What Did Jesus Know?

What did Jesus know?

The question of what Jesus knew about the future at the time of the Olivet Discourse has been on my mind lately. Not only am I writing a chapter of a book on it, but people have been asking me about this section of Scripture ever since I became a believer way back in the early 70’s. Indeed, I was intrigued by the speech the first time I read it and throughout Seminary.

What we find in the parallel Gospel records of the discourse (Matthew 24, 25; Mark 13 and Luke 21) can be off-putting to the logical reader. It appears that Jesus has predicted something that did not come to pass (“Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.”). Maybe it’s the eschatological language that’s used there, maybe it’s that predictions themselves can be enigmatic, but studious Christians want to know what’s going on. If this verse was not enough, how do reasonable Christians read the following and not get confused? “And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark 9:1) As I've said to many friends of mine over the years; either there are a lot of very old people in Palestine today or Jesus was mistaken.

I got interested in these eschatological chapters when Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, wrote about them all those years ago. That late 60’s book was like the Left Behind series today in it’s media driven exposure and in its focus on the “end of the age” time period. In fact, both books are theologically derived from the dispensational viewpoint of Scripture, in which school I count myself a student. It’s exegesis was as confusing back then as it is to most Christians today.

Hal set forth a bizarre set of circumstances regarding the “end times” and asked his readers to look around themselves (at that time, circa 1970) and see if they see the conditions of what Jesus was describing. As naïve as I was, theologically, I bought into some of the hype and circumstance and began to peddle the wares of the end-time dispensationalist: “The end is near, repent and save yourselves; we’re gonna be in a maelstrom soon”!

The problem was, I couldn’t “put it all together” exegesis-wise. There were too many disparate interpretations out there about the “wars and rumors of war”, false messiahs and the love of people growing cold. And this is where many Christians have blown it in the “lack of logic” area.

1. They don’t take Jesus at his word. Not only did he say what I mentioned above about his return, but he also said, “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28).

2. They aren’t curious about Daniel the prophet and what he said about the time Jesus spoke of (Do you realize that Daniel was given information that pinpointed Jesus’ first coming and his second?).

3. Finally (and this is surely the silliest…), they apply to Christians things spoken to Jews (as if there wasn’t any difference…I hear my seminary professor even today, “Oh, we’re all the people of God…”. He couldn’t interpret his Bible either).

Do you know what C. S. Lewis said about Matthew 24:34? "It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible." I agree! You have to be just plain stupid not to take the Son of God at his word, but embarrassingly enough, most Christians can’t conceive that Jesus didn’t know something. And that’s all we have before us in the texts. Jesus proclaimed a coming “great tribulation”, which Daniel says would last seven (7) years and he didn’t know what his Father had up his proverbial sleeve. If Biblical chronology had continued unchecked by an inserted time period then Jesus’ words would have come to pass as spoken.

But there was a secret “dispensation” that God introduced into His purposes; a wisdom that had been hidden “from ages and generations”, “not made known unto the sons of men”, that was “hid in God” and subsequently “by revelation made known” unto Paul and the other “holy apostles and prophets”.

Daniel’s “time of trouble” (Daniel 12:1), that “great tribulation” Jesus spoke of during the final days of his first visit to earth, will come to pass. It will be the “time of Jacob’s trouble” as the prophet Jeremiah said (30:7). It won’t be the time of the Church’s trouble.