Week 37 Matthew 24
Near the end of his life the disciples took the Lord aside privately and asked him a couple of forecastive-type questions:
Q#1: When will the temple be demolished?
Q#2: What are signals of the end of the age?
I don’t know exactly what the disciples were hoping for but my preference would have been for a fairly explicit answer. For example:
A#1: the temple will be destroyed 40 years from today.
A#2: I will return in 2458 AD.
But I don’t get my wish. The Lord forecasts only pretty generic events like the fact there’ll be:
wars & rumors of wars
famines & earthquakes
persecution hatred animosity betrayal
false & deceptive prophets. Like that.
Even though these tips do give me something to work with they don’t seem like very decisive forecasts. And to make things worse the second-half of the chapter says things like:
no one knows about that day or hour
it’ll be just like people in the time of Noah who knew nothing about what would happen until the rain actually began
you do not know on what day your Lord will come
the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
I’m not drawing any final conclusions today since other bible readers have extra opinions to add to the hopper.
But I do have one take-away: on the Do Know-Don’t Know Scale I figure I’m a lot closer to Don’t Know.
Note: quotes from Matthew 24:36 37-9 42 44 (NIV)