Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom. (Matt. 16:28)So what was Jesus saying here? That his Second Coming would occur during the lifetime of "some of those who are standing here"?Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. (Matt. 24:34)
Well, first of all we've got to understand that we're dealing with prophecy here: Jesus is predicting something in the future. And prophecy can be very difficult to understand. Prophecies are often stated in very cryptic ways.
For example, Jesus was walking in the temple with some of his disciples one day, and he prophesied that he would rise from the dead, by saying, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again." (John 2:19-21)
That's pretty cryptic. It left everybody scratching their heads, wondering how Jesus would by himself rebuild the whole temple in three days if somebody destroyed it. But it also tells us right there in the Bible what the meaning of this prophecy was: By "temple" Jesus meant his own body (obvious to us now, but who could have figured it out at that time, before they had any idea that Jesus would die and rise again?), which he would raise up after being crucified.
However, the Bible doesn't always tell us the meanings of the prophecies it contains. With many prophecies you can get into some very deep theological questions. Our present example is one of those prophecies. There are many different ideas about its interpretation. After studying up a little on the subject, I can briefly give a taste of what some of the ideas are about it, but of course there is no final agreement about its exact meaning.
1. Theologians of "dispensationalist" schools of thought say that this was a prediction that the actual event of Jesus' second coming would occur within the lifetimes of some of the people living at that time. However, they say the prediction was implicitly conditional (as for example Jonah's prophecy of Nineveh's destruction was)--the condition being that Israel would fulfil God's requirement that they accept Jesus their Messiah and then evangelize the world with the gospel of Christ. But Israel didn't do this. Therefore, God was not required to fulfil his part of the covenant, and instead delayed Jesus' second coming while he turned to the Gentile world to establish the church and evangelize the world through them. (For example Bob Enyart espouses such views in his "Plot of the Bible.")
2. Another interesting view that I ran across raises the intriguing idea that the statement was prophetically referring not to those living then, but to people living at a future time when Jesus would return. It was meant as a promise to the faithful who would be around during the final tribulation period before Jesus' return, a time when believers are being persecuted and killed (persecution, taking up one's cross, etc. are mentioned in the context of Jesus' words), and that it is a promise to them that even though it looks as if they are going to be wiped out in the persecution they are suffering, Jesus' return is actually imminent, and will occur even before all of them are wiped out.
The natural question that this view raises is, Why then does Jesus' statement use the present tense: "Some who ARE standing here?" One answer to this question may be that prophecies sometimes use present tense to foretell the future, as in for example Psalm 22 and other Psalms.
3. But now here's the view that I tend to favor. To say that someone will "SEE the Son of Man coming in his kingdom" does not necessarily mean that they will experience the actual event. We can take as our example here the fact that Moses lived to SEE the promised land, but he never actually experienced it himself. He just saw it from afar (for any who don't know the Biblical story, God allowed Moses to view the land from a nearby mountaintop, but he died without entering it).
So how did some of those standing there with Jesus SEE the kingdom? Well, what about the Transfiguration--when Jesus took Peter, James and John to a mountaintop and Jesus suddenly was revealed to them in all his heavenly glory? Could that be an example of "seeing" Jesus' kingdom?
Well, it depends on what the kingdom is. Without going into a lot of detail here, let me say that in the gospels the kingdom is presented as something that started at the time of Jesus' life on earth. Jesus says in one place, "The kingdom is in your midst," (Luke 17:21--NASB, etc., also translated "within you"--KJV, NIV, etc.). Also the parable of the mustard seed and other parables teach that the kingdom starts small and grows gradually.
So if the kingdom was among the people at that time because Jesus was among them, then when Peter, James and John saw Jesus revealed for who he really was, the glory they saw in him revealed that he was the one who would rule in the kingdom, and who even now was bringing the kingdom to their midst. They had a foretaste of the time when the kingdom would come in its fulness.
Flash forward several years. Here's John, the last living disciple, living in exile on the island he has been banished to. He now realizes that Jesus probably won't return before his death, as perhaps he once thought. But he remembers that he and the other disciples did get a preview of the glory that will be seen when Jesus returns in his kingdom.
And of course, not only did John have that memory, but God then gave him his final revelation--in which John saw in vivid detail a vision of Jesus' second coming and his reign in glory.
In this way, it could be said that some SAW Jesus coming in his kingdom--not in the actual event, but by being shown a preview of it, just like Moses' preview of the Promised Land.
In any case, the main thing to remember here is that this is a foretelling--a prophecy--and such things naturally are often difficult to understand.