When Will Jesus Come

“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

“It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

When will Jesus come? Back in 1991 during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, just before the Persian Gulf War began, I remember seeing one of the popular teachers on conservative religious television. For at least 25 years this man had taught emphatically about the Second Coming of Christ. Just before the war began he said, “It’s only a matter of months, a year or two at most. Christ will come again very soon.”

A few years later I saw the same man on television again. Then he was saying that Christ will return within the next ten years or so. Now those ten years have gone by and he has changed his tune a bit. According to his website on March 11th, just a week ago, he is saying now that global warming will result in Jesus coming again.[1] Soon!

More than a thousand years ago, back in the 990s there was considerable speculation and anxiety that Christ would come again when the millennium turned. And I’m sure you’ll remember just a few years ago in the late 1990s and there were all kinds of prophecies about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ. The fact is that since the writing of the New Testament itself, Christians have speculated about the end of the world.[2] So I want to ask a couple of questions that may help us find our way in all this ceaseless chatter about return of our Lord.

First, do we really believe in the Second Coming of Christ? Well, we say that we believe in it. In the Apostles’ Creed, which we’ll recite in a few minutes, we affirm our belief in “Jesus Christ … [who] ascended into heaven … from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” We say it when reciting the creed but do we really believe it.

I’m guessing that most Presbyterian preachers don’t preach or teach much about the Second Coming. I know this Presbyterian preacher hasn’t and most Presbyterian churches and church members don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Second Coming either. The same would be true of most Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Catholics. But the same is not true for a lot of others in the Christian faith.

In a fascinating book called When Time Shall Be No More, a scholar by the name of Paul Boyer has described how over a century or so a whole cottage industry has grown up around the teaching of the Second Coming. This industry includes churches, schools and seminaries, publishing houses, radio and television stations, newsletters, magazines, a speaker’s circuit, and all manner of informal networks. If he were updating the book today, Boyer would certainly include the Internet. If you have cable television and tune in to the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), you’ll see the smokestacks of this cottage industry: show after show will talk about the Second Coming. Presbyterians don’t talk much about it but many other Christians do.

Is this kind of talk what we should all embrace to be believers in the Second Coming? As a young man, I would have answered yes. I grew up in this kind of teaching. I remember leading my high school group in a Bible study about 1965 when I taught that Jesus would be returning very soon because there had just been an earthquake in Seattle and earthquakes were one of the signs of the end.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before or not. But when I was born my mother dedicated me to the Lord to be a minister. I was born in 1947 just after World War II. The world had then seen the atomic bomb used in war and Israel had become a nation. These were certainly signs, according to my mother and many other Christians, that the end was near. So when my mother dedicated me to the Lord, she was sure the world wouldn’t last long enough for that to happen. I think the most surprising day of her life was the day I graduated from seminary!

But I happened to learn in that seminary that this hyper-emphasis on the Second Coming was not the only way to reflect biblically on what it means. So, yes, we believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ but that doesn’t mean you should cash in your life insurance policies or, as one group did a few years ago, plant palm trees in Denver so Jesus will feel more at home. According to their understanding, when Jesus comes back he will go first to Denver.[3]

We obviously need to ask, then, a second question and that is what does the Second Coming mean? I think it means essentially two things.

First, it is a way of affirming that Jesus is in control. As the text said, Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. At the beginning of Revelation the author tells his readers that the seven churches to which he was writing are symbolized as stars and they are held in Jesus’ hand. (Revelation 1.16, 20) Nothing happens to us, indeed, nothing happens at all, that is outside the control of Jesus Christ.

It’s interesting to me that some Christian teachers today make this point by emphasizing the church’s political clout. The bigger the church and the more influence Christians have in politics or the media or entertainment, the more we can see that Christ is in control. I’m not so sure about that. The first readers of Revelation lived in a time when the church amounted to nothing at all. Churches had no clout in Roman society; in fact, Christians were at times routinely persecuted and killed. Yet they could still believe that everything was in Jesus’ hands. That should tell us something. Our Lord is in control. I don’t know and I don’t think the Bible tells us how that is going to work out in the historical, economic, political, cultural and international arenas of the world. But we don’t need to know. We, along with the first readers of Revelation, just need to offer our praise to God because Jesus is the Alpha and Omega.

Which brings us to the second thing the Second Coming means. It means we are to grow in our desire for the Lord. Six times in the ten verses of our text, it talks about Jesus coming soon. Maybe they believed it would happen literally in the sky, maybe they didn’t. But the point is they desired the Lord’s coming. They knew their lives were incomplete until they were completely filled up with Christ. They longed for the Lord’s coming. So must we.

