Online Booklets

Home

Online Booklets

Christ's Second Coming Explained

CHRIST'S SECOND COMING EXPLAINED

A Brief Panoramic View by Dr. M. E. J. Packer.

A GOOD while ago I was standing on a small hill near Calais harbour, gazing with eager expectancy out over the English Channel. A heavy fog obscured the distant part of the sea. It was a specially happy occasion for me because soon, indeed at any moment, a ship with my daughter on board would suddenly burst through the bank of mist, and she who was coming from the north and I who had come from the south would meet each other and so continue to be together. But a far greater thrill awaits the believer at that marvellous day of the Rapture, when from the earth below all the Lord's own (composing the church), whether alive or dead, will rise up in glorified bodies to meet our Lord from heaven above, in the air. Then after a short time, the Lord will lead us triumphantly back to earth. Thus His coming will be in two stages, firstly into the air, and then down to earth.

The Coming Crisis

Crisis, climax zero hour, the crash! Is that how it is to be? Is there something catastrophic round the corner? Are we sitting on a volcano grumbling to erupt? But isn't it all very stupid to talk like that?

Scaremongering is a mean business and we want none of it. Yet - and this is a remarkable thing - if you were to confide your fears to the man in the street, he wouldn’t think you mad! He is very worried himself when he thinks about it. The press, TV and radio pour the whole wretched story of a chaotic world into our laps. We cannot escape it. The violent insanity of our age threatens to undo civilisation and throw us back to an early barbarism where high principle, moral standards, common civility and God himself have no meaning. History, of course, is a series of crises. That’s how we fix dates in our mind. Crises tumble one on another thick and fast, or history books would be as stuffy as the multiplication table.

There Will Be A Millennium

THERE is a certain group of teachers today - and some of them in respected evangelical circles - who are making bold assertions, which are ill-founded, and without Scriptural authority.

The writings of these A-Millennialist teachers show very considerable disagreement among themselves. Most of them, however, apparently subscribe to three propositions:

(1) that there is to be no millennium;
(2) that there is no future for Israel; and
(3) that all the prophecies of the Old Testament are to be spiritually realised in the Church.

These three assumptions are, of course, bound up together. To say that there is no millennium means that there is no future for Israel, and if there be no fulfilment of these predictions for Israel then we may assume that they are to be fulfilled as all prophecy must be, and fulfilled in this case in the Church. These three suggestions, therefore, stand or fall together.