5. So in what place would Jehovah take up the exercising of world domination at the end of the Gentile Times, and what question would it be time for him to answer, answering it in what way?

⁵ In the face of that, it would be in relationship to this “Jerusalem above” that Jehovah God would take up the exercise of his world domination at the end of the Gentile Times in the war-torn year of 1914. Then it came to be the time for him to answer with action the question raised by the inspired writer King David, in Psalm 2:1-6:

“Why have the nations been in tumult and the national groups themselves kept muttering an empty thing? The kings of earth take their stand and high officials themselves have massed together as one against Jehovah and against his anointed one [his Messiah], saying: ‘Let us tear their bands apart and cast their cords away from us!’ The very One sitting in the heavens will laugh; Jehovah himself will hold them in derision. At that time he will speak to them in his anger and in his hot displeasure he will disturb them, saying: ‘I, even I, have installed my king upon Zion, my holy mountain.’”​—See also Acts 4:24-26.

7. The installation of the Messiah as King at the end of the Gentile Times in 1914 marked the beginning of what relationship on his part to the earth, and how so?

⁷ The installation of the Messiah as King at Jehovah’s right hand in that selfsame year marked the start of his invisible presence with respect to our earth. Why so? Because as the newly installed King over the earth it was proper for him to turn his attention to his earthly domain, then occupied by his enemies, aspirants for imperial world domination. ‘The rod of his strength’ was sent out of “the Jerusalem above,” toward our earth. At Jehovah’s command he began to ‘rule in the midst of his enemies’ down at the earth. It was also to the earth that he hurled down the Devil and his demons out of heaven.​—Revelation 12:7-17.

8. For “the sign” of what did Jesus’ apostles ask him, and, according to Psalm 2:1, in what state would the nations then be?

⁸ “The sign” that the Messiah Jesus described as evidence of his invisible “presence” came into visibility at the end of the Gentile Times in 1914. Shortly before his martyr’s death the apostles asked Jesus: “Tell us when these things shall be,​—and what the sign of thy presence and the conclusion of the age.” (Matthew 24:3, The Emphasised Bible, by J. Rotherham; The Emphatic Diaglott, by Benjamin Wilson; Young’s Literal Translation; New World Translation) According to Psalm 2:1, the nations would be tumultuous at the time for God to install the Messiah Jesus as King in the celestial Jerusalem, or Zion.

9. (a) During the first century, did the inquiring apostles witness a tribulation so great as to be forever without equal? (b) So their witnessing things mentioned by Jesus in Matthew 24:7-15 served as what kind of fulfillment?

⁹ Whether Jesus when giving his answer had Psalm 2:1 in mind, and also Psalm 110:1-4, we do not know. At any rate, his answer corresponds with those prophecies made by King David, far more impressively so since 1914 than during the 37 years from when the apostles asked the question and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions in 70 C.E. Certainly that appalling Jewish calamity did not remain without equal. It was not worse, for example, than the massacre of the reported 6,000,000 Jews under the Nazi Hitler regime before and during World War II. Jerusalem’s destruction was not a “great tribulation such as has not occurred since the world’s beginning until now, no, nor will occur again.” (Matthew 24:21) What the inquiring apostles witnessed down to the end of the first century C.E. was a miniature fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy, in the way of famines, earthquakes, pestilences, wars and persecutions, as well as the wiping out of “the Jerusalem today.” They did not need to howl over this, because the celestial Jerusalem kept standing.