Matthew 24:4

Jesus Is Concerned That The Disciples Are Not Led Astray By Future Happenings (24:4).

‘And Jesus answered and said to them, “Take care that no man lead you astray.” '

Jesus is giving these warnings so that none who follow Him might be led astray by events of the future. Men have always had weird ideas about what the future would hold. And they have always looked for, and hoped for, future Messiahs who will arise among men and solve all their problems. But Jesus warns severely against expecting the latter, or interpreting the former in the wrong way. All these things that He is about to describe will come on the world but they are not to be looked on as signs of the end.

We must remember as we consider His words what limited experience of the world the disciples as a whole had. They were largely Galileans whose main adventures in their lives had been regular trips to Jerusalem for particular feasts, and while the twelve had occasionally also visited neighbouring countries with Jesus, they had had little real experience of them. Thus their knowledge of the wider world was almost non-existent. Once they were facing that wider world, therefore, Jesus knew that they might easily have begun to imagine all kinds of things as a result of seeing and experiencing the tumults among nations and the events that took place there, and even more so when they received news of events on an even wider scale. Jesus thus warns them not to take such events, both seen and heard, however spectacular, as signs of the end. They are rather simply to see them as the continual outworking of history,