What Is the Great Tribulation?

Why Tribulation Came to the Jew First

Before we talk about judgment, let’s start with the good news. When we believe the gospel, we are reconciled to Yahweh through the blood of Jesus Christ. Our standing before Him no longer depends on keeping an account of sins and wondering whether we have done enough to be received.

We can serve our Father freely. We can turn our attention toward Him with a clear conscience, knowing that our sin is no longer breaking our fellowship with Him or stirring up the wrath from which Christ has delivered us. His face is toward us.

That is good news, isn’t it? Paul places it at the beginning of his letter:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Romans 1:16–17 ESV

The same gospel was not received gladly by everyone. In 2 Corinthians 2:15–16, Paul describes the message of Christ as the fragrance of life to those being saved and of death to those perishing. Those who receive Christ receive spiritual and eternal life. Those who reject Him remain in spiritual death and face eternal death.

That difference helps us read Romans 2:6–8. Paul speaks of eternal life for those seeking glory, honor, and immortality, and wrath for those who reject the truth. Glory and Honor and Immortality follows those words more fully. These are things the Lord gives to those who seek Him in faith.

Paul continues:

There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.
Romans 2:9–11 ESV

Righteousness Comes Through Faith

We should not read those verses as though Paul has suddenly replaced the gospel with a way to earn life. His explanation in Romans 9:30–32 is plain. Gentiles attained righteousness by faith, while Israel pursued the law as though righteousness could be gained through works. They stumbled over Christ.

The sacrifices themselves showed why self-effort could not solve the problem. Hebrews 10:1–3 calls the law a shadow and explains that repeated sacrifices could never perfect the worshipers. Their repetition was a reminder of sin. If those sacrifices had cleansed the worshipers completely, the offerings would have ceased.

Jesus came to give the life to which those shadows pointed. Yet the leaders who resisted Him clung to their authority and opposed the gospel. Expectations of a restored earthly kingdom could not supply the reconciliation He came to give. The issue was faith in the Messiah whom God had sent.

For those who believe, the old identity of sinner has given way to the identity of saint. We belong to Christ, and Yahweh has made us holy to Himself. Those who reject the truth face God’s judgment. Being outwardly associated with the covenant people did not exempt anyone from that distinction.

First in Salvation and in Judgment

Jesus said He was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 15:24). Messiah came to Israel, the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, and the gospel then went out among the Gentiles through the apostles. Paul, himself a Jew, was commissioned to proclaim Christ among the nations.

That gives us the order Paul describes: to the Jew first and also to the Greek. The Jew First and also the Greek develops the connection further.

But what about judgment? Humanity had been rejecting God long before the first century. Why would Paul now specify tribulation for the Jew first?

The answer lies in Israel’s covenant. The people who received the law, the prophets, and the Messiah first were also the people to whom the covenant warnings had been given. God’s impartiality did not erase that history. It meant their privileges could not protect unbelief from judgment.

The Covenant Already Announced Its Judgment

Moses did more than deliver commands for Israel’s life in the land. He also announced a prophet whom the people would be required to hear:

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.
Deuteronomy 18:18–19 ESV

That prophet was Christ. Listening to Moses meant receiving the One Moses had announced. When Jesus was asked what people must do to perform the works of God, He answered:

This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.
John 6:29 ESV

The Messiah had arrived. Israel could not reject Him and continue appealing to the law as though nothing had changed. The temple worship that had pointed toward Him was passing away. The shadows had served their purpose, and the covenant judgment announced through Moses was drawing near.

The Song Was a Witness Against Israel

Before Moses died, Yahweh told him that Israel would turn to other gods and break His covenant. Trouble would follow, and the people would ask whether their suffering had come because God was no longer among them. Yahweh then instructed Moses to teach Israel a song that would stand as a witness against them (Deuteronomy 31:16–19).

The Song of Moses begins by declaring the Lord’s faithfulness:

The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.
Deuteronomy 32:4 ESV

The contrast is with a crooked generation that had dealt corruptly with Him (Deuteronomy 32:5). Later, Moses says they forgot the Rock who gave them birth (Deuteronomy 32:18–19).

