The Lord is Not Slack: Why Has Jesus Not Returned?

One question which has nagged Christians and seekers for 2000 years since Jesus' walked the earth is why has Jesus not returned? 

This is a legitimate question, and I can remember being disturbed after reading one of my favorite theologians (who seemed to have answer for everything) say he did not know why God chose ¨soon¨ language to apply to Jesus' Coming in light of such a time gap!

This will be a longer than necessary post, in some respects, because I want to explain how I got from point A to point B in helping to answer for myself why the delay of Jesus' return does not invalidate the truth of The Way. 

The non-return of Jesus has indeed served as a basis by which some atheists and other assorted non-believers have scoffed at the Christian faith. 

And that Jesus (Matt. 16:28) and Paul (1 Thess. 4:15-17) (and presumably others; see James 5:7-9) seemed to think he, Jesus, would return in their lifetimes in the first century only exacerbates the problem. 

(On a more quirky note, Jehovah's Witnesses use this unfulfilled expectation to justify their failed prophetic speculations and subsequent disappointments.)

I understand many alternative explanations exist for the passages which suggest Jesus should have come back shortly after his ascension into heaven. 

Some have gone through each verse separately to explain why it does not teach what it appears to teach (John Piper takes this approach, for example). 

Living 2000 years on this side of the cross, I am conditioned to read these passages as if their writers and hearers were not anxiously expecting Jesus to return. 

However, a plain reading of the passages points in a different direction, prompting us to at least consider the possibility of a first century return expectation. 

The hope of the Coming of the Jesus in Scripture is routinely connected to the patient endurance the first believers were encouraged to have because they would be soon delivered (1 Thess. 4:15-17; Heb. 10:25; Rom. 13:12), not some future generation of Christians thousands of years later. 

At any rate, I am going to assume for the sake of argument Jesus did expect a sooner return, as did his followers.

So then what is the deal? Was Jesus a failed prophet? Were the Apostles and early Christians duped? 

That is, of course, a possibility. 

Indeed, maybe we are all wrong about The Way and Jesus is never coming back! 

Now obviously I do not believe that, but I am simply granting it as a logical (not actual) possibility. 

I believe the Bible shows how we may reconcile the teaching of Jesus' imminent return with his 2000 year delay to show neither Jesus nor the Apostles were wrong, per say, without forcing us to deny the earliest believers did, in fact, expect Jesus to return in their lifetimes.

Simply put the answer is that the soon return of Jesus in the lifetimes of his first followers was a prophetic prediction on Jesus' part, and that prophecy was conditional. 

I stumbled upon this answer while listening to the Bible Broadcasting Network, which airs sermons by the late Presbyterian Bible teacher J Vernon McGee who just briefly mentioned this view in answer to a related question about the end of times. 

Because this was an unanswered faith question of mine, I made a mental note to look more into it. 

However, it was not until I was doing some digging on Peter Enns' blogsite (Enns is an anti-innerantist OT Bible scholar) and saw he had featured some Bible scholars who had written a book taking this very approach (see their posts here, here, and here)! 

(I had also just read on the conditional nature of prophecy in Virkler and Ayayo's Hermeneutics for my hermeneutics class.) 

In other words, various streams of thought were coming together. 

So here is the basic argument:

1. Prophecy may be conditional. I won't spend much time on this but will refer the reader to the book of Jonah and Jeremiah 18:1-11 (other examples exist).

2. Jesus' soon Coming was conditioned on, at least, the repentance of the Jewish people. This is the linchpin of the argument. Read Acts 3:15-21 to grasp this point and compare it with Peter's words in 2 Peter 3:9-12.

3. Because the Jewish people did not repent, as was apparently the hopeful expectation of Jesus and the Apostles, the Messiah did not come as soon as expected (and we see a shift in the thinking of the church regarding these matters).

The authors I mentioned earlier have written a book to explain this (which I have not read) titled ¨When the Son of Man Did Not Come.¨ Their book's blurb summarizes their thesis in this way:

The authors argue that the deferral of Christ's prophesied return follows logically from the conditional nature of ancient predictive prophecy: Jesus has not come again because God's people have not yet responded sufficiently to Christ's call for holy and godly action. God, in patient mercy, remains committed to cooperating with humans to bring about the consummation of history with Jesus' return.

Theirs is not a new theory, but one I was up to this point unaware of. 

It does raise questions such as ¨well, is Jesus coming soon or not?¨ and ¨how does the snatching up (rapture) of the church fit into all of this¨, but the main takeaway, as one of the book's authors writes, is ¨the delay of the parousia [the Coming of Christ] does not falsify Christian hope.¨ 

The implications of this hypothesis are huge and I look forward to chewing on this more (and reading the book)!