Can we know when Jesus will return?

Question 10079.

Can we know when Jesus will return? The short answer is no, and it comes from His own lips rather than from any caution of mine. “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).

That ought to settle it. What it has never done is stop people trying, and the wreckage left behind by those attempts is one of the sadder features of church history.

What Jesus actually said

The statement in Matthew 24:36 is remarkable for what it includes. Not the angels, who see the throne. Not the Son, speaking in the days of His humiliation when He had voluntarily set aside the independent use of certain divine prerogatives. Only the Father.

If that information was withheld from angels and from the incarnate Son during His earthly ministry, the idea that a Bible teacher with a calculator can extract it is not humility’s opposite so much as its comedy.

He repeats the point in different words: “Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” Unexpectedness is built into the design. A date would destroy the very thing the doctrine is meant to produce.

After the resurrection the disciples asked once more whether He would restore the kingdom to Israel at that time. His answer was, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7), and He immediately redirected them to witness.

People sometimes reply that Jesus ruled out the day and the hour but not the month or the year. I have never found that persuasive. It treats a solemn statement about the limits of revealed knowledge as though it were a contractual loophole, and it ignores Acts 1:7 entirely.

Times and seasons

That phrase in Acts 1:7 uses two Greek words worth noticing. Chronos is time measured, the sort you count. Kairos is the opportune moment, the season with a character to it.

Jesus rules out both. We are not given the measured duration and we are not given the appointed moment. The Father has fixed them “by his own authority,” which is about as firm a keep-out sign as language can produce.

Paul tells the Thessalonians, “Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you” (1 Thessalonians 5:1). They already knew what they needed, which was that the day comes like a thief.

Notice what he does not do. He does not supply a chart. He moves straight to how believers should live as children of the day, which is the consistent New Testament pattern whenever this subject arises.

So the honest position is this. Jesus will return, and nobody living knows when. That is not a gap in our knowledge to be closed by ingenuity; it is a deliberate feature of how God has arranged the age, and it is arranged for our good.

Why people keep trying anyway

Partly it is the appeal of secret knowledge. There is a certain thrill in believing you have seen what others have missed, and prophecy provides plenty of raw material for that particular vanity.

Partly it is anxiety. In hard times a date offers a false comfort, an end point to hold on to. I understand the impulse pastorally even while I reject the practice, because waiting without a deadline is genuinely difficult.

And partly, it must be said, it sells. Books predicting that Jesus will return in a named year have made a good deal of money for their authors and a good deal of trouble for their readers.

The results are always the same. William Miller’s followers sold farms and waited on hillsides in 1844. A pamphlet in 1988 gave eighty-eight reasons for that year, and a radio broadcaster named 2011 twice. Every date passed, and every time the name of Jesus took a public beating.

Each failure follows the same pattern. A confident calculation, a devoted following, a date, a silence, and then a revised date. The revisions are the tell. If the method could not detect its own error the first time, it cannot be trusted the second.

What we can know about when Jesus will return

A great deal, as it happens. We know the fact: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Personally, bodily, visibly.

We know the manner. Every eye will see Him. He will descend to the Mount of Olives. He will come with the armies of heaven and with the saints who went before. Nobody will have to be persuaded that it has happened.

We know the order of events well enough to teach it. The Rapture of the Church, the tribulation period, the Second Coming in glory, the thousand year reign, the final judgement and the new creation. Sequence is given; schedule is not.

And we know it is near in the sense that matters most: nothing has to happen first. That is the doctrine of imminence, which I explain in my answer on imminence. Jesus will return at a moment nobody has calculated.

Signs and the season

Some object that Jesus gave signs, so surely we can read them. He did give signs, and they belong to the period after the Church is removed, as I set out in my answer on what signs precede Christ’s return.

Even then, signs indicate a season rather than a date. The fig tree tells you summer is near; it does not tell you the day the harvest begins. Jesus made that comparison and then immediately said no one knows the day or hour.

What I do reject is newspaper exegesis, where a headline is matched to a verse and a conclusion is announced. That method has a hundred per cent failure rate over two thousand years, which is a record worth respecting.

Watching is not the same as calculating. One is obedience and the other is disobedience dressed up as enthusiasm.

It is also worth remembering that no sign has to occur before Jesus will return for His Church. The signs belong to the seventieth week of Daniel, and the Church is not appointed to that period at all, which removes the whole basis for reading indicators as a countdown.

The damage date-setting does

It hurts believers. People have given away savings, abandoned careers, taken children out of school and been left humiliated and disillusioned. I have met some of them, and the wound goes deep.

It hurts the gospel. Peter warned that scoffers would come asking, “Where is the promise of his coming?” and every failed prediction hands them their script. The world does not distinguish between a crank and a church.

It also corrupts discipleship. A dated hope produces a burst of activity followed by collapse. An undated hope produces steady faithfulness, which is precisely what Jesus commended in the parables at the end of the Olivet Discourse.

My answer on why date-setting is wrong goes into the biblical case in more detail, and I hold it firmly.

The remedy is not less interest in prophecy but better handling of it. Teach what Scripture teaches about how Jesus will return, teach it warmly, and stop precisely where the text stops.

Living without a date

The New Testament turns this doctrine towards holiness every single time. “Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” Not everyone who calculates. Everyone who hopes.

It also turns it towards service. The faithful servant is found feeding the household. The point of not knowing when Jesus will return is that every day must be lived as though it might be the day, which is a far healthier arrangement than a countdown.

And it turns it towards comfort. Paul finishes his teaching on the Lord’s coming with “therefore encourage one another with these words.” A believer who is frightened by this doctrine has been taught it badly.

I have buried enough people to know how much that comfort weighs when the coffin is in front of you. The promise does not need a date attached to hold a grieving family upright.

There is freedom in this too. If I do not know when Jesus will return, then I am released from the exhausting business of monitoring the calendar and left with the far simpler task of being faithful today. That is a trade I am glad to make.

So, now what?

Stop looking for the date and start looking for the Person. Titus calls it “our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ,” and hope of that kind is a settled expectation rather than a nervous scan of the horizon.

And if you have been shaken by someone’s failed prediction, do not let their foolishness rob you of the promise itself. Jesus will return, exactly as He said, at an hour nobody expects. Would that hour find you ready?

“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, ESV