Sermon Tone Analysis

Some of the marble columns were forty feet tall.

Contemporary apocalyptic teaching offered various signs by which men might know that the End was near.

Luke has already shown that Jesus rejected any such use of signs to calculate when the kingdom of God would come, and that he taught that the Son of man would come suddenly and unexpectedly; men, therefore, could not live carelessly until the End was drawing near and then reform themselves at the last minute.

This lesson needed to be reinforced, especially in relation to the tradition that Jesus had given teaching on signs indicating the approach of the End.

Luke, therefore, tries to show that various events, which might be regarded as signs of the End, were not in fact such signs.

Even the fall of Jerusalem would not be followed immediately by the End.

But the fact that Jesus had spoken of signs could not be edited away, and there is a certain tension in the discourse between the recognition that there will be signs of the End and the fact that the End will be sudden and unexpected.

There is no point in trusting in the temple, for one day it will be destroyed.

Blood ties are strong, and so is friendship, but hatred of Christ and the gospel destroys them utterly and turns them into the very opposite.

We must mind Chesterton’s dictum: “It is only the fool who tries to get the heavens inside his head, and not unnaturally his head bursts.

The wise man is content to get his head inside the heavens.”