Luke 21:32

This verse begins Jesus’ final word confirming the certainty of His prophecy. He introduced it with the solemn "Truly I say to you" or "I tell you the truth."

"This generation" refers to the unbelieving Jews who were alive when Jesus spoke, as it usually does in the Gospels (cf. Luke 3:7; Luke 7:31; Luke 9:41; Luke 11:29-32; Luke 11:50-51; Luke 17:25; Mark 11:14; Acts 2:40). Jesus may have meant that that generation would not disappear until the fulfillment of all that He had predicted had begun. A better interpretation is that "this generation" refers to the generation referred to in Luke 21:25 that will see the beginning of the end in the cosmic signs. [Note: Bock, Luke, pp. 538-39, M. Bailey, pp. 146-47, and Wiersbe, 1:263. For a discussion of other interpretations, see my note on Matthew 24:34; Maddox, pp. 111-15; and Morris, pp. 300-1.] The destruction of Jerusalem was the beginning of the fulfillment of what Jesus had predicted in this discourse. Obviously all the things that He predicted here did not happen within the lifetime of His hearers. He evidently regarded the beginning of fulfillment as a guarantee of complete fulfillment. This was a common Semitic viewpoint. The Semites regarded a part of the whole as the whole (cf. Deuteronomy 26:5-10; 1 Kings 13:32; Jeremiah 31:5; 2 Samuel 5:6-10; Revelation 14:1; Revelation 22:1; Romans 15:19-24). The name that some scholars have given this viewpoint is representative universalism. [Note: See A. J. Mattill Jr., "Representative Universalism and the Conquest of Canaan," Concordia Theological Monthly 35:1 (1967):8-17.]