When will Jesus return?

Question 10011.

The return of Jesus is the most asked-about event in Christian teaching, and the question people actually put to me is nearly always the same one the disciples put to Him: when? Let me answer honestly from the start: I do not know, you do not know, and anyone who claims to know has already disqualified himself by the Lord’s own words. But that is not the end of the answer, because Scripture tells us a great deal about the timing question: what is unknowable, what is imminent, what comes in stages, and how to live inside the not-knowing. Those four things are worth more than any date.

The Words That End All Date-Setting

On the timing of the return of Jesus, the Lord could not have been clearer: “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36). After the resurrection, asked again about timing, He replied, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). That double prohibition covers every calculation, every numerological scheme, every prophecy teacher’s countdown. History has staged the demonstration often enough: the Millerites in 1844, the Watchtower’s serial failures, Harold Camping’s billboards in 2011, and each collapse handed the scoffers of 2 Peter 3:4 fresh material. Date-setting is not zeal; it is disobedience with a deadline.

Why has the Father kept the date to Himself? Because not-knowing produces exactly the spiritual posture He intends: “Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42). A servant who knows the master returns Friday evening can idle until Friday afternoon. A servant who does not know must be found faithful every day. The concealment is pastoral genius.

Two Stages, Two Answers

Part of the confusion around the return of Jesus comes from flattening two distinct events into one, a distinction I set out fully in What is the difference between the Rapture and the Second Coming?. The Rapture is the Lord coming for His Church: “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command… and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). The Second Coming is the Lord coming with His saints to earth, every eye seeing Him, to judge the nations and take the throne of David (Revelation 19:11-16; Matthew 25:31).

The timing signature of each event differs. The Rapture is signless and imminent: nothing prophesied stands between you and it, which is why the New Testament tells believers to wait not for signs but for the Son, “to wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:10). The Second Coming, by contrast, is preceded by announced events: the Tribulation, the abomination of desolation, the darkening of sun and moon, “immediately after the tribulation of those days” (Matthew 24:29-30). One event could occur before you finish this article; the other follows a published programme. Keep the two apart and the timing texts stop quarrelling with each other.

The Return of Jesus Is Imminent

Feel the pulse of expectation in the apostolic church: “the appointed time has grown very short” (1 Corinthians 7:29); “the Lord is at hand” (Philippians 4:5); “the coming of the Lord is at hand… the Judge is standing at the door” (James 5:8-9); “the end of all things is at hand” (1 Peter 4:7). Paul included himself among those who might be alive at the catching up, “we who are alive, who are left.” Were they mistaken? No; they were positioned. Imminence does not mean soon; it means nothing must happen first. Every generation of believers has rightly stood on tiptoe, and the long delay falsifies nothing, for “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years… The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you” (2 Peter 3:8-9). The interval is mercy, measured in conversions.

What of the signs people ask about, wars, earthquakes, Israel’s regathering? Signs belong to the Tribulation and the Second Coming, not the Rapture. Yet stage-setting is visible: Israel back in her land in unbelief, exactly the arrangement the Tribulation prophecies presuppose, as I showed in my article on the Land covenant. If the shadows of the Tribulation are already lengthening, how near must the signless event before it be? That is a legitimate inference; a date is not.

Why He Has Not Yet Come

Peter answers the delay in the return of Jesus directly: the Lord is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Every year of the Church age is another year of the open door, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. There is also a fullness to complete: the Church will be caught up when the body is complete, “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25), a phrase I unpack in a separate article. God is not behind schedule; He is filling a family. The moment the last stone of the living temple is set, the shout will not linger.

And when He comes, the timetable accelerates without mercy for procrastinators: “while people are saying, There is peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:3). The day that dawns like any other will end like no other. Sudden does not mean unforeseeable; it means unforgiving of delay.

Living Between the Comings

So how does Scripture tell us to await the return of Jesus? Watchfully: “stay awake” is the Lord’s repeated command, an attitude of the heart that keeps short accounts and holds plans loosely. Purely: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3); nothing sanctifies a day like the possibility that it is the last one. Busily: the parable of the talents places “settling accounts” at the return of Jesus, and the servant’s question is not when but what shall I have to show? Missionally: the gospel of the kingdom is for all nations, and every delay is a commission extended. And comfortingly: Paul ends the great Rapture passage not with a puzzle but a pastoral instruction, “Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:18). Prophecy that does not produce comfort, holiness, and urgency has been read wrongly, whatever chart it came with.

I sometimes ask congregations this: if you knew the Lord were returning tonight, what would you put right this afternoon? Whatever your answer, that is the thing to put right, because the whole point of the doctrine is that tonight is never ruled out.

Waiting Well for the Return of Jesus

Church history offers a gallery of how not to wait, and the portraits instruct. Some, date-fixated, sold farms and sat on hillsides, and their disappointment bred generations of scoffers. Some, embarrassed by the delay, quietly retired the doctrine altogether, and their churches lost both urgency and comfort at a stroke. Some turned the return of Jesus into a system to be defended rather than a Person to be desired, and grew quarrelsome over charts while their first love cooled. The New Testament’s portrait of healthy waiting is different from all three: Thessalonian believers who “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). Serving and waiting, in one sentence: hands busy, eyes up. The waiting sanctifies the serving, and the serving disciplines the waiting.

Notice too that the New Testament attaches a crown to the attitude itself: “there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord… will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:8). Loved His appearing: the reward is for affection, not calculation. You can be entirely orthodox about the return of Jesus and entirely cold towards it, the way a man can believe in his wedding anniversary without loving his wife. The cure for cold eschatology is not more charts but more Christ: the return is precious in exact proportion as the Person is. Ask yourself honestly which you would feel if the trumpet sounded tonight: interruption, or reunion? Wait in such a way that the honest answer is reunion.

So, now what?

Refuse both ditches: the scoffer’s where is the promise of his coming, and the date-setter’s calendar. Live the tension Scripture actually assigns: ready as though the return of Jesus were this evening, faithful as though the interval were another century. Put right today what you would put right if you heard the trumpet at dusk. And if you are not yet Christ’s, hear the kindness in the delay: the door stands open this hour precisely because He is patient towards you. The one date that matters for you is today: “now is the day of salvation.” Will the day of His return be your best day or your worst?

“Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” (Matthew 24:44, ESV)