What did Jesus mean when He said ‘this generation will not pass away’?

Question 10164.

This generation will not pass away until all these things take place. That sentence, spoken by Jesus on the Mount of Olives, has been called the most difficult verse in the Gospels, and sceptics have used it for two centuries to argue that Jesus predicted his return within a few decades and was simply wrong.

I take the charge seriously, because a believer who cannot face a hard verse honestly has not really believed the easy ones. So let us look at what this generation means, what the alternatives are, and which reading actually fits the passage.

The problem stated plainly

In Matthew 24:34 Jesus says, truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place (Matthew 24:34). The immediately preceding verses describe the abomination of desolation, unparalleled tribulation, the darkening of the sun and moon, and the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

The difficulty is obvious. If this generation means the people standing in front of Jesus in about AD 33, then all these things should have happened before roughly AD 70. Some of them arguably did. The destruction of Jerusalem was catastrophic and the temple was levelled. But the Son of Man did not appear on the clouds, the tribes of the earth did not mourn at his coming, and no angels gathered the elect from the four winds.

So either Jesus was mistaken, or this generation does not mean what the sceptic assumes. Since I am not willing to entertain the first option, the honest task is to examine the second carefully rather than reaching for a convenient escape.

The Greek word behind this generation

The word is genea, and it normally refers to the people living at a given time, a generation in the ordinary sense of the word. Some older commentators argued that it can mean race or kind, so that Jesus was promising the preservation of the Jewish people until the end. That is a defensible sense in a handful of texts, and the promise itself is thoroughly biblical.

I am not persuaded that it is the sense here, though. When Jesus uses this generation elsewhere in Matthew he is nearly always addressing the moral character of his contemporaries, calling them an evil and adulterous generation or a faithless and twisted generation. The word is doing sociological work, not ethnic work.

So I would rather not solve the problem by redefining the noun. The better solution lies in the little word this, and in identifying which generation Jesus has in view when he says it.

Which generation is this generation?

The whole Olivet Discourse is an answer to a question about the future. The disciples asked when these things would be and what would be the sign of his coming and of the close of the age. Jesus then describes a period he calls the great tribulation, gives instructions to people who will be living in Judea at the time, and tells them what to watch for.

Throughout that section the audience is a future audience. When you see the abomination of desolation, then let those who are in Judea flee. Those hearers are the people of the Tribulation, not the men on the hillside. The fig tree illustration two verses earlier says the same thing: when you see all these things, you know that he is near.

Read in that flow, this generation means the generation that sees these things begin. Jesus is promising that once the events of the seventieth week are under way, they will run to completion within one lifetime. The Tribulation will not be a slow unwinding over centuries. It is seven years, and the people who see it start will see the King arrive.

Why the preterist reading does not satisfy

The main alternative is preterism, which holds that all these things were fulfilled in AD 70. There is real substance in the observation that Jerusalem’s fall was a genuine judgement and that Jesus predicted it. Luke 21 in particular contains material about armies surrounding Jerusalem that reads naturally of that event.

The difficulty is everything else. Jesus speaks of tribulation such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. Terrible as AD 70 was, and Josephus makes hard reading, the twentieth century alone produced worse. He speaks of a coming visible to all, like lightning from east to west, and of angels gathering the elect. Turning that into a description of Roman legions requires a symbolic method that would let a text mean nearly anything.

I have set out the wider case when asking what preterism is and whether Revelation has already happened. My conclusion is the same in both places. The AD 70 reading purchases an easy answer to this generation at the cost of emptying the return of Jesus of its plain meaning.

The other proposed solutions

Some suggest that this generation means the generation of 1948, on the assumption that the fig tree of the previous verse stands for Israel and a generation is forty years. That gave us 1988 and a famous booklet. The booklet was wrong, and the method was worse than the result, because it did the one thing Jesus explicitly forbids in the next breath.

Others take this generation to mean this kind of unbelieving people, so that Jesus is saying opposition to God will persist until the end. That is true as a statement, and it is close to how the phrase functions in some Old Testament texts, but it makes the promise oddly toothless in a context that is otherwise full of specific timing.

A further group treat the whole sentence as a general assurance that the age will not end before God’s purposes are complete. Again, true, and again, thinner than the sentence deserves. Jesus says will not pass away until, which is the language of a boundary, not of a general principle.

The pastoral point Jesus was making

Step back from the debate and notice what the sentence does for its intended hearers. Someone living through the Tribulation, watching an image erected in a rebuilt sanctuary, hunted for refusing a mark, would have every reason to fear that the darkness would simply go on for ever. Jesus tells them it will not. Their own generation will see the end of it.

Then he adds the guarantee: heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. The permanence of creation is the weaker thing in that comparison. The stars are less durable than the promise. That is the sort of assurance you can put your weight on when the sky is going dark.

This is also why I resist turning the verse into ammunition, whether for sceptics or for chart makers. It was given to strengthen frightened saints. Any interpretation that leaves it unable to do that job has probably missed the point even if it wins the argument.

Reading hard verses honestly

There is a habit of mind I want to commend here. When a verse looks like a problem, the first move is not to explain it away and it is not to panic. The first move is to ask what question the passage is answering and who is being addressed. Nine difficulties in ten dissolve at that point, and the tenth teaches you humility.

