Matthew 24:21 · World English Bible
Matthew 24:21 Meaning For Then There Will Be Great Suffering
for then there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, nor ever will be.
What does Matthew 24:21 mean?
The severest inner ordeal comes when the whole structure a person has built is broken down at once so that a higher order can be born. Great tribulation is the crushing pressure at the crisis point of consciousness, the threshing of the old self, unmatched because it is the single decisive passage through which the being has never gone before and, once through, need never go again.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Matthew 24:21 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The severest inner ordeal comes when the whole structure a person has built is broken down at once so that a higher order can be born. Great tribulation is the crushing pressure at the crisis point of consciousness, the threshing of the old self, unmatched because it is the single decisive passage through which the being has never gone before and, once through, need never go again. It is the pressing that separates what is real in a person from what only accumulated.
This is the world within coming apart, not the globe outside. The beginning of the world is the founding of one's own mental order, and this is the hour that shatters it so a new center can rise. The plain sense is that a person passing from the lower life to the higher meets one supreme, unrepeatable pressure, and everything false is shaken loose in it.
Great tribulation: the crushing pressure at the crisis of consciousness, the threshing that breaks down the old self so a higher order can form Beginning of the world: the founding of a person's own inner order of mind, the structure now being shaken so a new center can rise
Esoteric lensGo deeper in the app
Esoteric lens
Live Matthew 24:21 today
- When the thing you were counting on falls apart today, sit with it for five minutes before you reach for your phone to fix it or distract yourself. Let the empty feeling be empty for a little while.
- If someone close to you is in the middle of their own collapse, resist the urge to patch it with advice. Say something like, this is the hard part, and stay on the call.
- Under real pressure at work, when you feel yourself scrambling to hold the whole picture together, let one piece drop on purpose. See which parts of you were actually load bearing and which were just habit.
What in your life are you holding up with both hands that might not need to stand at all?
The same truth in other traditions
Zen
The old teachers speak of the bottom of the bucket falling out. Nothing can be saved from that moment, and nothing needs to be, because what falls away was only the bucket.
Sufism · Rumi
The field must be broken open before anything can grow in it. Rumi says the wound is where the light gets in, which only makes sense if the breaking is the doorway rather than the damage.
Bhagavad Gita
Arjuna collapses on the battlefield before he hears anything true. The teaching does not arrive until the structure he came in with has already failed him.
Free · No account needed
Read all of Matthew 24 through 17 lenses
Lensightful opens every verse of the Bible through the traditions you choose. Save readings, ask a follow-up question, and get one verse a day.
Get Lensightful on the App Store