1133. The Pre-Millennial Coming of Jesus Christ

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University. In this episode of The Daily Platform, we're continuing a study series entitled Return of the King, which is a study of the second coming of Christ. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Eric Newton of the Bob Jones Christian man, very godly man, and a wonderful teacher of the Word of God. And I think you'll be encouraged this morning as he speaks and continues our series on the Return of the King. Dr. Newton. Good morning.

Hope you're doing well. Would you turn your Bibles with me to the very first verse of the New Testament? Matthew 1, verse 1.

And we will come to that text and some other verses here shortly. I don't know what traditions your church, your local church has. You know, the kind of things that make sense to those of us who regularly attend and may need to be explained to those who don't regularly attend. Even if you work hard at not being cliquish or ritualistic, every assembly has customs of this nature. Well, the local church that I grew up in as a kid and a teenager had an interesting custom. We sang the very same song at the conclusion of every Sunday morning service. It's a song called He is Coming Again. And we sang the very same chorus at the end of every Sunday evening service, every week.

The name of that is We'll Never Say Goodbye in Glory. Now, that practice may strike you as quaint or even imbalanced. You may say, well why didn't you, if you had to sing something every week, why didn't you sing something about the cross? Or about the glory of God, why didn't you mix it up some? Well, you know, I had some of those questions as a kid.

Actually, I wasn't that mature. I just always thought that the tune for We'll Never Say Goodbye in Glory sounded like it kind of needed an accordion or something. No offense to both of you who play the accordion out there. You know, I wondered why we did that every week too. And you could argue for different positions. You know, as I look back on that, our pastor was emphasizing something really significant. He wanted us to leave our gathering together as the church of God and disseminate with this reality in mind, Jesus Christ is coming again.

And that shapes how we live as his people. Our topic today is the premillennial coming of Jesus Christ. We're not necessarily taking these topics in chronological order as they will unfold.

This is the topic assigned to me. So I want to talk about the second coming of Christ, which is really the integrating hub. It's the center of eschatology. The Bible speaks of the future in a way that coheres in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He's the Son of God who became incarnate. He came, he died for our sins, and he will come again. He will return in glory to consummate all that the Father has planned.

He will come to reign. Now I think sometimes we can get the impression that eschatology is one of those doctrines that we've focused on in the last, I don't know, hundred years or so, maybe to an unhealthy degree. There's been kind of a fascination with it, and that we should sort of scale it back. And one of the points of this series is that sure, eschatology can be easily misunderstood, it can be unhelpfully debated, but it is central to our belief as a Christian. And, you know, that's true because this has been ascribed to, this has been believed from the very beginning. You've undoubtedly heard of the Council of Nicaea. Constantine gathers together these bishops, three hundred or so, bishops from all across the Roman Empire to talk about doctrines, specifically the Trinity and how Jesus relates to God the Father. Well, the second ecumenical council, in a place called Constantinople, in 381, is where we get these words. This is the Nicene Creed, slightly expanded.

It wasn't overturned, it wasn't changed, it wasn't disagreed with, it's expanded. And I'm gonna read this, this is the first portion of it. We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. Notice the heart of the Trinitarian doctrine of this creed. And we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried and the third day he rose again according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven, and the narrative just keeps going without missing a beat, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, from thence he shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end. And we believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, and it goes on a little bit past that. And even before the fourth century creeds, church leaders penned statements like this one by Irenaeus in the second century.

This church father sat under the teaching of Polycarp, who sat under the teaching of the Apostle John. He's living in the late 100s, the second century, this is very early, and he makes this statement about Christ's coming and reigning in the millennium, then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire, but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom, that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day, and restoring to Abraham the promised inheritance, notice the link to the Old Testament promises there, in which kingdom the Lord declared that many coming from the east and the west should sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The doctrine of Christ's second coming is as ancient as the church, it's not a new thing, it's not an insignificant thing. But this doctrine is important not just because it's old, I mean not necessarily is something good because it's old, right? It's important because of everything that has to do with why the early church believed the second coming of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the second coming became clear in the teaching of Jesus Christ himself.

I think that's really important. The second coming, the premium coming of Christ is Christ's teaching. Dr. Horn mentioned last week that the second coming is foretold in the Old Testament just as Christ's first coming was.

But the prophecies are often intertwined in such a way that it would have been difficult for even the most astute Jewish scholar to understand the distinctions. For example, read with me Isaiah 61, 1, and 2. The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. These are obviously the words of the coming Messiah. He had sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all that mourn. The Messiah is coming, he's going to set up a kingdom, and it seems like all of this is probably going to happen at the same time. But Christ did come, he preached the gospel, he proclaimed liberty and the day of salvation. He set people free, he set us free from our sins, but the day of vengeance awaits. Some of you are going through very difficult times.

