1 Thessalonians 1:10

and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, who delivereth us from the wrath to come.

And to wait for his Son from heaven ... It is most deplorable that scholars press this passage as proof of their allegations that the apostles expected Jesus to come in the Second Advent during their lifetime. For example, Hayes said:

We may believe that Paul was mistaken in his expectation of the speedy Advent of our Lord. After nineteen centuries of waiting, we know that he was mistaken, if he expected it in his generation, or in his century. We think the sufficient warrant for his expectation was to be found in the belief of all the apostles and in the traditional teaching of the Master himself.[19]

This is fembu at its noisome worst. Neither Paul, nor any of the apostles, and least of all the Lord himself, expected that the Second Advent would be "speedy," or "in their lifetime," or at any time other than remote generations afterward; but none of that prevented Christians from living and dying "in expectation of the return of Christ," even as true believers do now! And yet every Christian knows that the actual coming may still be centuries or millenniums in the future.

THE SPEEDY RETURN OF CHRIST

Did Christ and the apostles believe and teach that the Second Advent would occur in their generation, at a time immediately in the future? The answer to that question is negative.

Jesus himself declared that he himself did not know the day nor the hour (Matthew 24:36); least of all could any apostle have pretended to know.

Christ emphatically declared, "Wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, that also which this woman hath done (Mary's anointing) shall be spoken of for a memorial of her" (Mark 14:9). Preaching the gospel in the whole world was a task involving generations and centuries, not merely a lifetime.

Christ thundered the prophecy that "Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled (Luke 21:24); and the treading down of Jerusalem by Gentiles was an event that did not begin until a full forty years after Christ was crucified; and no sacred writer, all of whom wrote before that event, could ever have imagined that Christ would surely come until after that prophecy had been fulfilled.

Christ, in the analogy spoken in the parable of the talents, said: "Now after a long time the lord of those servants cometh" (Matthew 25:19); and there is nothing there that speaks of any "speedy return."

Paul did not expect the Second Advent in his lifetime, because he speaks of his own resurrection from the dead, along with the resurrection of all the Corinthians, as an event scheduled for the future (2 Corinthians 4:14). Furthermore, his saying, "We shall not all sleep" (1 Corinthians 15:51) refers to the ultimate fact of Christians who may be alive at the coming of the Lord, and not either to himself or the Corinthians of his generation. It bears this construction as easily as it bears the one which makes it a certainty of the speedy return of Jesus. Furthermore, in these very letters to the Thessalonians, written long before the Corinthian letters, Paul affirmed that "The coming shall not be except the apostasy come first" (2 Thessalonians 2:3); and the apostasy was an event which Paul clearly understood as involving a great deal of time.

Much more could be said on this; but further attention will be given to it in the 2Thessalonian commentary.

The reason that scholars often mistakenly believe that Christ taught his "speedy return" is that they misconstrue passages like Mark 8:38 and Mark 9:1 as references to the Second Advent, whereas the reference, like some similar passages, refers not to the Second Advent but to the establishment of the kingdom of Christ, an event which did occur immediately.

It is not amiss to note, in this context, that some prefer to believe that the Holy Christ and the blessed apostles were all mistaken; and that bias enters into their interpretations. The importance of this question is inherent in the fact that if the Lord himself and his apostles were truly mistaken about such an event as the Second Advent, then how may one be sure they were not also mistaken about heaven and hell, the terms of the gospel, the necessity of godly living, and all the rest of the Christian message? There is no way that this writer could accept either such implications or the false interpretations by which they are advocated. The holy apostles were inspired of God in what they wrote, and the totality of their teaching derives from God himself.

Who delivereth us from the wrath to come ... This is a reference to the judgment of the Great Day, and the "wrath of God that falls upon the sons of disobedience" (Ephesians 5:6). Other passages bearing on this are Romans 1:18,28,32; Romans 2:8,9; Ephesians 2:3 and Colossians 3:6. God has a score to settle with sin, and a day has been appointed in which he will judge the world in righteousness, "by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all people, in that he hath raised him from the dead" (Acts 17:31). Amen!