1 Thess. 4:16—“For the Lord himself [= in his own person] shall descend from heaven, with a shout[something heard], with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”—see Com. of Prof. W. A. Stevens: “So different from Luke 17:20, where ‘the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.’The ‘shout’ is not necessarily the voice of Christ himself (lit. ‘in a shout,’ or ‘in shouting’). ‘Voice of the archangel’ and ‘trump of God’ are appositional, not additional.” Rev. 1:7—“every eye shall see him”; as every ear shall hear him: John 5:28, 29—“all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice”; 2 Thess. 2:2—“to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled ... as that the day of the Lord is now present”—they may have “thought that the first gathering of the saints to Christ was a quiet, invisible one—a stealthy advent, like a thief in the night”(Lillie). 2 John 7—“For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh”—here denial of a future second coming of Christ is declared to be the mark of a deceiver.
Alford and Alexander, in their Commentaries on Acts 1:11, agree with the view of Hackett quoted above. Warren, Parousia, 61-65, 106-114, controverts this view and says that “an omnipresent divine being can come, only in the sense of manifestation.” He regards the parousia, or coming of Christ, as nothing but Christ's spiritual presence. A writer in the Presb. Review, 1883:221, replies that Warren's view is contradicted “by the fact that the apostles often spoke of the parousia as an event yet future, long after the promise of the Redeemer's spiritual presence with his church had begun to be fulfilled, and by the fact that Paul expressly cautions the Thessalonians against the belief that the parousia was just at hand.” We do not know how all men at one time can see a bodily Christ; but we also do not know the nature of Christ's body. The day exists undivided in many places at the same time. The telephone has made it possible for men widely separated to hear the same voice,—it is equally possible that all men may see the same Christ coming in the clouds.
2. The time of Christ's coming.
(a) Although Christ's prophecy of this event, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, so connects it with the destruction of Jerusalem that the apostles and the early Christians seem to have hoped for its occurrence during their life-time, yet neither Christ nor the apostles definitely taught when the end should be, but rather declared the knowledge of it to be reserved in the counsels of God, that men might ever recognize it as possibly at hand, and so might live in the attitude of constant expectation.
1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”; 1 Thess. 4:17—“then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord”; 2 Tim. 4:8—“henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day: and not only to me, but also to all them that have loved his appearing”; James [pg 1006]5:7—“Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord”; 1 Pet. 4:7—“But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore of sound mind, and be sober unto prayer”; 1 John 2:18—“Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that antichrist cometh, even now have there risen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour.”
Phil. 4:5—“The Lord is at hand (ἐγγύς). In nothing be anxious”—may mean “the Lord is near”(in space), without any reference to the second coming. The passages quoted above, expressing as they do the surmises of the apostles that Christ's coming was near, while yet abstaining from all definite fixing of the time, are at least sufficient proof that Christ's advent may not be near to our time. We should be no more warranted than they were, in inferring from these passages alone the immediate coming of the Lord.
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:349-350, maintains that Jesus expected his own speedy second coming and the end of the world. There was no mention of the death of his disciples, or the importance of readiness for it. No hard and fast organization of his disciples into a church was contemplated by him,—Mat. 16:18 and 18:17 are not authentic. No separation of his disciples from the fellowship of the Jewish religion was thought of. He thought of the destruction of Jerusalem as the final judgment. Yet his doctrine would spread through the earth, like leaven and mustard seed, though accompanied by suffering on the part of his disciples. This view of Wendt can be maintained only by an arbitrary throwing out of the testimony of the evangelist, upon the ground that Jesus' mention of a church does not befit so early a stage in the evolution of Christianity. Wendt's whole treatment is vitiated by the presupposition that there can be nothing in Jesus' words which is inexplicable upon the theory of natural development. That Jesus did not expect speedily to return to earth is shown in Mat. 25:19—“After a long time the Lord of those servants cometh”; and Paul, in 2 Thess., had to correct the mistake of those who interpreted him as having in his first Epistle declared an immediate coming of the Lord.
A. H. Strong, Cleveland Sermon, 1904:27—“The faith in a second coming of Christ has lost its hold upon many Christians in our day. But it still serves to stimulate and admonish the great body, and we can never dispense with its solemn and mighty influence. Christ comes, it is true, in Pentecostal revivals and in destructions of Jerusalem, in Reformation movements and in political upheavals. But these are only precursors of another and literal and final return of Christ, to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people. That day for which all other days are made will be a joyful day for those who have fought a good fight and have kept the faith. Let us look for and hasten the coming of the day of God. The Jacobites of Scotland never ceased their labors and sacrifices for their king's return. They never tasted wine, without pledging their absent prince; they never joined in song, without renewing their oaths of allegiance. In many a prison cell and on many a battlefield they rang out the strain: ‘Follow thee, follow thee, wha wadna follow thee? Long hast thou lo'ed and trusted us fairly: Chairlie, Chairlie, wha wadna follow thee? King o' the Highland hearts, bonnie Prince Chairlie!’ So they sang, so they invited him, until at last he came. But that longing for the day when Charles should come to his own again was faint and weak compared with the longing of true Christian hearts for the coming of their King. Charles came, only to suffer defeat, and to bring shame to his country. But Christ will come, to put an end to the world's long sorrow, to give triumph to the cause of truth, to bestow everlasting reward upon the faithful. ‘Even so, Lord Jesus, come! Hope of all our hopes the sum, Take thy waiting people home! Long, so long, the groaning earth, Cursed with war and flood and dearth, Sighs for its redemption birth. Therefore come, we daily pray; Bring the resurrection-day; Wipe creation's curse away!’ ”
(b) Hence we find, in immediate connection with many of these predictions of the end, a reference to intervening events and to the eternity of God, which shows that the prophecies themselves are expressed in a large way which befits the greatness of the divine plans.