This may seem strange to you but I think one of the most important things we do in the church is talk about death. The ultimate issues of life and death are always present here in scripture readings and prayers, in hymns, sermons, and creeds. We mention death all of the time. That’s a gift for us because it helps us understand what life is all about.

Many people can’t deal with death. It’s always interesting for me to do a funeral in a funeral homes. What often happens then, after I’m done, is the casket is opened if it wasn’t before and people are allowed to file by and “pay their last respects.” I’ve seen this a lot, of course, and it’s always the same. Many, many people cannot and will not look at a dead body. They look every other way except into the coffin. But friends, that’s where we must all look because that’s where we all are going. Except, for the Christian we look into the face of death not out of morbidity and fear but out of the hope that comes in the presence of Christ. This life, by itself, ends in the grave but life in Christ — Come, Lord Jesus! — ends in the joy of God’s presence. To believe in the Lord’s Second Coming is to long for the fullness of that presence. Come, Lord Jesus!

One of my favorite hymns — we’ll sing it in a moment — has words based on this text from Revelation. Let me read a few lines of that hymn.

Christ rules. Not the world, not the nations and governments, not money or power or fame. Christ rules. He is the Alpha and Omega.

There is a sadness here on Earth, a recognition that the fullness of the Lord’s blessing is not yet ours and we long for that which is to come.

I remember vividly a moment more than 25 years ago. It was just a few days before we moved from Seattle to Detroit. We went up to Bellingham, Washington to visit my brother-in-law who was dying of cancer. He was in his early fifties. He had fought the disease for six or seven years and through three operations. But it was obvious to everyone including to himself that it was only a matter of months if not weeks before he died. My big sister’s husband was a farmer by vocation. He had been important to me growing up because I would spend part of my summers helping out on the farm. He loaned me money to help pay for my college education. When it came time to pay it back, he forgave the loan. He had been a big, strong man but was now down to less than 90 pounds. I sat beside his bed and we talked for a long while.

We talked about many things but everything we said was in the context of what it meant to be a Christian, to have faith in God even in days of death. In his battles with cancer my brother-in-law had become a valiant champion of faith in God. He had learned to take the question asked by so many facing suffering — “why me?” — and make it a different question — “why not me?” He knew God was not calling him to die but to step into a fullness of life we cannot even imagine. When I had to leave we both said we would not see each other again on Earth but that someday we would pick up the conversation where we left it. I realized as I went from his room that he was more alive than I.

He was already living more fully in the presence of Jesus Christ. To long for Christ is not world-denying, it is life-affirming. It is saying, that in Christ we have the fullness and the joy and the peace that only God can give. To long for the presence of Christ is part of what the Second Coming means. Even so, come Lord Jesus. Thanks be to God.

[1] Hal Lindsey on WorldNetDaily, online, www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55646, Internet, 11 May 2007.

[2] “The prophetic beliefs that influenced the worldview of millions of Americans in the late twentieth century were grounded in the sacred texts of a far-distant era. In an age of computers, space travel, and genetic engineering, a genre of visionary writing that flowered from the middle of the second century bc to the end of the first century ad, and whose roots go back much further, shaped countless believers’ views of what lay ahead for humankind. This genre, the apocalyptic, has complex sources. Historians of the ancient world find mythic outlines of history, conflict between cosmic forces of good and evil (or order and chaos), and eschatological visions in many ancient literatures, including Ugaritic, Akkadian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman. Early Persian mysticism had strong apocalyptic elements as well, although the problems of dating Persian texts make it difficult to discuss their influence with any confidence. Hesiod, a Greek poet thought to have lived in the eighth century bc, believed that man’s only hope lay in absolute submission to the gods. He envisioned history as a divinely ordered succession of worsening stages, descending from a golden age to a silver and on through bronze and iron — metallic symbolism that would reemerge in the Jewish Book of Daniel. In Hesiod’s bleak view, the final stage, before Zeus destroyed humankind for its wickedness, would be marked by warfare and social discord: “Bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.” Vergil’s Aeneid, by contrast, foretold a “golden age” for Rome, with the Emperor Augustus as the promised deliverer.” Boyer. Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 21.

[3] Ralph P. Martin, my primary New Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, read an article from the newspaper (circa 1972) about some group from Denver which had done precisely that, convinced as they were that not only was Christ returning soon but that he was coming to Denver!

[4] The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990) hymn 69. The words to “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright” were written by Philipp Nicolai (1597), altered by Johann Adolf Schlegel (1768) and translated by Catherine Winkworth (1863). The hymntune, “Wie Schön Leuchtet” was composed by Nicolai and the present arrangement was harmonized by Johan Sebastian Bach (1740).