The Olivet Discourse

Mark 13:1-27 · 2025-03-02 · Jason Wolin · Gospel of Mark | Cross and Crown

Mark 13:1-27 · Prophecy. The Olivet Discourse — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

The Olivet Discourse Slideshow for this message PDF Message Download Well today we come to one of the most important prophetic sections of our Bibles. It’s referred to as the Olivet Discourse. For Bible-loving, Bible-believing Christians, there is a lot of debate on this section. Leon Morris says that the reason for this kind of controversial debate is because “there are some puzzling exegetical problems.” That is a serious understatement. That’s kind of like saying, “The sun is pretty hot.” That’s not wrong. You open the door into Mark 13, it’s easy to feel like you stumbled into Alice in Wonderland. So on the one hand we want acknowledge the genuine complexity of the passage, but it would be wrong to go so far as to create despair. God gave this to us to be understood. And let’s just be clear as to where the difficulty lies. The difficulty is not in understanding what is being predicted! That is pretty obvious. Even a child could understand it. But the question is when. Everyone who reads the passage tries to discern how much of what Jesus says has to do specifically with the issue of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem that occurred in 70AD and how much of what Jesus has to say has to do with events still future to us. Background As with most problem passages in the Bible, I think the key is the context. ** So let’s ask this question: what gave rise to this red-letter portion of our Bibles? What’s the context? Two things to say. There’s an ethnic context and there’s an event context. Let’s start with this ethnic context. This might seem insultingly obvious, but bear with me. Jesus is a Jew speaking to Jews. We picture Christianity as a religion carried forward by Augustine and Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards. Okay, but salvation is of the Jews. Jesus is not a Roman Catholic Priest. He’s not Greek Orthodox Monk. Jesus is most certainly not an American. Jesus is a Jew. He did not come to the land of Turkey. He did not come to give a message to Greece. Jesus came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And God’s plan has always been to work THROUGH the JEWISH people, to save the world through a JEWISH Messiah who would reign over his JEWISH kingdom. When Jesus is answering this question about end times, the entire thing is framed from this perspective. He’s quoting from Jewish prophecies made to the nation of Israel. That’s the foundation for the content he is about to give. That’s the first piece of context you need. There’s an ethnic context. Now here’s the second piece you need. The event context. We need to rewind about six months. If you recall, in the last 6 months of Jesus’ ministry there were three successive death threats upon Jesus. We’ve referenced those several times. After that third death threat in John 10 at the feast of de…

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