Eschatology — the Olivet Discourse names one sign you will never find on a map
Ask a room full of prophecy readers what to watch, and you will get a list you could verify with a news feed. Jerusalem. Treaties. Troop movements. Currency. Earthquakes. A rebuilt temple. All of it external, all of it checkable, all of it happening somewhere other than in you.
Jesus put something else on the list. It sits right in the middle of the Olivet Discourse, between the wars and the worldwide preaching of the gospel, and no satellite will ever pick it up.
And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
Matthew 24:12 (KJV)
That is a sign of the times. Not a devotional aside tucked into a prophecy chapter — a listed indicator, sitting in the same paragraph as false prophets and betrayal, carrying the same weight as the earthquakes everybody tracks.
They Asked Three Questions and Got a Long Answer
The Discourse does not begin with a sermon. It begins with disciples asking.
And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?
Matthew 24:3 (KJV)
Read the question as it stands and the answer has to be read the same way. They asked when, and they asked for a sign. Those are questions about actual history — a stretch of real time with real events in it. If you take the chapter as a general mood-picture of the church age, verse 12 reduces to a sad observation about people in general. If you take it the way the disciples asked it — as a description of an intensifying, identifiable period running up to a literal, bodily return — then verse 12 is a measurement, and somebody is going to live through the reading.
That is the heart of the futurist, premillennial way of handling prophecy: you read the prophetic text by the same rules you read the historical text. Words mean what they meant. Promises land where they were addressed. A coming is a coming. And a cooling is a cooling.
Read the List All the Way Down
Jesus answers in a sequence, and the sequence matters. Deception first — many shall come in my name … and shall deceive many. Then wars and rumours of wars, nation against nation, famines, pestilences, earthquakes. And then He stops and labels what He has just described.
All these are the beginning of sorrows.
Matthew 24:8 (KJV)
The beginning. Not the climax — the birth pains. Then the list turns inward and gets harder: delivered up, hated of all nations, and then this, which should stop any reader cold.
And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
Matthew 24:10–11 (KJV)
One another. Twice. That phrase is not how the New Testament describes the world’s treatment of the church. It is how the New Testament describes what happens inside a body of people who were supposed to be family. Betray one another. Hate one another. And immediately after that, verse 12: the love of many shall wax cold.
So the cooling He is naming is not primarily the cooling of a hostile world. The world was never warm. The paragraph is about betrayal among people who sat in the same room.
What “Wax Cold” Actually Describes
The old English is worth slowing down over. To wax is simply to grow or become — the same word in wax strong or a waxing moon. So the sentence reads: because lawlessness grows large, the love of many becomes cold. It is gradual. It is a process with a direction. Nobody wakes up frozen.
And notice the causal chain, because it is not the obvious one. Jesus does not say iniquity murders love. He says abounding iniquity cools it. Lawlessness does not come at your heart with a weapon. It comes with attrition. It wears the warmth out of you.
Think about how that works in an ordinary man. You get used to being lied to, so you stop extending trust. You get burned helping, so you stop offering. You watch leaders fall, so you hold every leader at arm’s length. You see so much evil that outrage becomes your resting state, and outrage is exhausting, so eventually you downshift into something cheaper: indifference. None of those steps feels like sin. Every one of them feels like wisdom. That is exactly why the sign is hard to spot from inside.
Here is the test. Can you still be grieved? A cold heart is not an angry heart. Anger still cares. A cold heart is the one that hears a story that should break it and feels nothing but a flicker of vindication — I knew it.
Doctrinally Sound and Freezing
If you want to see what verse 12 produces when it finishes its work, read the letter to Ephesus. That church had everything a discerning man admires.
I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars … Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.
Revelation 2:2, 4 (KJV)
Hard-working. Patient. Intolerant of evil. Able to detect a false apostle and willing to say so. And cold. The sorting skill was intact and the love was gone, and the Lord who commended the discernment did not let the coldness pass.
That combination is the occupational hazard of men who study the end times. We train the eye to spot deception and then wonder why the heart hardened. Paul settled the math on this long before John wrote to Ephesus: though I understand all mysteries, and all knowledge … and have not charity, I am nothing (1 Corinthians 13:2). You can hold the whole prophetic chart and be nothing.
The Very Next Sentence
Jesus does not leave verse 12 sitting there as a diagnosis. He follows it with a command and a promise.
But he that shall endure unto the end shall be saved.
Matthew 24:13 (KJV)
That verse has been misread in both directions. It is not teaching that you earn salvation by gritting your teeth long enough. Scripture is immovable that salvation is by grace through faith, not of works. What endurance does is reveal. The one whose faith is real is the one still standing at the end, because the God who began the work is the one sustaining it. Paul says the same thing to the Colossians — reconciled and holy, if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled (Colossians 1:23). Hebrews says we are His house if we hold fast the confidence … unto the end (Hebrews 3:6). Continuance is not the root. It is the fruit.
Which means verse 13 is the answer to verse 12. In a climate engineered to cool you, the mark of the genuine is that it does not go out.
Check the Thermostat, Not Just the Headlines
So here is the confrontation, and I am not going to dress it up. You may be watching the wrong instrument.
You can follow every development in the Middle East and track every move in the global financial system, and be more informed than ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and still be failing the one sign Jesus listed that is actually inside your jurisdiction. You cannot do anything about an earthquake in Asia. You can do something about the fact that you have not spoken to your brother in four months and have stopped wanting to.
Three honest questions, then:
- Who used to be on your heart that is not on it now — and what happened?
- When bad news breaks about someone you disagree with, what is the first thing you feel?
- When was the last time the sin of another man made you grieve instead of merely confirming your assessment of him?
If those land badly, do not resolve to try harder at loving people. That is thin fuel and it will be gone by Thursday.
You Are Not the Furnace
The reason a cold heart can be warmed is that the heat was never generated by you in the first place.
And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
Romans 5:5 (KJV)
Shed abroad — poured out. It is His love, moved into you by His Spirit, and it is the only kind that survives an environment built to put it out. John says it even more simply: We love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). You do not strike the match. You come back to the fire.
And to Ephesus the Lord gave the actual path back, which is not a feeling but three steps: remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works (Revelation 2:5). Remember what it was like. Call the cooling what it is. Then go do the thing you used to do before you stopped — make the call, pray the name, open the door — and let the warmth follow the obedience rather than waiting to lead it.
Because the chapter ends where it was always going: Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come (Matthew 24:42). Watching is not a notebook. He is coming back for a people whose love for Him and for each other outlasted a lawless age — and the only sign on His list that you can change today is the temperature of your own heart.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist