Chapter Six: This Generation (1 of 2)

Matthew 24:34 is the verse the dispensational system cannot accommodate without redefining a word. “I tell you the truth, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”

The formula Jesus uses to introduce the statement is itself significant. The Greek is ἀμήν λέγω ὑμῖν—amen, I say to you. The prophets introduced their words with “Thus says the LORD,” speaking on behalf of another. Jesus speaks on his own authority. He does not channel; he declares. The formula appears roughly seventy times in the Synoptic Gospels, each time flagging what follows as a statement of particular weight. When Jesus says amen, I say to you, he is marking the sentence that follows as something the hearer must not pass over. Matthew 24:34 carries that mark. The dispensational system has to pass over it anyway.

Jesus had just described the destruction of the Temple, the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation, false messiahs, cosmic signs, and the coming of the Son of Man. The disciples had asked when these things would happen and what the sign of his coming would be. Jesus answered at length. And at the end of his answer he said: this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

The Greek word is genea. In the Gospels, it is used consistently to refer to the people alive at the time Jesus was speaking. “This evil and adulterous generation.” “The people of this generation.” “This generation will rise up at the judgment.” Genea does not mean race, does not mean the Jewish people across all time, does not mean a future generation that will see certain signs and then experience the fulfillment within their lifespan. It means the people in front of Jesus when he spoke.

Open the Scofield Reference Bible to Matthew 24:34 and the note defines the word this way: “Genea—the primary definition of which is, race, kind, family, stock, breed. So all lexicons.” Two moves in one sentence. First, Scofield offers a minority lexical reading as the primary definition. Second, he tells the reader that every serious lexicon agrees with him. Neither claim holds up. BDAG—the standard Greek lexicon used in seminaries across the English-speaking world—places Matthew 24:34 under its definition “the sum total of those born at the same time, expanded to include all those living at a given time.” The race or kind meaning Scofield called primary is listed as a separate, secondary definition in BDAG, with a single New Testament example—and Matthew 24:34 is not that example. The note presents a contested reading as universal scholarly consensus, closing the question before the reader can open it. The note at Matthew 24:4–14 then splits the parallel accounts: the passage in Luke “refers in express terms to a destruction of Jerusalem which was fulfilled by Titus, A.D. 70” while the passage in Matthew refers to a future tribulation crisis. Luke and Matthew are parallel accounts of the same discourse from the same Jesus on the same hillside. The note divides them across two thousand years of history. The text itself never does.

Picture what this looks like on the physical page. A reader opens to Matthew 24:34. Jesus is speaking. The word “generation” appears in the text. The reader’s eye drops to the footnote column below, where Scofield’s note waits in smaller type: genea—race, kind, family, stock, breed—so all lexicons. The note has already answered the question. The reader who follows the page as designed never has the chance to ask it. That is the mechanism this entire volume is describing—not in the abstract, but in the physical experience of reading a specific word on a specific page.

The authorized Catholic commentary says so directly. The New American Bible Revised Edition, in its note at Matthew 24:34, states that the difficulty raised by the verse “cannot be satisfactorily removed by the supposition that this generation means the Jewish people throughout the course of their history, much less the entire human race.” The Reformed scholar R.C. Sproul, editor of the Reformation Study Bible, reads this generation as referring to Jesus’s first-century contemporaries and treats the Olivet Discourse as substantially fulfilled in AD 70. D.A. Carson, writing in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary and a principal contributor to the ESV Study Bible, calls it “ridiculous quibbling divorced from the context” to make this generation refer to all believers throughout the present age. These are not fringe readings assembled to argue against Scofield. They represent Catholic official scholarship, the Reformed tradition, and mainstream evangelical scholarship working from the same Greek text without the Scofield grid. What they share is not a common theological system. What they share is the willingness to let the sentence mean what the sentence says.

The dispensational system cannot accept this reading. If “this generation” means the generation alive in the first century, then the Olivet Discourse was not primarily a prediction about events two thousand years in the future. It was a prediction about events within the lifetime of the people Jesus was addressing. That is exactly what partial preterism holds—and exactly what the plain reading of the Greek requires.