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 65)
The Plan Behind the Second Coming
Chapter 4 – The Predetermined Plan
The Importance of Christ
These next three sections – the last three of this chapter – will summarize all I have explained to you in this book up to this point. These three sections will also provide the pivot to the remainder of the book: the three implications. Everything in the book to this point has been introductory. I’ve been laying a substantive foundation upon which we will build our understanding of each implication.
To fully grasp each implication will indeed require a strong foundation. That foundation is the broader context in which each implication is discovered, analyzed, and remembered. The majority of this book will be taken up with discussing the individual implications, but we will constantly be referring back to this foundational material to keep those discussions thoroughly grounded in what the Bible explicitly says – not in philosophy, theology, conjecture, or speculation.
In the first three chapters, I gave you sufficient biblical descriptions of the Second Coming for you to realize how profound a change it was to the entirety of creation. In this fourth chapter, I’ve shown you how the Second Coming is a part of something bigger than itself: the plan of God for the redemption of His fallen world. Then I showed how even that plan is part of something bigger than itself: Christ Himself.
Christ is the solution – the total and complete solution – to what went wrong with the world when Adam and Eve sinned. Thus God’s plan was Christ Himself. And the Second Coming was the completion of that plan. This landmark event left the world as Paul described it would be:
Ephesians 1:10 …an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth…
Therefore, we cannot separate the understanding of Christ from the understanding of God’s predetermined plan, and we cannot separate the understanding of God’s predetermined plan from the understanding of the Second Coming, aka the coming of the kingdom of God.
What all this means, among other things, is that if we misunderstand the Second Coming, we’re going to misunderstand Christ. Recall from chapter 3 that one of the most prominent themes of the Second Coming was the revelation of Christ. Jesus even called His return,
Luke 17:30 “…the day that the Son of Man is revealed.”
No wonder people who push off the revelation of Christ into the indefinite future struggle to understand Christ as God. They’re choosing to ignore revelation that is currently on offer – and has been for almost two thousand years.
Further, it seems to me that, when confronted with the question of whether the Second Coming is past or future, more and more people are, in effect, throwing up their hands and saying to themselves, “At this point, what difference does it make?” It makes a lot of difference, because without the information that the Second Coming brings about Christ, we will not adequately know Him and appreciate who He is. You’ll know exactly what I mean by the time we’ve finished “Implication One: Christ Alone Is God.”
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