5 Things About Jesus' Second Coming
Some thoughts inspired by my podcast series on Revelation
In John 14, Jesus speaks to His disciples about His impending death and resurrection. He also tells them: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:1-3)
This is one of several places where Jesus promises that one day He will return to this cosmos, raise the dead, judge the living and the dead based on whether they have turned from sin and death and trusted in Him, call believers to Himself, and establish a new heaven and earth, a new and eternal cosmos. It’s a promise that most Christians confess as part of their faith in the Apostles’, Nicene, or Athanasian creeds every time we gather for worship. We call it the Second Coming of Christ.
Jesus and the New Testament writers taught that the sinfulness of the world and the persecution of Christ’s Church would both go on from the moment He ascended into heaven following His resurrection until His return. They also taught that evil in the world and the persecution of the Church will intensify to just before Christ does return.
From the early days of the Church then, Christians have speculated as to whether the times in which they were living would see Christ’s return.
So, when will Christ return? Here are five things to remember in connection with that question.
1. It will happen when God the Father decides it will happen.
The Bible reveals that the God of the universe is “triune,” that is He is one God in three Persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit. But, mysteriously to us, though God is One, only God the Father knows when Jesus will return to the cosmos.
Jesus says: “…concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” (Matthew 24:36)
We can only speculate as to why or how this is so. But it does tell us that simply knowing that Jesus will return and using whatever time God gives to us to share Christ, His Gospel, and His love with the world is more important than our knowing when He will return.
2. It’s not for us to know when.
Jesus explicitly said this after His resurrection. The apostles, who are still looking for Jesus to be a conventional earthly king who promises a chicken in every pot (and a Maserati in every garage), ask Jesus if now that He’s risen from the dead, He’ll usher in His Kingdom. Jesus says: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7)
3. At the moment of Jesus’ ascension when, the Bible says, He took His throne next to God the Father and when Satan was cast from heaven, all the conditions for Jesus’ return had already been met.
By the moment of His enthronement, Jesus had died as the perfect Lamb of God Who takes away our sin and risen from the dead to open eternity to all who believe in Him.
First-century Christians observed the evil in the world and experienced persecution and rejection, conditions Jesus had said would exist before His return, and wondered why Jesus hadn’t come back yet.
The apostles, like Peter and Paul, assured those early Christians that, while Jesus’ seemingly delayed return was difficult to understand, believers could continue to trust in the Lord Who had conquered death. “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness,” Peter told Christians in first-century Asia Minor (today, largely the site of Turkey), “but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)
In other words, God the Father was delaying the second coming of Jesus in order to give people the chance to partake of God’s gift of repentance: turning away from sin and death and turning to Jesus for forgiveness and life with God.
The Church and individual Christians should see in Christ’s seeming delay an ongoing opportunity to share Christ and His call to repentance, faith, and eternal life with their friends, neighbors, and even adversaries and enemies, fulfilling what’s called the Great Commission.
4. (This is specific to my current podcast study of Revelation.) The three sevenfold visions that take up most of Revelation are not a succession of events, but different takes on the same period of history.
That period is the time from Jesus’ ascension until His return. Only a few passages of Revelation speak of the days just before Jesus’ return. The rest of the book describes life in this world since the first-century until whenever Jesus’ second coming happens.
5. Speculation about when Jesus will return arises for two main reasons.
The first is a set of misinformed interpretations of the Bible. These misinterpretations talk about things like a rapture and a millennium. (You may have encountered these terms.) These teachings are called “dispensationalism” and posit a complicated timeline for when Jesus will finally, fully establish His kingdom, the new heaven and earth. Nobody—not Jesus, not the apostles, absolutely nobody—taught dispensationalism until 1833, when a man named John Nelson Darby began teaching it. But the simple teaching of the Bible is that when Jesus returns, He will raise the dead, judge all humanity, and fully usher in His eternal kingdom.
Dispensationalism, in all its forms, is a waste of time and effort. Our call is to trust Jesus and His promises. And it’s false. Period.
The second reason that people get caught up in speculating about when Jesus will come back and whether we’re living in the end times—we are, by the way, and have been since Jesus ascended to heaven, is the desire to be in control. We inherited this sinful desire from Adam and Eve who, Genesis tells us, caved into the temptations of the serpent because they wanted to “be like God.” (Genesis 3:5) But for the Christian, it’s enough to know that Jesus is the Lord of time and eternity and that one day, He will return to make all things new.