I would rather hold a text open and unresolved than force it into a system. As it happens, I do not think this text has to be held open. The future generation reading fits the discourse, fits the fig tree illustration in the previous verses, fits the Old Testament background of Daniel’s seventieth week, and leaves the return of Jesus exactly where the rest of the New Testament leaves it.

It also leaves the sceptic’s objection without much to stand on. Jesus did not fail a prediction. He gave a promise to people who are not yet born, and that promise is still waiting to be collected.

What Mark and Luke add

Matthew is not our only witness. Mark 13 carries the same saying almost word for word, and Luke 21 carries it with a difference of emphasis that has fuelled much of the debate. Luke includes material about Jerusalem being surrounded by armies and about the times of the Gentiles being fulfilled, which many take as a description of AD 70 and the long period that followed.

I think Luke is doing something deliberate. He has a near horizon and a far horizon in view, and he moves between them in the way the Old Testament prophets constantly do. The fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 was a genuine judgement and a genuine preview, and the language of Luke 21:24 about Jerusalem being trampled by the Gentiles until their times are fulfilled implies a period that has a stated end and therefore a future beyond it.

Read together, the three accounts point the same way. This generation belongs to the people who see the final sequence begin. The AD 70 material in Luke is preparatory, showing what judgement on the city looks like when it comes, without exhausting what Jesus said about his own return in glory.

Did the apostles expect an immediate end?

A related objection says the apostles clearly expected the end within their own lifetimes, so Jesus must have taught them to. I would put it differently. They expected their Lord at any moment, which is not the same thing, and that expectation is exactly what the doctrine of imminence produces. I have set this out when asking about the doctrine of imminence.

Watch how Paul handles it. He can write we who are alive, who are left, including himself among those who might be caught up, and he can also write that he is being poured out as a drink offering and that the time of his departure has come. Both are true at once for a man who believes his Lord could come today and might not come for a century.

That is why I do not read this generation as a failed prediction of an apostolic era return. Peter, writing late, deals directly with the scoffers who ask where is the promise of his coming, and his answer is not embarrassment but patience: with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and the delay is mercy giving room for repentance.

What hangs on getting this right

Some questions can be left comfortably open. This one has consequences. If this generation means the contemporaries of Jesus and the events did not occur, then either the Gospels misreport him or he was mistaken, and both conclusions cut at the root of everything else we believe about him.

If instead we rescue the verse by making the return of Jesus a symbolic description of AD 70, we have kept his accuracy and lost his promise. The blessed hope becomes an event in Roman military history. That is a high price to pay for solving a difficulty, and I notice that the New Testament writers after AD 70 do not behave like men whose hope has already been fulfilled.

The future generation reading keeps both the accuracy and the promise. It also fits the way Jesus has been speaking throughout the discourse, addressing people who will live through events that have not yet begun. When a reading holds a text together without straining any part of it, that is usually a sign you are close to what the author meant.

How the early church handled the delay

It is worth asking what happened after AD 70, because if this generation had been understood as a prediction that failed, we would expect to see the church in crisis about it. We do not. The generation that followed the fall of Jerusalem went on preaching the return of Jesus with complete confidence, and the writings that survive from that period breathe expectation rather than embarrassment.

Clement of Rome, writing near the end of the first century, still urges his readers to look for the coming of the Lord. The Didache closes with an eschatological section that assumes the whole programme is still ahead. These are men close enough to the events to know if a promise had collapsed, and they show no sign of having noticed one.

That silence is evidence. The early believers had access to the same sayings we do and to people who had heard them spoken. If this generation had meant the audience on the Mount of Olives, the failure would have been unavoidable and the apologetic scrambling would be all over the second century literature. Instead the hope continues undisturbed, which suggests they read the saying much as I am reading it here.

The one place where the question surfaces is in Peter’s second letter, and there the scoffers are not disappointed Christians but mockers outside the church who use the passing of time as an argument. Peter’s reply treats the delay as deliberate and merciful rather than as evidence of a mistake, which is precisely how a promise about a future generation ought to be defended.

There is one more consideration that weighs with me. Jesus had already told his disciples plainly that he did not know the day or the hour, and a man who freely admits the limits of his knowledge is not the sort of man who then invents a confident timetable two sentences later. The humility of verse 36 guards the meaning of verse 34.

Taken together, the discourse gives us a Saviour who tells his people what will happen, refuses to tell them when, and guarantees that once it starts it will finish quickly. That is a coherent message, and it has been sustaining persecuted believers for two thousand years without needing rescue from its friends.

So, now what?

If this verse has ever troubled you, let the answer do more than settle an argument. Notice how carefully Jesus pastors people he will not meet for centuries. He knows what the worst period of human history will feel like from the inside, and he sends comfort ahead of time.

That is the God we are dealing with. He speaks into futures we cannot see and he keeps his word across generations who never met one another. If he takes that much care over believers in the Tribulation, what makes you think he has overlooked your situation this week?

Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

Matthew 24:34-35, ESV

For Further Study

J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come and John Walvoord’s The Return of the Lord both handle the Olivet Discourse at length from a futurist standpoint, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s The Footsteps of the Messiah traces the Jewish background of the discourse in detail. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology gives a compact summary of the interpretive options, while Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology surveys the wider debate more evenhandedly than most, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology represents the older dispensational treatment of the passage.