Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Matthew 24:35
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
35. This verse was originally omitted in the Sinaitic MS., but is inserted by a later hand.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Heaven and earth shall pass away … – You may sooner expect to see the heaven and earth pass away and return to nothing, than my words to fail.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Mat 24:35
But My words shall not pass away.
The words of Christ
The characteristics of our Lords words.
1. The authority which speaks in them.
2. Their elevation.
3. Their awful depth. (Canon Liddon.)
The permanency of Christs teaching
1. The words of Christ are abiding because of their special inspiration. His words cannot die by reason of the living power that is in them.
2. The teachings of Jesus have a great and an enduring task to perform. The gospel has the power of an endless life which the work before it demands. Great things and great ends require great and large preparation. The Niagara Falls is one, if not the greatest, of the wonders of the world; but the river St. Lawrence was twenty-seven thousand years making the deep cutting in the rock which forms the cataract. The great task before the gospel, of bringing the light of truth to every heart, must be accomplished. The efforts of the Church must not be relaxed until this end has been attained. Whatever changes are woven into the nature of things the continuation of gospel teaching is inevitable. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
3. As the gospel has survived the revolutions of more than eighteen centuries, so it will survive those yet to come.
4. The impression which the words of Jesus make on the souls of the redeemed is another proof that they shall not pass away. When the world has passed away, these words will abide in the hearts of men who have believed in Christ. Every portion of the gospel we learn and feel and practice will remain with us for ever. (The Weekly Pulpit.)
The transient and the permanent
Heaven and earth shall pass away.
I. It needs some thoughtfulness to apprehend the transient character of these great objects of our interest.
1. The forms of life and activity with which we are familiar pass away. The morning light, buds, seasons, living creatures, soon die.
2. If we extend our vision and take within its sweep not only the life of the individual, but the course of the ages, and the history of the world. These pass away.
II. And yet in all this there is permanence. The form passes, but the material remains. Perhaps even the material may be our name for the unknown nothing, and there remains only the law, only the type, only the order, which unceasingly lives. Thus the form of the living thing disappears, but life remains; and that vegetable life which we saw so busy and so plentiful in forms of flower and leaf and tree, shall next year bring forth new flowers and put out fresh leaves; and when the trees that to-day stand erect, monarchs of the forest, shall, fallen prone, be slowly turning into the fuel of future ages, that same life shall yet be lifting up new pillars of the forest, tall and stately, beautiful and strong, over which new generations of branches and leaves shall wave beneath the sunshine and be swayed by the breezes of the future years. And so is it with the life of the animal and man. This animal, this man, may perish, but man remain. And the human race has not vanished. Babylon, Egypt, and ancient Greece and Rome have disappeared, but man remains, in his essential nature unchanged. The moods of the sensitive nature pass away and follow each other like the shadows on the mountain-side when the fleecy clouds are floating oer the sky on a summer noon. And yet there is something that remains. There is the subject of these sensations; there is that element which is always present in these conscious states which knows itself and them, and the differences between each state, and the resemblances and the differences between itself and them, and the combination of all into one homogeneous whole. There is something permanent, something that lasts. You cannot destroy, you cannot waste it, you cannot, indeed, change it. It is itself-itself always-eternal, I believe, as the eternal God. Or we might illustrate it again in relation to thoughts, to ideas, to concepts; to those class cognitions of the mind which result from the comparison and the abstract classification of states of sensation, of memory, of judgment. We thus gain ideas-the good, the beautiful, the true, the evil, the human, the Divine. The individual states, the individual acts, the individual persons who, by these acts, produce these states-all these may vanish. They may be only a memory; or even grow in memory dim, and at last fade away from the last reminiscence of the soul; but the ideas we have formed-that abstract beauty, goodness, humanity, or divineness-these remain. Their light will play about other forms; their relations dwell within the caverns of our nature and fill them with music, or make them hideous with discord.
III. Thus the words of Christ seem only to be the following, accompaniment of what we saw on all sides of our quest-that there is a permanent, and that there is a transient. He goes down to the very base of the nature, and declares that a man must be born from above if he is to see the kingdom of God. The spiritual only can behold the things of that kingdom, which are wholly spiritual. The worship of God is to be in spirit and in truth. His own very words are to be interpreted in the sphere of the spiritual and the true, and the work He came to do for men was not to make their lot here easy or hard, not to spread lifes path with flowers or with thorns; it had no respect to these mere circumstances and conditions of outer life. But it went to the very centre of being, to the inner personality of the man. And, as Christ Himself gave up all that He had that was external, material, physical, letting it all go in death, and living only in His living union with the eternal God, so must man live only in that living personality, letting all else die with Christ, and even when living, not living except as Christ lived in him. (L. D. Bevan, D. D.)
