| Jesus and the End-Time The Conclusion of the End-Time The Return of Jesus |
And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud w2ith power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. Luke 21:25-28At the beginning of this book I said that Christianity looks forward, because it must me in the future that "things will work out for the best." Everything that has been said to this point is directed to the even we now consider-the return of Jesus. In his return everything will work out for the best; that is, according to the will of God. The end-time is something like a game, in which the ultimate meaning is determined by the outcome. In competitive games the point is who wins and who loses, not how well the players follow their game plan. One of the details to notice in a basketball game is how often the players will glance over their shoulders to see two things-what the score is, and how much time they have left to achieve their goal of victory. Of course, the game analogy breaks down at this point; Jesus has already won the victory for us-the outcome is not dependent on the efforts of the players. But that doesn't make the outcome less significant or our cooperation with the winning side less important. A necessary distinction must be made between endeavors that are dependent on their outcome and endeavors that have meaning in themselves quite apart from their final destiny. A twisted sense of values will inevitable arise out of confusing them. An example of an endeavor that is of value for its own sake is the American Republic. When it was founded two hundred years ago, its purpose was not to attain some distant goal but to provide a political and social system with guarantees of personal freedom and self-government for people then living and their posterity. The system was successful and is successful as long as it does this. If the United States, for some unforeseen reason, were to collapse in the immediate future, it would still be a success; it did what it set out to do for a very long time. Its purpose is not survival for its own sake, but survival in the defense of freedom. If the United States were to sacrifice liberty and become a government of tyrants for the purpose of survival, at that point I would fail. Free government is an example of something that is worth doing for its own sake, for as long as it can continue. There are countless other examples of thins that are worth doing for their own sake. But the world as a whole is not a success unless it ends well-unless the end-time comes to a proper end. The world in the process of time must somehow be translated into eternity; otherwise death has dominion, and nothing we do in the short span of our lives is going to matter very much one way or another. For if we treat the world as something to be preserved and perpetuated in its present state, we will lose sight of the truth that the Kingdom of Jesus is not of this world (John 18:36). The proper end of the world is the return of Jesus, the Savior and Lord of the world. When he comes, history will find its fulfillment in the end of persecution and suffering; when he comes, the Kingdom will find its fulfillment as he delivers all things to his Father; when he comes, the expectation of the Church will be fulfilled in the keeping of his promise to return; when he comes, evil will be destroyed as he slays the son of perdition with the breath of his mouth and by his appearing-evil, already conquered, will finally be eradicated; when he comes, Israel will be fulfilled, for all the promises made to Israel find their fulfillment in him. And when he comes, he will gather his people to himself, with both the dead and the living alive forever with his life. The end-time will come to a proper end with him, as it never could without him. It is easier to discuss the meaning of his return than to describe it. But we'll make a stab at it. As Jesus himself foretold it, his return will be unconditional, glorious, and redemptive. An event is unconditional from one side when all of the conditions are established on the other side. An unconditional surrender is one in which the victorious army dictates the terms of peace to the vanquished. An unconditional event is one in which someone else does it all, and you can't do anything to change it or forestall it. "There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves." The return of Jesus will upset the order of the world, and no emergency meeting of the United Nations will be able to pass a resolution condemning it. There won't be time. Our conditioning of events depends on our having the time and the power to manipulate them. But when Jesus comes, time will be no more; all power will be concentrated in him. The first coming of Jesus, in his birth at Bethlehem, was conditioned by the circumstances of human life and history. Few guessed that this peasant carpenter from a back-country town was the Son of the living God, and those who did had divine assistance (Matthew 16:16,17). In the present age, Jesus is still conditioned. He comes to us through Word and sacrament, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, in the Church, his body; through these means do persons come to know and love him. When he comes at the close of the age, all conditions will end.1 Even the faithless will see that Jesus is the Son of God. The word used by the apostles was parousia, or "appearing"; the Jesus known to them by faith would become known to all men everywhere, revealed in the fullness of