7.02. Christ's Second Advent
Christ’s Second Advent The teaching of Scripture is explicit that Jesus Christ shall come again from heaven to earth in a visible bodily form: “While the apostles looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, who also said, You men of Galilee, why stand gazing up unto heaven? This same Jesus, who is taken from you into heaven, shall so come, in like manner as you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:10-11). Christ himself, being solemnly adjured by the high priest to say whether he was “the Christ the Son of God,” replies “You have said. Hereafter shall you see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:63-64). St. John, seeing the event in ecstatic vision, says, “Behold, he comes with clouds, and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him” (Revelation 1:7). The passages of Scripture which must chiefly be relied upon in constructing the doctrine of the second advent are Matthew 25:1-46; Matthew 26:64; 1 Corinthians 15:1-58; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-17; Revelation 20:1-15; Revelation 21:1-27. The doctrine which the church very early derived from the Scriptures respecting Christ’s second coming is found in the statement of the Apostles’ Creed: “The third day Christ rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven; and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” According to this statement, there is no corporeal advent of Christ upon earth after his resurrection, until he leaves his session with the Father and comes directly “from thence” to the last judgment. The doctrinal statement in the Apostles’ Creed, consequently, precludes a premillennial advent of Christ. According to this theory, there are two corporeal resurrections; the first, of the righteous alone, supposed to be taught in Revelation 20:4-5; the second, that of both the righteous and the wicked at the end of the world, taught in Matthew 25:31-46. There is an interval of a thousand years between the two, and during this period Christ reigns in corporeal presence upon the renovated earth.
Premillenarianism was the revival of the pseudo-Jewish doctrine of the messianic kingdom, as this had been formed in the later periods of Jewish history by a materializing exegesis of the Old Testament (see Neander, History 1.650-51). Its most flourishing period was between 150 and 250. Its prevalence in the church at that time has been much exaggerated. That it could not have been the catholic and received doctrine is proved by the fact that it forms no part of the Apostles’ Creed, which belongs to this period, and hence by implication is rejected by it. “Chiliasm,” says Neander (1.651), “never formed a part of the general creed of the church. It was diffused from one country [Phrygia] and from a single fountainhead.” In the preceding period of the apostolic fathers, 100 to 150, it had scarcely any currency. There are no traces of it in Clement of Rome, Ignatius, and Polycarp. In Barnabas, Hermas, and Papias it is found; but these are much less influential names than the former. The early apologists Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus do not advocate it. Alford (on Revelation 20:4-5) is greatly in error in saying that “the whole church for three hundred years from the apostles understood the two resurrections in the literal premillenarian sense.”
Revelation 20:4-6 is the chief and nearly the sole support of the doctrine of two corporeal resurrections. In explaining it, reference must be had to other passages of Scripture, especially Matthew 25:1-46. Christ himself here gives an account of his own final advent, and he speaks of only one corporeal resurrection. In order to harmonize Matthew 25:1-46 with Revelation 20:4-6, the term resurrection in the latter passage must have a tropical signification. And this is supported by the phraseology employed by St. John: “I saw the souls (psychas)1[Note: 1. ψύχας] of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and they lived (ezēsan)2[Note: 2. ἔζησαν] and reigned with Christ a thousand years. This is the first resurrection.” The “living and reigning” is the “resurrection.” Had St. John intended a literal resurrection, he would have said, “I saw the bodies of them that were beheaded”; and he would have employed the verb anistēmi,3[Note: 3. ἀνίστημι = to raise, raise up] as is the case in the New Testament generally, and not the verb zō4[Note: 4. ζῶ = to make alive] or anazō.5[Note: 5. ἀναζῶ = to make alive again] The revelator, in vision, sees the martyrs and other witnesses for Christ as disembodied spirits dwelling in paradise and describes them not as rising, but as “living and reigning” with Christ for a thousand years. This “living and reigning” he calls “the first resurrection.” They lived with Christ by their faith in him, and this spiritual life was a spiritual resurrection from “death in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Having thus “risen with Christ” (Colossians 3:1), they sought “those things which are above where Christ sits on the right hand of God,” and as the reward of their eminent spirituality and devotion, even to martyrdom, reign in the heavenly paradise with Christ in his spiritual reign, during that remarkable period of the triumph of the gospel upon earth which is denominated the millennium. Special honor in heaven, granted to particular persons for extraordinary service and suffering in Christ’s cause upon earth, is spoken of elsewhere. To the apostles our Lord says, “When the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of his glory, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28). This certainly is to be interpreted metaphorically, not literally. The tropical use of “resurrection” to denote regeneration is a characteristic of St. John, as well as of St. Paul. In John 5:25-29 our Lord speaks of two resurrections, the first of which is spiritual, and the second is corporeal: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” The reference, here, is to the regeneration of the human soul, which is often called a resurrection, as the following passages show: “He that believes on me is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24); “he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (11:25-26); “as Christ was raised from the dead, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4); “arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you life” (Ephesians 5:14); “if you be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above” (Colossians 3:1); “when we were dead in sins, God quickened us and raised us up and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6); “entombed with him in baptism, wherein also you are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God” (Colossians 2:12).
