The Olivet Discourse Part III

Those who have attempted to date the rapture or the Second Coming of the Messiah have often misused this section. The fig tree is often taken to mean the re-establishment of The State of Israel in 1948. Then, within a generation, that is forty years or so from 1948 the Second Coming must occur. This would place the Second Coming in 1988. Because the Rapture precedes the Second Coming by at least seven years, it would place the Rapture by 1981. This is simply date setting; something the Scriptures clearly forbid. Nevertheless, date-setters continue to revise their 1988 “prophecy” year after year. Since 1988 has now come and gone, the new focus is to start the forty years with Six-Day war in 1967. So now, some are predicting the return of the Lord around 2006-2007.

There are two errors in this type of reasoning and its exposition. First, the Bible nowhere limits the period of a generation to simply forty years. The one place where the term “generation” is given a specific length of time, it is reckoned to be one hundred years (Genesis 15: 13-16). Actually the term “generation” can mean “twenty”, “forty”, “seventy”,” eighty” or a “hundred years.” Sometimes it simply means “contemporaries, much as we use the term today. That is the way it is used here. A second mistake made in this reasoning is assuming that the fig tree is a symbol of Israel and that this passage is speaking of the re-establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. This has not been mentioned anywhere is the entire Olivet Discourse. The re-establishment of Israel has merely been assumed and presupposed in the passage, but, it has never been dealt with specifically. Furthermore, the usual scriptural symbol of Israel is the vine.