The End of the Age-Seasons

This morning, we come to the end of our subseries on “The End of the Age”. For several weeks, we’ve been studying the prophecies of Jesus about the destruction of the Temple from Mark 13. These prophecies began with two questions from his disciples. They asked him, when will these things be, and what will be the signs? So far, Jesus has answered the second question first by giving various signs that lead up to the destruction of the temple. Now, Jesus ends this teaching with the answer to “when”. To see that, let’s read Mark 13:28-37. From this text, see three points: The Teaching of the Fig Tree, The Terminal Generation, and the Timing of God.

First. From verse 28 and 29, see the teaching of the fig tree. There is an interesting literary device that Mark uses in chapters 11-13. In Chapter 11, verse 12, Jesus has a strange interaction with an actual fig tree. On Jesus’s first full day in Jerusalem, after the triumphal entry, he passes by a fig tree early that morning, but he doesn’t find any fruit. Mark tells us why – it’s not the season for figs. Fig trees in Jerusalem produce fruit in late summer, and Jesus is looking for fruit in the spring. But, finding no fruit, Jesus curses the tree, commanding it to never bear fruit again. Then, he marches into the Temple, and there too he does not find what he was looking for. Instead of finding a place of worship for all nations, he finds a den of thieves. So, he drives out the moneychangers and merchants and calls the oppressed to come to him. On the way back to the Mount of Olives that evening, they pass by that same fig tree, and his disciples find it withered. Obviously, there is more than meets the eye here. Jesus was not “hangry” and acting brashly to curse this tree. He does this as an object lesson for the nation of Israel. The fig tree is Israel under the Old Covenant. The OT repeatedly refers to them as such. Hosea 9:10 compares Israel to the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season. Jeremiah 8:13 compares the disobedience of Israel to finding no figs on the fig tree. In Micah 7:1-2, God looks for “the first-ripe fig” but finds none. Now, the very son of God, the Son of the Master of the Vineyard, comes to his own people, and he does not find them in true worship, waiting for him with joy. He finds them in hypocritical disobedience. Instead of acting as witnesses to the world by calling the world to come and worship the one true God, they had set up shop in the court of the Gentiles.

This analogy of the fig tree forms what scholars call an “inclusio” in the Gospel of Mark. Starting with the fig tree of Mark 11 and running through the fig tree of our passage in chapter 13, all of Jesus’s interactions take place in the temple, and they all involve conflicts between him and the religious leaders. So, in Mark 11, he told his disciples what would happen to Israel by cursing the fig tree, and now he tells them of the timing of all these things by speaking of another fig tree. He says, in verse 28, “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near.” In this analogy, it is spring, and the fig tree has no leaves. But, you can always tell that summer is on the way because the old dead branches of the fig tree begin to put out shoots, and the leaves begin to bud and grow. So it is with the coming judgment of Israel and the beginning of the new covenant. I think Jesus intends for us to see two fig trees here. One fig tree is that of Israel. It has been cursed. Even at the time of Jesus’s prophecy, it was withering, and it would never produce fruit again. But, there is another fig tree – the tree of the New Covenant established in Jesus himself. That tree was not dead; it was just starting to spring forth.

So, how would the disciples know when all these things would come to pass? How were they to know when to flee for the mountains or when the abomination of desolation would come? How would they know when the Son of Man would ascend in glory, or when the gathering of the elect would take place? As Jesus says, they will know the time is near when the Gospel puts out shoots and grows into the world. The more the church expanded in the book of Acts, the more the world persecuted it. Yet, with every persecution, the tree didn’t die, it just sprouted forth new shoots, from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, to the utter most parts of the earth.

But, that timing could be a challenging to understand, so Jesus gives another measurement in verses 30 and 31. That brings me to my second point: The Terminal Generation. Jesus puts a limit on all of the signs and times that he has given so far – “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place.” In my introduction to this subseries, I pointed out that this statement serves as an interpretive key for all of the signs that Jesus gives. Jesus is not speaking of events way out in the future at the end of time. He is speaking of things that will take place in “this generation.” The generation that heard his prophecy, the generation that rejected him; they would be the ones to face all of the judgment he’d predicted. But, that generation would also be the one to see the glory of the Son of Man and the ingathering of God’s elect from the four corners of the world. As Jesus would promise in Luke 9:27, “[Some of you] will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God.” The disciples witnessed all of these things and trusted the Lord through it all. 

