Successive generations have pored over these words of our Lord with great eagerness, endeavoring to extract from them a clear forecast of the future. In the case of the early Christians, they warned them to flee to Pella, and in doing so, to escape the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. But to all of us they are full of instruction.

It is best to consider these paragraphs as containing a double reference. In the first place, up to v. 28, they evidently deal with the approaching fall of Jerusalem. Our Lord describes the events which were to mark the

consummation of the age, v. 3, R.V., margin. Antichrists, disturbances of physical and national conditions, the persecutions which the infant Church must encounter, the progress of the gospel, and finally the swoop of the Roman eagles on their prey—all these were to mark the close of the Hebrew dispensation and the birth of the Christian Church.