I remember a church I attended not long after I became a Christian many years ago. They had a class in the auditorium that did a verse-by-verse study of every book in the New Testament. Well, almost every book. When they finished Jude, they passed over Revelation and restarted in Matthew. My guess is that many churches did and do something like that because on the whole, Revelation is quite a bit different than what we read in the rest of the New Testament.
Mark 13 would fit in the same category. It’s certainly different than what we read in the rest of Mark and it is fact more like what we read in Revelation and the prophets. It reads that way because like Revelation and the prophets, it employs apocalyptic speech. What is that? It is language that speaks of the sun turning black, the moon turning red, stars falling to earth, etc., (see Revelation 6:12ff). It is cataclysmic speech focusing on disaster and destruction.
To the uninitiated, this sounds like the end of the world—but it isn’t because this same language is used by the prophets over and over to refer to different judgments God brought on different nations at different times! Take a look at these texts and note the similarity in language to Mark 13:
Isaiah 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Babylon (v. 1, 19)
Isaiah 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edom (v. 5-6, 9, 11)
Ezekiel 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Egypt (v. 2, 12, 15-16)
Nahum 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . Nineveh (v. 1, 8, 11, 14)
Zephaniah 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Judah (v. 4)
Since you can only have one end of the world, the language isn’t meant to be taken literally but figuratively. It lets the ungodly know that the God who created the world will “un-create” their “world.”
In all of this we have a critical truth reinforced—knowing what the text says (rivers drying up/Isaiah 19 or flooding/Zephaniah 1) is wonderful but understanding what it means is what we’re after! To look at a text and say, “It says what it means and means what it says,” is a cop out. It is a failure to engage the text.
So, what have we said about Mark 13? We’ve said it’s a challenging text because of its apocalyptic, figurative speech that most of us are unfamiliar with. Much of what bogs people down in this chapter is trying to literalize speech that was never meant to be taken that way. This language is rooted in the prophets. If we use them as our cue, it will help us to understand what Jesus is telling us through Mark.
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 