Why is date setting for Jesus’ return wrong?

Question 10080.

Date setting has a long and embarrassing history in the church, and it keeps coming back because the longing underneath it is real. We want the Lord to come. We read the prophetic Scriptures, we glance at the news, and something in us wants to close the gap between promise and fulfilment by fixing a day in the diary. I understand that impulse. I feel it myself when I read Revelation late at night. But the impulse and the practice are two very different things, and Scripture treats the practice with a bluntness that ought to stop us where we stand.

So let me put my cards on the table. I believe the Rapture is imminent. It could happen before you finish this paragraph, and no prophetic sign has to be fulfilled first. It is precisely because I believe that, that I regard date setting as a quiet denial of the very doctrine it claims to honour. A man who names the year has already stopped expecting the Lord this afternoon, whatever his mouth says. That is the strange irony of it: the practice that looks like the height of prophetic seriousness turns out to be a way of putting the Lord off.

What Jesus actually said about the day and the hour

The words are not obscure. Matthew 24:36 reads, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son but the Father only.” Jesus is speaking about His own return, and He places the timing inside the Father’s own authority, out of reach even of the angels. Whatever else that verse does, it closes the door on the calculating mind. If the angels do not know, the man with the spreadsheet does not know either.

The risen Lord said something very similar to disciples who asked Him about the restoration of the kingdom to Israel. Acts 1:7 answers, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” The two words are chronos, measured duration, and kairos, the significant season or opportune moment. Between them they cover the whole territory that date setting tries to occupy. Jesus is not being coy. He is telling His people that the schedule is not their business.

Notice what He says next. Instead of a timetable they receive power and a commission. The alternative to knowing the date is not passivity but witness. That substitution is the heart of the matter, and every generation that has gone in for date setting has felt the pull away from the second thing towards the first.

Why date setting always ends the same way

The record is not encouraging. William Miller told his followers the Lord would return in 1843, then 1844, and the collapse of those hopes is still remembered as the Great Disappointment. The Watchtower movement has named dates and quietly revised them. In my own lifetime I have watched booklets sell in their millions promising a specific year, only for the year to pass like any other. Not one instance of date setting in two thousand years has been right, and the failures are not random. They are the predictable outcome of doing something Scripture forbids.

There is a cost to the watching world too. Peter warned that scoffers would come saying, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). Every failed prediction hands that argument to them free of charge. When a Christian on the radio names a Saturday in October and the Sunday arrives as usual, the mockery does not fall on him alone. It falls on the doctrine of the Lord’s return, and it falls on the gospel that stands behind it.

I have sat with people picking through the wreckage of a failed prediction. Some had given away savings. One had told his employer he would not be needed after the spring. What struck me was not the naivety but the sincerity. These were not cranks. They were believers who had been badly taught, and the teacher had already moved on to the next book.

Date setting and the doctrine of imminence

The pretribulational position rests on the conviction that the Lord’s coming for His Church is signless and could occur at any moment. That is the doctrine of imminence, and it is not a decorative extra. It shapes how a believer holds his plans, his money and his ambitions. A named date destroys it at a stroke. If the Lord is coming in 2031, then He is not coming tonight, and the whole texture of expectancy collapses into waiting for a diary entry.

This is why I think date setting is more than an intellectual mistake. It is a spiritual one. It replaces watchfulness with arithmetic. Watchfulness keeps a man alert every day of his life; arithmetic keeps him alert for a fortnight before the predicted date and slack for the years either side. The Lord’s own parables press the opposite instinct, since the servant who does not know when the master returns is the servant who stays at his post.

There is a further irony in it. The men who go in for date setting usually do so out of a high view of prophecy, believing that God has told us more than the average Christian realises. I share that instinct. Prophecy occupies a quarter of the Bible and God did not fill those pages to be ignored. But taking prophecy seriously means taking seriously the parts that tell us to stop, and the words about the day and the hour are among the plainest sentences Jesus ever spoke. A high view of Scripture that runs past an explicit prohibition is not a high view of Scripture at all.

But what about the signs?

Someone always asks about the signs, and it is a fair question. Jesus did give signs, and Revelation is full of them. The dispensational answer is that those signs belong to a period the Church will not be here to see. The signs that precede Christ’s return in glory are given to Israel and to those living through the Tribulation, and they attach to the Second Coming rather than to the Rapture. That distinction is the reason date setting cannot get any purchase on the Rapture at all, since there is nothing to count from.

Matthew 24 is a case in point. The audience is Jewish, the setting is the temple, the questions are about the temple’s destruction and the sign of His coming and the close of the age. The abomination of desolation, the flight from Judea, the concern about travelling on a Sabbath, all of it sits naturally inside a Jewish frame. Reading the Olivet Discourse as a countdown clock for the Church misreads who is being addressed.

So the man who watches the news for signs of the Rapture is looking for something Scripture never promised him. He may well see events that fit the drift of the age. He will not see a starting gun, because none has been issued.

Does that mean we can know nothing at all?

Not at all, and I want to be careful here, because an overreaction to date setting can leave people thinking prophecy is unknowable fog. We know a great deal. We know the sequence. We know that a covenant with Israel opens the final seven year period of Daniel’s seventy weeks, that it is broken at the midpoint, that the Beast arises, that the Lord returns in power, that a literal kingdom follows. That is not vague. It is detailed, and it is meant to be studied.

What we do not have is a fixed point from which to measure. Every prophetic clock in Scripture starts with an event rather than a year, and the events that would let us calculate lie on the far side of the Rapture. Paul can say the day will not overtake believers like a thief because they are children of light (1 Thessalonians 5:4), and in the same breath insist that it comes as a thief. Both are true. We are not in the dark about the character of the day. We are simply not given its date.

The pastoral damage of a fixed date

I have never known a predicted date leave a congregation stronger. What it leaves is a residue of embarrassment and a suspicion of prophecy altogether. Young believers conclude that anyone who teaches on the end times is a crank, and the pendulum swings from feverish date setting to a shrug. Both extremes cost the church something. One makes us ridiculous, the other makes us worldly.

There is also the matter of stewardship. Men have neglected pensions, their children’s education and long term ministry commitments because someone assured them the Lord was coming in eighteen months. Jesus told a parable about servants entrusted with money and the instruction, “Engage in business until I come” (Luke 19:13). The word is until, not instead of. Expectancy is meant to make us faithful in the ordinary, not reckless with it.

I would add something about the effect on the person who does the predicting. Date setting has a way of hardening a man. When the day passes he must either admit he was wrong, which few do, or recalculate, which most do, and each recalculation costs him a little more of his integrity. I have watched teachers become unreachable this way, defending an ever more elaborate scheme against people who love them. The doctrine damages the hearers, but it does something worse to the one who holds it.

So, now what?

Refuse the date and keep the hope. When someone hands you a book with a year on the cover, put it down gently and pick up your Bible instead. Read 1 Thessalonians 4 and 5 together. Let the promise do what it was given to do, which is to comfort you about the believers you have buried and to steady you about the days ahead.

Then let the hope work its way outwards. John says that everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself as He is pure (1 John 3:3). That is the intended effect, not a chart on the wall but a life that could be inspected at any hour without embarrassment. Date setting asks when. Scripture asks who you will be found being when He comes. Which of those two questions have you actually been living with this week?

He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Acts 1:7-8 (ESV)