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 Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact
(Book Installment 5)
The Scope of the Second Coming
Chapter 1 – References to the Second Coming
Near-Literal References to the Second Coming
As you could have guessed from the previous section, we are not going to be able to turn to an exhaustive concordance and search under the letter “S” for all occurrences of “Second Coming,” just like we couldn’t look under “F” for all occurrences of “First Coming.” The Bible just doesn’t talk that way. Instead, we see great variety in how these comings have been identified and described.
We do have, however, in the case of the Second Coming, a couple of places where the Bible comes very close to literally saying “The Second Coming.” The first was spoken by Jesus to His apostles at the Last Supper, the night before He died.
John 14:3 “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.
Having previously said, “I have come,” saying here, “I will come again,” is clearly an explicit declaration of the Second Coming. Of course, the “place” of which Jesus was speaking was heaven. And, indeed, we’ll spend some time dwelling on the interdependence of everyone going to heaven and the Second Coming later in this book – when we get to specific implications. For now, we just need to notice that while Jesus may not have used the expression “Second Coming,” He obviously taught about it. And the same goes for the rest of those who spoke about it in the Bible.
The other passage that comes close to saying “Second Coming” literally is the following one from Hebrews.
Hebrews 9:27 And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,
Hebrews 9:28 so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.
In this passage, Paul is pointing out that Christ’s first coming was about sin and the second was about salvation. To drill down a bit, the first coming was about solving the problem of sin and death; this Christ did by dying for our sins on the cross and then rising from the dead on our behalf. The second coming was about distributing salvation to those who had accepted and were applying the sin solution to their own lives. We – their posterity – benefit from both comings. Without a successful first coming, there would never have been a second.
The rest of the Bible’s references to the Second Coming are not as explicit as the two above…and they vary in terms and phrasings from each other in many ways…which you are about to begin witnessing…in abundance. It is said by scholars that there are over 2,000 references to the Second Coming in the Bible. Depending on how you count them, that’s more than 1,800 in the Old Testament, and more than 300 in the New. Rest easy – I’m not going to show you all of them. You’ll just feel like I am.
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