III. The Second Coming of Christ.
While the Scriptures represent great events in the history of the individual Christian, like death, and great events in the history of the church, like the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and the destruction of Jerusalem, as comings of Christ for deliverance or judgment, they also declare that these partial and typical comings shall be concluded by a final, triumphant return of Christ, to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people.
Temporal comings of Christ are indicated in: Mat. 24:23, 27, 34—“Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is the Christ, or, Here; believe it not.... For as the lightning cometh forth from the east, and is seen even unto the west; so shall be the coming of the Son of man.... Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be accomplished”; 16:28—“Verily I say unto you, There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”; John 14:3, 18—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.... I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you”; Rev. 3:20—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”So the Protestant Reformation, the modern missionary enterprise, the battle against papacy in Europe and against slavery in this country, the great revivals under Whitefield in England and under Edwards in America, were all preliminary and typical comings of Christ. It was a sceptical spirit which indited the words: “God's new Messiah, some great Cause”; yet it is true that in every great movement of civilization we are to recognize a new coming of the one and only Messiah, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and to-day and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 1:840—“The coming began with his ascension to heaven (cf. Mat. 26:64—‘henceforth ἀπ᾽ ἄρτι [from now] ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven’).” Matheson, Spir. Devel. of St. Paul, 286—“To Paul, in his later letters, this world is already the scene of the second advent. The secular is not to vanish away, but to be permanent, transfigured, pervaded by the divine life. Paul began with the Christ of the resurrection; he ends with the Christ who already makes all things new.” See Metcalf, Parousia vs. Second Advent, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1907:61-65.
The final coming of Christ is referred to in: Mat. 24:30—“they shall see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a [pg 1004]trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other”; 25:31—“But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 1:11—“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven? this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; 1 Thess. 4:16—“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”; 2 Thess. 1:7, 10—“the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power ... when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed”; Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Rev. 1:7—“Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him.” Dr. A. C. Kendrick, Com. on Heb. 1:6—“And when he shall conduct back again into the inhabited world the First-born, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”—in the glory of the second coming Christ's superiority to angels will be signally displayed—a contrast to the humiliation of his first coming.
The tendency of our day is to interpret this second class of passages in a purely metaphorical and spiritual way. But prophecy can have more than one fulfilment. Jesus' words are pregnant words. The present spiritual coming does not exhaust their meaning. His coming in the great movements of history does not preclude a final and literal coming, in which “every eye shall see him” (Rev. 1:7). With this proviso, we may assent to much of the following quotation from Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 44-58—“The last things of which Jesus speaks are not the end of the world, but of the age—the end of the Jewish period in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem.... After the entire statement is in, including both the destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of the Lord which is to follow it, it is distinctly said that that generation was not to pass away until all these things are accomplished. According to this, the coming of the Son of man must be something other than a visible coming. In O. T. prophecy any divine interference in human affairs is represented under the figure of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Mat. 26:64 says: ‘From this time ye shall see the Son of man seated ... and coming in the clouds of heaven.’ Coming and judgment are both continuous. The slow growth in the parables of the leaven and the mustard seed contradicts the idea of Christ's early coming. ‘After a long time the Lord of these servants cometh’ (Mat. 25:19). Christ came in one sense at the destruction of Jerusalem; in another sense all great crises in the history of the world are comings of the Son of man. These judgments of the nations are a part of the process for the final setting up of the kingdom. But this final act will not be a judgment process, but the final entire submission of the will of man to the will of God. The end is to be, not judgment, but salvation.” We add to this statement the declaration that the final act here spoken of will not be purely subjective and spiritual, but will constitute an external manifestation of Christ comparable to that of his first coming in its appeal to the senses, but unspeakably more glorious than was the coming to the manger and the cross. The proof of this we now proceed to give.
