Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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(Today’s Reading)
The Biblical Case for the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact
(Book Installment 9)
Part Two – The Timing of the Second Coming
Chapter 2 – What the Gospels Say
The Times of Jesus the Messiah (continued)
Jesus did not want to make His identity as Messiah an issue until after His resurrection. The resurrection was the primary missing puzzle piece that would cause everything God said through the prophets to make sense. So, until people realized that, they would remain uncertain about how the “last days scenario” would play out. Without the missing piece of the resurrection, most people foresaw Messiah taking the throne of Israel and leading battles against the nations in the manner of King David, and ultimately, as a result of His victories, bringing righteousness, peace, and joy to Israel and the world.
Resurrection from death is one of the things, aside from His unique and exclusive claim to the title of Messiah, that so distinguished Jesus from the other possible Messiahs. For them, death was always the end of their messianic careers. For Jesus, however, it was only the beginning.
The resurrection was not just the missing piece to the puzzle, it was the missing piece that changed the fit of all the other pieces. It’s like having 4,999 pieces of a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle put together. You finally find the one missing piece behind the sofa. But in so doing, you see beautiful colors on the other side of the puzzle piece and you realize you have been working
with the plain cardboard side of the pieces and have been putting the whole thing together upside down! This was not just true for the high and mighty religious leaders who condemned Jesus, but even the humble disciples expected Jesus to reign as an earthly king and did not know about His resurrection from the dead until it happened – even though He privately told them at least three different times that it would occur!
Such were the times in which Jesus found Himself. Understanding those times is not essential to establishing the timeline for the Second Coming, but it can help us understand why Jesus and the apostles often spoke as they did. That is, they did not always fully explain every term they used because they and their hearers had common understandings. Just as today, when there’s some new government scandal, we can say, “Looks like another Watergate” without going into details about President Nixon, the burglars, and the fact that there really was no water and no gate involved. Two thousand years from now archaeologists might have to look to a history book to try to figure out what our figure of speech meant to us. And so, just because “Armageddon,” “abomination of desolation,” and “end of the age” sometimes throw us for a
loop does not necessarily mean the eyes of the disciples glazed over when they heard these and similar terms. It seems far more likely that Jesus and His apostles were communicating in a language that they and their audiences understood.
Having the context of the times in which He spoke firmly in our minds, let us now see what Jesus Himself said about the timing of His second coming.
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