Which Generation?
Matthew Chapter 24 as History
As premillenials do, we awaited the Great Tribulation and Rapture with great anticipation. Every headline, every disaster, every disturbance in the Middle East pointed toward the rebuilding of the Temple and the rise of Antichrist.
It seems all so macabre in hindsight.
But in order to get to our Blessed Hope, this all needs to go down first. Just turn on TBN on any day and you will see those spokesmen for the Creator tell us why America and the World in general (but mostly America) is going to face the Wrath of God and really soon.
As I went down the path in pursuit of the truth of things, I was pointed to this passage from The Wars of the Jews by Flavius Josephus:
Accordingly, it appears to me that the misfortunes of all men, from the beginning of the world, if they be compared to these of the Jews are not so considerable as they were; while the authors of them were not foreigners neither. This makes it impossible for me to contain my lamentations. But if any one be inflexible in his censures of me, let him attribute the facts themselves to the historical part, and the lamentations to the writer himself only. (Preface, section 4)
It sounded an awful lot like what Jesus said in the Olivet discourse to me. An awful lot like it (it never entered my mind until months later that this possibly wasn't a prophecy at all, but written after the fact...more on that later).
Preterism
That used to be a dirty word to me. Preterism is the belief that most (if not all) of the prophecies in scripture have already been fulfilled. Crazy, right? I knew that Catholics and most mainline Protestants were partial Preterists, meaning that all events except for the second coming of Jesus were already done. But hey, they just didn't understand prophecy correctly, they were all led astray by the Catholic church, blah, blah, blah. But now I started to see why. I searched it out and found that the things Jesus said would happen to "this generation" actually did.
Ask any futurist and they will change the meaning of generation. I did. But what if Jesus meant what he said and was saying it to the actual persons that he was addressing, not people hundreds of centuries in the future?
There are some here that will not taste death...All these things will come upon this generation...When YOU see Jerusalem surrounded by armies...
Really, go back and read Jesus's prediction of the destruction of the Temple and then Revelation and then go and read what Josephus recorded as what historically happened.
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Applying the words of Jesus and John to things that had already historically been recorded was satisfying in a way that I cannot even describe. It was like I had been putting a puzzle together with the wrong pieces and someone had finally given me the correct ones. There was no more speculating about how and when all this would happen, it was over, past history. Although I had no idea where I would end up, I knew that I could never, ever see it the way I had before. This just made too much sense. Jesus said these things would happen soon, very soon, upon this generation, very quickly.
And they did.
Why was I just now hearing about this?
I felt a bit embarrassed at myself for all the time and effort and energy I had spent on trying to map out the End Times, but I tried not to dwell on that. There were still a few correct pieces that I needed to finish this puzzle once and for all, I was almost there.
Part Eight
