6.3 — Christ's Second Coming (4 of 4)

Weighing this piece separately. This gives every believer born after AD 70 a complete, unbroken hope with nothing left pending — arguably a cleaner comfort than a system where the final word, two thousand years on, still has not been spoken. What it does not resolve is the very text already sitting a few paragraphs above this one. Paul does not console the Thessalonians grieving those who died before the promised return by telling them their loved ones already received, individually, everything that return was going to give. He points the living and the dead toward one shared future event, together, at the same moment (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). A theology that gives the individual believer a complete personal answer at death still has to explain why the apostle, writing specifically to comfort grieving people, reached for a future corporate reunion instead of the private completeness this reading offers. The question also faces any view that holds both a conscious presence with Christ at death and a future corporate event, as Part Two does. A full preterist answers that before AD 70 the dead were still awaiting the resurrection (Hebrews 11:39–40; Revelation 6:9–11), and that Revelation 14:13 marks a change from that point on. The tension is not a small thing to leave standing. It is the same kind of question 6.2 raised from 2 Timothy 2:17-18, surfacing again here from a different angle.

A note on sourcing, offered here in the same spirit of transparency this book has tried to maintain throughout: an earlier version of this argument considered drawing on Isaiah 62's bridegroom imagery and the parable of the ten virgins to strengthen this section further. This book could not find independent, well-sourced support for that material for either side of this argument; it exists mainly inside material reviewing a specific online teacher's claims, not as settled, independently developed exegesis in its own right, so it was left out. The partial preterist case in this section rests instead on the evidence above: the seam at Matthew 24:36, the plain testimony of Acts 1:11, and Paul's language in 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17. That is a real absence, honestly disclosed, not a gap papered over with a citation this book could not stand behind.

A closer look at the seam itself. The division at Matthew 24:36 leans on a specific clause — "But as for that day and hour no one knows it — not even the angels in heaven — except the Father alone" (NET) — and that clause is not evenly attested. Mark 13:32 has it in nearly identical wording and adds "nor the Son" (NET), a phrase that also appears as a textual variant in Matthew 24:36. Luke 21, telling the same discourse, does not. Luke moves directly from the Son of Man coming in the clouds (21:27), through the fig tree parable (21:29-31), into "this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (21:32) — one continuous unit, with nothing in Luke's own text marking a change of subject the way Matthew and Mark's shared clause does. Read Luke 21 on its own, and the case for an internal seam disappears with it. That is a real gap, and it deserves to be named rather than assumed away. But it isn't the whole picture. The material that reads like Matthew's post-36 section — sudden, unpredictable judgment arriving in the middle of ordinary life, "People were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage — right up to the day Noah entered the ark... It will be the same on the day the Son of Man is revealed" (Luke 17:27, 30, NET) — is in Luke's Gospel too. It simply isn't in chapter 21. Luke places it four chapters earlier, in 17:26-30, as its own teaching rather than folded into the Olivet discourse itself. The same two-horizon content survives in Luke; it's organized differently, distributed across two passages instead of divided within one. A full preterist replies that Luke 17:25 ties the day of the Son of Man to "this generation," that Luke 17:31 repeats the flight language of Mark 13:15, and that "all these things" in Matthew 24:34 includes the coming of the Son of Man in 24:30. The partial preterist replies that peri de marks a topic shift. Each reading has a textual basis. So the honest statement of the evidence is this: the "this generation" dating is triple-attested, appearing in all three Synoptic accounts of the discourse. The seam that divides near judgment from far judgment is attested in two of the three by an explicit clause, and recoverable in the third only by reading Luke's Gospel as a whole rather than chapter 21 in isolation. Whether that counts as the same division told three ways, or a division genuine to Matthew and Mark that Luke structures on his own terms, is exactly the kind of question this book has asked you to sit with rather than have settled for you.

What follows if each is right. If dispensationalism is right here, a literal, visible, still-future return of Christ remains genuinely ahead of you, arriving in two stages you have not yet seen either half of. If partial preterism is right, Christ's judgment-coming against Jerusalem is behind us, already fulfilled in AD 70, but a second, distinct, still-future bodily return remains genuinely ahead of you as well — the waiting is real, just not the only event left on the calendar. If full preterism is right, both comings the New Testament describes are already behind you, and the only meeting with Christ still ahead of anyone alive today is the personal one each believer reaches at death, not a shared event still to come.