Not all who mourn are yet comforted. To change to a frequently cited analogy, it's like looking at a mountain range, and I couldn't exactly find a picture that perfectly represented this, but it's like looking at a mountain range where the peaks pretty much look like they're the same mountain. Like you're looking at it from such an angle that these peaks are miles and miles and miles apart, but they almost look like they're the same thing. That's what eschatology is like, particularly in the Old Testament. But this started to change when Jesus came and taught his disciples. Even early in his ministry, Luke records how Jesus opened the scroll in his hometown Nazareth synagogue, and he read those very two verses, Isaiah 61 one and the beginning of verse two, and then he stopped, and he said that this portion that he had just read was being fulfilled in their hearing that very day.

But there was and is more to come. Mark 14 62, Jesus says to the high priest in one of his religious trials, I am, he's pronouncing that he's God, I am, and you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven. Regular people don't come in the clouds of heaven. Okay, that's what deity does. That's what God the Son, the incarnate Son, is going to do. The second coming is not a fanciful speculation.

It's not a manipulative way to get control of people. This is not a mere human prophet. Take for instance the Baha'u'llah, the 19th century founder of the Baha'i, who announced to the world and its religious leaders that he was the manifestation of the Spirit of God.

The Spirit had arrived in him. No, this is Christ's own teaching. But in addition to being the clear teaching of God the Son, it is about God the Son. And so we want to take a few minutes and consider from Matthew and from another book in the New Testament, this idea of Christ as King, the kingdom of God and of his Messiah, his Christ. We can see Old Testament prophets speaking of this, but I want us to notice specifically in Matthew, this doctrine of a kingdom. Matthew is the canonical link between the Old and New Testament.

And we know that from the very first verse. Look at Matthew 1-1. The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Now you could make an argument for the importance of Moses. But alongside Moses, by far and away the two most important people in the Old Testament, other than God himself, are Abraham and David. Those are crucial covenants, the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant. And Matthew says, this one of whom this book is about is Jesus the Messiah and he's the son of David.

He's a king. And it goes to the genealogy. And this was troubling. If you notice chapter 2, see how quickly you can thumb through your version of the scripture today. Chapter 2 verses 1-3, the magi show up and they say, where's the king of the Jews? And Herod's really troubled because he thought he was the king, though he was not a Jew.

And he said, go find him and then come report to me so that I can acknowledge him as well. The king, in some sense, had arrived. And in chapter 3 verse 2, John the Baptist starts preaching in the wilderness and he says, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom has drawn near.

It has approached. And Jesus comes himself in chapter 4 and he preaches this same kingdom. And it's a kingdom that Satan offered him, but he did not take Satan up on that offer.

He resisted him in the wilderness in chapter 4. And he preaches the gospel of the kingdom and he speaks of kingdom citizens. It says in chapter 6 verse 10, familiar words from the Lord's prayer, that we're supposed to pray that God's kingdom would come and that his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6-33 says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. As we see that, we won't take time to look at all these verses, but as we see this truth progress through Matthew, we come to a point in Matthew 21. If you look at Matthew 21 verse 5.

We'll start in verse 4 actually. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Zion, behold, thy king cometh unto thee, meek and sitting upon an ass, an occult the full of an ass. The king is coming. And so these people were, they were exhilarated.

They thought that this was the moment. And Jesus, Jesus kept calling out the religious leaders and he kept speaking of these people's sins. And by the end of that week, he was in a tomb. They had crucified him.

Well now what do you do? I thought in some sense that the kingdom had come. I mean the king had arrived. And so Jesus is raised from the dead and he commissions these disciples to go and to preach the gospel. And we see throughout the New Testament, we see these books picking up this theme, that in one sense the king has come and he's ruling in the hearts of men, but in another sense we're still looking for this kingdom. We're still looking for the fulfillment of the kingdom prophecies of the Old Testament in many regards. And so we come to the last book of our New Testament. Would you turn to Revelation 1 verse 1. We could have picked other passages.

I'm just picking the bookends. Revelation 1, 1. The revelation of Jesus Christ. Verse 5, and from Jesus Christ who is the faithful witness and the first begotten of the dead, the prince of the kings of the earth. Verse 6, he's made us kings and priests unto God his father. If you look in chapter 11 verse 15 it says, There were great voices in heaven saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever. And after the events of the tribulation, ending in chapter 18 into chapter 19 in verse 11, we have the heavens opened, the end of the tribulation, and this white horse appears. And there's a rider on that horse and he's called Faithful and True.

And when John gets a closer look, emblazoned on his thigh is this title. He's the King of Kings. He's the Lord of Lords. And he's coming to reign. Why take all this time to talk about the kingdom, to talk about this second Adam who's coming to reign on earth?

Well, sometimes we can get sort of enveloped in the details of eschatology and forget who the main person is. And we can shy away from why he's coming again. So we should have a couple of questions.

We can't answer them all. We're going to take two of them in the few minutes we have remaining. What is this coming like and how should I respond?

What is this coming like and how should I respond? Three sets of characteristics. Number one, the coming of Christ. I'm talking about the premillennial coming after the tribulation. Other speakers will talk about the rapture and the tribulation before that.

It's number one, personal and visible. Acts 1-11, Jesus ascends and two angels come and they say to the disciples, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus which is taken up from heaven, from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go to heaven.

