The final coming of Christ is referred to in: Mat. 24:30—“they shall see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a [pg 1004]trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other”; 25:31—“But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 1:11—“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven? this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; 1 Thess. 4:16—“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”; 2 Thess. 1:7, 10—“the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power ... when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed”; Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Rev. 1:7—“Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him.” Dr. A. C. Kendrick, Com. on Heb. 1:6—“And when he shall conduct back again into the inhabited world the First-born, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”—in the glory of the second coming Christ's superiority to angels will be signally displayed—a contrast to the humiliation of his first coming.
The tendency of our day is to interpret this second class of passages in a purely metaphorical and spiritual way. But prophecy can have more than one fulfilment. Jesus' words are pregnant words. The present spiritual coming does not exhaust their meaning. His coming in the great movements of history does not preclude a final and literal coming, in which “every eye shall see him” (Rev. 1:7). With this proviso, we may assent to much of the following quotation from Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 44-58—“The last things of which Jesus speaks are not the end of the world, but of the age—the end of the Jewish period in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem.... After the entire statement is in, including both the destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of the Lord which is to follow it, it is distinctly said that that generation was not to pass away until all these things are accomplished. According to this, the coming of the Son of man must be something other than a visible coming. In O. T. prophecy any divine interference in human affairs is represented under the figure of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Mat. 26:64 says: ‘From this time ye shall see the Son of man seated ... and coming in the clouds of heaven.’ Coming and judgment are both continuous. The slow growth in the parables of the leaven and the mustard seed contradicts the idea of Christ's early coming. ‘After a long time the Lord of these servants cometh’ (Mat. 25:19). Christ came in one sense at the destruction of Jerusalem; in another sense all great crises in the history of the world are comings of the Son of man. These judgments of the nations are a part of the process for the final setting up of the kingdom. But this final act will not be a judgment process, but the final entire submission of the will of man to the will of God. The end is to be, not judgment, but salvation.” We add to this statement the declaration that the final act here spoken of will not be purely subjective and spiritual, but will constitute an external manifestation of Christ comparable to that of his first coming in its appeal to the senses, but unspeakably more glorious than was the coming to the manger and the cross. The proof of this we now proceed to give.
1. The nature of this coming.
Although without doubt accompanied, in the case of the regenerate, by inward and invisible influences of the Holy Spirit, the second advent is to be outward and visible. This we argue:
(a) From the objects to be secured by Christ's return. These are partly external (Rom. 8:21, 23). Nature and the body are both to be glorified. These external changes may well be accompanied by a visible manifestation of him who “makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
Rom. 8:10-23—“in hope that the creation also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God ... waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; Rev. 21:5—“Behold, I make all things new.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 49—“We must not confound the Paraclete and the Parousia. It has been argued that, because Christ came in the person of the Spirit, the Redeemer's advent in glory has already taken place. But in the Paraclete Christ comes spiritually and invisibly; in the Parousia he comes bodily and gloriously.”
(b) From the Scriptural comparison of the manner of Christ's return with the manner of his departure (Acts 1:11)—see Commentary of [pg 1005] Hackett, in loco:—“ὂν τρόπον = visibly, and in the air. The expression is never employed to affirm merely the certainty of one event as compared with another. The assertion that the meaning is simply that, as Christ had departed, so also he would return, is contradicted by every passage in which the phrase occurs.”
Acts 1:11—“this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; cf. Acts 7:28—“wouldest thou kill me, as ὂν τρόπον thou killedst the Egyptian yesterday?” Mat. 23:37—“how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as ὂν τρόπον a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”; 2 Tim. 3:8—“as ὂν τρόπον Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also withstand the truth.” Lyman Abbott refers to Mat. 23:37, and Luke 13:35, as showing that, in Acts 1:11, “in like manner” means only “in like reality.” So, he says, the Jews expected Elijah to return in form, according to Mal. 4:5, whereas he returned only in spirit. Jesus similarly returned at Pentecost in spirit, and has been coming again ever since. The remark of Dr. Hackett, quoted in the text above, is sufficient proof that this interpretation is wholly unexegetical.
(c) From the analogy of Christ's first coming. If this was a literal and visible coming, we may expect the second coming to be literal and visible also.