The immutability of the words of Christ
I. The permanence and immutability of the gospel are proofs of the perfection of its plan.
II. The immortality of the words of Christ is proof of their perfect adaptability to the constitution and course of nature.
III. Is proof of their perfect consonance with absolute truth.
IV. Is proof of their identity with the ultimate basis of life.
V. Two lessons.
1. He that formulated this immutable scheme and must be Divine.
2. Upon these words of Christ we have an assured and stable basis upon which to build for eternity. (E. S. P.)
The enduring word
I. What word is this?
1. My Word. Who spoke this word? Jesus Christ the Saviour. Must not He be God who could fling upon the winds such a prophecy as this, and be sure of its everlasting success? It is not the word of Jeremiah, John, etc. They were the instruments, but Christs word is nevertheless audible in all.
2. What are some of the marks and characteristics of Christs word?
Given in the Bible.
1. Authoritative. We hear men saying, We want an authority: here it is.
2. True.
3. Spirit and life.
4. Never man spake like this man.
II. What does Christ say? of His word? It shall not pass away. Empires, etc., have passed away, but the word of Christ still survives; it speaks with undiluted emphasis; it spreads with uninterrupted speed. All things that threatened to extinguish it have only aided it. Those things that once seemed to rise like mountain obstructions to its march are day by day dissolving like wreaths of snow in the sunshine, in contrast to the advancing and triumphant word of the Lord. And when the new heaven and the new earth shall come, Christs word shall not cease. The only change will be, all its promises will be enjoyments, etc. Comfort for the believer. Of the least promise that you choose to select you may say, Heaven and earth, etc. Encouragement to the seeker, worker, minister, etc. (J. Cumming, D. D.)
The immutability of the Divine Word
1. The certainty of Divine truth.
2. The words of Christ considered in their necessary imperishableness.
3. The words of Christ shall never pass away, because they form the last of that series of communications given by God to a lost world.
4. Because they are founded on eternal truth, and on the fixed counsels of the immutable God.
5. Because of their connection with His own final glory as Mediator.
6. These are the words preached unto you. (D. Moore, M. A.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Heaven and earth shall pass away,…. This is either an assertion, which will be true at the end of time; not as to the substance of the heavens and earth, which will always remain, but as to the qualities of them, which will be altered: they will be renewed and refined, but not destroyed; the bad qualities, or evil circumstances, which attend them through the sin of man, will be removed and pass away, but they themselves will continue in being: or is a comparative expression, and the sense is, that the heavens and the earth, and the ordinances thereof, than which nothing can be more firm and strong, being fixed and supported by God himself, shall sooner pass away, than anything asserted and predicted by Christ shall:
but my words shall not pass away; be vain and empty, and unaccomplished; which is true of anything, and everything spoken by Christ; and especially here regards all that he had said concerning the calamities that should befall the Jews, before, at, or upon the destruction of their nation, city, and temple; and the design of the expression, is to show the certainty, unalterableness, and sure accomplishment of these things; see Jer 31:36.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
35 Heaven and earth shall pass away. In order to secure greater confidence in his statements, he illustrates their certainty by this comparison, that it is more firm and stable than the entire structure of the world. (156) But this form of expression is explained by commentators in a variety of ways. Some refer it as the passing away of heaven and earth at the last day, by which their frail constitution will be brought to an end; while others explain it to mean, that sooner shall the entire structure of the world perish than the prophecy which we have just heard shall fail to be accomplished. But as there can be no doubt that Christ expressly intended to raise the minds of his followers above the contemplation of the world, I think that he refers to the continual changes which we see in the world, and affirms, that we ought not to judge of his sayings by the changeful character of the world, which resembles the billows of the sea; for we know how easily our minds are carried away by the affairs of the world, when it is undergoing incessant change. For this reason, Christ enjoins his disciples not to allow their attention to be occupied by the world, but to look down, from what may be called the lofty watch-tower of divine providence, on all that he foretold would happen. Yet from this passage we draw a useful doctrine, that our salvation, because it is founded on the promises of Christ, does not fluctuate according to the various agitations of the world, but remains unshaken, provided only that our faith rises above heaven and earth, and ascends to Christ himself.
(156) “ Que tout l’ordre de nature qui se voit au ciel et à la terre;” — “than the whole order of nature which is seen in heaven and in earth.”
