Standing in the Rubble of Testimony

Dear Ehud,

In this letter, I am going to start with the understanding that you have a high respect for Scripture. Although you are not yet at the point of affirming complete faith in its divine inspiration, you do take the prophets seriously, and have some sense of scriptural authority. You grew up with it, and it is deep within you.

So I am going to begin with the prophet Isaiah. but before going there, I want to show you how much this issue matters. Sadly, this is an area where I believe that Christians bear a large responsibility for how we have muted one of the loudest apologetic proofs that can be be found in the entire New Testament, second only to the resurrection. It is quite tragic, really.

Because we have not understood the nature of prophetic decreation language, we have interpreted the Lord’s words about the destruction of Jerusalem as referring to the end of the space/time continuum, when that is not what it was about at all.

We believe the words of Scripture, and so we then go out and look at the night sky. We saw the sun go down just a few hours ago, and the moon is still right there, and the stars are showing no instability at all. Ah, we say. Since these scriptural words are true, that must mean that these events are going to take place sometime in our future. At the end of the world, say.

But this kind of language occurs all through the Old Testament, and it is a prophet’s way of telling kings and potentates that “your lights are going to go out.” This kind of language always refers to the destruction of a city and/or nation. I mentioned that I was going to start with Isaiah, and so here we are. The Lord’s words above are a citation from Isaiah 13:10 and 34:4. In Isaiah 13, the prophet was predicting the destruction of Babylon (Is. 13:1), and in chapter 34, he was predicting the fall of Edom. Jesus quotes that language, applying it to Jerusalem. Joel 2:28-32 is talking about the desolation of Israel. Amos 8:9 is about the northern kingdom of Israel. Ezekiel 32:7 is about judgment coming to Egypt.

One of these texts, the one from Joel, was the text that Peter used in his great sermon at Pentecost. Keep in mind that the baptisms that occurred on Pentecost, around 3,000 of them, almost certainly took place at the doomed Temple. On the south side of the Temple, dozens of miqvahs—ritual baths—have been identified by archeologists. Now in this apocalyptic text from Joel, there were two parts, one predicting the giving of gifts, prophesy, visions, and dreams, with the second portion being darker, predicting the leveling of Jerusalem.

Now Peter quotes both portions of Joel’s vision, and he begins his sermon by saying “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:16)—and then he quotes the whole thing, starting with the extraordinary gifts and ending with the fireball.

Now at the beginning of Matthew 24, the Lord had plainly told His disciples that Jerusalem was doomed, and they had naturally asked when it was going to happen. His reply was that it was all going to come crashing down within one generation. “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34). Within one generation, the Lord said, not one stone was going to be left on another in that great Temple complex.

The Wailing Wall, with stones still intact, is not a standing refutation of this. It was not one of the Temple walls, but was rather a retaining wall, holding the ground on which the Temple was built. Moreover, it was the portion of the retaining wall that was just below the location of the Holy of Holies. And so when Jews go to that wall to pray, they are surrounded with the rubble of testimony.

The irony is excruciating. The Jews do not accept Christ as their Messiah, and yet the most devout of them conduct their devotions while standing in the middle of a great proof of His identity. But it gets even more painful. Christians, for their part, do believe that Christ was the Messiah, and that He was a true prophet of God, and yet almost all Christians think that Jesus was talking about the Second Coming in Matthew 24—and consequently His timeline placing it within “one generation” is treated as an embarrassment. Bertrand Russell pointed to the Lord’s failed expectation here as one of the reasons Russell was not a Christian. And even someone as doughty as C.S. Lewis misses at this point, calling this verse the “most embarrassing verse in the Bible.”

Instead of this, we ought to be pointing to Matthew 24 as the calling card of the most vindicated prophet in all of human history. The apocalyptic passages in Matthew, Mark, and Luke are a prophetic tour de force. All by themselves, they settle the question of who Jesus was.

Moses gave us two great criteria that would mark a true prophet. The first is that he could not lead God’s people away from the true God to an idol (Dt. 13: 1-5). The second criterion was that what he prophesied needed actually to come to pass. If the thing prophesied did not come to pass, then that meant the prophet had spoken presumptuously, in his own name (Dt. 18:22). This is why Isaiah can taunt the false gods of his day. “Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: Yea, do good, or do evil, That we may be dismayed, and behold it together” (Isaiah 41:23). The God of history holds the entire future in the palm of His hand, just as Jesus held the future of Jerusalem in the palm of His hand.

But there is more to this. Just before Moses stated that a prophet’s words had to be fulfilled, he said that God was going to raise up a Prophet just like Moses. And it was crucial that this Prophet be heeded.

So in Peter’s next sermon, after the healing of the man at the Beautiful Gate, the apostle brings up this prediction that Moses had made about the greater Prophet who was coming. The people of Israel were told by Moses to listen to what this prophet said. As Jews, they should certainly want to listen to Moses. And as Peter applied the passage, Moses also said that anybody who did not heed that coming prophet would be destroyed utterly (Acts 3: 23).

The gift of tongues given at Pentecost figures into this as well. Too many people think of the gifts of tongues as a sort of linguistic party time, when it was actually an additional indicator of impending doom for those who rejected the Prophet. The apostle Paul teaches us that tongues were a sign for unbelievers (1 Cor. 14: 22), but they were not just another marvel. They were a sign of pending judgment, and this goes back to the prophet Isaiah, a passage that Paul quotes just before he says that tongues were for the unbelievers. He is speaking of the unbelieving Jews.

Broken, snared, and taken. When the streets of your hometown are filled with a language that you cannot understand, this is a sign that judgment is falling. This is what the Pentecostal tongues in the streets of Jerusalem meant. This city will fall, and fall entirely. The first part of Joel’s vision had landed, that day, and the second part of it was on its inexorable way.

So Jesus Christ was the victim of a ghastly judicial murder, killed by the ungodly rulers who ran the ecclesiastical machinery of old Jerusalem. They falsely believed that they had successfully dispensed with the “Christ threat”—but He then ruined their plans by rising from the dead. Now this resurrected Lord had predicted that He would come back from the dead, as His enemies well knew (Matt. 27:63). This momentous prediction had been fulfilled, as they also well knew (Matt. 28:11-15).

But in addition to this, remember that He had also predicted Jerusalem would be flattened within one generation (Matt.24:34). This meant the city was now on death row, and the clock running down. No wonder the early Christians were liquidating assets. They were listening to the sermons.

The resurrection was therefore the guarantee that the destruction to follow was certain. The rulers had killed a man whose predictions had, to date, all come true. So why wouldn’t this one come true? So this was the context in which the great apostle Peter was offering the miscreants terms. He was giving them a chance to surrender and repent.

Many did believe, but—in the teeth of the evidence—many others did not. The stones, scattered about the Temple complex, are still there, and like the hearts of those who will not see the force of this historical argument, they are still very hard.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson