Waymarkers
“And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple. 2) And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down. 3) And as he sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world” (Matthew 24:1-3)?
The idea of their Temple being destroyed was so momentous that they associated it with His second coming and the end of the world. Verse three is a two part question dealing with the destruction of the temple, and the sign of His coming and the end of the world. The following signs Jesus gave in answer to their question for both events, are intermingled.
“Jesus did not answer His disciples by taking up separately the destruction of Jerusalem and the great day of His coming. He mingled the description of these two events. Had He opened to His disciples future events as He beheld them, they would have been unable to endure the sight. In mercy to them He blended the description of the two great crises, leaving the disciples to study out the meaning for themselves” (Desire of Ages P. 628).
All the signs mentioned in verses 5-14, including the gospel to the then known world (verse 14) were fulfilled prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, see Colossians 1:5, 6, but will be repeated on a worldwide scale pointing to the coming of Jesus.
Jesus referred to the coming destruction of Jerusalem as the abomination of desolation (verse 15) and elaborated on it in verses 15-20. His prophetic words reached beyond that event to His second coming. The horrible destruction of Jerusalem was a miniature type of the destruction of the world at His second coming.
When Jesus spoke of the great tribulation such as never was (verse 21), He was looking at the dark ages when more than 50 million Christians were martyred, to the final end of time when all the world would be forced to receive the mark of the beast (Revelation 13:15-17).