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History will continue day after day after day after day until it won’t. The gospel of Jesus not only reconciles individuals to God, but reveals God’s all-encompassing plan for the world.
Throughout Jesus’ ministry, he announced the reign of God and extended the divine invite to his hearers that they may find purpose, restoration, and hope by connecting with the one who made them.
While those benefits occur now, they only faintly exist as a foretaste of the world to come in which God’s reign has removed all that once was wrong and renewed the earth so that it is perfect in peace, so that God’s glory fills the earth as the water fills the seas. Those who connect with God through Jesus in this life participate in the blessings of the coming world and will one day fully participate in them when Jesus gives his followers the same resurrection experience he had.
Perhaps, then, we can say our benefits in Jesus today are like a piece of bread that we can eat before the coming buffet—complete with all the wines, fillets, cakes, and coffee we can imagine.
What a day that will be!
But when will that day be? Does Jesus give us a clew? Kind of.
Time after time, Jesus prepared his followers for what awaited him in Jerusalem as his ministry neared the end:
“From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” (Matthew 16:21, ESV)
Then Jesus and his gang arrived at Jerusalem near Passover—the most significant holiday on the Jewish calendar. Jews from all over the Roman Empire gathered to celebrate God’s prior redemption, that had happened over a millennium ago in Egypt, which also would have directed their minds and hearts forward to a time when God would restore Israel and give them full reign over all nations, especially Rome—and all of this would come through the Messiah, the Christ.
That is what Jesus’ followers believed and had hoped would happen through him as the Jewish Christ. Jesus’ disciples expected that plan to initiate when they arrived in Jerusalem. They simply wanted to give him a nudge in the right direction by pointing his attention toward the great temple of God.
The End of the World
They knew he was the Christ, but, time after time, he told them he came to die, not abolish Israel’s enemies.
During the week of his death, the week of Passover:
“Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”” (Matthew 24:1–2, ESV)
His followers wanted him to see the majestic temple, the center of God’s presence among his people, anticipating its full majesty to be restored along with the nation’s. But Jesus said no.
Then he goes on the explain how the end will turn out, which gives us a hint about how we, today, should understand the end of the world.
The end-of-the-world teaching is called the Olivet Discourse because it took place on the Mount of Olives that overlooks the grand temple just across the Kidron Valley. You can read it in Mark 13, Luke 21, and Matthew 24. Today, the Mount of Olives is primarily a graveyard.
From the very beginning, the full meaning of Jesus’ Olivet Discourse has stumped even the most learned of scholars in putting together all of the details between each of the three Gospels.
Nevertheless, two points shout the loudest:
- Jerusalem will be overthrown and the temple destroyed (which happened in AD 70, about forty years after Jesus died and resurrected)
- Jesus will return and close the stage of human history as we know it
And the first point functions as a kind of foretaste to the latter point. Luke turns up the volume on the first point whereas Matthew and Mark turn up the volume more so on the latter.
It’s for this reason that we find in Matthew and Mark Jesus’ statement on the universal spread of the gospel that will accompany the end of the world.
The Spread of the Gospel
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14, ESV)
In part that event had already happened by the time of Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70. Here’s what the apostle Paul said, writing in the early sixties, to the church at Colossae:
“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth . . .” (Colossians 1:3–6, ESV)
In pockets all across the Roman Empire, the gospel flourished as churches grew. However, the gospel of Jesus had not fully spread. So even after the fall of Jerusalem, the early church continued in Jesus’ commission—that:
“. . . repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:47, ESV)
Because:
“. . . there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”” (Acts 4:12, ESV)
What Jesus commissioned at the end of the Gospel of Luke, the apostles Peter, Paul, and the rest of the early church obeyed in Acts. The Christian church follows in their footsteps to this day.
God wants all people to turn to him, by turning to Jesus who is the God-man, for the forgiveness of sins, deliverance from God’s coming wrath against all evil, and the sure hope of eternal bliss with our creator who loves us.
This commission has continued for nearly nearly two thousand years.
Today most Christians believe they can fulfill this mission not by proclaiming the gospel in every nation, which has been done in the nearly two hundred nations that now exist, but by translating the Bible, and the gospel, into languages of people groups who do not have access to it.
Wycliffe Bible Translators is a leading organization on global Bible translation. They say there are about 7,000 spoken or signed languages in the world with about 2,000 of them needing a Bible translation project to begin. So about one and a half billion people don’t have access to the Bible or gospel in their language.
In light of these statistics, how should we then understand Jesus’ statement below?
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14, ESV)
First, the Olivet Discourse provides many signs that will signal the end is near, but no single or specific indicator tells us it will happen at such-and-such a time or day. We simply don’t know when it will occur. So with regards to the spread of the gospel into each language, we know that it is necessary to have happened before the end will come, but does not immediately signal that the end with come. Time may continue for a thousand years after the gospel has penetrated every people group.
Second, we stay steadfast in the work of translating the Bible, creating healthy churches, and sharing the gospel so that more and more people can sit at the Lord’s eternal banquet and experience an appetizer in the here and now.
So what led Peter and the other disciples to do what Jesus commanded? They carried out Jesus’ call for two reasons—an exalted view of Jesus and a new hope.
Since Jesus resurrected, he indeed has the power to save us and renew us making him worthy of our adoration and obedience. Since Jesus resurrected, they shed their former hopes and dreams by aligning their vision of the new world with Jesus and orienting their lives around that new hope.
But It’s Been Nearly Two Thousand Years
During Paul and Peter’s day, the early church just knew for certain that Jesus would return, perhaps even before the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem. As the decades continued, some began to doubt and others even denied he would ever return. This led both Paul and Peter to write entire epistles correcting the false ideas about the end.
One of Peter’s statements on this topic provides a fitting conclusion. It shows the development in the early church’s thinking from the time Jesus spoke to the time Peter died, about thirty to thirty-five years later.
“This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 3:1–13, ESV)