1. The nature of this coming.
Although without doubt accompanied, in the case of the regenerate, by inward and invisible influences of the Holy Spirit, the second advent is to be outward and visible. This we argue:
(a) From the objects to be secured by Christ's return. These are partly external (Rom. 8:21, 23). Nature and the body are both to be glorified. These external changes may well be accompanied by a visible manifestation of him who “makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
Rom. 8:10-23—“in hope that the creation also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God ... waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; Rev. 21:5—“Behold, I make all things new.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 49—“We must not confound the Paraclete and the Parousia. It has been argued that, because Christ came in the person of the Spirit, the Redeemer's advent in glory has already taken place. But in the Paraclete Christ comes spiritually and invisibly; in the Parousia he comes bodily and gloriously.”
(b) From the Scriptural comparison of the manner of Christ's return with the manner of his departure (Acts 1:11)—see Commentary of [pg 1005] Hackett, in loco:—“ὂν τρόπον = visibly, and in the air. The expression is never employed to affirm merely the certainty of one event as compared with another. The assertion that the meaning is simply that, as Christ had departed, so also he would return, is contradicted by every passage in which the phrase occurs.”
Acts 1:11—“this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; cf. Acts 7:28—“wouldest thou kill me, as ὂν τρόπον thou killedst the Egyptian yesterday?” Mat. 23:37—“how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as ὂν τρόπον a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”; 2 Tim. 3:8—“as ὂν τρόπον Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also withstand the truth.” Lyman Abbott refers to Mat. 23:37, and Luke 13:35, as showing that, in Acts 1:11, “in like manner” means only “in like reality.” So, he says, the Jews expected Elijah to return in form, according to Mal. 4:5, whereas he returned only in spirit. Jesus similarly returned at Pentecost in spirit, and has been coming again ever since. The remark of Dr. Hackett, quoted in the text above, is sufficient proof that this interpretation is wholly unexegetical.
(c) From the analogy of Christ's first coming. If this was a literal and visible coming, we may expect the second coming to be literal and visible also.
1 Thess. 4:16—“For the Lord himself [= in his own person] shall descend from heaven, with a shout[something heard], with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”—see Com. of Prof. W. A. Stevens: “So different from Luke 17:20, where ‘the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.’The ‘shout’ is not necessarily the voice of Christ himself (lit. ‘in a shout,’ or ‘in shouting’). ‘Voice of the archangel’ and ‘trump of God’ are appositional, not additional.” Rev. 1:7—“every eye shall see him”; as every ear shall hear him: John 5:28, 29—“all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice”; 2 Thess. 2:2—“to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled ... as that the day of the Lord is now present”—they may have “thought that the first gathering of the saints to Christ was a quiet, invisible one—a stealthy advent, like a thief in the night”(Lillie). 2 John 7—“For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh”—here denial of a future second coming of Christ is declared to be the mark of a deceiver.
Alford and Alexander, in their Commentaries on Acts 1:11, agree with the view of Hackett quoted above. Warren, Parousia, 61-65, 106-114, controverts this view and says that “an omnipresent divine being can come, only in the sense of manifestation.” He regards the parousia, or coming of Christ, as nothing but Christ's spiritual presence. A writer in the Presb. Review, 1883:221, replies that Warren's view is contradicted “by the fact that the apostles often spoke of the parousia as an event yet future, long after the promise of the Redeemer's spiritual presence with his church had begun to be fulfilled, and by the fact that Paul expressly cautions the Thessalonians against the belief that the parousia was just at hand.” We do not know how all men at one time can see a bodily Christ; but we also do not know the nature of Christ's body. The day exists undivided in many places at the same time. The telephone has made it possible for men widely separated to hear the same voice,—it is equally possible that all men may see the same Christ coming in the clouds.
2. The time of Christ's coming.
(a) Although Christ's prophecy of this event, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, so connects it with the destruction of Jerusalem that the apostles and the early Christians seem to have hoped for its occurrence during their life-time, yet neither Christ nor the apostles definitely taught when the end should be, but rather declared the knowledge of it to be reserved in the counsels of God, that men might ever recognize it as possibly at hand, and so might live in the attitude of constant expectation.
1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”; 1 Thess. 4:17—“then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord”; 2 Tim. 4:8—“henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day: and not only to me, but also to all them that have loved his appearing”; James [pg 1006]5:7—“Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord”; 1 Pet. 4:7—“But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore of sound mind, and be sober unto prayer”; 1 John 2:18—“Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that antichrist cometh, even now have there risen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour.”