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(35) Heaven and earth.The tone is that of One who speaks with supreme authority, foreseeing, on the one hand, death and seeming failure, but on the other, the ultimate victory, not of truth only in the abstract, but of His own word as the truth. The parallelism of the words with those of Psa. 102:26, Isa. 40:8, gives them their full significance. The Son of Man claims for His own words the eternity which belongs to the words of Jehovah. (Comp. 1Pe. 1:24-25.) The whole history of Christendom witnesses to the fulfilment of the prophetic claim. Amid all its changes and confusions, its errors and its sins, the words of Christ have not passed away, but retain their pre-eminence as the last and fullest revelation of the Father.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
35. My words shall not pass That is, his predictions of the catastrophe so early as in that generation. Not only would the temple, Jerusalem, the Jewish state pass away, but even heaven and earth would pass rather than his prediction fail.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
And all that He has said is more certain and sure than the continuation of Heaven and earth. We learn here Jesus’ awareness both that Heaven and earth will one day pass away, and that His own words have a permanence that reaches into eternity. From this again we recognise the uniqueness of Jesus. Not even the prophets had dared to make a claim like this. But He then immediately goes on to point out that while He is here on earth and aware of all that will in the future occur on earth, there is one thing of which He is not aware, the time when He will come again, and when all things in Heaven and earth will come to an end.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Mat 24:35. Heaven and earth shall pass away It seems as if our Saviour had been aware of some such misapplication of his words, as is intimated in the preceding note, by adding yet greater force and emphasis to his affirmation; heaven and earth shall pass, &c. It is a common figure of speech in the oriental languages, to say of two things, that the one shall be, and the other shall not be, when the meaning is only, that the one shall happen sooner or more early than the other,as in this instance of our Saviour: the meaning therefore is, “Heaven and earth shall sooner or more easily pass away, than my words shall pass away: the frame of the universe shall sooner or more easily be dissolved, than my words shall fail of being fulfilled.” See Luke, xvi
One would be ready to think it next to impossible, that any man should duly consider these prophesies, and the exact completion of them; and if he be a believer, not be still more confirmed in the faith; or if he be an infidel, not be converted to the faith. Can any stronger proof be given of a divine revelation than the spirit of prophesy? And can any stronger proof be given of the spirit of prophesy, than the example now before us? in which so many contingencies, and we might say improbabilities, which human wisdom or prudence could never foresee, are so particularly foretold, and so punctually accomplished! At the time when Christ pronounced these prophesies, the Roman governor resided at Jerusalem, and had a force sufficient to keep the people in obedience; and could human prudence foresee, that the city as well as the country would revolt and rebel against the Romans? Could any human prudence foresee famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places? Could human prudence foresee the speedy propagation of the Gospel, so contrary to all human probability? Could human prudence foresee such an utter destructionofJerusalem,withallthecircumstancespreceding and following it? It was never the custom of the Romans absolutely to ruin any of their provinces; it was improbable therefore that such a thing should happen at all, and still more improbable that it should happen under the humane and generous Titus, who was indeed, as he was called, the love and delight of mankind. Yet, however improbable this was, it has happened, and it was foreseen and foretold by Christ. But how was it possible for him to do it, unless his foresight was divine, and his prediction theinfallible oracle of God? See Bishop Newton, and Dr. Macknight.Eusebius observes well upon this place, that whoever shall compare the words of our Saviour with the history of the war which Josephus has written, cannot but admire the wisdom of Christ, and acknowledge his prediction to be divine.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Mat 24:35 . With the preceding will commence the passing away of the fabric of the world as it now exists (2Pe 3:7-8 ); but what I say (generally, though with special reference to the prophetic utterances before us) will certainly not pass away, will abide as imperishable truth (v. 18). The utterance which fails of its accomplishment is conceived of as something that perishes (Addit. Est 7:2 ), that ceases to exist. Comp. , Rom 9:6 .
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
Ver. 35. Heaven and earth shall pass, &c. ] What God hath written he hath written. His word is established in heaven, saith David, Psa 119:89 ; it endureth for ever, saith Peter, 1Pe 1:25 ; it remaineth firm as Mount Sion, and shall stand inviolable when heaven shall pass away with a great noise, and the earth with its works shall be burnt up, 2Pe 3:10 , to the terror and confusion of those profane scoffers who deridingly demand, “Where is the promise of his coming?” &c.Mat 24:4Mat 24:4 ; that say, “Let him make speed and hasten his work, that we may see it,” Isa 5:19 ; “Woe to you that thus desire the day of the Lord. To what end is it for you? The day of the Lord is darkness, and not light,” Amo 5:18 . The great day of the Lord is near, it is near and hasteth greatly. It is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, to them “that are settled on their lees, and that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil,”Zep 1:12-15Zep 1:12-15 .
