Listen to this blog on The PRODCAST.

INTRODUCTION

If the topic of eschatology is fraught with endless amounts of speculation and uncertainty - and it is - then trying to understand when Jesus will return seems like the lookout point atop Obfuscation Mountain. For any brave soul who’d venture up there, tens of thousands of absurd and foolish predictions will greet you, lying doubly dead in the frozen tundra a top that silly peak. But, if you look closely enough, metaphorically speaking, just ahead of the outlandish pile of prophetic corpses, you will see a humble little plaque that reads: “No man knoweth the day nor the hour”, which seems like an appropriate monicker to eulogize such a spectacle. 

If a scene like that seems comical to you - and it is - perhaps you are not aware of the litany of false predictions that litter the landscape of church history. Rabid staggering ruminations based on a flawed hermeneutic are replete in our archives. These unbridled fomentations have not only brought unrest among the bride of Christ in every era, but proved themselves to be the blind opinings of irresponsible churchmen, based entirely upon a love of speculation and world events, and have done nothing for the building of Jesus’ Kingdom or the credibility of the Gospel. If anything, these vainglorious mishaps have made a pure mockery of both common sense and Christian prudence in one fell swoop.

From the earliest postulations of Hippolytus that Christ would return again in 500 AD (based on the dimensions of Noah’s ark), to the most recent prediction that Jesus would rapture his church away in 2021 (you know because of COVID or something), the last 2000 years are filled with doomsday duds in the same way a gas station trash can is filled with lottery losers. Enough is truly enough. 

Today, it is not my intention to jump headlong into the madness with the rest of the end-time speculators. My goal is not to offer up a new hot take on the end of the world or human history. My goal is to show how we have entirely misunderstood the language of Jesus’ return, and if we will simply look at the topic with sobriety and vigor, then I believe the confusion will abate. 

SECOND COMING CONFUSION

For what it is worth, the vast majority of eschatological bafoonery could be settled by understanding one critical issue. That is, Jesus does not return just once, He actually returns twice. Assuming I have not lost you at this point, let me explain. 

In the New Testament, there are two end-time comings of Jesus. There is His final coming at the end of human history, where He will separate the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the tares. That coming is still in our future and no one knows when it will occur. But, there are also a collection of texts, I will argue the majority, that talk about a different kind of coming that Jesus participates in. It is not a coming that happens at the very end, but has already happened. It is not a bodily coming, but a spiritual coming. And, it is not the kind of joyful coming where Jesus delivers the elect from a fallen world, but instead causes ferocious calamity to fall upon God’s enemies.

With this assertion, It is my humble contention, if we continue to mix up these two “comings” of Christ, then we will also continue to replicate the same level of pollution that has sicked evangelicalism into an eschatological stupor. My opinion is that there is no more need for that. So, let us, therefore, press ever onward.

THE VALIDITY OF TWO COMINGS

While we will deal with the future- oriented - end of world history - coming of Jesus at some point in the future (no pun intended) the vast majority of Biblical “second coming” language actually refers to a near-term event. That event is the downfall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Let me say it this way, the overwhelming majority of Biblical passages, the ones we were all taught to apply to the future, in fact, have already occurred in the past, which is no easy pill to swallow. I get that. 

But, since I have promised to be both rational and Biblical in this series, we must go through these passages, one by one, taking all of the necessary time and care to prove these things are true. My goal is that you will see the validity of the position and have confidence in a more hopeful and accurate understanding. For today, I only want you to see that 2 very different kinds of comings exist in the New Testament. In the weeks that follow, we will look at all the relevant passages dealing with each, but for now, our modest goal will do.

