly interesting: “You will be beaten in synagogues” (Mark 13:9). It would be hard to imagine this prophecy being fulfilled anywhere in the twenty-first century. When was the last time you heard of a Christian taken away to the local synagogue for a good, old-fashioned whipping? Jesus must have been referring to the generation of those listening, the “you.” That is the meaning of the word and the implication of the context.

The second rapturist attempt to explain this word is to say that Jesus did not mean
generation
at all, but
race
. In other words, the Jewish people would exist as a distinct race within humanity until these signs were fulfilled. They hold to this position even though the Gospel writers had other words they could have used to express
race
more clearly. If they understood Jesus to mean something other than the people living at the same time as His disciples, they could have used the Greek words
ethnos
(“nation”),
genos
(“kindred”), or
suggenes
(“kinsmen”).

This second solution seems to imply that Jesus was pulling the wool over the disciples’ eyes with virtually meaningless statements. His prediction could wait almost forever, as long as there remained a distinct Jewish race.

Yet Jesus was specifically answering a
when
question from His disciples. Just as in Daniel, we must be very careful about interpreting any passage in such a way that it makes it seem as though a straightforward question regarding time is answered by God in a deceitful way. The listener at that time would have thought Jesus was claiming that these events would occur in forty to sixty years, yet rapturists push them back two thousand years or more. That presumptuous parenthesis rears its ugly head again.

The most obvious conclusion from all of this is that Jesus really did mean the generation that included His disciples. To explain that away clumsily is no less insulting than is Russell’s claim that Jesus was simply wrong. Indeed, Christians deserve to be the objects of scorn when they propose the type of word-parsing that rapturists perform on this statement of Jesus. It comes across as dishonest, because it is. It is insulting to the original speaker’s intent.

Both of the attempted solutions are demolished by a parallel passage in Luke. In Luke’s version of the Olivet Discourse, specifically Luke 21:20–24, there are details that were entirely fulfilled in 70 A.D. Even the
New Scofield Reference Bible
admits this. But the rapturist tries to claim that Matthew and Mark, because they omit some of the identical details of Luke, are actually talking about a different event! In notes on Matt. 24:16 and Luke 21:20 Scofield writes, “The passage in Luke refers in express terms to a destruction of Jerusalem which was fulfilled by Titus in A.D. 70.… Two sieges of Jerusalem are in view in the Olivet Discourse, the one fulfilled in A.D. 70, and the other yet to be fulfilled at the end of the age.”

We would not interpret other parallel passages in Scripture in this way. For example, there are multiple descriptions of Jesus’ Resurrection, each containing different details. Do rapturists believe in more than one Resurrection as well? Of course not, but that heresy would be entirely consistent with the hermeneutic they employ in the Olivet Discourse. Isn’t it much more likely that Luke merely chose to add a few details of the Olivet Discourse that Matthew omitted?

Besides relying on a faulty hermeneutic, both rapturist solutions are based on circular reasoning. They claim Jesus could not have meant His generation, because the events didn’t pan out (from their perspective) as He had prophesied. They are forced to twist the obvious meaning of Jesus’ statement because the prediction did not come to pass.

When Jesus predicted the events of the Olivet Discourse, He fully expected those in the first century to understand that
they
would see the events transpire. He didn’t expect them to have to reinterpret the meaning of simple, common words. Jesus never intended us to question our understanding of what “is” is.

The only convincing response the rapturist can muster is Scofield’s note referenced previously—namely, that “none of ‘these things,’ i.e., the worldwide preaching of the Kingdom, the tribulation, the return of the Lord in visible glory, and the regathering of the elect,” has yet occurred anytime in history
(SRB)
.

But what if there
has
been a fulfillment of the Olivet Discourse? That would destroy the rapturist argument at its root. Russell would be proven wrong, and Lewis would be relieved that His Savior was not a false prophet.

A different and potentially more satisfying solution to the problem is to understand correctly the two questions asked by the disciples in Matthew 24:3.

Two questions combined into one sentence can cause confusion if we are not careful listeners. For example, suppose your teenage daughter asks for permission to go to the prom, because she and her date would like to go afterward with a group of friends to a summer cottage for a sleepover. Contained in that sentence are two very distinct questions: First, can I go to the prom? Second, can I go to a sleepover with my date? I do not know about your home, but for our children, the answers to those two questions would be very different indeed!

The key to understanding the Olivet Discourse is to understand that it contains two
distinct
questions. Jesus gives distinct answers to each, but some people insist on confusing them. They really have no excuse. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record this discourse with essentially the same responses. Luke, however, places the two questions, with their two answers, in entirely different chapters. In other words, if someone is confused about which question is being answered at any given point, he need only turn to Luke, where the separation is crystal clear.

The early Church knew there were two questions with different answers. The fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, split this text into two sections. “When the Lord had finished all that related to Jerusalem, He came in the rest to His own coming” (cited in
GCC
in Matt. 24:23).

St. Augustine agreed: “In answer to the disciples, the Lord tells them of things which were from that time forth to have their course; whether He meant the destruction of Jerusalem, which occasioned their question … or the end itself, in which He will appear to judge the quick and the dead” (
EPA
, CXCIX:9).