Phil. 4:5—“The Lord is at hand (ἐγγύς). In nothing be anxious”—may mean “the Lord is near”(in space), without any reference to the second coming. The passages quoted above, expressing as they do the surmises of the apostles that Christ's coming was near, while yet abstaining from all definite fixing of the time, are at least sufficient proof that Christ's advent may not be near to our time. We should be no more warranted than they were, in inferring from these passages alone the immediate coming of the Lord.
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:349-350, maintains that Jesus expected his own speedy second coming and the end of the world. There was no mention of the death of his disciples, or the importance of readiness for it. No hard and fast organization of his disciples into a church was contemplated by him,—Mat. 16:18 and 18:17 are not authentic. No separation of his disciples from the fellowship of the Jewish religion was thought of. He thought of the destruction of Jerusalem as the final judgment. Yet his doctrine would spread through the earth, like leaven and mustard seed, though accompanied by suffering on the part of his disciples. This view of Wendt can be maintained only by an arbitrary throwing out of the testimony of the evangelist, upon the ground that Jesus' mention of a church does not befit so early a stage in the evolution of Christianity. Wendt's whole treatment is vitiated by the presupposition that there can be nothing in Jesus' words which is inexplicable upon the theory of natural development. That Jesus did not expect speedily to return to earth is shown in Mat. 25:19—“After a long time the Lord of those servants cometh”; and Paul, in 2 Thess., had to correct the mistake of those who interpreted him as having in his first Epistle declared an immediate coming of the Lord.
A. H. Strong, Cleveland Sermon, 1904:27—“The faith in a second coming of Christ has lost its hold upon many Christians in our day. But it still serves to stimulate and admonish the great body, and we can never dispense with its solemn and mighty influence. Christ comes, it is true, in Pentecostal revivals and in destructions of Jerusalem, in Reformation movements and in political upheavals. But these are only precursors of another and literal and final return of Christ, to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people. That day for which all other days are made will be a joyful day for those who have fought a good fight and have kept the faith. Let us look for and hasten the coming of the day of God. The Jacobites of Scotland never ceased their labors and sacrifices for their king's return. They never tasted wine, without pledging their absent prince; they never joined in song, without renewing their oaths of allegiance. In many a prison cell and on many a battlefield they rang out the strain: ‘Follow thee, follow thee, wha wadna follow thee? Long hast thou lo'ed and trusted us fairly: Chairlie, Chairlie, wha wadna follow thee? King o' the Highland hearts, bonnie Prince Chairlie!’ So they sang, so they invited him, until at last he came. But that longing for the day when Charles should come to his own again was faint and weak compared with the longing of true Christian hearts for the coming of their King. Charles came, only to suffer defeat, and to bring shame to his country. But Christ will come, to put an end to the world's long sorrow, to give triumph to the cause of truth, to bestow everlasting reward upon the faithful. ‘Even so, Lord Jesus, come! Hope of all our hopes the sum, Take thy waiting people home! Long, so long, the groaning earth, Cursed with war and flood and dearth, Sighs for its redemption birth. Therefore come, we daily pray; Bring the resurrection-day; Wipe creation's curse away!’ ”
(b) Hence we find, in immediate connection with many of these predictions of the end, a reference to intervening events and to the eternity of God, which shows that the prophecies themselves are expressed in a large way which befits the greatness of the divine plans.
Mat. 24:36—“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only”; Mark 13:32—“But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is”; Acts 1:7—“And he said unto them, It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within his own authority”; 1 Cor. 10:11—“Now these things happened unto them by way of example; and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come”; 16:22—“Marana tha [marg.: that is, O Lord, come!]”; 2 Thess. 2:1-3—“Now we beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him; to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled ... as that the day of the Lord is now present [Am. Rev.: [pg 1007] ‘is just at hand’]; let no man beguile you in any wise: for it will not be, except the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.”
James 5:8, 9—“Be ye also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Murmur not, brethren, one against another, that ye be not judged: behold, the judge standeth before the doors”; 2 Pet. 3:3-12—“in the last days mockers shall come ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for, from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they wilfully forget, that there were heavens from of old.... But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise.... But the day of the Lord will come as a thief ... what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for and earnestly desiring [marg.: ‘hastening’] the coming of the day of God”—awaiting it, and hastening its coming by your prayer and labor.