THE END OF HUMAN HISTORY “COMING”

When we think of Jesus’ second coming, we often think about an end of history event where Jesus comes back to claim His elect bride and to take her home to be with Him in eternity. When that coming happens, the world ends, which I most certainly agree with this and so does the Bible. For instance, when Paul is referring to the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he is teaching us everything we need to know about Jesus’ final, end of the world, coming. He says:

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all (the elect) will be made alive. 23 But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming, then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death. - 1 Corinthians 15:22-26 (Emphasis mine)

Paul is telling us that there is an order to events of world history and understanding it will help us know what the very end will look like. First, all human beings, who will ever live, at any time or in any place, have all equally fallen under Adam. He became the federal head of all people, past, present, and future, when he rebelled against His God. This means his fall not only affected him, but everyone after him. That, of course, includes everyone living between his first born son Cain and the last and final human being to born on planet earth. Every single human that will ever live - even all those who have not yet been born - were already covenantally born into Adam and are all the recipients of his fallen nature. That is the first thing we must understand, which is how the story began.

Second, after Adam sinned, God set about a plan of redemption for a specific group of people called the elect. A group that the Old Testament era of types and shadows alludes to, but does not come into picture-perfect clarity until the incarnation of Christ. When Jesus came, He revealed His primary mission was to purchase and secure all of God’s pre chosen people (Ephesians 1:4) by transferring them out of the headship of Adam and into the family of God (1 Corinthians 15:22 and Romans 5:12-19). This began the middle part of the story.

Third, we must understand that Jesus did that work of transfer in two specific stages. He established an era where men and women would be saved by faith in Christ and a future era when they would be transformed into the image of Christ. A present time period when they would be given new hearts by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and a future eternal era when they would be given new glorified bodies. A current epoch where God’s people would get their citizenship papers and a future era when they would populate the celestial city. This is so important for us to understand because it lets us know exactly when Jesus will return without an ounce of speculation. 

Jesus will return when the last and final member of God’s family is saved. That is the end. Whenever that last Christian is saved, when that final person hears the Gospel and is converted, when the final Christian is made, the final heart indwelled, when the final passport for His Kingdom is stamped, then the end will come. And we know that because Paul says Jesus will hand over a completed Kingdom to God, and the Kingdom will not be complete until every single member of God’s elected bride have come. This will happen in every era God predestined, among every people tibe our God created, and out of every nation that God has chosen. Not a moment sooner. 

This, according to Paul, is when physical death is defeated (v. 26). After the final salvation occurs the era of spiritual resurrections is complete. Then, physical death will be thrown into the lake of fire, and every believer past, present, and future will be given newly glorified and imperishable bodies, signaling the very end of the story. At that time, all of God’s people will be set back right again. We will be like Adam and Eve before the Fall, Living as redeemed spiritual and physical beings in perfect integrated harmon in the glorious presence of God (v. 42). 

Those who died before the era of New Eden, who were truly saved and waiting on the Lord’s return, will be bodily raised from their graves (v. 53-57) and presented before King Jesus with new radiant bodies that match His. And, all of those who are alive when He returns will likewise be caught up in the air with Him (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), and in some way or another, they too will be presented to Him with a new imperishable body. That is what the end of human history looks like. When Christ takes His bride home to live with her forever.

But, as I have alluded before, every New Testament “coming” passage does not refer to this end of human history event. And, to force it into that mold, causes awful head-scratching confusion.

THE AD 70 COMING

The second kind of coming in the New Testament, does not occur at the end of the world, but when Jesus comes in judgment against Jerusalem in AD 70. This will be made abundantly clear over many weeks, as we go verse by verse through the mound of Biblical evidence the New Testament provides on this topic. Before we are finished, you may have AD 70 references coming out of your ears. But, as I mentioned before, today I simply want you to see that there is a different kind of coming that exists in the text. I am calling it a judgment coming. To do that, we will turn to Matthew 24:1-3. The text says: 

Jesus came out from the temple and was going away when His disciples came up to point out the temple buildings to Him. And He said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down.” As He was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things happen, and what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” - Matthew 24:1-3

In the moments immediately before Matthew 24, (aka Matthew 23) Jesus pronounced a seven-fold covenantal curse upon the city of Jerusalem and it’s leadership. He reminded them how He (as God) had sent them prophets throughout every generation, and would be sending His own disciples in the coming days to call them to repentance (See also Acts 1:8). But, Jesus tells us, they would not only persist in their disobedience, but they would invoke the fury of God for killing the ones that God Himself would sent (Mt. 23:34). The final straw for wicked Jerusalem had come.

