We Believe: He Will Come Again in Glory
Up until this point in the Creed, we have confessed what Christ has done in the past. When we confess “He will come again,” our attention pivots rapidly from the past to the future: What our Lord Jesus Christ will do, in time to come. We lift our eyes to the horizon of time, and we see the finish line. This is only the finish line of our own individual life, but the finish line of human history. It is the finish line of God’s redeeming work toward which we should direct and find the meaning of all our efforts (Philippians 3:13-14). It’s a dense sentence, so we must take it phrase by phrase.
He Will Come Again
We know where the Lord Jesus is right now, in his resurrected body—we just confessed it, having ascended, he is now at the right hand of God the Father, i.e., the highest heavens. As we count time (an important caveat, since with God all of time is present, hence “a thousand years are as one day” in 2 Peter 3:8), he has been there for 1992 years.
Sponsored
After a few more years pass (maybe a dozen, maybe a thousand, we do not know, indeed, the Lord himself told us nobody knows. Matthew 24:36), on a very definite day in human history, Jesus will come again from heaven, back down to earth. We sometimes refer to this event as “The Parousia” (the Greek word for ‘Presence’ or ‘Arrival’) or “The Second Coming.” We say Second because the Son of God has already come to earth once in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The prophets also call this “The Day of the Lord” or even sometimes simply, “The Day”—so great will it be, and so surpassing the gravity of all other days.
In Glory
The second coming of Christ will be very different than his first coming. The first coming was in humility; the second will be, as we confess, in glory. The first coming was in obscurity—only a few people even knew about it; the second will be in blazing clarity—the entire world will see it at the same time:
…all the tribes of the earth […] will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
Matthew 24:30
When we think of the Second Coming, we must not think of Jesus in a body that is 5’5” (the average height of a 1st-century Jewish man) descending into the modern city of Jerusalem. Only people within a 25-mile radius of Jerusalem would see that. No, we must picture our Lord in his transformed, resurrected body, which is as different from a natural body as a full-grown plant is from a seed (1 Corinthians 15:37).
We get a glimpse of what the resurrected Jesus looks like in the Revelation given to John,
clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.
Revelation 1:13-16
And when he comes, it will be a cataclysm in space-time. God spoke through his servant St. Peter who describes how “the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved.” (2 Peter 3:10). The round earth and the very fabric of space-time will all be flattened and drawn in towards the theo-cosmic gravity of the glorious Son of Man manifesting himself in glory—and we will all see him.
Side-bar on “The End Times”
Anglican Amillennialism
Mention of the heavenly bodies burning up may have triggered memories of reading Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind in the early 2000s (or Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s). Where do “the End times” fit in this picture? In the late 19th century, Cyrus Scofield (1843-1921), a midwestern politician turned preacher, published a study bible that popularized a version of John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalist teaching, which sought to map out a timeline-like sequence of what would happen in the last days of human history. It used old words with new meanings to map out such things as “the rapture”, “the tribulation”, “the millennium”, etc.
Many in the evangelical church got caught up disputing the exact order of these things, eventually birthing works like those of LaHaye and Lindsey. But before 1909 (the publication year of the Scofield Reference Bible), a fairly consistent witness existed for 1800 years of Christian history that taught differently, and this is how Anglicans teach.
Those downstream from Scofield sometimes dub the historic Anglican position as “amillennial.” All but two or three of the scores of early Church Fathers share this view, as do as all of our English Reformers. Anglicans believe that we, the Church, in these years after the Resurrection (which was almost certainly in the year 33), are presently living in the “Millennium.” This is not a literal thousand years (as, none of the numbers in Revelation are “literal”: There aren’t only 144,000 people in heaven, for instance), but a period in which Christ Jesus is reigning, and yet, the story isn’t over, and Satan and the demons have not been banished to the Lake of Fire for eternity yet.
The Current Tribulation
As the years of this “Millennium” draw on, things will get worse and worse, outwardly, especially for Christians. As the Christians in Constantinople knew in 1453 when the Muslim caliphate conquered and sacked their city, as Christians in Nigeria who are being killed as martyrs by Muslim extremists right now, we know acutely that we are already in the tribulation. The increase of persecution of Christians, the increase of Christians falling away from the faith, the increase of natural disasters, wars, and pestilence. The Lord Jesus told us all these things would take place before his Parousia, and they are all happening, and have been happening for some time. Revelation is not a “time-line” of events, but an imagistic and symbolic presentation of the same happenings our Lord prophesied on Mount Olivet (Matthew 24-25).
There are a handful of specific prophesied portents, including especially the infiltration of a false-teacher inside the Church who is “Anti-Christ” (1 John 2:18) and the “Man of Lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:3)—same guy—and will deceive many Christians. But, it is impossible to know in real time which earthly person/event is the last one, until Christ comes again, and then we will know, “O, that was the last one”. There is also no “rapture”, as that word signifies since Scofield, but there will be a moment when we all meet the Lord in the air, which takes us back to our main subject, covered in our next installment, “To Judge the Living and the Dead.”
Image: Christ Pantokrator with Archangels dome mosaic, La Martorana (Palermo, Italy). Photo by Matthias Süßen, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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