Rev. 1:3—“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of the prophecy, and keep the things that are written therein: for the time is at hand”: 22:12, 20—“Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to render to each man according as his work is.... He who testifieth these things saith, Yea: I come quickly. Amen: come, Lord Jesus.” From these passages it is evident that the apostles did not know the time of the end, and that it was hidden from Christ himself while here in the flesh. He, therefore, who assumes to know, assumes to know more than Christ or his apostles—assumes to know the very thing which Christ declared it was not for us to know!
Gould, Bib. Theol. N.T., 152—“The expectation of our Lord's coming was one of the elements and motifs of that generation, and the delay of the event caused some questioning. But there is never any indication that it may be indefinitely postponed. The early church never had to face the difficulty forced upon the church to-day, of belief in his second coming, founded upon a prophecy of his coming during the lifetime of a generation long since dead. And until this Epistle [2 Peter], we do not find any traces of this exegetical legerdemain as such a situation would require. But here we have it full-grown; just such a specimen of harmonistic device as orthodox interpretation familiarizes us with. The definite statement that the advent is to be within that generation is met with the general principle that ‘one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’ (2 Pet. 3:8).” We must regard this comment of Dr. Gould as an unconscious fulfilment of the prediction that “in the last days mockers shall come with mockery” (2 Pet. 3:3). A better understanding of prophecy, as divinely pregnant utterance, would have enabled the critic to believe that the words of Christ might be partially fulfilled in the days of the apostles, but fully accomplished only at the end of the world.
(c) In this we discern a striking parallel between the predictions of Christ's first, and the predictions of his second, advent. In both cases the event was more distant and more grand than those imagined to whom the prophecies first came. Under both dispensations, patient waiting for Christ was intended to discipline the faith, and to enlarge the conceptions, of God's true servants. The fact that every age since Christ ascended has had its Chiliasts and Second Adventists should turn our thoughts away from curious and fruitless prying into the time of Christ's coming, and set us at immediate and constant endeavor to be ready, at whatsoever hour he may appear.
Gen. 4:1—“And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man with the help of Jehovah [lit.: ‘I have gotten a man, even Jehovah’]”—an intimation that Eve fancied her first-born to be already the promised seed, the coming deliverer; see MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ. Deut. 18:15—“Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken”—here is a prophecy which Moses may have expected to be fulfilled in Joshua, but which God designed to be fulfilled only in Christ. Is. 7:14, 16—“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.... For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land whose two kings thou abhorrest shall be forsaken”—a prophecy which the prophet may have expected to be fulfilled in his own time, and which was partly so fulfilled, but which God intended to be fulfilled ages thereafter.
Luke 2:25—“Simeon; and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel”—Simeon was the type of holy men, in every age of Jewish history, who were waiting for the fulfilment of God's promise, and for the coming of the deliverer. So under the Christian dispensation. Augustine held that Christ's reign of a thousand years, which occupies the last epoch of the world's history, did not still lie in the future, but began with the [pg 1008]founding of the church (Ritschl, Just. and Reconc., 286). Luther, near the time of his death, said: “God forbid that the world should last fifty years longer! Let him cut matters short with his last judgment!” Melanchthon put the end less than two hundred years from his time. Calvin's motto was: “Domine, quousque?”—“O Lord, how long?” Jonathan Edwards, before and during the great Awakening, indulged high expectations as to the probable extension of the movement until it should bring the world, even in his own lifetime, into the love and obedience of Christ (Life, by Allen, 234). Better than any one of these is the utterance of Dr. Broadus: “If I am always ready, I shall be ready when Jesus comes.” On the whole subject, see Hovey, in Baptist Quarterly, Oct. 1877:416-432; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:641-646; Stevens, in Am. Com. on Thessalonians, Excursus on The Parousia, and notes on 1 Thess. 4:13, 16; 5:11; 2 Thess. 2:3, 12; Goodspeed, Messiah's Second Advent; Heagle, That Blessed Hope.