As a punishment for killing God’s messengers, even His one and only Son, all of God’s covenantal fury would be poured out on that specific generation (Mt. 23:35-36), which meant that the city and it’s house (a reference to the temple), would be left totally desolated (Mt. 23:38). Thus, as we turn over to Matthew 24, a passage many people claim is talking about the second coming, what we see is Jesus’ extended commentary with His disciples on how Jerusalem, Judaism, and it’s wicked house would be left in utter shambles. 

Knowing this, we can understand why Jesus wasn’t impressed, in the slightest, with all of the buildings in the Herodian temple complex, even as His disciples were fawning and slobbering all over them out (Mt. 24:1). We may also see why the disciples, ethnic Judeans who loved their temple as a symbol national pride, were distressed at Jesus’ prophecy that it’d be torn apart brick by brick (Mt. 24:2-3). But what most have not yet seen clearly in this passage, is how Jesus limits the entire prophecy to a near term fulfillment. Let me explain by highlighting the three questions His disciples come to ask Him. 

QUESTION 1: WHEN WILL THESE THINGS HAPPEN?

As the disciples walk in silence with Jerusalem at their backs, clearly shaken by what Jesus has just told them, they wait long enough for Jesus to take a break at the Mount of Olives before bombarding Him with questions. With the Jerusalem temple as an apropos backdrop upon the horizon, they figured now was as good a time as any for them to ask Him what His cryptic statements really meant. 

They ask Him, “When will these things happen?”, which clearly “these things” means the things Jesus had just spoken about. For the disciples' part, they wanted to know when the temple would be destroyed. It seemed clear that a brick by brick demolition was on Jesus’ mind, so they wanted to know when it would happen. Seeing that a completely leveled temple would certifiably end the Old Testament priesthood, end the sacrificial system, and would end the entire Old Covenant era, this was not an insignificant or foolish question. Or to say that a modern way, they were picking up what Jesus was tearing down.

In answering there signficant questions, Jesus does not give them insignificant answers. He looks them right in the face, In verse 34, and He tells them:

Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. -Matthew 24:34

He tells them as a matter of truth, staking His own credibility, that the temple would not stand in the span of 40 years. Unsurprisingly, Since Christ is God, it was a single Biblical generation (forty years later) when the Roman legions invaded Judea and systematically leveled the Jerusalem temple to the ground. Jesus’ prediction not only proved to be true, but the timing of it occurred with such divine precision and clarity, that it cannot be questioned.

What we have to be comfortable with, is that the word “coming” in this passage does not mean a future bodily coming of Jesus, but a coming whereby Christ uses the Romans to execute justice against rebel Judah. If that understanding of “coming” is difficult for you, consider that God the Father also speaks this way in Isaiah 13 (and in other places) when He raises up one nation to destroy another. These are common ways God speaks about judgment, through the language of “coming”.

QUESTION 2: WHAT WILL BE THE SIGN OF YOUR COMING?

The second question the disciples asked for was the sign of Jesus’ coming. And while we will deal with this in full later, Jesus gives them a startling and terrifying sign which unambiguously proves this “coming” in Matthew 24 is not a future event for us, but something that occurred within their lifetime. He tells them in verses 37-39:

37 For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be. - Matthew 24:37-39

While many unstable interpreters make this to be about an end-time rapture, the logic of the passage renders that view completely untenable. For starters, Jesus already told them what these events were concerning (i.e. the destruction of the Jewish temple), when they would occur (i.e. within a single generation) and where they would happen (i.e. within Jerusalem). So, unless Jesus wildly jolts off topic - like a street raving lunatic after a few drinks - this passage cannot refer to future twenty-first century events. 

