Matthew 24:29-31

Soon after the trouble of those days This difficult passage must be understood according to Matthew 24:34 which puts it at the time of the siege. Then it must speak of a "spiritual coming" of Jesus, rather than the Second Coming. This can be tied in with what Peter says about judgment beginning with God's own people (1 Peter 4:17-18). A. B, Bruce, in the Expositor's Greek Testament (Eerdemans) says this: "It seems to me that in true prophetic Oriental style the colossal imagery of the physical universe is used to describe the political and social consequences of the great Jewish catastrophe: national ruin, breaking up of religious institutions and social order. The physical stands for the social, the shaking of heaven for the shaking of earth (Haggai 2:6); or in the prophetic imagination the two are indissolubly blended: stars, thrones, city walls, temples, effete religions tumbling down into one vast mass of ruin." [This may also be symbolic of the Second Coming.]