DAY 154
CHALLENGE
“In his discourse about the destruction of the temple, Jesus said, ‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken’ (Mark 13:24–25). Those things never happened, so Jesus prophesied falsely.”
DEFENSE
The imagery Jesus used does not imply the end of the world.
Some understand the imagery as familiar phenomena: a solar eclipse (sun darkening), a lunar eclipse (moon not giving light), a meteor shower (stars falling). If Jesus merely meant these would occur before the temple’s destruction in A.D. 70, he was not predicting that the world would end.
However, there is another understanding. The prophets often used “cosmic cataclysm” language to announce God’s judgment on a people (see, e.g., Isa. 13:10; 24:18–23; 34:4; Ezek. 32:7; Amos 8:9; Joel 2:10, 31; Hag. 2:22).
Thus Isaiah 13 contains an oracle against Babylon that says, “The stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising and the moon will not shed its light” (v. 10), and God “will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place” (v. 13). The oracle also makes clear how the judgment on the Babylonians will be accomplished: “I am stirring up the Medes against them” (v. 17).
This conflict and others the prophets predicted using similar language were long over by Jesus’ day, and none involved a literal cosmic cataclysm. Thus the language was seen for what it was: a poetic expression of what the experience of living through judgment would be like. For those experiencing it, it would be as if the sun and moon darkened and the stars fell from the sky. Further, some saw the celestial bodies as symbols of the rulers of the people, who would quake and lose their positions in the turmoil.
It is no surprise to find Jesus using the same language describing the coming judgment on Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.
TIP
The prophets’ language has been understood this way for a long time. See the work of the twelfth-century Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed 2:29).