When Will He Return?

This note is interpretation, not translation. It is our best attempt simply to summarize the scriptures where Jesus talks about when He will come back: everything He says on it, as near to His words as the Greek allows, set out in the kinds of answer He gives. It adds nothing of its own: no date, no scheme, and no reading from Jon. The apostles’ own lines on the subject are kept to the end and marked as theirs. Every quotation is rendered from the Greek of Nestle 1904; Revelation’s are this translation’s.

The question. The disciples ask it outright on the Mount of Olives: “Tell us, when will these things be, and what is the sign of your coming (parousia) and of the completion of the age?” (Matthew 24:3). The Pharisees ask when the kingdom of God is coming (Luke 17:20), and the eleven ask on the day He is taken up whether He is restoring the kingdom to Israel now (Acts 1:6). Everything below is what He answered, in those places and in others where He raised it Himself.

Soon. In this book He says it five times, in the same two words each time, erchomai tachy: “I am coming to you soon” (2:16); “I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have” (3:11); “Look — I am coming soon. Happy is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this scroll” (22:7); “Look — I am coming soon, and my reward is with me” (22:12); and the last word of the book before the blessing, “Yes — I am coming soon” (22:20). The speaker at 22:7 and 22:12 is not named until 22:16, “I, Jesus”. Around them the book says the same of itself: what must happen “soon” (en tachei, 1:1, 22:6) and “the time is near” (ho kairos engys, 1:3, 22:10). To the assemblies He also says “I am coming to you” with no word of time (2:5) and “hold on to what you have until I come” (2:25). In John He promises the coming itself: “if I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again and will take you to myself, so that where I am you may be too” (John 14:3); “I will not leave you orphans; I am coming to you” (14:18); and of the disciple He loved, “if I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you?” (21:22). The “little while” of John 14:19 and 16:16 (“a little while and you will see me no more, and again a little while and you will see me”) is said on the night before the cross and is fulfilled in the days after it, so it is not counted here.

Nobody knows the day or the hour. “But about that day and hour nobody knows, not even the messengers of the skies, nor the Son, only the Father” (Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:32 has “nor the Son, only the Father” too). He says it of the hearers five more times in the same speech and the parables that follow it: “stay awake, because you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (24:42); “be ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not think” (24:44); the master of the servant “will come on a day he does not expect and at an hour he does not know” (24:50; Luke 12:46); “stay awake, because you do not know the day or the hour” (25:13); “you do not know when the time is” (Mark 13:33), and the master of the house may come “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning” (13:35; Luke 12:38 has the second or the third watch). His last recorded word on it is to the eleven, on the day He was taken up: “It is not yours to know times or seasons, which the Father has set in his own authority” (Acts 1:7). In this book the same thing is said to Sardis: “you will not know at what hour I come to you” (3:3).

Like a thief. The picture He chooses for the unknown hour is a burglar: “if the master of the house had known in which watch the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into” (Matthew 24:43; Luke 12:39), and so “be ready”. In this book He says it of Himself twice: “I will come like a thief” (3:3) and “Look — I am coming like a thief. Happy is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes on” (16:15). Paul and Peter carry it on in His words: “the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2); “the day of the Lord will come like a thief” (2 Peter 3:10).

Not yet: the things that come first. He also says plainly that certain things happen before it, and that the first of them are not the end. “You are going to hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for it must happen, but the end is not yet” (Matthew 24:6; Luke 21:9, “the end is not at once”); “all these are the beginning of birth pains” (24:8). “This good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed in the whole inhabited world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (24:14). Then the abomination of desolation spoken of through Daniel standing in the holy place (24:15), then “great pressure, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now” (24:21), and “immediately after the pressure of those days” the sun darkened, the stars falling, and the sign of the Son of Man (24:29–30). In Luke the thing seen is Jerusalem surrounded by armies (21:20), and “Jerusalem will be trodden down by the nations until the times of the nations are fulfilled” (21:24). Before all of it, “first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (Luke 17:25). And He warns about people who announce the time: “many will come in my name saying, I am he, and, The time has come near; do not go after them” (Luke 21:8); “if they say to you, Look, he is in the wilderness, do not go out; Look, he is in the inner rooms, do not believe it” (Matthew 24:26).