After speaking of regeneration as a spiritual resurrection, our Lord proceeds to speak of another resurrection which he describes as corporeal: “Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming [he does not say: and now is], in the which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.” This is the literal resurrection of the body; and this is the “second resurrection” in relation to the first tropical resurrection. The regeneration of the soul, according to St. Paul, results in the resurrection of the body: “If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). It should be noticed that while Christ in John 5:25-29 directly mentions both resurrections, St. John in Revelation 20:5-6 directly mentions only one, namely, the “first resurrection.” He leaves the “second resurrection,” namely, that of the body, to be inferred. That the “first resurrection” in 20:6 is spiritual is proved still further by the fact that those who have part in it are “blessed and holy” and not “under the power of the second death” and are “priests of God.” The literal resurrection is not necessarily connected with such characteristics, but the tropical is. (See supplement 7.2.1.) In Revelation 20:5 it is said that “the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.”6[Note: 6. WS: Tischendorf, Hort, A,B, and Vulgate read ezēsan (ἔζησαν = lived) instead of anezēsan (ἀνέζησαν = lived again) in Textus Receptus. The Revised Version omits “again.”] The remainder of the believing dead do not “live [and reign with Christ]” until the final consummation at the end of the world. The martyrs are honored above the mass of believers by a coreign with the Redeemer during the millennium. The church generally does not participate in the triumph of its head until after the millennium and final judgment.
Augustine (City of God 20.6-10) gives this explanation of the two resurrections. The binding of Satan, he says, is spiritual, and the reign of Christ on earth is also spiritual. The martyrs, as disembodied spirits, reign spiritually with their Lord. Augustine (City of God 20.7) mentions the opinion of some who believed that the saints will rise on the completion of six thousand years from the creation and will live upon the earth to celebrate the millennial Sabbath. “This opinion,” he adds, “would not be objectionable, if it were believed that the joys of the saints in that Sabbath shall be spiritual and consequent on the presence of God, for I myself, too, once held this opinion. But as they assert that those who then rise again shall enjoy the leisure of immoderate carnal banquets, furnished with an amount of meat and drink such as not only to shock the feeling of the temperate, but even to surpass the measure of credulity itself, such assertions can be believed only by the carnal. They who do believe them are called by the spiritual ‘Chiliasts’; which we may literally reproduce by the name of ‘Millenarians’ ” (see Wordsworth on John 5:24-29).
S U P P L E M E N T
7.2.1 (see p. 865). Neither the phrase second resurrection nor the phrase first death are found in Scripture. They are inferences from the phrases first resurrection and second death, which are found there; the former in Revelation 20:5-6; the latter in 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8. The inferred “first death” and the inferred “second resurrection” are both of them physical. The “first death” is destroyed by the resurrection of the body (1 Corinthians 15:26; 1 Corinthians 15:54-55; 1 Timothy 1:10; Hebrews 2:14); the “second death” is indestructible (Revelation 20:14; Revelation 20:10). The “second resurrection” is that of the body; and the “first resurrection” is that of the soul in regeneration. One death and one resurrection are directly taught, and one death and one resurrection indirectly taught in Scripture. One of each is physical, and one of each is spiritual. But the order is different in each class. The first death is physical, and the second is spiritual; the first resurrection is spiritual, and the second physical.
Leighton (on 1 Peter 2:2) explains the phrase newborn babes as denoting the new birth and says that “this new birth is the same that St. John calls the first resurrection and pronounces them blessed that partake of it: ‘Blessed are they that have part in the first resurrection, the second death shall have no power over them’ (Revelation 20:6). This new life put us out of danger and fear of that eternal death. ‘We are passed from death to life,’ says St. John (1 John 3:14), speaking of those that are born again.”