Who is this Rock? Paul makes the connection directly when he writes about Israel in the wilderness:

For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.
1 Corinthians 10:4 ESV

Christ did not suddenly become relevant when we reached the New Testament. He was already there in the Scriptures Israel had received. Jesus said Moses wrote about Him (John 5:46–47), that the Scriptures bore witness about Him (John 5:39), and that what was written about Him in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms had to be fulfilled (Luke 24:44–45).

The whole testimony points us to Christ. Possessing Scripture while refusing the One it reveals leaves the reader without the life being offered. That same question of religious claims and knowing the Lord is developed in I Never Knew You.

Set Apart Did Not Mean Faithful

When I speak of Israel as God’s holy nation, I am speaking of a people set apart under His covenant. That does not mean every person in that nation was faithful or spiritually alive.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes the division of the nations according to the sons of God, while Jacob remained Yahweh’s own portion. The other nations were allotted to lesser spiritual rulers, and Yahweh took Israel as His covenant people. A Gentile entering that covenant community came into Israel and its law.

This setting is developed in The Rebellion of Yahweh’s Divine Council and It Is Finished: What Christ Accomplished. It helps explain the significance of calling Yahweh the God of Israel.

Israel received the covenants, the law, the worship, and the promises. From Israel came the Messiah according to the flesh (Romans 9:4–5). Yet those privileges did not make unbelief into faith. Yahweh revealed His justice as well as His goodness in His dealings with that nation.

The Nations and Israel’s Latter End

The Song of Moses speaks both of Israel’s end and of jealousy provoked through another people:

They have made me jealous with what is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.
Deuteronomy 32:21 ESV

Paul draws on that very passage in Romans 10:19 as he explains Israel’s response to the gospel reaching the Gentiles. The song belongs in the story Paul is telling. Its language of judgment and jealousy comes into focus in the first-century spread of the gospel.

Moses also says:

For they are a nation void of counsel, and there is no understanding in them. If they were wise, they would understand this; they would discern their latter end!
Deuteronomy 32:28–29 ESV

Israel’s covenant did not promise an endless continuation of temple worship regardless of their response to the Lord. Its own Scriptures announced judgment. The coming of Messiah brought those warnings to their appointed fulfillment.

The Day of the Lord in the Prophets

The great tribulation belongs within the prophetic warnings of the Day of the Lord, or the Day of Yahweh. The prophets speak of God coming in judgment, bringing down the proud and ending an order that stood against Him.

To understand that language, we need to pay attention to how the prophets use it. A darkened sun or a shaken earth cannot simply be lifted from its passage and made into a description of the physical universe coming apart.

Babylon and Jerusalem

Isaiah 13 announces judgment against Babylon and names the Medes among its instruments. The prophecy describes the sun, moon, and stars losing their light, the heavens trembling, and the earth being shaken (Isaiah 13:10–13, 17–19). That is the prophetic language of a kingdom being brought down under God’s judgment.

Revelation then gives us a connection we need to consider. It describes the great city as the place where the Lord was crucified, Jerusalem, and spiritually calls it Sodom and Egypt (Revelation 11:8). Isaiah had already addressed sinful Judah and Jerusalem using the names Sodom and Gomorrah (Isaiah 1:9–10). A city could bear an enemy’s name because it had taken on that enemy’s character.

The blood of the prophets makes the connection especially clear. Jesus charged Jerusalem with killing the prophets and placed judgment upon His generation (Matthew 23:34–38). Revelation describes Babylon as the great city in which the blood of prophets and saints was found (Revelation 18:21–24).

The marriage picture fits as well. Ezekiel 16 describes Jerusalem as a wife who broke covenant faithfulness. Revelation sets the harlot Babylon against the New Jerusalem, the Lamb’s bride (Revelation 17:1–6; 21:9–10).

Taken together, these passages identify Revelation’s Babylon as apostate covenant Jerusalem. “Babylon” describes what Jerusalem had become in her rebellion against the Lord. The name carries prophetic meaning. This connection allows us to follow the judgment imagery from the prophets into Jesus’ warnings about Jerusalem without losing sight of whom He was addressing.

When the Lights Go Out

Listen to Isaiah’s description:

For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.
Isaiah 13:10 ESV

That language would have been familiar to readers of Israel’s Scriptures. In Genesis 37:9–10, Joseph dreams of the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him. His father understands the dream in relation to their family. The heavenly lights represent people and their place within an order.

