Jesus Is NOT Coming Soon!

When I was growing up, the churches I attended heavily emphasized the imminent return of Jesus. We even sang the song, “Jesus is coming soon / morning or night or noon / many will meet their doom / trumpets will sound / all of the dead shall rise / righteous meet in the skies / going where no one dies / heavenward bound.” Jesus could come at any time and rapture all of Christians out of here. Seven years of tribulation would start after this followed by Jesus returning to finish off the world and establish his millennial kingdom. We developed ways of thinking about how it would happen and when it would happen.

Everything in the news pointed to this imminent return of Jesus. The development of the European Common Market, the Illuminati, the Russian Bear coming from the north, China’s one million (or was it two million?) foot soldiers, a computer called “The Beast,” threats of computer chips in the right hand and forehead to buy and sell, Henry Kissinger’s name somehow adding up to 666, Israel becoming a nation again in 1948, the red heifer being bred in Jerusalem, talk of rebuilding the temple, and even unseasonably warm or cold weather (because you don’t know the times or seasons). Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth in the ’70s. There were eighty-eight reasons why Jesus was coming in 1988. When that didn’t happen, the Gulf War in the early ’90s was a sure sign. I was working in a Christian bookstore during seminary in the early ’90s at the time and Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis by John Walvoord was selling like hotcakes. (You can get it pretty cheap now!) There were movies such as A Thief in the Night and A Distant Thunder that dramatized the rapture and after-effects used to scare teenagers into a decision. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye is where I started losing touch with that part of the American Christian world, though I’m certain it remains alive and well. (They must be having a field day with 2020!)

The disciples had their own version of this when they were nearing Jerusalem in Luke 19. This is it. All the signs point to the kingdom of God coming immediately, which means that the old order is done away with and David’s victorious son is enthroned in Jerusalem. All of that would happen, but just not the way they envisioned it. Jesus had to instruct his disciples in the fact that he was not coming soon, at least not in the way that they were thinking.

To instruct his disciples in the time and manner in which the kingdom comes, Jesus tells a parable about a nobleman, ten servants, and ten minas (that’s money not little fish). (Lk 19.11-27) The nobleman (who is, no doubt, Jesus) goes away to receive a kingdom. He entrusts each of his ten servants with a mina apiece and expects them to do business and make a profit while he is gone. He will come back and evaluate what they have done, expecting that they have been faithful stewards, having made him a profit. Consequently, he must give them time to do what he expects them to do.

Jesus is working with a deep theme that begins with man’s creation and runs through all of history. The theme goes something like this: God creates and establishes his people, gives them commands and responsibilities, leaves them to do what he says, and eventually returns to evaluate their work, dispensing rewards and punishments. This is a pattern established before the fall. God created Adam, placed him in the Garden with specific commands (work and guard the Garden, don’t eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), gave him help to complete his task, left, and eventually returned to evaluate what Adam did.

This is what God does with Israel over its history. Israel is created at Sinai, given commands and responsibilities, he leaves them to do what he says, and eventually, he comes to visit them in the Person of Christ Jesus to evaluate their work, dispensing rewards and punishments.

Jesus says that this is the pattern that he will continue to follow with his church. Jesus creates the church through his death, resurrection, ascension (the time he receives the kingdom; cf. Dan 7.9-14), and the pouring out of his Spirit at Pentecost. He gives gifts to the church through the Spirit. While he is gone, seated at the right hand of the Father, he expects the church to “make a profit,” investing the gifts he has given to see them multiply. What started with small gifts in the first century must be multiplied until all of the nations are discipled. (Mt 28.19) Jesus will come back when the time for this mission is completed, and each of us will stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of the deeds done in our body, whether good or evil. (2Cor 5.10) Each of us will give an account for the stewardship Jesus entrusted to him/her.

This is typified every week in our worship-work pattern. On the Day of the Lord, the Lord’s Day, we gather in the presence of our King to be re-created through worship, instructed, and supplied with what we need to go out and do the work we have been called to do. As images of God, we are to go out and be productive, taking what the Lord has given us and making more out of it. But the Lord’s Day is also a day of judgment, an evaluation of the work we have done the past week; works that we are presenting to him through tithes and offerings, which include the bread and wine of the Supper. Jesus evaluates our works dispensing praise as well as rebuke.

These weekly patterns are microcosms of history, reminding us that we have responsibilities to be faithful stewards of what our Lord has put in our hands. One day these weekly judgments will give way to the final judgment. Our desire should be to hear on that day, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”