What Means the Olivet Prophecy?

The Olivet prophecy includes the warning that before the return of the Son of man, there will be wars and rumors of wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes.  This has always puzzled me because for something to be a sign of such a significant event, it seems to me that it would have to be new phenomenon and not something that happens all the time anyway. I mean, Jesus may as well have said that before he comes, men will be inhaling and exhaling, seeking food, drinking water and having showers. That is stuff that goes on all the time….just like wars, hunger, disease epidemics and seismic activity. Hardly signs of anything.  But wait…..what if these phenomena ceased for a time and then began again? That resumption of activity would be out of the ordinary and could be a sign.

On the other hand, maybe what Jesus is saying in response to the question put to him at Matthew 24:3 is that there will be wars, etc., but those are not the sign of the end of this age. No, the sign is at verse 14: the good news of the Kingdom is to be preached to the whole world and then shall the end come.  But it has been preached everywhere, hasn’t it?  Still no end of the world.  He keeps on discussing the issue and then in verses 37-39 he says that his coming will be at a time that is no different from the lead-up to the last worldwide catastrophe: people will be going about their business and will be unaware that anything is about to happen. Because there is not sign ahead of it?  No, because they aren’t aware of the sign.

I confess that his meaning in the Olivet prophecy isn’t quite as clear to me as I one time thought. Yes, I get the correlation between the 7 seals of Revelation and the details of this prophecy, and it is an attention grabber for sure, but the fact remains that the wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes of which Jesus spoke are on the decline.

It was one time typical for about 10% of deaths to be by violence, but now it is only about 1%. Wars are greatly on the decline and so are murders.

More people die now from too much food than from too little. Famines just don’t exist any longer except where men have caused them for political or military reasons. Then it isn’t an issue of lack of food production, but of food distribution.

Pestilences no longer are the issue they onetime were. We have nothing like the Black Death or the Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions of people. Even the potentially genocidal Ebola plague only killed about 10,000 people.

Earthquakes are waning. The 1970s had about 4 times the seismic activity we have today if I understand the facts.

Maybe Y’shuah was listing conditions that would occur before his coming, but not meaning they would last right up that momentous event. In fact, there is only one condition that he seems to say will always be happening through history: false religious teachers claiming his authority (Mt 24: 4-5, 23-26). 

In the end, he says that the main thing is to be ready. You don’t know when he is returning, so be ready for it to happen at any time (vs. 44-51).