Think about it, do we really believe that He’d stop mid-sentence, look at Peter, James, and John, and basically say to them: “I know you all really want to know when all of these will happen, don’t ya? Trust me, I can see how jazzed up you all are about it. But, instead of staying on topic and addressing the actual questions you were asking me about, let me instead tell you about something completely irrelevant to your experience, and won’t affect any aspect of your life, or the life of your children.” That simply cannot be what He is doing here. It would not only be a strange way for Him to answer them, but it would be a very unloving way for Him to answer their very specific question. 

The second problem with this passage being about an end-time future rapture is found in the analogy itself. Jesus says that His coming will be like the days of Noah, which did not carry away the righteous, but captured a world full of wicked people in the cascading waters of a global flood. If Jesus were talking about a world-wide event, where the righteous were caught away and delivered from the wicked, He would not use the example of the days of Noah! In those days, it was the wicked who were “taken away”! Not the righteous! Context matters when we are trying to understand Scripture.

Jesus tells them that His coming against rebellious Jerusalem will be just like God’s coming flood against the wicked world. His fury would overtake Jerusalem, flooding it with God’s covenantal fury. And just as it was in the days of Noah, none of the wicked would survive.

In the original flood, the wicked descended into a watery grave where the fish and sea creatures consumed them. In Jesus’ judgment on Jerusalem, their dead bodies would lie baking in the open streets so that the birds of heaven would peck at the corpses (Matthew 24:28). That is what His coming against Jerusalem would look like, and that is exactly what it did look like, when Rome sacked Jerusalem in AD 70. This passage is not about the rapture! 

QUESTION 3: WHAT ABOUT THE END OF THE AGE?

We will dive further into this point in the weeks ahead, but if you think about it, the answer is not all that difficult to discern. The disciples had just heard Jesus say: “your temple will be totally destroyed”. This gives us two options on what the “end of the age” means. 

If the “end of the age” means the “end of time”, then you would have to imagine the disciples coming to Jesus exclaiming: “Lord! How could you say that this particular temple will be destroyed in our lifetime? When will it happen? What are some of the tell-tell signs that it is about to happen, so that we can make sure we leave the city with plenty of time to spare? And, oh yeah, while you are at it, Peter has some end-time questions we were all debating… Could you also give an answer to that rando question as well? Please and thank you…” Clearly my sarcasm is bleeding through here, but is that really what they were looking to understand given the context? In lieu of the immediate and cataclysmic event they were concerned about, were they really asking a question about what life would be like at the end of human history. I find it hard to believe myself.

On the other hand, if “end of the age” meant the “end of the Jewish age” (a common understanding at that time) then things start to make sense. We know that the Jewish age was an era in redemptive history when God covenanted to live with His people in temples, served by Levites and priests, and where their sins would be covered by the sacrifices of animals. If Jesus is talking about the downfall of the Jerusalem temple, He is assuredly talking about the end of the Jewish age, which is why the disciples asked the question. Again, they knew exactly what His comments meant and their questions were rational and focused.  

This reading not only makes more sense of the context, it proves that Jesus’ “coming” in Matthew 24, was not an end of history coming, but a judgment coming of Christ against Jerusalem, who became His great enemy. 

CONCLUSION

In the weeks ahead, I will do my very best to show you what Jesus’ coming against Jerusalem really means. I will show you just how many of the passages you were told were future, have actually already occurred in that devastating destruction on Jerusalem. And I will show you how all of the future passages still left to be fulfilled, do not leave us with doom and gloom, dread, and paralyzing fear, but with joy, hope, and courage to build God’s Kingdom while we wait on the bodily resurrection. 

Until next time, it may be the end of the world, but I feel fine! 

If you would like to read other installments in this series, or more articles on various topics, please check out our blog for more.