Recounting Christ’s Comings

To Bible believers, “The Second Coming” refers to the close of Jesus’ ministry to the church on earth. They consider Christ’s first coming to be the one that began in a Bethlehem stable and culminated with His death on the cross and ascension into Heaven. There is a large faction of the American church that believes the culmination is really a second, third, and fourth “coming” that will span 1007 years. I have written several articles explaining why I don’t subscribe to that eschatology; you can read them in the related posts below.

The seed that got me thinking about this subject again was planted by my wife when she came across something in her daily Bible reading that she had forgotten. She was reminded that a common phrase we have used in our fifty-some years of sailing the Great Lakes was spoken by Jesus. Our modern version is “Red sky at night – sailor’s delight; red sky at morning – sailor’s take warning.” At first, I went to what some refer to as Jesus’ end times discourses near the close of the Gospel of Matthew. Failing to find it there, I did what any modern Bible scholar would do: I Googled it.

Turns out, it is not in the longer section of Jesus’ discussion of the topic, but much earlier in His ministry. The Jews had demanded a sign to validate His claims and authenticate His teaching. He chided them by citing their belief in the folksy sailor’s rhyme while missing the signs that He was indeed the promised Messiah. He followed that with one of His very politically incorrect pronouncements that they were evil and adulterous. The evil part became clear when the morally bankrupt, power-hungry leadership murdered an innocent man. The adulterous part makes me want to look back at their history with God.

Throughout much of the poetry of the Old Testament, God was pictured as the loving husband of the repeatedly unfaithful wife, Israel. In this metaphor, their consistent dalliance with other “gods” was adultery. The beautiful part of this sad story is that God always took them back. True, they often had to pay for their transgression with some significant punishment, but there was always a remnant that came back to the loving Husband. God is also poetically referred to as the heavenly vineyard owner, the gardener, and rarely as the Father.

It may be Jesus’ reference to God as His Father that irked the Jewish leadership the most. They believed He was illegitimate both literally and theologically, so His assertion that God was His father and the attendant claim to be Son of Man (another OT usage) made them livid. When the High Priest asked at His trial if He claimed to be the Son of God, He replied, “It is as you say.” Though He never used the title Himself (although a voice from Heaven did), He accepted the High Priest’s application as valid. The Jews knew that when Messiah came, He would be the Son of God, so the question had an ulterior motive: get the Man to condemn Himself. He did.

This made me think about how many times Jesus had made Himself known before His “first coming.” Jesus coming in the manger of Bethlehem is called the incarnation because in that instance, God took on flesh in human form. John says plainly, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” However, just prior to that John had said that the Word was present at the creation of the world. In fact, it is the Apostle’s declaration that everything that was made was made by Him. So, Jesus’ first coming was in Genesis chapter one, “In the beginning.”

Here is the startling fact about that understanding: the Old Testament (and the New) says plainly that God created all things. No question. The name that is most often cited as the divine Creator is the Hebrew word “Yahweh.” In almost every English translation of the Scripture, the Hebrew word is substituted with the word “lord” spelled “LORD.” This practice was instituted to mimic the Jews’ reverence for the name of God. They believed it was sacrilege to pronounce it out loud. Whenever the Hebrew word represented by the consonants “YHWH” appeared, they substituted “LORD.” We don’t know exactly how to pronounce God’s name because the vowels are omitted, but most modern scholars agree that Yahweh is a good guess. Some older translations use Jehovah, but that is not thought to be as close to the original Hebrew as Yahweh.

I said it was startling; here is why. After God revealed His name, Yahweh, to Moses, the Bible writers repeatedly asserted that Yahweh created the Earth. John says Jesus created the Earth. Wait! What? Either John is mistaken (NOT!) or else Yahweh is Jesus in His preincarnate form. If that is true, as I believe it is, then Jesus had appeared to His people dozens of times throughout their history, most notably to Abraham and Moses, but to others as well. He also made numerous predictions about how He was going to appear one day in a unique form, often referred to as the Servant, to bring His program with the Children of Israel to completion. It is clear to us on this side of the Cross how those prophecies came to be. The evil and adulterous minds of the Jewish leaders in the first century refused to see it. They wanted a different Messiah, one who rode a warhorse and defeated the Romans.

I have to admit at this point that Jesus is distinct from Yahweh in some ways. Paul told the Philippians that Jesus “emptied Himself” when He became a human being. He left some of His eternal divine attributes behind when He came into the manger. He was no longer omnipresent; He was restricted in location to where His physical body was. His omnipotence (power) was there to a degree as evidenced by healing the sick, calming the storm, raising the dead, and so on. It is unclear from Scripture what level of omniscience He retained; the Gospels do say He knew what was in man, and He demonstrated that by revealing what the Pharisees were thinking. Much of the remainder of the divine character was still there, as He told Phillip that if they had really seen Him, they had seen the Father. In other words, all our finite minds can fathom about God, we can see in the human Jesus. Phillip didn’t see it at first; the Jewish leaders never did.

That had to be both frustrating and heartbreaking to Jesus. So, He told the Jews the sign they were seeking would be the sign of Jonah: three days out of sight then ta-da “I’m back!” Most of them didn’t even get that. So, Yahweh/Jesus did what He had foretold: He came in judgment on His adulterous people and used Rome to destroy their idolatrous temple and end their mockery of worship. (That’s the Book of Revelation.) Yahweh/Jesus introduced an entirely new way of worship: worship in spirit and truth. The old paradigm of select priests at a designated temple was done away. Peter said it: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s possession.”

Our God is Yahweh. Our God is Jesus, and He is coming again. We are used to calling that the Second Coming, but I think a more Scriptural understanding is that He always has been and always will be here. His special “coming” to Bethlehem and victory on the Cross are wonderful beyond imagining. His current place as the Son of God at the right hand of the Father is also unfathomable to our finite minds. How He brings it all to a conclusion when He creates the New Heaven and the New Earth is still a mystery. I want to see that! I say with John, “Amen; come [again] Lord Jesus!”

Related posts: Taking the Bible Literally, Part 2; Heaven Can Wait; Binding Satan