Olivet Discourse
[3]: p.5 Preterists believe the passage largely refers to events surrounding the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem[4][5] and as such is used to date the Gospel of Mark around the year 70.
After Jesus described the "abomination that causes desolation", he warns that the people of Judea should flee to the mountains as a matter of such urgency that they shouldn't even return to get things from their homes.
Jesus then states that immediately after the time of tribulation people would see a sign, "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken".
[18] Jesus states that after the time of tribulation and the sign of the Sun, Moon, and stars going dark the Son of Man would be seen arriving in the clouds with power and great glory.
(Matthew 24:31) Those who subscribe to the doctrine of the "rapture" (a view popular in American Evangelicalism) find support in this verse, reading this as meaning that people would be gathered from Earth and taken to heaven.
This directly relates to a quotation from the Book of Zechariah in which God (and the contents of heaven in general) will come to Earth and live among the elect, who by necessity are gathered together for this purpose.
[19] In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus was reported to have told his disciples, "Truly I tell you, this generation [greek: genea] will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.
[22][23][24] The Danish linguist Iver Larsen argues that the word "generation" as it was used in the English King James Version of the Bible (1611) had a much wider meaning than it has today, and that the correct current translation of genea (in the specific context of the second coming story) should be "kind of people."
"[25] According to Larsen, the Oxford Universal Dictionary states that the latest attested use of genea in the sense of "class, kind or set of persons" took place in 1727.
[26] Bible scholar Philip La Grange du Toit argues that genea is mostly used to describe a timeless and spiritual family/lineage of good or bad people in The New Testament, and that this is the case also for the second coming discourse in Matthew 24.
In his popular book, The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, evangelical Christian author Hal Lindsey argued that prophetical information in Matthew 24 indicates that the "generation" witnessing the "rebirth of Israel" is the same generation that will observe the fulfillment of the "signs" referred to in Matthew 24:1–33—and that would be consummated by the second coming of Christ in approximately 1988.
"[33] Lindsey later stretched his forty-year timetable to as long as one hundred years, writing that he was no longer certain that the terminal "generation" commenced with the rebirth of Israel.
[3] Within conservative, evangelical Christian thought, two opposite viewpoints of the Great Tribulation have been expressed in a debate between theologians Kenneth L. Gentry and Thomas Ice.
