I : Alternate Views : Luke 21:25-28; Acts 1:6-11
If we believe Jesus to be the Son of God, and the Gospels a reliable record of His deeds and words, then we have to believe in His Second Coming. Those who heard Him speak of it, the Gospel writers, were better placed than any others before or since to understand what He meant, and they are unanimous in what they reported.
1. Luke 21:27
Then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. (See Note 1 below)
2. Acts 1:11
This Jesus, Who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.
3. Mark 13:32-3
Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son of Man, but the Father only. Take heed then, and watch; for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
These statements make it quite clear that the Lord's return will be ...
1. Personal
the Son of Man will come
Luke 21:27
2. Visible
the same way you saw Him go
Acts 1:11
3. Unpredictable
of that day and hour no-one knows
Mark 13:32
Anyone who professes to know is dishonest ... or deceived. To be sure, the Lord told us there will indeed be signs to tell us when the end is near - but not how near.
One would have thought this was enough. Unfortunately, it is not. What Christians believe about the Second Coming is complicated by three considerations at least: the destiny of the Jews, the Great Tribulation and the Millennium. Of the three, the Millennium is the crucial one; what you believe about that more or less decides what you believe about the other two.
The Millennium is referred to in only one chapter of the Bible, Rev. 20 - a period of one thousand years during which Satan is bound so that he may not deceive the nations, and during which the martyrs live and reign with Christ. The way this passage is understood pretty well determines how we see the shape of the future as the Bible foreshadows it.
Our intention in this series is not so much to settle the issues as to elucidate them.
Sincere, Bible-believing Christians have understood what the Bible teaches about the Second Coming in three different ways ... more or less! I say 'more or less' because to discuss the finer points of prophecy with dedicated students of it is to find that there are almost as many views as there are students. Sometimes I have wondered whether Paul's counsel to Timothy ought not to be pronounced over the whole argument: "Charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers." (II Tim. 2:14) But that would perhaps be a little cavalier, for Paul goes on at once to say, "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." Unhappily the attempt to do just that often has the result that it divides, not the truth, but Christians!
Broadly, speaking there are three ways in which Christians see the future; the three views are rather clumsily labelled ...
1. Pre-Millennial - the Second Coming will happen before the Millennium
2. Post-Millennial - the Second Coming will happen after the Millennium
3. A-Millennial - there will be no literal Millennium: the phrase is symbolic of the Gospel Age in which we are living now.
We review them briefly.
The present age will come to its climax with the Second Coming of Christ Part I, at which time the church on earth in its entirety will be "caught up to meet Him in the air." All the Christians in the world will instantaneously vanish into thin air, miraculously drawn up into Heaven to celebrate there the "Marriage Supper of the Lamb."
For a period of seven years there will then be a time of great tribulation in the earth which ends with Christ's return Part II to the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, when He will overwhelm the massed forces that have gathered in the Plain of Megiddo to wipe out the nation Israel.
Introduced by a gruesome clean-up of the corpses, the Millennium follows - a period of one thousand years in which Christ sets up a visible earthly kingdom over which He reigns personally from Jerusalem, rebuilds the temple there, and reconstitutes the whole pattern of Old Testament sacrifices. During this age our earthly society will approximate to the dream of Paradise that has haunted it since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.
The Millennium will end with a further time of testing, when the devil, who has been restrained throughout the 1,000 years, will be loosed to test the hearts of men. This brief period of testing will be followed by the General Resurrection and the Last Judgment. There then follows the setting up of the New Heavens and a New Earth.
The present age will see a steady progress of the Gospel throughout the world until the world is eventually 'christianised.' Whilst evil will not be entirely eliminated from human life on earth, it will be so severely restricted that earthly society will, near enough, become the 'Paradise' for which men yearn and of which they dream.
Only at the close of this long period of peace and righteousness (the Millennium) will the Second Coming occur, and it will be followed at once by the General Resurrection, the Last Judgment and the establishment of the New Heavens and a New Earth.
On this view the Millennium is not to be understood at all as the promise of a literal earthly kingdom, ruled by Christ from Jerusalem. Rather it is to be understood as picture language, consistent with the style of the book of Revelation, describing the Lordship of Christ throughout the whole of this Gospel age, during which Satan is so bound as to be powerless to prevent the spread of the Gospel throughout the world.
There will in fact be no earthly paradise of the kind suggested by the other two views at all until a new earth is established. The present age will see the conflict between the forces of good and evil intensify to the point where the personal return of Christ in power and great glory will end it at a stroke. History itself will end with the Second Coming; the world as we know it will 'pass away,' and the New Heavens and the New Earth will take its place. On this view, the Second Coming, the General Resurrection and the Last Judgment will all be more or less simultaneous.