Jacob, whom God named Israel, and his twelve sons also point beyond themselves. The old covenant nation was a shadow of the reality found in Christ. Jesus is true Israel, and His apostles belong to the foundation of His church. When the old covenant lights went out, the temple order came to its end. The life found in Christ remained.

What Is Preterism? explains this way of reading fulfilled prophecy and its first-century setting. Here, the question is why the judgment belonged to Israel’s covenant history and came to the Jew first.

Religious Privilege Could Not Prevent Judgment

Ezekiel rebuked Israel’s false prophets for failing to prepare the house of Israel to stand in the Day of the Lord (Ezekiel 13:5). Joel spoke of the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood before that day (Joel 2:31). The warnings were part of Israel’s own prophetic testimony.

Amos addressed people who desired the Day of the Lord as though it could only mean victory for them. He asked why they wanted it when it would be darkness. A person fleeing a lion only to meet a bear had not escaped danger. Neither would Israel escape judgment by pointing to its religious observances (Amos 5:18–20).

Yahweh said He would not accept their feasts, assemblies, or offerings. Their songs could not cover their unfaithfulness. He called for justice and righteousness (Amos 5:21–24).

That is a serious warning against assuming that something is pleasing to God simply because it looks religious. The people had His commands and their regular observances. They still needed to hear Him.

Malachi brings the warning into sharp focus:

For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.
Malachi 4:1 ESV

This is judgment upon the unfaithful. The image of branches being burned also deserves careful attention when we read Jesus’ words in John 15. The Vine and Branches: Who Is Thrown Into the Fire? examines that passage in its own setting.

John and Jesus Announced the Approaching Judgment

Malachi did not leave the warning without a sign of its approach. Elijah would come before the great and awesome Day of the Lord, turning hearts before the land faced destruction (Malachi 4:5–6).

Should we still be waiting for that Elijah? Jesus answered the question:

For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Matthew 11:13–15 ESV

John the Baptist was the promised Elijah. That places Malachi’s warning in the world of Jesus and His first-century hearers. John had arrived, and he was preparing the way for the Lord.

The Holy Spirit and Fire

John described the One coming after him:

I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.
Matthew 3:11–12 ESV

The next sentence explains the fire. Wheat is gathered, while chaff is burned. John is announcing both the blessing of the Spirit and the judgment of the unfaithful. The baptism of fire is a baptism of judgment.

We see the Spirit given at Pentecost. We also need to recognize the judgment John announced. Malachi had warned of a day that would set the unfaithful ablaze. John was telling Israel that the One who would carry out that judgment was coming.

The words are urgent. The winnowing fork is already in His hand. These were warnings for the people John was addressing.

The Temple Before Their Eyes

Jesus then spoke directly about the temple:

As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.
Luke 21:6 ESV

Imagine hearing that while looking at the temple. Its worship, sacrifices, and ceremonies had shaped the disciples’ world. Jesus was telling them that the building before their eyes would be destroyed.

That setting matters when we ask what the great tribulation means. Jesus was speaking about their temple and the end of the age to which it belonged. The disciples’ question arose from His announcement, and His answer needs to remain connected to it (Matthew 24:1–3).

He also told them what to watch for:

But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it, for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written.
Luke 21:20–22 ESV

The instructions name Jerusalem and Judea. People inside the city were to leave, and people outside were not to enter. Matthew 24:15–16 gives the corresponding warning about the abomination of desolation and tells those in Judea to flee. Jesus calls the distress that follows the great tribulation (Matthew 24:21).

The place, the people, and the warning are all connected. This was the judgment that overtook Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70.

The Tribulation and the Coming of Christ

Jesus’ warning raises another question. If the tribulation was fulfilled in the first century, what about His coming? We need to read the sequence He gave rather than separating events that His words connect.

First, consider how He spoke about the timing. Matthew 24:34 places these things within the lifetime of His generation. Yet only two verses later, He says no one knows the day and hour (Matthew 24:36).

Those statements belong together. Knowing that an event is approaching is different from knowing its precise day and hour. Jesus gave His hearers signs to recognize and instructions to obey. Uncertainty about the exact moment did not cancel what He had told them about their generation.

The Feast of Trumpets gives us an important picture of what Jesus meant. Preparations had to be made for the feast, but they did not know the exact date or time it would begin. They had to watch the sky and wait for the new moon to appear. They knew the approximate timeframe and what would signal its arrival, so they could be ready. And, of course, the sounding of trumpets was a major part of this feast. That becomes especially important when Jesus describes His coming immediately after the tribulation with a loud trumpet call. The connection between the feast, the waiting, and the trumpet sounding is difficult to miss.

