QUERY CONCERNING THE “GREAT TRIBULATION.”
Dear Sir:
The ‘Synopsis of the Kingdom,’ in volume 1 page 193, is estimated here very highly. Two or three passages struck me as especially beautiful and touching; one particularly, where your pencil, by the light of testimony, studied and believed, portrays the entrance of Israel’s King into his dwelling place. ‘Tis a joyous, heart-thrilling scene. I seemed in reading it, as if already listening to the glad shouts of Israel’s sons, and witnessing, as these re-echoed round the world, the joy of the earth, and the gladness of the isles, because the Lord reigneth. Oh, my beloved brother, shall we be present with that rejoicing throng, and behold the fulfilment of all that we have hoped and prayed for? I often think this is too glorious a destiny for me—one that I can never be accounted worthy of. Yet, I have resolved long since not to abandon hope, or let the anchor go. It is always our wisdom to eschew despair, since we cannot possibly gain any thing by it, and may lose all.
I have lately met with some ideas on Matthew 24 that please me. These are that the ‘great tribulation’ must not be understood to have reference simply to the calamitous period of the destruction of the Hebrew Commonwealth; but as beginning then, and terminating only with the completion of ‘the Times of the Gentiles,’ being thus co-extensive with the dispersion; and that the word ‘this,’ in verse 34, referring in the original to the thing last mentioned, the ‘generation’ there spoken of, is that which sees the signs indicating the Lord’s return, and the nearness of his kingdom; and not as you suppose, the generation contemporary with the passing away of the First Heavens and Earth. What think you of this view of the subject?
PERSIS.
England.
REPLY, WITH REMARKS ON “THIS GENERATION.”
If our friend will turn to Matthew he will find from the context that it is impossible that the ‘tribulation,’ referred to there, can be co-extensive with ‘the Times of the Gentiles.’ The sixteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first verses say, that the ‘great tribulation’ shall be ‘in the winter and on the Sabbath-day,’ at a period of ‘flight from Judea to the mountains.’ This winter period is termed ‘those days’ in the twenty-second verse, which ‘were shortened’ that the whole nation might not be destroyed. The tribulation being shortened for the elect’s sake, we are told that ‘immediately after,’ the luminaries of the Hebrew polity were eclipsed and shaken from their spheres—verse 29. The tribulation must therefore have preceded the actual suppression of the Commonwealth—a suppression, however, which is co-extensive with the times referred to; for ‘Jerusalem shall be trodden under foot of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled,’ and then the throne and kingdom of David will be restored.
The genea autee of verse 34 is manifestly the ‘this generation’ Jesus had been treating of in his previous discourse, which led to the reproduction of Daniel’s prediction concerning Jerusalem and the Temple (see chapter 9: 26,) in the 24th of Matthew. ‘Serpents, generation of vipers!’ said he to the Scribes and Pharisees, ‘how can ye escape from the judgment of Hinnom’s vale?’ ‘Generation’ here is genneema in the sense of offspring—they were the Serpent offspring of that genea, who were to fill up the measure of their fathers’ iniquity, so that upon them might come vengeance for all the righteous blood shed upon the land from the death of Abel to the murder of Zacharias, son of Barachus, between the Temple and the Altar, during the siege of Jerusalem, as related by Josephus. The particulars that filled up ‘the measure of their fathers,’ and made up the krisis, or judgment, are termed ‘all these things’ in the thirty-sixth verse of the twenty-third chapter; and because they affected Christ’s ‘prophets, wise men, and scribes,’ as well as their persecutors, and therefore all classes of the nation, Jesus said, ‘Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this genea, or generation.’ Thus we are presented with the relation of genneema to genea. The latter includes the former, as the whole includes a part, or the greater the less.
In Matthew twelfth, and forty-fifth verse, Jesus likens the then living race of Jews to a man in two states of diabolical possession, divided by a brief interval of sanity. In the first state he was wicked, but not totally depraved. He was therefore relieved of his malady for a time. His cure however was not permanent. Excitement revived, fear supervened, madness seized upon him, and he became sevenfold more desperate than before; so that the last state of the man was worse than the first. ‘Even so,’ said Jesus, ‘shall it be also unto this wicked genea or generation.’ And even so it was. When John the Baptist had fulfilled his mission he had ‘emptied, swept, and garnished’ the generation; for ‘there went out unto him all the land of Judea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptised of him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins’—Mark 1: 5. Judah thus prepared, ‘the people were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts of John, whether he were the Christ or not’—Luke 3: 15. The unclean spirit was gone out of them for a time; and when Jesus first appeared among them, ‘they heard him gladly.’ In process of time, however, the spirit that beheaded John gained strength, and possessed not Herod only, but all the rulers of the people, and at length all the people too. They crucified Jesus, killed his disciples, and abounded in all iniquity, so that their last state was worse than the first, when John came to them ‘preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.’ What was to be done with such a generation? Was it not condemned by the example of Nineveh, which repented at the preaching of Jonas; by that of the wisdom-seeking Queen of Sheba, who came from the far-south to hear the words of Solomon? For seven years John, the greatest of all the prophets, and Jesus, the ‘greater than Solomon,’ proclaimed repentance and the wisdom of God; and then almost for forty years, a great company took up the word and preached it to the people; nevertheless iniquity abounded, and even the love of the many who had embraced the gospel of the kingdom cooled. Was not the generation incorrigible—hath there ever been a generation of Israel like it before or since? Well, therefore, might Jesus liken it to Noah’s, and say, ‘This generation shall not pass away till all my words concerning it shall be fulfilled.’ History attests the fact. The heaven and the earth of the Hebrew Kosmos passed away with a great noise, but not a jot or tittle that he had spoken failed of its entire accomplishment.
They who look for ‘the signs’ enumerated in the first twenty-nine verses of Matthew 24 as indicative of the Lord’s return in majesty and power, may as well look for the signs that preceded the Deluge as indicative of the same event. They will see the one as soon as they will see the other, which will be as soon as they shall see the shadow of the degrees upon the dial of Ahaz go backward ten degrees. The signs of ‘the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory,’ are not significative of Judah’s overthrow, but of the destruction of the Papacy, the fall of the Ottoman dominion, the subjection of the kingdoms of the west to the Autocrat, preliminary to the redemption of the whole Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the resurrection of the dead. The signs of these events are not in the sun, moon, stars, and constellations; but in ‘the unclean spirits like frogs, which go forth to the kings of the earth and of the whole empire to gather them together to the war of the great day of God the Almighty,’ whose operations may be discerned by all who ‘watch’ the progress of things in the light of scripture truth.
EDITOR.
