Christ Our Coming King

This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. ACTS 1:11

The fourth wheel was, for Simpson, not a speculative appendix but the engine of everything practical he did. He built a training school, founded a missionary society and drove himself into repeated exhaustion because he believed the King was coming and there was work to finish first.

A personal, visible return

His position was straightforward and he defended it against the alternatives current in his day. The return of Christ is personal — this same Jesus, not a principle, an influence, or the gradual improvement of society. It is visible. And it is an event, not a process.

Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him. REVELATION 1:7

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout …and the dead in Christ shall rise first. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:16

Simpson held the premillennial view — that Christ returns before the promised age of righteousness, rather than at the end of a period of gradual Christian progress. This mattered to him practically. The optimistic alternative popular in his generation held that the world was steadily improving and the kingdom was arriving through civilisation and reform. Simpson thought that view drained the urgency out of missions, and the twentieth century did not treat it kindly. Christians differ on the details of the timing, and have since the earliest centuries. What the New Testament asserts without ambiguity is the fact.

Why it is called a blessed hope

Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. TITUS 2:13

Simpson dwelt on the adjective. The return of Christ is not, for the believer, primarily a terror. It is the moment the whole story has been travelling towards: the end of separation, the vindication of everything endured, and the sight of the One we have loved without seeing.

Whom having not seen, ye love …yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. 1 PETER 1:8

He noticed how the New Testament actually deploys this doctrine. It is used to comfort the bereaved, to steady the persecuted, to encourage the labouring, and to sober the careless. It is almost never used to satisfy curiosity.

What the hope produces

Three effects, each with a text. Purity. The expectation of seeing Him has a cleansing force that mere rules do not.

And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure. 1 JOHN 3:3

Watchfulness. Not calculation — watchfulness. The believer lives as a servant whose master may return at any hour, which is a different posture from one who has worked out the schedule.

Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. MATTHEW 24:42

Urgency in mission. This is the link that governed Simpson’s life, and it comes from the Lord’s own words.

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. MATTHEW 24:14

Simpson read that as a task with a stated relation to the return, and it made him incapable of leaving the unreached alone. Every institution he founded was built to get workers to places where Christ had not been named.

Where he was mistaken

Honesty requires a note. Simpson and many of his contemporaries expected that the gospel might reach every nation within their own generation, and that the Lord would then return. That expectation was not fulfilled, and similar expectations have failed in every century since the first. He generally avoided setting dates, and he was more restrained than many around him. But the flavour of imminence in his writing sometimes shades into calculation, and the reader should hold that lightly. The Lord Himself declined to supply the information.

And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power …and ye shall be witnesses unto me. ACTS 1:7–8

Notice how the verse continues. The refusal of the timetable is immediately followed by the commission. That is exactly the right ordering, and it preserves everything valuable in Simpson’s urgency while removing what was mistaken in it.

The practical question is not when He is coming. It is whether you would be glad to be found doing what you are doing when He does.

A doctrine for the grieving

It is worth noticing the setting in which the New Testament’s fullest teaching on the return of Christ appears, because it is not a prophecy conference. Paul is writing to a young church that has buried some of its members and is distressed about them. The question is not chronology. It is whether their dead have missed something.

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:13

Paul then gives the great passage about the Lord descending with a shout, the dead in Christ rising first, and the living being caught up together with them. And he closes not with an exhortation to watch the signs but with an instruction about pastoral care.

Wherefore comfort one another with these words. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:18

Simpson kept this use of the doctrine prominent, and it is a good test of whether we are handling it as Scripture does. A believer whose interest in the second coming runs entirely to charts and current events has drifted from the apostolic pattern. A believer who can sit with a grieving friend and make the return of Christ a genuine consolation is using it exactly as Paul did. Note also the phrase together with them. The reunion is part of the hope. The Christian’s expectation is not merely that he will see Christ, but that the separations death has caused are temporary.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask whether the return of Christ functions in your life as a doctrine you affirm or a hope you actually anticipate.

2. Apply 1 John 3:3 concretely: name one thing you would want dealt with before He appears, and deal with it. 3. Stop calculating and start watching. If you follow prophetic speculation, consider how much of that time could go to intercession instead. 4. Use this hope the way the New Testament does — to comfort someone bereaved, or to steady someone under pressure. 5. Consider what you are doing that will matter on that day, and do more of it.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are coming, and I have arranged my life as though You were not.

Forgive the drowsiness that treats Your return as a doctrine rather than a hope. Make me watchful without making me speculative.

Purify me. Let the thought of seeing You do what rules have never done in me.

And let me be found at work — among the people You died for, in the places where You are not yet named — when You come. Amen.