Christ Will Come Again

Since the beginning of time, human shave told stories of the end of the world as we know it. These stories differ greatly across the globe, but almost every culture has some story to be told of the end. For any culture, how we view the future influences how we live today.

Christians boldly and hopefully proclaim the end in a three-fold confession:

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

But what do we mean by confessing that Christ will come again? In the ’70s, films like “Thief in the Night” narrated a certain timeline of fear-inducing events leading up to Christ’s return. This kind of narrative was revised in the late ’90s with the “Left Behind” series.

Christ-followers who find these perspectives unsatistfactory sometimes opt to believe that the second coming is a metaphorical way of speaking about a mystery, and then think no more about it.

And yet, we set aside four Sundays a year, every Advent, to celebrate and proclaim Christ’s first coming, and Christ’s second coming as well.

This Advent, we explore Christ’s second coming. What are we hoping for? How can we read the Bible’s vision of the future from the perspective of our world today? In what ways does our understanding of Christ’s second coming impact our engagement as faithful Christ-followers in our world?