We Don’t Know When Christ Will Return. We Do Know How.

In the fourth chapter of his first epistle, in light of all that he’d written up to that point, Peter continued to unpack how the reality of Christ’s sacrifice should shape the day-to-day of the Christian life. Living under the shadow of the cross, Alistair Begg explains, means thinking properly, living differently, and being prepared to face abuse—even as we keep our eyes fixed on the end:

History is not cyclical. I think we’re agreed on that. It is linear. We live in between the two advents of the Lord Jesus. … In the Anglican prayer book and in the liturgy and in the collects, we recognize that the advent of Jesus in His first coming is in direct relationship to His second coming ….

Whenever you read a phrase like “The end of all things is at hand,” especially if you’re in a local Bible study group, you know, put your helmet on, because somebody is going to tell you exactly about the return of Jesus Christ—particularly when He will be coming. And I’ve always been excited when Murray M’Cheyne used to speak to his Bible study group, and sometimes, for fun, he would say to them at the end of the evening, “And let me just ask you: Do you think Christ will return before we have our next study together?” And to a man, they all said, “No, not at all.” And then he said, “Well, you must always be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour we do not expect.” When we think in terms of when that will be, “no one knows, not even the angels of heaven”—which is quite a thought—“nor the Son”—the one who is coming—“but the Father only.”

We don’t know the when, but we do know the how. He will come in fulfillment of the promises that He has made and that the Scriptures provide us with. He will come in power to reign. He won’t come, as per His entry into Jerusalem, riding on the foal of a donkey, but He will come in triumph, and He will come, as we’ve already noted, “to judge the living and the dead.”

“The end of all things is at hand.”

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