Mark 13:1-2 And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!… The difficulty in explaining this discourse of our Lord lies in the appropriateness of its terms to two distinct and distant events, — the end of the world and the destruction of Jerusalem. But whether we assume, with some interpreters, that the one catastrophe was meant to typify the other; or, with another class, that the discourse may be mechanically divided by assuming a transition, at a certain point, from one of these great subjects to the other; or, with a third, that it describes a sequence of events to be repeated more than once, a prediction to be verified, not once for all, nor yet by a continuous progressive series of events, but in stages and at intervals, like repeated flashes of lightning, or the periodical germination of the fig tree, or the reassembling of the birds of prey whenever and wherever a new carcass tempts them; upon any of these various suppositions it is still true that the primary fulfilment of the prophecy was in the downfall of the Jewish state, with the previous or accompanying change of dispensations; and yet that it was so framed as to leave it doubtful until the event, whether a still more terrible catastrophe was not intended. However clear the contrary may now seem to us, there was nothing absurd in the opinion which so many entertained that the end of the world and of the old economy might be coincident. This ambiguity is not accidental, but designed, as in many other prophecies of Scripture. (J. A. Alexander, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here! |
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