What is the significance of the fig tree in Matthew 24?

Question 10163.

The fig tree in Matthew 24 has carried more prophetic weight over the last seventy years than almost any other image in the Gospels, and I think it has been asked to carry rather more than it can bear. Jesus tells his disciples to learn a lesson from the fig tree, and a great many teachers have concluded that the lesson is a coded reference to the rebirth of Israel.

So what did Jesus actually mean? The answer is available to anyone willing to read the sentence in front of them rather than the sentence they have been told is there.

What Jesus said about the fig tree

The saying comes near the end of the Olivet Discourse. Having described the horrors of the Tribulation and his own return in power, Jesus says that from the fig tree we should learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, we know that summer is near (Matthew 24:32). So also, when we see all these things, we know that he is near, at the very gates.

Notice the shape of the illustration. It is an argument from the obvious. Everyone in Galilee knew that a tree in leaf meant summer was coming. Nobody needed a prophet to work that out. Jesus is saying that the events he has just described will be equally readable to the people who live through them.

Luke’s version puts the matter beyond doubt. He records Jesus saying, look at the fig tree, and all the trees. If the tree were a secret symbol of Israel, adding all the other trees would ruin the code entirely. Luke’s phrasing tells us we are dealing with an illustration from nature, not an allegory of national politics.

Is the fig tree a symbol of Israel?

The idea did not come from nowhere. There are Old Testament passages where figs picture Israel, most memorably Jeremiah’s basket of good and bad figs, and there is Jesus cursing a barren tree in the week of his passion, which most commentators rightly read as an acted parable about fruitless national religion.

So the symbolic use exists. What does not exist is any indication that Jesus is using it symbolically here. In this context the tree is doing what such trees do in ordinary Galilean life, which is announcing summer. When a preacher moves from the fig tree can symbolise Israel to it must symbolise Israel here, an argument has been smuggled in without being made.

The popular version goes further still. It says the budding is 1948, that a generation is forty years, and that therefore the Lord had to return by 1988. That calculation was published, believed, and falsified. I have written elsewhere about whether modern Israel is prophetically significant, and I think it is, but not by this route.

Reading the parable in its own setting

The disciples had asked two questions on the Mount of Olives: when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age. The whole discourse answers those questions for people who will be living through the Tribulation. The illustration belongs to them.

For those readers, the signs are not subtle. There is a covenant broken at the midpoint, an abomination standing where it ought not, a flight from Judea, cosmic disturbance, and finally the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. A believer in that period does not need a prophecy chart. He needs only to look up, in the same way a farmer looks at a tree in leaf and knows the season.

This is why the passage sits so awkwardly in Church age speculation. It was never given to help us calculate a date. It was given to assure a future generation that when the events arrive, they will be recognisable. That is a pastoral promise, not a puzzle.

Summer is near, but nobody names the day

There is a fine irony in the way this passage gets used, because two verses later Jesus says that concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. The fig tree tells you the season. It does not tell you the date. Anyone who uses it to fix a year has read the illustration and ignored the application that immediately follows it.

The same tension runs through the whole New Testament. Believers are told to watch, to be ready, to live as those expecting their Lord, and at the same time they are told they cannot know the timing. Those two commands are not in conflict. Readiness is not a calculation. It is a way of living.

I find that liberating. If I could work out the date, my obedience would become a matter of scheduling. Because I cannot, my obedience has to become a matter of character. The illustration encourages watchfulness precisely by refusing to satisfy curiosity.

What about the generation that will not pass away?

The sentence immediately after this illustration is the one about this generation not passing away until all these things take place, and it has generated its own literature. I deal with it separately when I ask what Jesus meant by this generation, so I will say only this here.

The most natural reading, and the one that fits the fig tree illustration, is that the generation which sees these things begin will see them completed. The Tribulation is not a slow burn across centuries. It is a compressed seven year period, and the people who watch the branch grow tender will still be alive when summer arrives.

Read that way, the two sayings reinforce one another. Both are saying that the end time events belong together, in one lifetime, recognisable to those who live through them.

Why this matters for how we handle prophecy

Every time a confident prophetic calculation collapses, ordinary Christians pay the price. Some lose confidence in the Bible, though the Bible never made the prediction. Others become cynical about prophecy altogether and quietly stop reading a quarter of their Bibles. Others take up the next chart with undimmed enthusiasm, which is the strangest response of all.

The remedy is not to abandon prophecy but to read it the way we read the rest of Scripture: literally where it speaks literally, figuratively where it signals figure, and always in context. A fig tree in a parable about seasons is a tree. If the Holy Spirit had wanted us to see Israel there, he was quite capable of saying so, as he does plainly in dozens of other places.

If you want to see the wider approach, my treatment of the Olivet Discourse as a whole sets each section in its place, and the Greek word for generation, genea, repays a careful look in a lexicon before anyone builds a timetable on it.

Watching without wishful thinking

There is a way of reading the Bible that is really a way of reading the newspaper, and it has been the ruin of a lot of good prophecy teaching. The method works backwards: start with today’s crisis, find a verse that can be bent around it, announce the fulfilment, and move on to the next crisis when the first one resolves itself. Nobody ever apologises, because a new headline always arrives in time.

Jesus offers something better and considerably less exciting. He tells his people what will happen, he tells them it will be unmistakable when it happens, and he tells them nobody knows the day or the hour (Matthew 24:36). Everything between those two statements is meant to produce endurance rather than calculation.

The Greek verb behind watch in this discourse, gregoreo, means to stay awake, to be alert. It is the word for a night watchman rather than a fortune teller. His job is not to predict when the enemy will come. His job is to be awake when he does. That is a considerably more demanding calling than working out dates, which is perhaps why so many prefer the dates.

So when I am asked whether some current event fulfils the fig tree, I generally answer with a question of my own. Would knowing the answer make you a holier man this week? If not, the honest thing is to leave the timing with the Father, where Jesus explicitly left it, and get on with the work he gave us in the meantime.

So, now what?

Learn the lesson Jesus actually gave. He pointed at a common tree and said that God’s calendar is legible to those who are watching. Not predictable, legible. That should make us alert rather than clever.

So let the fig tree do its proper work in your soul. Live as though your Lord might come today, serve as though you have forty years of work ahead, and refuse to be either bored by prophecy or intoxicated by it. When was the last time the return of Jesus changed anything about your Tuesday?

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. So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates.

Matthew 24:32-33, ESV