Luke 17:22-25

“ And He said unto the disciples, The days will come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall not see it. 23. And they shall say to you, See here! or, see there! go not after them, nor follow them. 24. For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in His day. 25. But first must He suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation. ”

The course of thought is this: The kingdom, in the sense understood by the Pharisees, will not come immediately (Luke 17:22); and when it shall come, no uncertainty will be felt about His appearing (Luke 17:23-24). Luke 17:25 returns to the idea of Luke 17:22.

῾Ημέραι (Luke 17:22), days, long days, during which there will be time to sigh for the visible presence of the Master. Comp. Luke 5:35. The desire to see one of the days of the Son of man may refer either to the painful regret of the Church when she recalls the happiness enjoyed by her while He was present on the earth, or to her impatient waiting for some manifestation from on high announcing that the day is at length near. Substantially, the first meaning leads to the second, as regret does to desire; but the second idea is the dominant one, according to the context. When the apostles or their successors shall have passed a long time on the earth in the absence of their Lord, when they shall be at the end of their preaching and their apologetic demonstrations, and when around them scepticism, materialism, pantheism, and deism shall more and more gain the ascendency, then there shall be formed in their souls an ardent longing for that Lord who keeps silence and remains hid; they will call for some divine manifestation, a single one (μίαν), like that of the old days, to refresh their hearts and sustain the fainting Church. But to the end, the task will be to walk by faith (οὐκ ὄψεσθε, ye shall not see). Need we be astonished if in such circumstances the faith of the great majority verges to extinction (Luke 18:8)?

With this heightening of expectation among believers there will correspond the seducing appeals of falsehood (Luke 17:23). Literally taken, this verse is in contradiction to Luke 17:21. But Luke 17:21 related to the spiritual kingdom, whose coming cannot be observed or proclaimed, while the subject now in question is the visible kingdom, the appearing of which shall be falsely announced. Why shall those announcements be necessarily false? Luke 17:24 gives the explanation.

Gess exhibits the application of this teaching, on the one hand, to the folly of the Romanists who will have no Church without a visible head, and, on the other, to that of Protestant sectaries who expect the appearing of the kingdom of God to-day in Palestine, tomorrow in Russia, etc.

Ver. 24. The Lord's coming will be universal and instantaneous. Men do not run here or there to see a flash of lightning: it shines simultaneously on all points of the horizon. So the Lord will appear at the same moment to the view of all living. His appearances as the Risen One in the upper room, when closed, are the prelude of this last advent. But if He is to return, He must go away, go away persecuted. This is the subject of Luke 17:25.

This generation can designate no other than the Jewish contemporaries of the Messiah. A separation is about to supervene between Israel and its now present Messiah. And this rejection of the Messiah by His own people will be the signal for the invisibility of His kingdom. Comp. the antithesis Luke 13:35 (the faith of Israel bringing back the Messiah from heaven). How long will this abnormal state last? Jesus Himself knows not.

But He declares that this epoch of His invisibility will terminate in an entirely materialistic state of things, Luke 17:26-30, which will be brought to an end suddenly by His advent.