Mathew Henry: “This prophecy, under the type of Jerusalem’s destruction, looks as far forward as he general judgment; and, as is usual in prophecies, some passages are more applicable to the type, and others to the antitype; and toward the close, as usual, it points more particularly to the latter.”
William Hendrickson: “In describing the brief period of great tribulation at the close of history, ending with the final judgment, Jesus is painting in colours borrowed from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans” (Commentary on Matthew, p. 847).
Anthony A. Hoekema: “Jesus is proclaiming events in the distant future in close connection with events in the near future. The destruction of Jerusalem which lies in the near future is a type of the end of the world, hence the intermingling. The passage therefore deals neither exclusively with the destruction of Jerusalem nor exclusively with the end of the world; it deals with both—sometimes with the latter in terms of the former” (The Bible and the Future, p. 149).
Kim Riddlebarger: “Jesus was on the Mount of Olives speaking as God’s final prophet, using the temple and the city of Jerusalem as graphic visual aids. Jesus spoke not only directly about God’s coming judgment on the city and the temple but also to the church awaiting the great consummation and the end of the present age many years hence” (A Case for Amillennialism, p. 158).
O. Palmer Robertson: “When Jesus presents the terrors of God’s coming judgment, he intertwines the destruction of Jerusalem with the end of the age so that the two aspects of his prophetic declaration cannot be separated. When armies surround Jerusalem and its desolation is near, then the ‘time of punishment in fulfilment of all that has been written’ will have arrived (Luke 21:20-22). The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 anticipated that great day of [Jehovah] which shall consummate the Lord’s judgments, even as did the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. Even as in Zephaniah’s prophecy, so also in Jesus’ prophecy, the judgment of God on Jerusalem inevitably anticipates the final devastation of the nations” (The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990], p. 325).
