Luke 21:25 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

And there shall be signs— See on Matthew 24:29. To what has been said there, we may add, that the circumstances of the light of the sun and moon being obscured, and of the stars falling from heaven, are not descriptive of the last day of judgment, but of the great and terrible day of the Lord, which in scripture language means the destruction of Jerusalem. For when the prophet Joel speaks of that day, and describes the locusts, one of the four plagues, under a most beautiful allegory, he represents the earth as quaking before them;—the heavens shall tremble, says he, the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining, Joel 2:10. And, to remove all possibility of doubt concerning the meaning of these words in St. Matthew's gospel, our Saviour closes his predictions in this remarkable manner, Verily I say unto you, this generation shalt not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. Nothing surely can be more explicit, more certain, more convincing to any unprejudiced mind, than this evidence for Christ and Christianity from prophesy. Here is no ambiguity, no conjecture, no accommodation; all is plain and evident: and with regard to the last destruction of Jerusalem, the words of our Lord himself in the gospels exactly correspond with those of the ancient prophets. Bowyer, in his Greek Testament, proposes to render the last clause, Through distress, as of the roaring sea.