his glory. No one will be able to shut Jesus out in that day. He will appear, and we will see him as he is. He will be undisguised, unconditioned.2 SO the return of Jesus will be glorious. "and then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory." It is impossible for us to describe what this will look like, for the glory will be that of God and not that of human kings. Glory means "radiance" or "splendor," and, by derivation, the manifestation of the majesty and holiness of God. I think it is a mistake to dress up the return of Jesus with visions of earthly glory. Certainly no one has a canvas large enough or oils vivid enough to paint a picture of it. An attempt to do so reminds me of the small boy who was drawing picture. When his mother asked him what he was doing he said that he was drawing a picture of God. "But nobody know what God looks like," she said. "They will when I'm finished," he answered. It is tempting for an interpreter to be like that boy, constructing pictures of heavenly realities, in words or other media, when we have very little to go on. Of course, there is here the interpretive judgment as to what should be taken symbolically and what literally. Some take Revelation 19 as a literal description of the return of Jesus. There the Word of God comes riding on a white horse, followed by a great host also on horseback. It is a beautiful and impressive scene. But in the same scene the leading rider has a sword coming out of his mouth; if we take the horses as literal, we should also take the sword as literal and insist that Jesus will come with a sword dangling from his lips. If we protest that the sword is the obvious symbol for the Word of God, the counter-protest is in order that the horse is the obvious symbol for a conquering king. For just as Jesus does not need a literal sword with which to smite his enemies, neither does he need a horse to get from one place to another.3 It is better, in my opinion, to keep Revelation 19 within the context of the book of Revelation, where its meaning is best understood. The plain predictions of the Gospel should be allowed to speak for themselves. Finally, the return of Jesus is redemptive. "Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because you redemption is drawing near." Redemption is a finished work in the sense that Jesus has already dealt with sin and death. But still to come is our final deliverance. We have been saved at the cross of Jesus, where he conquered sin, death, and the power of the Devil; we are being saved in the present moment, as the Holy Spirit delivers and keeps us day by day; but we also will be saved when Jesus returns, for then we will come into our full inheritance as the children of God and the servants of his Kingdom. The redemption that draws nigh is from the bondage of this world, from the persecution and tribulation we suffer for the sake of Jesus in the world, and from the hold that death has on our mortal bodies. WE do not now have all that we will have. So we look up! Keep us, Lord, O keep us cleavingBut our redemption is not simply personal. It is the redemption of the world. The end of all things is not judgment and destruction, but redemption. Jesus is the hope of the world, not only of the Church. But how can this be, when the tribes of the earth will mourn when they see Jesus coming on the clouds of heaven? Certainly Jesus is not their hope. That is true. But their situation will be no worse than it was before; it will only become more apparent. In the salvation of the world, as in the salvation of Israel, the principle of the remnant is still operative. God will make the use of the remnant into the principal use; the old order will pass away, but he will establish out of it a new heaven and new earth for his elect. "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father: (Matthew 13:43). As the end-time concludes with the return of Jesus, so, strictly speaking, should our interpretation. But the fact is, we are still here, waiting for the return of Jesus. SO a more appropriate end to our study is an examination of our obligations as we wait for him. If this is the end-time, our lives should reflect it; so that will be our theme in the concluding chapter. 1 2 Peter 3:12 speaks of "hastening the coming of the day of God." I do not know what his means. I checked carefully the translation of the verse, and both the Greek text and the modern translations in my possession agree that this is the best reading of it. RSV's note on it says "earnestly desiring" is possible instead of "hastening" but there seems to be littler scholarly support for that alternative. Only a paraphrase departs from "hastening." But even if we can "hasten" the day of God we will never know whether we have succeeded. The Father has fixed that date by his own authority, so he has already taken into account whatever hastening will have taken place. The immediate event of the return of Jesus is unconditioned in that no man or nation will to his own knowledge set it in motion. 2 G.C. Berkouwer, op cit., p. 153. 3 This argument may appear simplistic. But I am not here reacting to reserved, scholarly interpretation. There are, for example, 150,000 copies of Oliver Greene's The Revelation Verse by Verse Study in print, and Greene sees the horses as real horses. An interpretation that reaches such a large readership deserves to be discussed on its own terms. 4 Thomas Kelly, 1769-1855. » Next Page — The Ethics of the End-Time: Purity » Table of Contents » Home |