Jerusalem really did fall. The sun was never darkened, and no angel gathered anybody from the four winds.
Sooner or later somebody will tell you, usually with a kind of relief in his voice, that the whole thing is already over. That Matthew 24 was cashed out in the summer of AD 70 when the Roman legions broke the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple, and left the place a field of ash. That the great tribulation was that war. That the coming of the Son of man was Christ coming in judgment through Titus. That we are not waiting for anything.
Let me say two honest things before I say anything else.
First, AD 70 was real and it was staggering. Jesus did prophesy the destruction of that temple and it happened inside the lifetime of men who heard Him say it — “there shall not be left here one stone upon another” (Matthew 24:2, KJV). Any reading of this chapter that ignores AD 70 is not reading carefully.
Second, there are serious, orthodox, Christ-loving brethren who read the first half of this chapter as fulfilled in AD 70 and still confess with the whole church that Christ will return bodily. That position is not heresy and the men who hold it are not fools. What is heresy is the consistent version that empties the future entirely — that says the resurrection, the judgment, and the return all already happened and nothing is left. That one does not merely misread a chapter; it denies the creed and cuts the nerve of Christian hope.
So the question is not whether AD 70 happened. The question is whether Matthew 24 is finished. And the way to answer it is not to pick a camp. It is to read the paragraph and ask what the words say.
Start With the Questions He Was Answering
The disciples ask three things, not one, and the whole chapter hangs on that.
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)
When shall these things be — the temple. What shall be the sign of thy coming — His arrival. And of the end of the world — the Greek is aion, the end of the age, the close of this whole order of things. They asked about a building, a return, and the end of an age, and they plainly assumed all three would come together. Our Lord answers all three, and He does not answer them in a way that collapses them into one afternoon in AD 70.
Four Things in the Text That AD 70 Did Not Do
Here is the heart of it. Walk through the second half of the chapter and ask, simply: did this happen?
One. The superlative.
For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
Matthew 24:21 (KJV)
That is a claim with a fence on both sides of it: nothing before it was worse, and nothing after it will be worse either. The siege of Jerusalem was a horror; Josephus could barely write it down. But the century just behind us buried tens of millions in industrial quantities. If AD 70 was the fulfillment, then the back half of that sentence failed, and our Lord overstated the case. A man can call it hyperbole. But the phrase nor ever shall be is precisely the kind of thing hyperbole does not survive.
Two. The timing word, and what follows it.
Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.
Matthew 24:29 (KJV)
Immediately after. Not eventually. Not in principle. The text welds the cosmic signs to the end of the tribulation with a word that leaves no room for two thousand years in the joint. And the sun was not darkened in AD 70. The Romans fought in daylight.
Three. A coming that everybody sees.
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
Matthew 24:30 (KJV)
Count the universals. A sign in heaven. All the tribes of the earth mourning. They shall see Him. Four verses earlier He had already ruled out any hidden or regional or spiritual version of His arrival: “as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:27, KJV). Lightning is not something you have explained to you afterward.
Nobody in Spain or China mourned in AD 70. Most of the planet never learned a war had happened. A judgment that requires a historian to point it out to you is not the event this verse describes.
Four. The gathering.
And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
Matthew 24:31 (KJV)
This is the one that will not bend. AD 70 did not gather the elect; it scattered them. Believers had already fled the city. The Jewish people were dispersed for nineteen centuries by that war. Whatever Matthew 24:31 is describing, it is the opposite motion from what Titus accomplished, and it has angels and a trumpet in it.
The Date Nobody Can Know
There is one more test, and it is quiet but decisive.
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
Matthew 24:36 (KJV)
Apply that to AD 70. By the spring of that year the date was not unknowable at all. Legions were camped around the city. Anyone on the wall could see it coming and could have told you roughly when. A siege announces itself for months.
The event our Lord is guarding here is one that arrives without a visible run-up — which is exactly why He goes straight from that verse into the days of Noah, into two men in a field, into a thief in the night and a servant who thought he had more time. That whole section only makes sense about something that cannot be calendared. The fall of Jerusalem could be calendared. This cannot.
The Pattern the Prophets Taught Us to Expect
So what do we do with the pieces that do fit AD 70 — the stones thrown down, the warning to flee to the mountains, the instruction not to turn back for a coat?
We do what the Old Testament trained us to do. Prophecy regularly speaks to a near horizon and a far one in the same breath. Isaiah announces a child born to Ahaz’s generation and a child born of a virgin. Joel describes a locust plague the farmers could see out the window and a day of the LORD still ahead. Zechariah puts a king on a donkey and a King with His feet on the Mount of Olives in the same book. The near event is real, and it is also a working model of the far one — a rehearsal in a smaller theater.
That is a disciplined reading, not a dodge. It takes the AD 70 language literally where the text points there, and it refuses to force cosmic, global, visible, angel-and-trumpet language into a local siege just to tidy up the chronology. The plain sense of words is the only safeguard any of us has against making prophecy mean whatever we need it to mean.
Why It Matters What You Are Still Waiting For
You might be wondering why a man should care about a dispute over a date in the first century.
Because what you believe is still coming is what shapes how you live this week. The two angels on the hill did not tell the disciples to go study. They said: “this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11, KJV). This same Jesus. In like manner. Bodily, visibly, personally — the way He left.
A church that believes everything is behind it has nothing to wake up for. It becomes an institution with a heritage. But a church that believes the Lord Himself may step back into history before the week is out lives differently, and John said exactly how: “every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3:3, KJV). The return is not a hobby for prophecy men. It is the engine of ordinary holiness.
So let the record stand on both sides. Jerusalem fell, exactly as He said, and that should settle forever whether His words come true. But the sun has not been darkened, no sign has appeared in heaven, the tribes of the earth have not mourned, and no trumpet has sounded over the four winds.
Which means the best of it is not behind us. He is still coming, and He is coming where everyone will see Him.
Live like a man who expects to be found working.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist