The Promise of His Coming

The Bible does not end with good advice. It ends with a promise: He is coming.

Revelation 1:7

What we are (and are not) doing here

Prophecy is not a hobby for the clever. It is pastoral. It warns the proud, steadies the suffering, and keeps the church looking up. Charts can wait. The Lord cannot.

Two errors sit on either side of the road:

• Treating the future as a code only insiders can crack
• Treating the future as poetry with no teeth

Scripture does both: it unveils, and it conceals. We read it the same way we read the rest of the Word — see A Passage in Its Place.

The hope underneath

Whatever sequence you hold, do not lose the Person. The last things are about Jesus Christ: Judge (Acts 17:31), Bridegroom (Matthew 25:6), King (Revelation 19:16). The gospel you already have is the same gospel that will be vindicated: The Gospel.

The first coming has its own catalog: Prophecies of the First Coming. The words still ahead have another: Prophecies of the Second Coming. Look up where a word was said, and how it is read now. Most of those are not cashed yet.

Studies under this teaching

• From Daniel to Christ: Part 1 of The God Who Keeps Time. Daniel's four empires, Antiochus IV, and the sixty-nine weeks that land on Palm Sunday
• Watching Wisely: Part 2. How to watch the signs without setting dates, and how the major views differ
• The Tribulation — a slower look at a hard word
• The Four Horsemen — what the first four seals actually say
• The Seven Churches — one skeleton, seven cities, the details of each letter
• Marriage and Union. Jesus ends marrying and being given in marriage. I do not believe that ends the first union of man and woman.