No matter your trails and temptation throughout this life, know all you'll get is Pella. A natural land, in a historic time period. This life is all for natural results. I guess Pella is the Age to Come, The New Heavens and Earth which Preterist make a post-70ad period. Pella . . .the land of promise . . . This is a real faith builder for Christians today. I guess PELLA is the primary moral of the story. Clearly this defines the focal point of Preterism. Mere past events.
Sam Dawson
Jesus provided A WAY for faithful Jews (who became Christians) to know when Rome was about to destroy Jerusalem and the practice of the Mosaical Law. This should be a real faith-builder for Christians today. It was a logical extension because God had always provided a way of escape for His people in trying circumstances. In Ezekiel 9, God marked His people so they wouldn't be destroyed in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. In Ac. 18.9-10, Jesus told Paul in Corinth not to be afraid, for "no man shall set on thee to harm thee." In Jn. 18.8, at His own arrest, Jesus expressed concern for the safety of His apostles. Likewise, in Matthew 24, Jesus provided protection for the faithful. As Paul said in I Cor. 10.13:
There hath no temptation taken you but such as man can bear: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it.
As we've seen, the purpose of Jesus' words in this chapter was to warn faithful people who would see the signs of the approaching physical judgment and escape it. Eusebius, a third century historian, wrote of the early Jerusalem church: The whole body, however, of the church at Jerusalem, having been commanded by a divine revelation given to men of approved piety there before the war removed from the city and dwelt at a certain town beyond the Jordan, called PELLA. (Pamphilus Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, Translated by C. F. Cruse, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Company, 1869, lib. 3, chapter 6.) So, in a siege of Jerusalem where 1,100,000 Jews perished and another two and one half million were taken into slavery, not one faithful individual who heeded the warnings of Jesus given in this chapter perished. Christians fled as Jesus had commanded them to do.gospelthemes.com/Mt24.htm