We may represent the three views graphically as follows:
We may well ask how the study of the same scriptures by equally sincere men can yield such different conclusions. The answer is not a simple one. Here are some of the difficulties:
1. The Book of Daniel.
The Book of Daniel contains a prophecy (9:24-27) which forecasts events through a period of 'seventy weeks' of years, from the time of Daniel himself down to the time of Christ. A week of years is reckoned to be seven years, so the period under review is 490 years.
Some hold that whilst the events foretold for the first sixty-nine weeks of years were all fulfilled by the time of Christ, those for the seventieth week were not, and still await their fulfilment therefore in the future. It is as though at the end of the 69th week, God said, "Stop the clock." The countdown has been 'on hold' ever since.
Others believe the events foretold for that week were in fact fulfilled at the time of Christ's first coming. There is no seventieth week 'on hold,' waiting to be fulfilled in the Great Tribulation.
2. The Book of Ezekiel.
The Book of Ezekiel, in its last 11 chapters, contains two awesome visions of the future.
The first is the vision of an enormous human conflict in the land of Palestine which will be 'the war to end all wars' - a victory for the God of Israel over all human opposition so crushing that there will remain no doubt thereafter of God's reality and power. The vision ends with a picture of the Jewish nation reestablished in its own land as the religious leaders of the world.
The second vision is of a new Temple built in the city of Jerusalem (its description is extremely detailed), and of the reinstatement of the whole ritual of sacrifices as practised in Old Testament times.
How these two visions are understood depends on whether they are interpreted literally or figuratively - whether they will be fulfilled to the letter, or whether they are simply a promise in picture language only of the final triumph of good over evil and the establishment of pure worship over all the earth.
3. Prophecies in the Old Testament.
Many of these promise a golden age of prosperity and true faith in the latter days to the nation Israel, e.g.:
Isaiah 11:6-9 -The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. Cow and bear shall feed and their young lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The suckling child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Isaiah 65:17-25 - Be glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. No more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the child shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed ... The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox ... They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
Ezekiel 39:21-29 - Thus says the Lord God: "I will restore the fortunes of Jacob, and have mercy on the whole house of Israel ... They shall forget their shame, and all the treachery they have practised against me, when they dwell securely in their land with none to make them afraid ... when I have brought them back from their enemies' lands I will leave none of them remaining among the nations any more; and I will hide my face from them no more, when I pour out my Spirit upon the house of Israel."
Hosea 3:4-5 - The children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar ... Afterward they shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.
Will these and other such prophecies have their fulfilment in the millennium, or after the Millennium in the new earth?
4. How is the book of Revelation is to be interpreted?
A vexed question! Does it supply a programme of events from the time of our Lord's resurrection down to the time of His Second Coming ... and beyond? Or is it to be understood quite differently ... not as a vision of future events, but as a profound statement, in highly symbolic language (almost all of it drawn from the Old Testament), of the way in which Christ risen and ascended is exercising His rule over the world's life, now, and in every age until the last?
5. Which prophecies about Israel have been fulfilled, and which not?
Many Old Testament prophecies promise a regathering of her scattered peoples, and we could be forgiven for thinking that they are being fulfilled in our own day since the Jews were restored to the State of Israel in May 1948.
The trouble is that her people were once before in their history dispossessed of their land, scattered abroad, and then regathered in it, at the time of Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian and Cyrus the Persian. And since Old Testament prophecies were written before, during and after that time, it is not at all easy to be sure when any particular prophecy was written so as to know whether or not it had its fulfilment then.
There are other difficulties too: how many 'judgements' does Scripture foretell, and how many 'resurrections', and how many 'Kingdoms' does it refer to? But the five listed are enough to be going on with! We shall turn to them in the next chapter.
Trying to evaluate the respective merits of the three schemes is a complicated process; but all three agree on the three basic affirmations with which we began: that Christ will return personally, visibly and unpredictably. And whatever programme of events follows His Second Coming, for those who are living at the time it will be 'the end'; for those who have heard and rejected the Gospel by then there will be no 'second chance.'
Finally, a dictum that should guide all discussion of these issues among Christians is:
"In things essential, unity; in things doubtful, liberty; in all things, charity."
It is on the things essential that the Gospels and the Epistles concentrate. Aside from the Books of Revelation and Ezekiel, neither the Battle of Armageddon nor the Millennium are mentioned in the Scriptures. But the personal return of Christ in power and great glory and final victory is underscored again and again. To that we should hold, and on the rest reserve judgment!
Note 1:
Compare Mark 14:61-62, The High Priest asked Jesus, "Are you the
Christ the Son of the Blessed?" And Jesus said, "I am; and you will
see the Son of Man, seated at the right hand of power, and coming in
the clouds of heaven."
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