The second coming

He will come back the same way

On the day Jesus ascended, angels told the disciples staring into the sky: "This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). The one who comes is no one other than Jesus himself, and his coming will not be a secret known to a few but an event all will see. Jesus said, "They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory" (Matthew 24:30), and Paul wrote:

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will be the first to rise. After that, we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.

1 Thessalonians 4:16–17

The New Testament often calls this coming the parousia (παρουσία), ‘presence’ or ‘arrival’, a word also used for the official visit of a king to a city. At his first coming Christ offered himself to bear sin; "He will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await Him" (Hebrews 9:28). So Paul calls it "the blessed hope" (Titus 2:13), and the Bible closes with the prayer, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (Revelation 22:20).

The hope the church confesses together

The churches of East and West have confessed this hope from the beginning. The Nicene Creed says of the Son:

and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

The Nicene Creed

With his coming the dead will be raised, the last judgment will take place, and there will be "a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13). No one knows when. "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Matthew 24:36). Jerome explains why it was not revealed: "that being in uncertainty of the coming of their Judge, they should live every day as though they were to be judged that day" Jerome. Everyone in the church's history who has calculated a date has been wrong, and many have been left frightened or disillusioned. What the Lord asks is not calculation but faithfulness: "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come" (Matthew 24:42). Matthew Henry calls the resurrection and the second coming a remedy against the fear of death, "and of these doctrines we have full assurance" Matthew Henry.

Where the traditions differ

Christians agree that Christ's return will be personal, visible and glorious. They differ over how it relates to the thousand years of Revelation 20. Amillennialism reads the thousand years as the present age between Christ's first and second comings; postmillennialism expects Christ to come after an age of peace brought about by the spread of the gospel; premillennialism holds that Christ will come and then reign on earth for a thousand years. Among premillennialists, dispensationalists distinguish a rapture of believers before a great tribulation from his return after it, while historic premillennialists expect a single coming after the tribulation. Faithful Christians have read these texts in more than one way, and all of them wait for the same Lord. These questions are taken further in the lesson Christ’s return and the millennium, in Will Jesus come again? and in What are the rapture and the millennium?