The Shape of Matthew 24-25: Overview

Jesus’ Olivet discourse—especially in Matthew—is a difficult text for which no school of interpretation can supply a satisfactory explanation. However, when understood as a Levitical harvest offering, it makes perfect sense.

Matthew’s Olivet Discourse is one of those “chicanes” of controversy in the “racetrack” of expository preaching that the sensible pastor dreads. If he can just make it through to the other side without any scrapes, he will live to preach another day. In contrast, the “Bible prophecy expert” revels in the apparent complications and illustrates them with charts that make God’s method in history look like sheer lunacy. Why did the Bible need to be so complicated?

While the Bible appears to be complicated, it is merely detailed, patterned like tessellated tiles or the feathers on a peacock. Since it is comprised of related iterations of the same “covenant” pattern, working at multiple levels, it can all be made sense of with a single key, and that key is the Bible Matrix.

Matthew 24 is no exception. When the covenant-literary pattern is identified in the text, not only the events described but also their arrangement suddenly make perfect sense. While the growing library of preterist commentary on this passage is a welcome development, our failure to take its covenant-literary structure into account hamstrings our understanding of its full meaning, and we are limited to the level of proof-texting isolated “tiles” without an understanding of the complete mosaic that Jesus is constructing.

Overview

The Book of Matthew works through the same fivefold covenant pattern as the Pentateuch, and each of those five sections works through the same pattern. Matthew 24 is part of the Oath/Sanctions step within the Oath/Sanctions cycle (see The Shape of Matthew’s Gospel). Thus, in a fractal sense, it is the judgment step within the judgment cycle, a sword within a sword.

Once the structure is identified, it can be observed that chapters 24 and 25 comprise a single sevenfold cycle, one that works its way, step by step, through Israel’s harvest year (as described in Leviticus 23) which in turn recapitulates the sequence of events in Genesis 1. What did this careful sequencing indicate to the informed reader, one whose heart was filled with the cadences of the sacred texts from childhood, who could not only recite them and sing them, but whose entire life was governed by the repeated rhythm of Israel’s annual calendar of sacrifices and feasts? The events predicted by Jesus on the mountain were not intended to communicate a near-and-yet-far, conflated or “telescoped” mash-up of the destruction of Jerusalem with the final judgment. For those who already knew the tune, this discourse was the silhouette of Yahweh and His sickle, as promised by John, standing in wait before the rising sun. He was coming soon to bring a complete end to the “old creation” order governed by fallen Man, and the ceaselessly repeated acts of substitutionary bloodshed required to keep sin’s insatiable appetite for vengeance at bay.

Jesus would die as the clean head of the sacrifice. Once enthroned in heaven, He Himself would swing the sickle to harvest the wheat, then bring down the sword upon the tares. That is described in detail in the book of Revelation, which is likely why John omitted the Olivet Discourse from his Gospel. This pericope of judgment, as a prediction of imminent sacrificial harvest, is an olah (“go up”), an ascension, a whole burnt offering (holocaust). It begins with Jesus seated in authority on a mountain on earth as a judge of Israel and ends with Him seated on His throne in heaven judging all the surrounding nations. His dominion over death in the Garden would put Him in authority as a king like David over the rulers of the Land (“the kings of the earth”) and finally as a “king of kings” like Nebuchadnezzar over the entire World.

The Bible Matrix in all its various forms—creation, covenant, tabernacle, sacrifice, dominion—is a process of transformation. What Jesus described was not a final end but a new beginning.

1. The first of the seven literary cycles presents the Temple as a corrupt Garden of Eden, a sanctuary ruled by serpent-kings, false Christs. The Adamic curses, and Abrahamic promises, upon the fruit of the land and the womb are also a prominent theme. (Genesis – Sabbath)
2. The second describes Jerusalem as a city like Egypt from which the saints must take flight. (Exodus – Passover)
3. The third (comprised of two parts, Altar & Table) presents the Herodian priesthood as a house of Baal in the Land, sons of Aaron who rejected Jesus’ flesh and blood while they cut their own flesh (in circumcision) and offered themselves on the altar. For playing the whore with the nations like the sons of Eli, they would become the flesh upon the table, the meat upon their own corrupted hooks. This section then reveals Jesus coming for all of those who had waited in patient faith through the centuries for the promise of salvation to be fulfilled, and He would receive them as a tithe, a holy firstfruits. (Leviticus – Firstfruits)
4. The fourth describes Jesus as the true priest-king, the Abrahamic star in heaven, a faithful Phinehas who would come suddenly to the house like a thief and put a kingly Gentile javelin (like that of Saul or Goliath) through the adulterers, the fulfullment of God’s promise that He would visit Israel again for their idolatry at Sinai, where 3,000 were executed under the Levitical sword. (Numbers – Pentecost)
5. The bridal cycle concerns the response of Israel as “daughter Zion,” awesome as an army with banners, the Temple-woman from Song of Solomon, a house with ten lampstands divided in two like the Tablets of Moses. Jesus would come suddenly to His Temple, and once again He would warn that “the light of a lamp will shine in you no more, and the voice of bridegroom and bride will be heard in you no more” (Revelation 18:23). Israel was two women, Hagar and Sarah, the harlot and the bride, two goats offered for the sins of the common people on this final Day of the Lord. (Deuteronomy – Trumpets)
6. The sixth cycle corresponds structurally to the very first “day of coverings,” when Yahweh came to the Garden to assess the faithful obedience of Adam, the world’s first steward. When God plants seed He rightfully expects it to be multiplied—in this case, a harvest of righteousness. The unfaithful servant in this parable is just like Adam, a man who slandered the character of God, considering Him to be unjust, and thus unrighteously feared His judgment. He lost not only the kingdom but also that which he had been freely given—the priestly Tree of Life. (Joshua – Atonement)
7. The structure leads us to the Feast of Ingathering, which explains the seventh cycle as a judgment upon the nations that surrounded Israel, and who would be blessed for blessing the children of Abraham, or cursed for cursing them. A similar event occurred at the destruction of the first Jerusalem and its Temple, when all of the Canaanite nations that had troubled and tempted Israel for so long were finally disempowered and dispossessed. Only Israel would rise from the ashes in the new order. In the first century, that new Israel was the Church, so the “least” of Jesus’ brethren were the disciples who had been preaching the Gospel. Like the first disciples who were sent to the cities of Israel, to bless and curse, bind and loose, these nations were held accountable for their treatment of the Firstfruits Church, the Jew-Gentile evangelists (human “angels”) whom Jesus had sent throughout the cities of the empire. These white fields had been sown with the Word of God under the ministry of the synagogues in the centuries after the exile. Jesus would now gather His harvest not only from the cultivated Jewish Land but also from the wild Gentile Sea. (Judges – Booths)

“Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes…

“Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. The one who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and the one who receives a righteous person because he is a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” (Matthew 10:21-23, 40-42)

Read Part 1 of the Analysis.

If you are new to this method of interpretation, please visit the Welcome page for some help to get you up to speed.