The Sign of the Son Of Man - Matthew 24:29-31
But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky; and the powers of the heavens will be shaken, and then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky; and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other. (24:29-31)
In clear, concise, straightforward terms the Lord Himself describes what will be the most momentous event of all time, His return to earth in divine glory. Throughout the history of the church, believers have looked forward with earnest anticipation to the coming again of their Lord Jesus Christ. Paul wrote to Titus,
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus” (Titus 2:11-13).
Believers are continually to live righteous lives, motivated in great part by their continual expectation of the Lord’s return. Much of the world is familiar with the circumstances and features of Christ’s first coming, such as His birth in Bethlehem, the magi guided by the star and bringing Him gifts, and the shepherds in the fields hearing the angel choir. Many people have heard something about His teachings and miracles and His crucifixion and resurrection. But even many professed Christians are little acquainted with what Scripture teaches about His second coming.
In Matthew 24:29-31, Jesus gives a vivid picture of the moment of His appearing, the sign of all signs of His coming again and of the end of the age, about which the disciples had just inquired (v. 3). Within these three verses Jesus presents five key truths about this supreme sign of His appearance:
- The sequence of events (v. 29a),
- The scene in the heavens (v. 29b),
- The sign in the sky (v. 30a),
- The strength and glory of the Lord (v. 30b), and
- The selection by the angels (v. 31).
1. The Sequence of Events
But immediately after the tribulation of those days (24:29a)
Jesus states unequivocally that the central sign of His return will occur immediately after the tribulation of those days, that is, at the end of the Great Tribulation (v. 21), the second three and a half years of the seven-year Tribulation period.
The context makes clear that those days refer to the preceding days of tribulation that Jesus has just been describing (vv. 4-28). They are the final days of unsurpassed tragedy (v. 21) that will mark the end of the present world age, days during which sin will be unrestrained on the earth, the church will have been raptured, and Satan will have been allowed almost unrestricted freedom in his final but futile attempt to usurp rule of the earth for himself.
With the abomination of desolation (v. 15) Satan will inaugurate the Great Tribulation, desecrating the restored Temple and slaughtering every Jew and Christian he can lay hands on. The Lord’s coming to reign will take place at the conclusion of this time of tribulation. As was noted in the last message, during those days, two out of three Jews in Palestine will be slaughtered, only a third being preserved (Zech. 13:8-9). 144,000 of them will be saved to evangelize the world, 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel (Rev. 7:4; cf. 14:1-5). Those Jews will be supernaturally sealed and protected by God, and no effort by the Antichrist or his collaborators will be able to destroy them.
2. The Scene in the Heavens
the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky; and the powers of the heavens will be shaken, (24:29b)
Jesus here describes the heavenly setting of His appearance. The whole universe will begin to disintegrate, apparently with great rapidity. The sun… and the moon will cease to give light, and the stars will even fall from the sky. From Luke’s parallel account we learn that there will be
“dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the power of the heavens will be shaken” (Luke 21:25-26).
The events will be so calamitous that men will faint from absolute terror. The Greek term behind “faint” means to expire or stop breathing, indicating that people will literally die of fright. No hurricane, tornado, tidal wave, earthquake, volcanic eruption, or combination of those natural disasters in history will have approached the extreme disruption of those end-time days. During that time the powers of the heavens will be shaken by Jesus Christ, the One who “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:3).
Just as He created everything, He also sustains everything, and without His full sustaining power, gravity will weaken and the orbits of the stars and planets will fluctuate. Astronomers can predict coming stellar events centuries in advance only because of the absolute consistency of the divinely ordered and uniform laws that control the operation of the stars and planets. But when the Lord withdraws the least of His power from the universe, nothing in it will function normally, and every aspect of the physical world will be disrupted beyond imagination.
All the forces of energy; here called powers of the heavens, which hold everything in space constant, will be in dysfunction. The heavenly bodies will careen helter-skelter through space, and all navigation, whether stellar, solar, magnetic, or gyroscopic, will be futile because all stable reference points and uniform natural forces will have ceased to exist or else become unreliable. The earth is held together by the power of God, and when that power is diminished, the resulting chaos will be inconceivable.
