He's coming soon...and always has been

Photo by Tom Hauk on Unsplash

Apologies in advance if this requires some mental acrobatics!

If there’s one thing this Advent has led me further into it is Jesus’ return (and the judgement that comes with Him). Along with this is a new sense of the imminence of His return. It always left me wondering a little to read of Jesus’ imminent return in Scripture. Jesus said it, Peter said, and so did John and Paul. Surely these extraordinary men of God couldn’t have all got the sense of urgency wrong? And yet two thousand years later we are still waiting for His imminent return, with a sense of urgency (often not as much as theirs!). Is it really possible for imminence and urgency to span two thousand years (and possibly more)? Well, I am now fully confident that it is!

This has much to do with our concept of time and reality. In this reality—this physical earthly realm—we measure everything through a lens of time, and we usually (unwittingly) measure spiritual things through that same lens. Take eternity for example; we use our earthly sense of time to measure it, and we think of it as a very long time, going on forever. A thought that is nauseous for some! But in the spiritual realm, where time ‘is not’, eternity simply ‘is’. We could perhaps call it existence or ‘being’. God declares Himself as “I AM” which means life and existence itself—He always was, is and always will be. He defines in Himself what I’ve described as eternity. As Peter said (in 1 Peter 3:8); “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” Time isn’t different in the spiritual realm, it just ‘isn’t’.

Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 4, declares “by the word of the Lord” that those who are alive and those who have died will arrive together at the “coming of the Lord” (and so also the judgement of all). Until then, from the earthly, time-based perspective, those who have already died are currently asleep. From the spiritual side, it will be for the dead in a moment that they arrive at the “coming of the Lord”. (Moment: an earthly time-based description of the suddenness and instantaneous…which are still time-based words!)

What has this to do with the imminence and urgency of Jesus’ return? For the dead, the length of waiting for His coming is nothing more than the span of their life, whether that person died yesterday or two thousand years ago. For those who are alive when Jesus returns, it is the span of their life to that moment. So wherever you are in time - dead or alive - Jesus’ return is imminent. With that imminence, then, is the urgency—we only have the span of our life to choose life in Christ through faith in Him.

If we think that the imminence (and the urgency that comes from this) expressed by Jesus and the Apostles is somehow just symbolism, metaphorical, already passed, or in some other way not to be taken as literal, then we are grossly mistaken. For every one of us, Jesus’ return is imminent, and there is an urgency to respond to His call to faith and salvation. We only have the span of our lives to make this response, unless He should return sooner. There is a true and real “coming of the Lord”, and there is no greater imminence or urgency than this.

Let us not grow cold or indifferent to Jesus’ call to be workers of the harvest—it is plentiful and ripe (Matthew 9:37-38, John 4:35-36)—because Jesus is coming soon!