When I learn that a Sunday School lesson is going to be on the Second Coming of Christ, I know that two things are going to happen. First, someone who has made the issue an obsession is going to hijack the class. Second, that same person is going to say something exceeding all expectations of weird. Amd if you say anything in response, they will lead you down a rabbit hole of crazy, from whence there is no return.
Once when bored out of my mind in a hotel room, I was flipping through the channels and stopped at a program with some kind of biblical scholar was hip-deep in Revelation, pontificating with a high degree of confidence what John meant and, in detail, what was going to happen as the Rapture approaches. He even named names of the people that were going to be featured in the key events. Some of the folks he identified are dead now. But I digress.
Anyway, he was writing all of his predictions on a giant chalkboard (ask your parents what that is, kids), and there wasn’t an inch of open space among the names, diagrams, and Bible verses scrawled on there. Seriously, that much chalk hasn’t been used since they outlined King Kong’s corpse. By the end of it, he had succeeded in the impossible: He had made Revelation even harder to understand, although it was clear that Jews and Muslims were in for a world of hurt.
It’s interesting that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is fairly circumspect in its discussions about the Second Coming. The event is mentioned frequently, but the particulars, not so much. I suspect some of that comes from our belief in living prophets and our confidence that when the Lord needs to reveal things, He will. Also, we are reasonably comfortable with the idea that a prophecy’s meaning only becomes clear when it is fulfilled. That’s kind of the way that God operates. Christ did that all the time, revealing that certain prophecies had been fulfilled by Him, although not in the way people expected. Matthew spends essentially his entire Gospel showing how Christ’s actions fulfilled this or that Old Testament prophecy.
That doesn’t mean that Latte-day Saints don’t know or believe anything about the Second Coming. We just don’t know everything, and I’m good with that. As Dad used to say, “If knowing it doesn’t affect my salvation, leave me alone.” A lot of Dad’s sayings ended with “leave me alone.”
The Church teaches that there are several “returns” or appearances of the resurrected Christ. First, He came back to Earth just three days after He was crucified to provide evidence of His resurrection and to give further instruction to his apostles.
He next visited and taught some of the inhabitants of the Americas, as recounted in the Book of Mormon. (If you are curious, I can mail you a copy). Whether He visited anyone else at or near that time is unknown, but certainly possible.
We believe that He appeared to a 14-year-old boy, Joseph Smith, to usher in the restoration of His gospel.
We believe that He appeared to Joseph Smith and Sydney Rigdon at the dedication of the first LDS temple in Kirtland, Ohio.
In the Doctrine and Covenants (a compilation of revelations given to Joseph Smith) at least three visits by Christ are anticipated as ushering in the Millennium:
One will be at the Mount of Olives to reveal Himself and rescue the Jews in the midst of a war, the nature of, and participants in, remaining very unclear. (Chalk guy said it would involve the USSR, which seems unlikely now).
Another will be at the temple that will be built in the New Jerusalem at Independence, Missouri (we get a lot of teasing over that, but He has to show up someplace. More of that in a future post). That’s the one that people of other Christian traditions see as “the” Second Coming. The Big One, with all of the trumpets. We believe at that time the righteous, living and dead, will be called up to meet Him. Incidentally, we do not believe that all of those people will be Latter-day Saints, something that our critics gently step over while arguing that we think that we will be the only ones left around. Making casseroles and Jell-o.
The third will be to a resurrected Adam and his immediate progeny (again, another post).
We also believe that the latter-day coming(s) of Christ will include the destruction of the wicked and will initiate a thousand-year period during which Satan will be bound, and people will live peacefully and righteously. At the end of the Millenium, Satan will be released for a season, stir up more trouble and wars, and then bound again for good. This will be followed by the final judgment. That’s the part that worries me.
Those are the broad points of what we believe. There are other details, but they share some of the same ambiguity as Revelation. Most of what will happen at the Second Coming remains on a need-to-know basis, and we don’t need to know. We don’t claim to have any top-secret knowledge about the date that Christ will return, nor do we understand all of the plethora of imagery used in Revelation. Our chalkboard still has plenty of room for a mean game of hangman.
But this we do know: Our focus should not be on some distant day when the Lord appears again. Rather, we have to develop our discipleship in the here and now. The Church teaches that we should live as if Christ will return tomorrow. That’s pretty decent advice.
One last story. It might be apocryphal, but I like it. My mission president’s wife shared a discussion she had years before with one of our General Authorities, a member of the Seventies, in his home. She said that during the visit she noticed a beautiful chair in one of the rooms and complemented him on it. He thanked her and then said that no one was allowed to sit in it. When she asked why, he responded, “That chair is reserved for the Savior when He returns.”
Latter-day Saints don’t know everything about the Second Coming of Christ, but one hopes that we have reserved a place for Him when it does.