Speculations such as the one just cited, no matter how scientifically derived, can only remotely approximate what the actual situation will be like. But just as the withdrawal of a small part of God’s sustaining power will cause such pervasive chaos and destruction, so will His supernatural control of that disintegration prevent the total destruction of the earth. His sovereign power will preserve and restore it and its people for the establishing of His millennial kingdom. Some seven centuries before Christ, Isaiah had predicted the end-time devastation:
Wail, for the day of the Lord is near! It will come as destruction from the Almighty. Therefore all hands will fall limp, and every mars’ heart will melt. And they will be terrified, pains and anguish will take hold of them; they will writhe like a woman in labor, they will look at one another in astonishment, their faces aflame. Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, cruel, with fury and burning anger, to make the land a desolation; and He will exterminate its sinners from it. For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their light; the sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will not shed its light. Thus I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud, and abase the haughtiness of the ruthless. I will make mortal man scarcer than pure gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir. (Isa. 13:6-12)
Although that prophecy applied immediately to the destruction of Babylon (v. 1; cf. Dan. 5:30-31), which occurred in 539 B.C., those events described by Isaiah are obviously far too universal and catastrophic to have related entirely to Babylon. The devastation of ancient Babylon was but a microcosm of what will happen to the whole universe in the end time. Isaiah continues to depict events that could in no way describe the relatively mild and confined judgment on Babylon by the Medo-Persians (v. 17).
Therefore I shall make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken from its place at the fury of the Lord of hosts in the day of His burning anger. And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, or like sheep with none to gather them, they will each turn to his own people, and each one flee to his own land. Anyone who is found will be thrust through, and anyone who is captured will fall by the sword. Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished. (vv. 13-16)
That series of catastrophes is clearly worldwide, affecting all nations and all people. Isaiah later presents still further details of end-time destruction:
Draw near, O nations, to hear; and listen, O peoples! Let the earth and all it contains hear, and the world and all that springs from it. For the Lord’s indignation is against all the nations, and His wrath against all their armies; He has utterly destroyed them, He has given them over to slaughter. So their slain will be thrown out, and their corpses will give off their stench, and the mountains will be drenched with their blood. And all the host of heaven will wear away and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; all their hosts will also wither away as a leaf withers from the vine, or as one withers from the fig tree. For My sword is satiated in heaven, behold it shall descend for judgment upon Edom, and upon the people whom I have devoted to destruction. (34:1-5)
It is from those passages in Isaiah that Jesus’ teaching and John’s vision were drawn. Edom is the southernmost region to which the great battle of Armageddon will extend. The total area involved will be two hundred miles long (Rev. 14:20), stretching from Bozrah, the capital of Edom, in the south (see Isa. 34:6) to the hills of Lebanon, just north of the Valley of Armageddon.
About a hundred years before Isaiah, the prophet Joel wrote of a vast, incredibly devastating locust plague that foreshadowed the disasters of the end time, the coming “day of the Lord” (Joel 2:1). The locusts marched across the land like a destroying army
“Before them the earth quakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and the moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness. And the Lord utters His voice before His army; surely His camp is very great, for strong is He who carries out His word. The day of the Lord is indeed great and very awesome, and who can endure it?” (vv. 10-11; cf. vv. 4-5).
The blotting out of natural light by those billions of insects illustrates the vastly greater darkening of the heavens by the direct intervention of God in the end time. The Lord continued to declare through Joel;
“And I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, blood, fire, and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes” (vv. 30-31; cf. Rev. 6:12-13).
The prophet Haggai wrote,
“For thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Once more in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea also and the dry land. And I will shake all the nations; and they will come with the wealth of all nations; and I will fill this house with glory’” (Hag. 2:6-7).
That is the time, Paul says, that the cursed universe is anxiously awaiting.
“For the creation was subjected to futility not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:19-22).
Continued Tomorrow
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