Well, Jesus seemed to say that his return was soon. So where is he? And why has the church had to wait for so long? It's a question from a listener named Ron. Pastor John, I am writing from Switzerland and have greatly been blessed by your ministry. I have a question with regards to the New Testament belief that Jesus would come very soon.

As I was studying with our children the need to evaluate prophets by biblical criteria, the following thought hit me. The Bible says in Deuteronomy 18 that a prophet whose predictions don't come true is not sent by God and that he should not be feared. However, in the New Testament we find repeated evidence of people whom we would call inspired, who evidently believed and sometimes claimed that Jesus would come back soon, even during the writer's own lifetime.

Examples of this include 1 Peter 4, 7; Matthew 24, 34; Matthew 26, 64; 1 Corinthians 10, 1 Thessalonians 4, 15-17; and 1 Corinthians 15-51. How can we still consider them authoritative while discarding modern day messengers whose prophecies don't materialize? I am a bit uneasy that at some stage our kids will tell us that Paul was wrong about 1 Corinthians 15-51 and so he's not to be taken seriously.

Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this tension? Yes, I do. Oh, good. It's a large issue and has several layers, and each one needs careful, patient attention. It's fairly easy to comb through the New Testament superficially and gather a lot of texts together that seem to indicate a false teaching about how quickly the second coming of Jesus would happen.

But if you take each one, each text or each group of texts carefully, patiently, and study it out with the help of those who have perhaps given more thought to it, what I have found is that there are explanations of how to understand those texts that do not impute error or false prophecy to what Jesus or the apostles taught.

So that's my first suggestion. Don't be superficial and simply gather a lot of texts together and impute to them something that they may not want to say. They may sound on the face of it incriminating about Jesus and his apostles, but individually, carefully, patiently studied out, you may find yourself regretting any conclusion like that.

So maybe the best thing I can do would be to just give five pointers to the kind of solutions you will find if you study these out. So number one, sometimes the events that are expected soon are not the very coming of Jesus, but things leading up to the coming of Jesus.

So here's an example. Matthew 24, 33, "So also when you see all these things, you know that he is near at the very gates." Next verse, and this is the problem verse for a lot of people. "Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." Now, notice carefully the phrase, "all these things that are going to take place within a generation" does not include the actual coming of the Lord.

Because in the previous verse, it says, "When you see all these things," the very phrase of verse 34 used in verse 33, "you know he is near." Not already here. So the fact that these things will happen within a generation, these preparations for his coming, does not mean that his coming would happen in a generation.

Now of course, it does say, "When they happen, he is near at the very gates," which leads to my second pointer. When the New Testament speaks of the Lord's being near, or at the gates, or at hand, it is not teaching a necessary time frame for the Lord's appearance.

Rather, it's saying that Christ the Messiah, long-expected Messiah, has come once for all, decisively, in his life and death and resurrection, fighting the major battle. He has set in motion an end-time process of gathering Messianic people. He has fulfilled many end-time prophecies. We are in the last days, have been for 2,000 years, and therefore Jesus is like a king in complete control, standing with his army outside the city, waiting to take it captive.

Nothing can stand between him and that capture except his own choice. That's the way I think we should read something like 1 Peter 4.7. The end of all things is at hand, or James 5.8. The coming of the Lord is at hand, or like Jesus says, he's at the gates.

That is, he has appeared, he has fought the decisive victory, he has shown himself sovereign and unstoppable in the resurrection, he has fulfilled vast amounts of Old Testament prophecy concerning the end time, and he may step in whenever he pleases. That's the way I think we should understand near, at the gates, at hand.

Here's the third pointer or observation. A third kind of text uses the word "soon," like in the book of Revelation where it says, "Behold, I am coming soon," Revelation 22.20. Now that Greek word "taku," soon, does not always or necessarily mean what we ordinarily mean by the word "soon," that is, after a short space of time.

Rather, it regularly means quickly, suddenly, unexpectedly, fast. For example, it's used in Matthew 28.8, the women at the tomb, it says, "So they departed quickly from the tomb." That's the word, soon, translated soon. So we must always ask, is the Scripture teaching that the Lord's coming will be sudden, unexpected, quick, fast when it happens, in that sense, rather than soon in the sense of, say, within 20 years?

Pointer number four. Amazingly, the gospel writers taught Jesus did not know the time of his coming. Now that in itself is kind of a problem, but that's what it says, and we will deal with it that the human nature of Jesus was not granted knowledge of the coming that the divine nature of Jesus had, in some way, that mysterious thing is affirmed.

It says in Matthew 24.36, "Concerning the day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the Son, but the Father only." Here's the implication. That means, surely, we should be very slow to impute to him predictions about the coming in a certain amount of time.

The Bible says he doesn't know. So what are we saying about him when we say he predicted them? Surely, he would not have said, "I am coming in this time frame," if he didn't know. That's not just a prediction problem. That's a moral problem. We got a major moral issue that I am not going to impute to Jesus.

So for example, when he says—how are we going to solve the problems then?—when he says in Matthew 16.28, "Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." What does that mean? Here's what's remarkable.

What's remarkable about this saying is that it occurs in Matthew, Mark, Luke, always, immediately before the transfiguration. And Peter, who was one on the mountain with Jesus during the transfiguration, Peter, in his second epistle, chapter 1, verses 16 and 17, treats this experience of the transfiguration on the mountain with Jesus as a preview of the second coming, a validation—we would say today a movie trailer—of the second coming.

You read that. "The second Peter," chapter 1, verses 16 and 17, and you'll see Peter takes the power and the coming of the Lord as a preview there on the Mount of Transfiguration, which means that what Jesus was saying was that some of his disciples, namely Peter, James, and John, would not die before they glimpsed the second coming or the coming of the Son of Man, namely in what they're going to experience on the mountain six days from now.

Here's my last pointer. Number five. When Paul uses the word "we" to refer to those who may be alive at the Lord's coming, "we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord," 1 Thessalonians 4, 15, I don't think we should say Paul is teaching that he must be alive when the Lord comes and that therefore the coming of Jesus must be within Paul's lifetime.

If Paul really meant to teach that when he used the word "we," then what are we to make of his words in Philippians 1:20 and following where he says, "It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not at all be ashamed, but that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me, yet which I shall choose, life or death, I can't tell. I'm hard-pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better." That does not sound like an apostle who considers it part of his teaching that he cannot die before the second coming.

No way. So I think when Paul says "we who are alive at the Lord's coming," he's simply referring to those who are alive at the Lord's coming, and he's including himself in that, in hope, in possible expectation, in general, but not with an intent to teach that Jesus therefore cannot come before he dies.

So those are my five pointers. But my main suggestion—and the pointers are just that, that's all they are—my main suggestion for Ron is that he be very slow to assume that the apostles and Jesus himself show themselves to be false prophets because of a quick and superficial reading of the New Testament.

Be patient and be careful. There are answers to these seemingly problem texts. Very helpful. Thank you, Pastor John, and thanks for the question, Roy. And as we head out for the day, this is my chance to let you know you can subscribe to our audio feeds and you can search our episode archive and reach us by email with a difficult question you might be facing in life.

Do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And on Friday, we're going to return to field a question from a listener who wants to interpret Scripture all by herself on a particular topic. So what are some tips and helps for navigating the Bible topically to make our own discoveries in Scripture?

That is on the table Friday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. 1 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2 Desiring God.org Page 1 of 2