That distinction matters. Not knowing the exact day or hour did not mean they had no idea when it was approaching. Jesus likewise gave His first-century followers signs to recognize so they would know what to watch for as the Day of the Lord drew near.

Using “no one knows” to move the whole warning into an indefinite future overlooks the rest of the passage. Ten Reasons Futurism is Destructive considers the wider effects of that approach. The immediate task here is to hear the timing Jesus actually gave.

What Paul Told the Thessalonians

Paul’s words to the Thessalonians belong beside Jesus’ warnings:

Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.
2 Thessalonians 2:1–2 ESV

Someone had disturbed them with the claim that the Day of the Lord had already arrived. Think about that. They were still living on earth and could nevertheless be troubled by such a report.

Paul did not answer by pointing out that the planet was still here. He reminded them of events that had to occur. Their concern and his reply make sense within the covenant judgment they had been taught to expect.

The rebellion had to come first, and the man of lawlessness had to be revealed (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). Paul then reminded them that he had already discussed these things with them. They knew what was restraining the lawless one, and the mystery of lawlessness was already at work (2 Thessalonians 2:5–7).

Notice the words “already” and “now.” Paul was speaking to people who knew the circumstances he meant. The rebellion against Rome that broke out in AD 66 belongs to the first-century setting of Jerusalem’s approaching destruction. The details of the rebellion and the man of lawlessness require their own treatment, but Paul’s language does not detach the warning from his readers’ world.

That is also why repeated claims that the end times are beginning again need to be tested against Scripture’s original audience and timing.

Immediately After the Tribulation

Jesus connects the tribulation, the prophetic darkening of the heavens, His coming, and the gathering of His people:

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
Matthew 24:29–31 ESV

We have already encountered this language in the prophets. The sun, moon, stars, and shaken heavens describe the overthrow of an order under God’s judgment. Isaiah 51:15–16 also joins the language of establishing heavens and earth with Yahweh’s declaration to Zion that they are His people. We need to let that covenant setting inform our reading.

Jesus places His coming immediately after the tribulation of those days. He does not give us a gap of thousands of years between the judgment on Jerusalem and the coming He describes. The tribulation and Christ’s coming belong together in their AD 70 fulfillment.

The trumpet and gathering also bring the Feast of Trumpets picture to its fulfillment. The old covenant shadows reach their purpose in Christ. The destruction of the temple marked the end of that covenant order, while His people were gathered to Him.

Questions about the judgment seat of Christ, rewards, and our gathering to Him deserve the same attention to context. Heavenly Rewards and Crowns, oh my! considers those questions more fully. They should not be used to pull apart what Jesus has joined in this passage.

Living in What Christ Has Fulfilled

Now we can return to Paul’s words. Why tribulation for the Jew first? Israel received the covenant, its warnings, and the Messiah. Judgment came to that covenant nation first, just as the gospel had come to it first.

The great tribulation brought the old covenant temple order to its final end. The cross had established the new covenant, and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 completed the transition out of the old age. The law’s shadows could no longer be treated as a continuing alternative to Christ.

A modern political state does not restore that covenant or supply the life found in Him. Religious observance cannot accomplish what the sacrifices themselves never accomplished. Christ has accomplished it. Our reconciliation rests in Him.

That conviction also shapes how we receive Scripture. Its prophecies are fulfilled. The Bible is complete, and we do not need a present-day prophet to add to what God has given. We can open the Scriptures to understand His testimony instead of waiting for someone to supply a missing revelation.

Many familiar religious claims deserve to be tested in that light. Astonishing List of False Teachings in the Church follows several of those questions. The purpose of examining them is to see Christ more clearly and rest in His finished work.

Paul’s warning about tribulation sits beside his promise of glory, honor, and peace. We should hear both. God showed no partiality, and outward privilege did not replace faith. The same Christ gives life to Jew and Gentile who believe.

We began with a clear conscience before our Father, and that is where this brings us. In Christ, we are reconciled to God. We can serve Him freely, knowing that His acceptance is grounded in what our Savior has accomplished. That is the good news Paul wanted his readers to understand.