Interactive Gospel
- Jesus is Coming Back - by Paul Hazelden
1. Summary
We believe that Jesus is coming
back.
Some people who believe there is a God think He created the
world and since then has left it strictly alone. As
a variation on this theme, some people think that God created
the world, helped out lots of people in the Old Testament, came
in the person of Jesus - and has left us alone since then.
Christian belief is very different. We believe in
a God Who is involved in the world. It was created
by Him, and one day it will be finished by Him. This
world will be brought to an end so that it can be replaced by
something better and longer lasting.
So, in Christian belief, Jesus' return is associated not so
much with the end of the world as we know it, as the beginning
of a better world. We also believe that God's
judgement will be made known when Jesus returns.
This means that Christian morality is rooted in more than simple
platitudes - the moral quality of your life really will matter
in the end. And the return of Jesus also means that
life has a direction, a purpose. We are working
towards something.
We have all kinds of moral difficulties in this
life. But when Jesus returns, we are promised that
everyone will recognise that God is good, and that
Jesus is the rightful Lord and Master of the
universe. And these two points will put most of the
other problems and difficulties we face into a very different
perspective.
Various Christians have strong beliefs about some aspects of
Jesus' return, and when this will happen. Our
difficulty is that the Biblical writers have no interest in
writing a 'future history' - simply predicting what will happen
and when. But on the other hand, they provide
numerous details, enough to tempt people into putting them all
together and showing how it is all going to happen.
Throughout the Bible, God speaks to us so that we will know how
to act - not to satisfy our curiosity. Prophecy
about the future is given so that we will know how to live
today, and to enable us to recognise the events when they happen
and respond accordingly.
If the prophecies about Jesus in the Old Testament were given so
that people could predict what was going to happen, they
failed. But they did enable people with faith to
recognise Jesus once He had arrived. The same is
true of the prophecies concerning His second coming - we just do
not know what He is going to do, or when He is going to do it,
but they will enable us to recognise it is Him at the right
time.
The key thing to remember is that the future we are promised in
the Bible is not some disembodied floating-in-the-clouds with
harps existence, like you see in cartoons. What we are promised
are new bodies, living on a new Earth, fully connected with the
new Heaven. We are promised physical bodies - new, improved,
better than the old ones, but still somehow recognisably the same.
We are promised resurrection bodies, like the one Jesus has:
He could walk through a locked door, but He could also eat a
piece of fish. In other words, the new body could do all that the
old one could do, but it didn't share all the limitations of the
old one.
There are many people who will give detailed descriptions of
what (they believe) will happen when various prophecies are
fulfilled. Of course, each detailed description contradicts the
other descriptions.
There is little point in outlining the various interpretations
that people have come up with. The traditional main schools of
thought each describe an understanding of one aspect called the
'millennium' - the belief that Jesus will have a thousand-year
reign on Earth before 'the end' finally comes - but there are many
other aspects that people violently disagree about.
But all these arguments about details mask the real point:
Jesus is coming back. Whether it is this year on in ten thousand
years' time, all will be made right, and life as it was always
intended to be will just be beginning.