(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
Compare Matthew 10:17-22; 24:24; Mark 13:22; Luke 12:11-12; John 14:26; 15:21; 16:2
These warnings strike me as more directly relevant, in certain respects, than they ever have been before at any point in my lifetime.
“False prophets,” love growing cold, iniquity abounding, divided families, hatred and contempt from “the world,” hostile governments and judges, members of the Church becoming “offended” (or, as at least one translation puts it, “falling away”) . . . and an exhortation to endure faithfully to the end despite it all.
It could have been written this morning.
By the way, did anybody who’s read these verses ever imagine that the “false prophets” would be successful by being obviously false? Plainly this won’t be the case. They’ll be persuasive, convincing, plausible, reasonable. But, for all that, no less false.
“In your patience possess ye your souls,” says the King James translation of Luke 21:19. But that’s a bit unclear. The Greek ἐν τῇ ὑπομονῇ ὑμῶν κτήσασθε τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν might also be rendered something like “By your endurance you will gain your lives,” or “Stand firm, and you will win,” or “Hold on and you will win your souls!”
A funny story, irrelevant but amusing, about Matthew 24:12, where the King James Version says that “the love of many shall cold”: A friend told me, many years ago, of a Gospel Doctrine class that he had recently attended. A zealous teacher had brought in a candle in order to illustrate the idea of “waxing cold.” He lit the candle and blew it out several times, and then the class was invited to comment on the supposed meaning and significance of cooling wax.
I hope you see the problem here:
“Waxing cold” has nothing whatsoever to do with candle wax, nor with wax of any kind. The archaic English verb to wax simply means “to grow.” It’s directly cognate with the common German verb wachsen, which likewise means . . . “to grow.” The moon, going through its monthly phases, “waxes” and “wanes.” That’s all.
Compare Luke 17:31; 19:43-44
The šiqqǔṣ mišômēm (שִׁקּוּץ מְשׁמֵם) or, in Greek, the bdelugma tes eremoseos (τὸ βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως), is something mentioned in the book of Daniel and in 1 Maccabbees, and is often rendered “abomination of desolation,” as in the King James Bible. Other renderings include the “desolating sacrilege,” the “abomination that causes desolation,” and even the “disgusting thing.”
In rabbinic Hebrew, “abomination” is a standard term for an idol.
On the first level, the prophecy almost certainly refers to events connected with the Roman destruction of the temple of Jerusalem, which will occur just a few decades later, in AD 70. Luke 21:20-24 — the Lukan equivalent to the Matthean and Markan passages — doesn’t mention the “abomination of desolation” at all. But, Luke 21:20 advises, “when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh.”
The LDS Bible Dictionary’s entry on the “abomination of desolation” is helpful, and it picks up on the idea that I mentioned earlier, that these prophecies have a fulfillment in the first century and a second fulfillment yet to come.
Posted from Cairo, Egypt
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