And, Jesus proved himself to be the divine Son of God by keeping every last word. This is why he could say, in verse 31, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” This statement is blasphemy if Jesus is not God. Jesus is claiming to speak with divine authority. He doesn’t say, “this is the Word of the Lord, and it will not pass away.” As Isaiah 40:8 says, “The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord abides forever.” God’s Word is true and trustworthy, and Jesus makes that same claim about his own words.

With that, consider my last point: The Timing of the Lord, from verses 32 – 37. After speaking with such confidence of the fig tree and this generation and his own words, now Jesus gives two warnings. First, in verse 32, he gives a caveat to his timing – “No one knows the day or the hour.” This saying is strange for a couple of reasons. For one, Jesus has just said that we can know the time, and now he is saying that no one knows. What is going on here? Jesus is drawing a distinction between knowing the season and knowing the hour. His disciples could know, based on the signs of wars and calamities and false teachers and the growth of the church, that the judgment of Jerusalem was near. But, it was not given for them to know the exact day and hour when it would happen. Why would Jesus give them the season, but not the date and hour? Because, if they knew the exact day and hour, they’d have no reason to wait on the Lord and trust him. But, there is something else strange in what Jesus says. He says that not even the Son knows the day and hour. This statement comes just one verse after he’d claimed to have the authority of God, and now he is saying that there is something that he does not know. Is this evidence that Jesus was not fully God? No, not at all. Rather, it is evidence of what theologians call the Hypostatic Union – the idea that Jesus was one person in two natures, without any mixture or confusion. Jesus was fully divine AND fully human. This doesn’t mean that he was God mixed with man, but rather that he was God AND man. In his divinity, he was the Son of God who was in the beginning with God and was God, but in his humanity, he was formed in the womb of Mary, born of a virgin, and suffered under Pontius Pilate. In his divinity, he knew the thoughts of men, but in his humanity, he wept at Lazarus’ tomb. In his divinity, he divided the loaves and fish and fed 5000, but in his humanity, he hungered for bread after 40 days of fasting. So, here, Jesus speaks of his human knowledge – knowledge that grew and matured as he aged and learned. And, in that human knowledge, he was not given to know the time that God the Father had appointed for the end of the Old Covenant.

This limitation should teach us something important, though. Jesus says that no one knows the day or hour, “But only the Father.” This brings up an issue that I’ve always had with the way we talk about the End Times. In the popular way that we talk about the Great Tribulation, the Antichrist, and the second coming, it is as though we can know the day and the hour, and we can even change it. Often, the coming of the tribulation and Antichrist are presented as warnings: “We better clean up our act or the tribulation will come.” “We better not vote for him because he could be the Antichrist.” But that is not the way Jesus presented the end of the age. According to Jesus, God the Father has set the very date on which these things will take place – we just can’t know it. As he tells his disciples in Acts 1:7, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” The Father is not reacting to us, changing history based on how we reform. He is not waiting on us to act so he can plan his next move. God the Father has decreed all things from before the foundation of the world, and nothing catches him by surprise or upends his plans.

So, if the disciples could know the seasons and the signs, but they could not know the exact day or hour, how were they to live? Jesus tells them how in verses 33-37. They were to “be on guard and keep awake.” Then, he gives an analogy. They are like the doorkeeper of a house who was left in charge while the master was away. They were to wait and watch for his return. If they fell asleep, they would fail in their obedience to the master. So, they were to stay awake and watch. And, they did just that. Not only did they stay awake. They went out boldly and proclaimed the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

The call to stay awake is not just a call for the disciples who heard this prophecy, though. Verse 37 ends with a call to everyone who would read this Gospel: “What I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.” So, throughout this subseries, I’ve insisted that these prophecies apply exclusively to the generation of Jesus’s day, and I believe that very firmly. But, just because the kingdom of God came in power through all that Jesus prophesied in this chapter, it doesn’t mean it is the end of the story. The kingdom of God came in power with his ascension, but there is more to come. The kingdom is right now expanding and taking hold of this world. And one day, it will be consummated when Christ returns to make all things new. So, what are we to do until that day? We are to stay awake. We are to be witnesses of the kingdom in this world, that others might come to know Christ. We are to work for the glory of God and pray that his kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven.