Every Christian should want Jesus to return. And the sooner the better.
As a child, the churches I went to were immersed in dispensationalism, which taught the world will slowly get worse and worse each generation, and sometime, very likely in our generation, the great tribulation will begin and the rivers turn to blood, nuclear bombs will threaten the globe, and the Russian attack helicopters come out. Meteors will hit the earth knocking it off it’s axis killing a third of humans earth. And if you’re unlucky enough to survive all of that, you’d then have to endure the rule of Satan.
Then after a while, Jesus comes back and fixes everything, the resurrection happens, and everything’s good.
My reaction to this story, like most peoples’ reaction, was pure terror. I did not want Jesus to return. I wanted the world to get better. More faithful. I desperately hoped at least a temporarily improvement in the moral condition of the world to hold off all of the impending chaos and despair. Every time I heard something about war on the news, I’d think WW3, and therefore the end of the world could be any day now.
My faith was fighting my eschatology. The way I thought God wanted us to live was fighting my view of the return of Jesus. How can a person want to be like Christ, but not actually want him to return?
Was it unbiblical of me to want the world to become more faithful, thereby delaying God’s plan for the end of the world?
The Dispensational Dichotomy
I won’t dive into any doctrinal distinctives of modern dispensationalism vs. traditional Biblical theology here, outside of eschatology. But you can search the tag “dispensationalism” if you’re itching for a deeper dive on this topic.
Living in a way to bring about God’s plan for the end times according to dispensationalism is counterproductive to the commands God has given us.
If we live faithfully and make the world a better place, Jesus’s return is farther off.
But Jesus’s return is good right? Isn’t it what every believer should be hoping for and working towards?
Intuitively, yes. But it becomes awfully challenging when actually living faithfully, evangelizing, discipling the nations and teaching them to obey, and making your family, church, town, and nation a better place actually delays the coming of the Messiah.
Jesus returning is a good thing. I think we should hope for Jesus’s return as quickly as possible. So why don’t all faithful dispensational Christians band together to bring about the conditions for the end times? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Obviously not. But this is the impossible dichotomy that dispensationalism creates.
The most terrible blasphemous murderous faithless person is doing more to bring about the glorious second coming of our Savior than the most faithful pastor or evangelist. Nero’s actions did more to bring Jesus closer than Paul’s.
Thank God that dispensationalists aren’t consistent.
Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow
An alternative to dispensationalism, postmillennialism, teaches that Jesus will return once all his enemies are made his footstool (Psalm 110:1).
Biblically and intuitively, I think we live in a world where living the way God wants us to live hastens the return of Jesus. The Biblical narrative doesn’t tell a story of progressive ruin, but progressive victory. We actually can make the world more Christlike, and we will. And the world will get better in the process. Not worse.
When God told Adam and Noah to fill the earth, that means the earth actually will be filled. When God told Abraham the earth will be filled with Christians (Galatians 3:7-9), he wasn’t lying. When Jesus told his disciples to disciple the nations, the nations will actually be discipled (Matthew 28:18-20). God was serious when he said the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14).
God doesn’t lie. And God doesn’t make plans he doesn’t intend on finishing.
We can actually have hope that our good works matter on earth, and are moving the world toward the good and glorious return of Christ.
When we look around us, things may appear bad. But remember in the first century, Nero, the emperor of the most civilized empire in the world was regularly beheading Christians and sticking their heads on pikes lining the main roads into Rome. In the 1500s, the Catholic church were burning the Reformers at the stake.
Today, here we are sitting on our comfy couches in our air conditioned homes, looking at our phone that receives images shot through space, and we hear about a Christian who got thrown in jail unjustly. No mass beheading. No stakes. No fire. And we think the world is getting worse.
The world is getting better. And we can have hope that the reason for this is because this is God’s plan, and it’s actually working.
