Where the secret coming came from

A fair question

If the Bible is as clear as the last four chapters suggest, why do so many Christians believe that Jesus will come twice: once secretly, to remove the church before a seven-year tribulation, and once visibly, at the end of it? The honest answer is that the idea is recent, and it arrived through a specific route.

For the first eighteen centuries of Christian history, no major teacher, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, taught a secret, two-stage coming. The Reformers did not. The Puritans did not. Wesley and Whitefield did not. The idea took shape in the British Isles in the 1830s, in circles connected with the early Plymouth Brethren and the teaching of John Nelson Darby, who built a system in which God deals separately with Israel and the church, and in which the church must be removed before God resumes His dealings with Israel in a final seven-year period. The scheme travelled to America, was printed in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, was taught in a generation of Bible colleges, and reached the general public through best-selling books and films in the second half of the twentieth century. Many who hold it have no idea that it was unknown to the church before their great-great-grandparents were born. That does not by itself prove it wrong; new insight is possible. But it does mean that the burden of proof lies with the new view, and the proof must come from the texts.

The passage about the “gathering together”

Paul wrote his second letter to the Thessalonians precisely because they had been told that the day of the Lord had already arrived or was about to. His answer is the clearest timetable in his letters.

Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

Read the first verse carefully. Paul is writing “concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him”. The coming and the gathering are one subject; he does not separate them by seven years or by a single day. And he says that this coming-and-gathering “will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed”. In other words, the church will still be here when the man of sin is revealed; the church will see him. Paul does not say, “Do not worry, you will be gone.” He says, “You will not be gathered to Him until these things have happened.”

Then Paul tells us how the man of sin ends:

And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming.

The lawless one is destroyed “with the brightness of His coming”. The Greek word for “coming” here, parousia, is the same word Paul used in verse 1 for “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together”. There is one parousia. It gathers the church and it destroys the lawless one, and it is bright, not secret.

“After the tribulation of those days”

Jesus Himself placed His coming on the timeline, and He placed it after the time of trouble, not before.

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days ... they will see the Son of Man coming ... and He will send His angels ... and they will gather together His elect.” The gathering of the elect, with a trumpet, happens after the tribulation and at the visible coming. Jesus had just said that the tribulation would be shortened “for the elect’s sake” (Matthew 24:22). Why shorten it for the elect’s sake if the elect are not there?

John’s vision agrees. When he sees the great multitude in white robes before the throne, he is told: “These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). They came out of it, through it, not around it.

What Jesus promised about trouble

Jesus never promised His people that they would be spared from tribulation. He promised them the opposite, together with His presence in it: “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). In His last prayer for them He said, “I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one” (John 17:15). Paul taught the young churches that “we must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). Every generation of believers from the apostles to the Reformers to the persecuted church today has entered the kingdom that way. There is no biblical reason to expect the last generation to be the exception, and there is good reason to expect the last generation to need, more than any before it, to have counted the cost.

Why the difference matters

If the church is taught to expect removal before the trouble, then when the trouble comes, the church will be unprepared and confused, and may conclude that the trouble is not the real one, or that God has failed. If the church is taught to expect Jesus to come after the trouble, visibly, with a trumpet, then nothing that happens before that moment can be mistaken for Him, and no hardship can shake the expectation. The secret coming is not merely a harmless alternative. It is a reading that leaves people open to exactly the deception Jesus warned about: “If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There!’ do not believe it.” A people who know that His coming will be seen by every eye are safe from every counterfeit that is not.