Will The Lord Return To Earth, What Do You Expect? (1)

The Second Coming: What do you expect? The greatest cataclysm of world history. The prophets talk about the bad news of the return of God to earth in the person of Jesus by a phrase that’s been mentioned a number of times in this book. The phrase is the Hebrew phrase yom Adonai. We translate it “the day of the Lord” or “the day of Yahweh.” The prophets stumble over each other trying to find adequate language to describe the horror of that day.

Turn to the end of the Old Testament to the little book of Zephaniah. Zephaniah shares with Joel and many other prophets of God a phrase that is the phrase of absolute horror. It’s called the great day of the Lord.

Zephaniah in 1:14-16 writes that the great day of the Lord is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of Yahweh is bitter. Mighty men will scream aloud. That is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, devastation and desolation, darkness and gloominess, clouds and thick darkness. I look at all of those pairs of words, and I see a man ransacking a thesaurus, if there were such a thing available, trying to find adequate terms to describe the calamity of the day of the return of Christ to the earth, because when He returns it will be in the worst judgment in the history of the world.

How can that be? How can that be if Genesis 6 to 9 describes the death of all living by the great flood? How can that be, given the suffering that we’ve experienced even in our own lifetime, like the recent calamitous flooding in places like Honduras, from typhoons, tsunamis, horrible earthquakes, hurricanes, all of these so-called acts of nature? How can there be something worse than all of those things?

I think what makes the Second Coming worse in judgment is that all of those things God did through mediation, that is through Creation, nature gone riot, Creation in upheaval. But in the Second Corning, the judgment will be done, not by water, not by flood, not by fire, not by storm, but by His own hand. Did you hear that? 

To be cont'd.

God Bless You !