9. What did Jesus predict for then, and when did Jerusalem’s “time of the end” begin and conclude?

⁹ In the account in Matthew 24:4-22 we can read how, in answer, Jesus predicted again the destruction of Jerusalem, also the wars, famines, earthquakes, persecution upon his faithful disciples, increasing lawlessness and cooling off of love, preaching activity by his disciples, and their flight from Judea and Jerusalem after seeing the holy place desecrated by the “disgusting thing that causes desolation.” This was to occur within “this generation” of which he and his apostles were a part. This meant that Jerusalem and the system of things based upon it as a national religious center were in their “time of the end.” That “time of the end” began in the year 29 C.E., when John the Baptizer began preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens has drawn near,” and then baptized Jesus, and it ended in the year 70 C.E. with the desolating of Jerusalem and its temple and the disappearance of the Aaronic priesthood. Jewry and Judaism have never been the same since.

Before the destruction of Jerusalem in 607 B.C.E. by the Babylonians, God spoke to the last Davidic king on the throne of Jerusalem, Zedekiah, and referred to the “time of the error of the end.” Jerusalem’s “time of the end” was then forty years long, beginning when God raised up Jeremiah to be his prophet in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah. (Ezekiel 21:25; Jeremiah 1:1, 2; Ezekiel 4:6, 7) Jerusalem of the first century C.E. also had its “time of the end,” of forty-one years (29-70 C.E.)—Luke 19:41-44; 1 Thessalonians 2:16.