Near, at the doors. The signs tell the hearer that it is close, without telling the day: “Learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts out leaves, you know that summer is near. So you too, when you see all these things, know that it is near, at the doors” (Matthew 24:32–33; Luke 21:31, “know that the kingdom of God is near”); “when these things begin to happen, straighten up and lift your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).

This generation, and some standing here. Four sayings put a time on it in terms of the people in front of Him, and they are the hardest in the set, so they are given as they stand. “Amen, I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things happen” (Matthew 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32). “Amen, I tell you, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28; Mark 9:1 has “until they see the kingdom of God come with power”, Luke 9:27 “until they see the kingdom of God”; in all three the transfiguration follows six or eight days later). To the twelve as He sends them: “you will not finish the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes” (Matthew 10:23). To the high priest: “from now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming on the clouds of the sky” (Matthew 26:64). And to Jerusalem: “you will not see me from now until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 23:39). What “this generation” and “some standing here” refer to is read in several ways, and this note does not choose; see the last paragraph.

A delay is built in. The same parables that say the hour is unknown also say the master is away a long time. The wicked servant says in his heart, “My master is taking his time” (chronizei, Matthew 24:48; Luke 12:45), and the parable has the master come late, though not as late as the servant hoped. “While the bridegroom was delaying (chronizontos), they all grew drowsy and slept”, and the cry comes at midnight (25:5–6). “After a long time (meta polyn chronon) the master of those servants comes and settles accounts with them” (25:19). Luke says why He told one of them: “because he was near Jerusalem and they thought the kingdom of God was going to appear at once”, so He told of a nobleman who “went to a far country to receive a kingdom for himself and to return” (19:11–12). And in the parable of the widow, God “will bring about their vindication quickly (en tachei); but when the Son of Man comes, will he find the trust on the earth?” (18:8). Peter answers the complaint of delay in the same terms: one day with the Lord is as a thousand years; He is not slow, but patient, not wanting any to perish (2 Peter 3:8–9).

As in the days of Noah and Lot. When it comes, it comes on ordinary life, suddenly: “as the days of Noah were, so will the coming of the Son of Man be: eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day Noah went into the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and took them all” (Matthew 24:37–39; Luke 17:26–27); “likewise as it was in the days of Lot: eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building; and on the day Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and sulphur from the sky and destroyed them all. It will be the same on the day the Son of Man is revealed” (Luke 17:28–30). “Watch yourselves, that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day come on you suddenly, like a trap; for it will come on everyone who lives on the face of all the earth” (Luke 21:34–35).

Not by watching for it, and seen by everyone. Asked when the kingdom of God is coming, He answers that it “is not coming with observation; nor will they say, Look, here, or, There; for look, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20–21; the Greek entos hymōn can be “within you” or “among you”). Then to the disciples: “days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it” (17:22), and “as the lightning flashes from one side under the sky and lights up the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day” (17:24; Matthew 24:27, “as the lightning comes out from the east and shines as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be”). When it happens, “all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:30), which this book opens with: “every eye will see him” (1:7).

Put together. Laid side by side, His answers are of five kinds, and all five are His own words. It is soon. The day and the hour are not known, not to the messengers, not to the Son, and not to be known by the disciples. It will be sudden, like a thief, on ordinary life. Certain things come first, and when they are seen it is near, at the doors, though the day is still not given. And the master is away a long time. So a reader who says He is coming soon is quoting Him, and a reader who says He delays is quoting Him too; what neither can quote is a date. The one thing He attaches to every one of these answers is the same command: stay awake (grēgoreite, Matthew 24:42, 25:13; Mark 13:35, 37; Luke 12:37; here 3:3 and 16:15), and be ready.

Where the text leaves it open. Three things the sayings do not settle, and this note does not settle for them. What “this generation” (Matthew 24:34) is: the people He was speaking to, or the generation that sees the signs, or something else; readers hold each. What the “some standing here” of Matthew 16:28 saw: the transfiguration that follows in all three Gospels, the resurrection, Pentecost, or the fall of Jerusalem. And whether the fall of Jerusalem in Luke 21 and the coming on the clouds are one horizon or two. The chapter-20 note on this site keeps the same silence about the thousand years. Nothing here is read through any later system of interpretation; the sayings are set out and left as He left them.