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Mat 24:35 . eclaration similar to that in chap. Mat 5:18 concerning the validity of the law.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
words. Plural of logos. See note on Mar 9:32.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
Mat 24:35. , heaven) The motion of which is otherwise regulated by the most unerring laws.- , the earth) which is otherwise most firmly founded.- , My words) The plural number is employed; cf. , all, Mat 24:34, which is likewise plural.- , shall not pass away) q.d. My words shall correspond exactly with the event; although it does not appear so to men immediately. Heaven and earth will give place to the new heaven and new earth, which are described by My words. The firmness of the law is illustrated in a similar manner in ch. Mat 5:18.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
Heaven: Mat 5:18, Psa 102:26, Isa 34:4, Isa 51:6, Isa 54:10, Jer 31:35, Jer 31:36, Heb 1:11, Heb 1:12, 2Pe 3:7-12, Rev 6:14, Rev 20:11
my: Num 23:19, Psa 19:7, Psa 89:34, Pro 30:5, Isa 40:8, Isa 55:11, Tit 1:2, 1Pe 1:25, Rev 3:14
Reciprocal: Gen 21:1 – Sarah as Gen 28:15 – until Gen 32:12 – thou Gen 41:32 – it is because Num 11:23 – thou shalt 1Sa 9:6 – all that he saith 2Sa 7:21 – thy word’s 1Ki 8:15 – hath 1Ki 16:34 – General 1Ki 22:38 – and the dogs 2Ki 7:16 – according to 2Ki 23:16 – burned 2Ch 6:4 – who hath with Job 14:12 – till the heavens Job 18:4 – the rock Psa 36:5 – faithfulness Psa 56:10 – General Psa 58:8 – pass Psa 89:2 – faithfulness Psa 93:5 – Thy Psa 119:58 – be merciful Psa 119:89 – For ever Psa 119:96 – I have seen Psa 138:2 – for thou hast Pro 12:19 – lip Ecc 1:4 – but Isa 9:8 – sent a word Isa 13:13 – the earth Isa 21:17 – for Isa 31:2 – will not Isa 58:14 – the mouth Jer 4:23 – the heavens Jer 32:24 – what Jer 32:42 – Like Jer 33:21 – may Jer 36:28 – General Jer 39:16 – Behold Jer 44:28 – shall know Eze 5:17 – I the Eze 10:7 – and went Eze 12:25 – I will Eze 17:24 – I the Lord have spoken Eze 21:32 – for I Eze 24:14 – the Lord Eze 26:14 – for I Eze 36:36 – I the Lord have Dan 2:45 – the great Dan 4:28 – General Dan 6:8 – altereth not Hab 3:6 – his Zep 2:2 – the decree Zec 1:6 – did Mat 10:15 – verily Mar 13:31 – Heaven Luk 21:33 – General Joh 10:35 – the scripture Rom 3:3 – shall Rom 9:6 – as though 1Co 1:9 – God 2Co 1:19 – was not 2Co 5:17 – old 1Th 5:24 – who 2Ti 2:13 – yet Heb 6:18 – two Heb 8:13 – ready Heb 12:27 – signifieth 1Pe 1:23 – by 2Pe 3:10 – in the which 1Jo 2:17 – the world Rev 3:7 – he that is true Rev 21:4 – the former
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
4:35
Heaven and earth means the objects composing the material universe such as the earth, sun, moon and stars. They are destined to pass away at the day of judgment, but the truths spoken by Jesus will not fail; they will always be the truth.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
Mat 24:35. Heaven and earth shall pass away. Not merely a strong asseveration (sooner shall heaven and earth pass away), but also a plain declaration that they shall pass away. Comp. Psa 102:26; Isa 51:6. The time is not indicated.
But my words shall not pass away. Scoffers imply: Heaven and earth cannot pass away (comp. 2Pe 3:8-10), but Christs words are losing their force. Of this we wait the proof. Not pass away means more than not remain unfulfilled; the words of Christ will abide as true in the hearts of all His people who look for and haste unto His coming. It is implied that some time will elapse.
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
24:35 {8} Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
(8) The Lord now begins the judgment, which he will finish in the latter days.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
Jesus further stressed the certainty of what the signs anticipated with these words. He claimed that His predictions had the same authority and eternal validity as God’s words (cf. Psa 119:89-90; Isa 40:6-8).