He was on the ground. He ascended up into heaven into the clouds. He's going to come back in the clouds as only God does with a retinue of angels and he's going to come to the earth and he's going to reign. This is not the kind of coming taught by a sex such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses said Jesus had returned invisibly in 1874. And then he started reigning in heaven in a new way in 1914.

This is a visible personal return. Number two, it's glorious and divine. It's glorious. It's unlike anything that you could imagine.

Even scenes from movies like the Lord of the Rings. It's beyond our comprehension. All we know is what God has revealed to us. Matthew 24, 30. Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fall from heaven, 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. One of the key words for this coming of Jesus Christ is the Greek word that we get our English term epiphany from.

And the root of this word is the idea of a bright light that brings something, makes something visible. And what's interesting about the idea of epiphany is that there were Greco-Roman rulers around the time of Christ that would attach it to their name to show that they believed they were in some sense a divine ruler. The most infamous of these people is the guy who goes, who's known to us as Antiochus Epiphanes, Antiochus the fourth. He came to Jerusalem in the second century BC. He desecrated the temple, the altar, with probably an image of Zeus. You won't be able to see it very well, but on the right side, the back of the coin, on the very left, in letters going down from top to bottom is this Greek word epiphany.

And so probably Paul and other writers of the New Testament by using this word, they're directly assaulting the culture's worship of emperors, of gods, of goddesses, like Diana, Artemis in Ephesus. This is not something that anybody can concoct. This is something that only God can do. God is coming.

He's returning. And thirdly, it's going to be sudden and wrathful. This is the part that we don't always get so excited about. First Thessalonians 5, 2 says, For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. Second Peter 3, 10 is very similar language. The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.

Yes, yes, there are things preceding it, but it will catch people off guard. Quite a few years ago, I woke up groggy on a Sunday morning. I found my coffee mug. I filled it. I entered my little study at the end of our home, and I noticed that the drawers of my desk were pulled out. And I really didn't know what to make of that. I thought perhaps my wife was looking for a piece of paper or something, and so I just moved on. But then my wife came over to my study, and she said if I had seen her laptop, which was out on a leather ottoman in the family room in another part of the house, and she started asking questions, and I turned to look to see if my laptop, which was in a bag on the floor, was still there, and it wasn't. And all of a sudden, you know, I hadn't drunk much coffee.

It wasn't the coffee. Adrenaline kicked in, and I started to notice things. I started to notice the overturned plant out in the yard. I noticed that the screen door was propped open.

We noticed that the glass door that they had evidently entered was a jar unlocked in the family room. Burglars had come. We were right there.

We slept through it. They had come and taken all this electronic stuff from our house. You know, we learned many lessons.

The most important of those was God's mercy. They didn't touch any of us, including our three little children at the time. Now, I could have become upset. I could have been like, all right, why didn't these guys call me and let me know they were coming? All right, thieves don't do that. Burglars don't intend to announce that they're arriving.

That's not the point. Like a thief in the night, it's going to catch people off guard. People are going to be living life as if nothing really is changing. People in 2 Peter, Dr. Horne mentioned this last week, they're like, where is this coming? Things are just like they've always been.

It's uniformitarianism. Nothing's ever going to change. And all of a sudden, Jesus is going to come. And God the Father has given him the right to judge. The Father judgeth no man, John 5.22 says, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son. We hear terms like judgment and vengeance and we kind of recoil, but the reality is that God is coming to set things right.

He paid for sins, but there are many, many people who refuse to turn to him and he has to make the world right. He's coming with a holy wrath. Our time is short, so we're going to skip the next slide and go to our response. How should we respond?

C.S. Lewis famously said, if you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one. And I think this is true.

This is insightful. And so I want us to notice in conclusion, very briefly, the two necessary responses to this coming of the Lord are for us as believers. And I want us to read these verses in 1 Peter 1, 13-16. Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance, but as he which has called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation, because it is written, be ye holy, for I am holy.

You study the passages on the coming of the Lord in the New Testament, and there are two dominant themes. You better be alert. And by being alert, you're going to have hope.

And by being alert, you're going to pursue holiness. Some of you in this room may wonder, well, why hasn't Christ come back yet? You know what Peter's answer to that is in 2 Peter 3? It's because the Lord is merciful. He's gracious. He doesn't want anyone to perish, but all to come to repentance.

You know why he hasn't coming back? He's waiting for you to repent. Don't store up for yourselves wrath on the day of vengeance when God's righteous judgment will be revealed because you presume on his grace. Jesus, the Son, the King, God is coming to righteously rule, to judge us according to his word. Will you turn to him today? And those of us who know him, will we live in expectation, in hope, pursuing holiness for his glory?

Would you pray with me? Our Lord God, we thank you for your truth. We thank you for the certainty. The second coming is just as certain as the first one was. And we pray that because of that, you would enable us to glorify you through hope and through holiness even today. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached at Bob Jones University by Dr. Eric Newton, which is part of the study series about the second coming of Christ. Join us again tomorrow as we continue this series here on The Daily Platform.