Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Why is Jesus Always Coming Soon, But Never Arrives?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
What will Happen Soon?
When is Jesus’s second coming supposed to be? The Christian New Testament is clear enough about it in citing the very words of God incarnate Himself, yet Christians will not accept them on face value. As usual, they make God into a crook like themselves:
But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.Matthew 10:22
But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.Mark 13:24-30
Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven. And then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. Now learn a parable of the fig tree—When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh. So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.Matthew 24:29-34
For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.Matthew 16:27-28
Revelation 3:11 and 22:7 say, “I come quickly”, and Revelation 22:10 says, “the time is at hand”. James 5:8 says, “the coming of the Lord draweth nigh”, although by “the Lord”, James would not have meant Jesus but God Himself, later Christians having conflated the two. Elsewhere, a letter supposed to have been written by Paul shows that he too believed the Second Coming would be soon:
For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord.1 Thessalonians 4:15-17
This latter is the origin of the absurd modern American notion of “the rapture”, apparently sincerely expected by modern US Christians still to be soon, and meant to be rapturous to remove any fears these poor people might have of the End of the World being at all unpleasant.
Now each of these quotations mostly by the incarnated God, or attributed to him, are as plain as the nose on your face that God, if that is who Jesus was, expected the world to end soon. That is, it was meant to end soon when He was speaking 2000 years ago. Even when Paul was writing epistles, he thought the coming would be soon, and Mark and Matthew evidently thought the same, all of these having been written before the generation that lived with Jesus was dead and gone. Now, Christian pastors can invent the rapture to comfort the lambs, but if the rapture is what is described in 1 Thessalonians, it was expected by the generation of the time, 2000 years ago. When many generations have gone by with none of them having ever been raptured off, how can people continue to believe such rubbish. Admittedly, they are ready to believe their ministers who persuade them that an almighty God cannot express Himself clearly, even though the words themselves brook no contradiction. Ingenious and greedy men find ways of contradicting them to sponge off their flocks, and gullible believers therefore continue to believe plain and obvious lies.
Christians were persuaded soon after the death of Jesus that the coming of God to judge the world, expected by Jesus in Gethsemane but not forthcoming then, would happen soon afterwards. A generation to the Jews is forty years, so they believed that the Second Coming would be within forty years of the death of Jesus. For forty years, or so—allowing a few extra years for mistiming (since no one had bothered to keep an accurate calendar)—the Day of God’s Vengeance was expected, but it never came. The Church instead tried several new excuses such as that the Kingdom of God was the Church! It had already come as a permanent institution of Christians while no one was looking, and before long was murdering, then burning, people alive. Another try was that really a millennium would have to pass. That put off the fateful day for a long time allowing the Church to wallow in filth for many centuries while the world fell back to the stone age, to exaggerate but a little. The lambs continued to believe, if for no other reason that it gave them hope in a world which Christianity had made into hell.
To this day, the born again lambs ignore history, and their pastors continue to preach, and seem to be believed, that the Second Coming will still be soon. It must take a Second Coming to make a Christian intelligent, but it remains something we shall never see, however long we live. Some hopeful Christians, fooled by their own delusions, have named dates when the Second Coming would be, but, though not one has ever been correct, the prophets and pastors still continue with the same inanities, and the inane still parrot it, as if their Christ had only died yesterday. It is sad.
