| Jesus and the End-Time The Conclusion of the End-Time The Blessed Hope |
So when they had come together they asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them "It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witness in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven". Acts 1:6-11Before we deal with the third aspect of the conclusion of the end-time which is the return of Jesus himself, we will take a break and consider why the apostles believed this to be so important. An understanding of their expectation will help us to understand our own. The return of Jesus is an assumption of the New Testament. By this I mean that, although it is described in places and fervently hoped for in other places, it is never analyzed or defended-as are, for example, the resurrection of the dead in 1 Corinthians 15 and the atoning death of Christ in the book of Hebrews. The return of Jesus is simply there; the apostles expected it, but they felt no need to defend or analyze it. And they certainly were not frightened by it. It is difficult for modern Christians to grasp their assurance and simplicity, to see the return of Jesus as a blessed hope. If we have not been subjected to sensationalisms of it that have confused and frightened us, we have likely been subjected to sophisticated preaching that never seems to get around to mentioning it. Either way we have not learned to expect the coming of Jesus as his apostles did. One of the reasons sensational (and to me, speculative) preaching on the return of Jesus has gained such an audience is that people desperately want to know about it, and many who believe in it do not preach and teach very much about it. Let us try to understand the blessed hope as plainly and simply as the apostles did. Their assurance came early, from the lips and actions of Jesus himself. For them, the return of Jesus was not a hope grounded in the book of Revelation, for by the time john saw his visions most of the apostles were dead. The visions of John were not for the apostles, They had their expectation firsthand, as did John himself; the visions of John were for the next generation of Christians, those who understood their symbols and images. The apostles had, not visions, but historical evidence. Evidence is what you know from direct experience-mainly, what you see and hear for yourself. It is not what somebody else thought. It is not even what you thought. It is rather what you remember about what happened. Christianity is not based on what the apostles thought. Faith is not opinions about God. Christianity is based on what the apostles remembered about Jesus-what he said, what he did. Because they remembered great things about him, they placed great faith in him. They were compelled to faith in him as a living Lord, because the last thing they saw him do was ascend into heaven. This is of great importance in understanding their confidence in his return and in understanding why they did not bother to interpret it more. (Even the book of Revelation is not, strictly speaking, an interpretation of the return of Jesus; it is a dramatization, albeit God-given of the whole scheme of redemption, of which the return of Jesus is part.) They reserved their defense and analysis for the heart of the redemptive acts of God in Christ, which were his death and resurrection. The return of Jesus did not need defense or analysis, for if Jesus really did die and rise again for us, then his return is a logical conclusion. His return is a culminating act, but it is not a redemptive one, except in the sense that he comes to claim what is already his. "So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him" (Hebrews 9:28). The apostles saw Jesus ascend into heaven and they heard the promise of the two men who immediately appeared on the scene. It is an event easily visualized and easily remembered, and the promise is explicit: "This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." The simplicity of their confidence rests in those two words: this Jesus. Remember that these people had forty days of living with the risen Jesus from the day of his resurrection to his ascension. That was plenty of time for them to establish in their minds and hearts that this Jesus was the same Jesus who had lived with them and taught them through preaching tours in Galilee and Judea, that grim journey when he finally went up to Jerusalem to his death. They knew him. He had not become, in his resurrection, a superman or a monster. They loved him, and they trusted him implicitly. They were comfortable with him. SO when the two men said that he was coming back as they had seen him go, those words held for them not the shadow of a threat, not a trace of fear. They were his closest friends; the promise of his return was the best of news. And they certainly expected a visible return. They heard two promises on Ascension Day. The first, from Jesus, was about the coming of the Holy Spirit upon them, the second, from the two men, was about the return of Jesus. They did not themselves confuse the promises. The coming of the Spirit was always, in their minds, an event distinct from the return of Jesus. They continued to watch for the return of Jesus all their lives, though the promised coming of the Spirit took place just ten days after the promise was given. The coming of the Spirit inaugurated the end-time, and the return of Jesus will conclude the end-time. The coming of the Spirit fulfilled another significant promise of Jesus, however: "truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power" (Mark 9:1). The apostles were those who, in their lifetime, not only saw in the risen Christ the victory of the Kingdom of God but also experienced in the Holy Spirit the very power of that Kingdom from Pentecost onward. We have spoken before in this connection of appearance and reality. We can state it another way and speak of invisible and visible realities. The Holy Spirit is invisible reality and Jesus is visible reality. Apostolic faith is always based first on visible reality. We believe in the Holy Spirit because we believe in Jesus. Invisible realities cannot be trusted as real until they are grounded in historical, visible evidences and historical, concrete expectations. Otherwise, they lose their substance and become mere feelings and opinions. The visible reality leads to the invisible; by taking them in that order we can accept both with confidence. Then it is the most natural thing in the world to believe that the same Jesus who once walked the earth as a man and with men will once again be visible to men at the conclusion of the end-time. Then we approach the simple faith of the apostles who, after all, were not philosophers. They were witnesses. But, the complaint is obvious, we do not have the firsthand evidence. We have not seen Jesus with our eyes or heard him with our ears. That is correct. That is what is meant when we say that Christianity is history-we must believe the witnesses. But then we have something more than history: The invisible reality of the Holy Spirit adds his witness to the historical witnesses; through the Spirit Jesus himself bears witness to his own deeds and promises. Jesus said that those would be happy who had not seen him and yet had believed. We are in that situation now; our blessed hope is that some day we will see. » Next Page — The Return of Jesus » Table of Contents » Home |