Behold, He Comes Again

It’s the Grand Final long weekend, and there are plenty of other places you could be. It’s good to see you here.

Thank you, Uno, for that scripture reading. You read it beautifully. Some of you are probably wondering how I’m going to connect it to the Second Coming. The truth is I can’t, because I stuffed up. I meant to ask for Ezekiel 16:1–14 and I sent through Exodus 16:1–14. So if you were waiting for me to connect it, I’m sorry. That’s beyond my pay grade! But I hope you can still glean something today as we look at the Second Coming.

Maybe you’re here for the first time, or maybe church is part of your weekly routine. Maybe church is mostly a time to hang out with friends, and there are lots of distractions. Whatever it is, I want to encourage you to lean in today. If someone wants to chat, say, “Afterwards.” Resist the phone. I believe God wants to tell you something about his heart and his love for you.

Father in heaven, we pause to recognise that your presence is here with us. Jesus, we’re thankful for your love and grace. Even though we’re flawed, people who make typos and go about things the wrong way, your love and grace are there, and you call us your bride. As we talk about the Second Coming, help us capture its essence and see why you’re coming back: because you love your bride. Open your word and show us something new that transforms us from the inside out. In Jesus’ name, amen.

A love story

The passage I meant to have read, Ezekiel 16, describes Israel as God’s bride. God finds Israel helpless and says:

Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “Live!” I made you grow like a plant of the field… Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your naked body. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.

— Ezekiel 16:6–8

Whether it’s Israel or the church, God’s people are often described as his bride. The Bible isn’t merely an instruction manual or a systematic theology textbook. It’s a love story about God’s love for humanity. Throughout Scripture God sees his bride, loves her, and makes her beautiful.

As we talk about the Second Coming today, I think it’s time for us to grow up and fall in love with Jesus again and again.

Jesus is attractive

Sometimes we make the Second Coming about “Jesus is coming soon, so get your act together or you’ll miss out.” Or we talk about the end times. I absolutely believe Jesus is coming very, very soon. But I don’t want us to miss why he’s coming.

The Second Coming isn’t fearful speculation or anxious worry about the future. It’s a captivating promise that Jesus has made to us, one we can believe firmly and put our hope in.

I love this quote from Ellen White:

The shortness of time is urged as an incentive for us to seek righteousness and to make Christ our friend. This is not the great motive; it savors of selfishness. Is it necessary that the terrors of the day of God be held before us, that we may be compelled to right action through fear? It ought not to be so. Jesus is attractive. He is full of love, mercy, and compassion. He proposes to be our friend, to walk with us through all the rough pathways of life.

Get that: Jesus is attractive. We don’t need fear tactics to get people to believe in the Second Coming. We can present Jesus as he is, coming back for his bride because he loves his people so much.

The best man

Last week Paul spoke about John the Baptist, the messenger sent to prepare the way for Jesus. John’s ministry stirred people’s hearts and created hunger and anticipation for the Messiah. I love what John says in John 3:

They came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, that man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan—the one you testified about—look, he is baptising, and everyone is going to him.”

To this John replied, “A person can receive only what is given them from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him.’ The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.”

— John 3:26–30

They’re asking, “John, are you jealous?” And John compares himself to the best man at a wedding. Jesus is the groom. John’s job is to get things ready and tell people to get ready, but he isn’t the star of the wedding.

I believe we have the same role today. As Advent people who believe Jesus is coming soon, our job is to tell people a wedding is coming, and it’s going to be the most amazing wedding ever. We live in the waiting time. Jesus has asked us to get ready and to help others get ready, because he could come at any moment.

Don’t unpack your suitcase

Here’s a rule of mine: when I travel, I don’t unpack my suitcase. I don’t put my clothes in the drawers and make myself at home, no matter how nice the hotel. (I’ve stayed in some nice ones, mostly thanks to good deals.) The hotel isn’t my home. I’m passing through, and I need to be ready to go at any time. I’m not buying new sheets for the bed or new utensils for the Airbnb kitchen. My home is back in Melbourne. (This is being recorded, so I won’t give you the address!)

I think many of us have started painting the hotel walls. We’ve put up new wallpaper, bought new utensils for the Airbnb kitchen, new pillows, new couches. We’ve settled into the hotel. But it isn’t our home. Jesus is calling us out of our comfort zone to see that where we are now isn’t really home. We were created for another world.

If we look deep inside, we find desires that nothing in this world can satisfy. C.S. Lewis wrote, “If I find in myself desires which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Look at the most successful, wealthy people. They have everything this world offers, and they still have unmet longings. That tells me we were made for a world where those longings are fully met, and they’re fully met in this final wedding.

All of Scripture builds towards this wedding, the climax of God’s great love story, where every desire and need is fully met in Jesus. And it isn’t a one-day event. It’s a wedding that goes on forever.

The cup and the proposal

At the Last Supper Jesus gives his disciples one more promise:

Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.

— John 14:1–4

Just before this, they share communion: the bread and the cup. Here’s some historical context that was a game-changer for me as I researched this.

In a Hebrew wedding, the proposal didn’t involve getting down on one knee. The groom would drink from a cup of wine and pass it to his bride-to-be. If she drank from it too, she was saying, “Yes, I agree to be your wife.”

So at the Last Supper Jesus drinks from the cup as the groom and passes it to his disciples. He’s effectively asking, “Will you be my bride? Do you accept my proposal, the covenant I want to make with you?”

When they accept, Jesus says, “I’m going away to prepare a place for you.” That was common too. Once the bride accepted, the groom would go to his father’s house, where the couple would live, and prepare a place, perhaps building an extension so they could live there together. Different times! But that’s how it worked.

So Jesus is calling his disciples his bride and saying, “Now that you’ve accepted the covenant, I’m going away for a little while to get the place ready.” It shows how much he loves us. He wants to spend eternity with us. He’s preparing a place where we can live with him forever. He wants to take us home.

There was a second purpose to this in-between time too. It was the bride’s time to get ready: to work out what she’d wear and make herself beautiful for the wedding.

So while Jesus’ physical presence is absent for now, he invites us to get ready for his wedding as his bride, and to help others get ready too. He calls us to live with the wedding in view, the day he’ll come and make everything right. All the suffering and pain we experience will be gone. So we fix our eyes on that future reality rather than getting stuck in the present or depressed about the past.

The rope

You’ve probably heard this analogy before. It’s a bit cliché, but it works. This is my climbing rope (any rock climbers here, let me know, I’m always looking for belay buddies). It’s 60 metres long, but imagine it goes on forever.

This little black section at the end is our life on earth. It’s tiny compared with the rest of eternity. Yet so many of us live as though the black bit is everything. We accumulate possessions, chase more income and more assets. We chase fame and reputation so people will admire us. It all fades away.

There’s so much more ahead. Jesus asks us to live for the things that are unseen, “for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).

In this betrothal period, many of us have accepted Jesus’ proposal but become distracted by life’s concerns, and we’ve started to think this is all there is. But Scripture promises that the groom who went away to prepare a place is coming back for the people he loves.

The wedding of the Lamb

All of Scripture points to this final wedding:

Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting: “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.”… Then the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” And he added, “These are the true words of God.”

— Revelation 19:6–9

At a wedding you wait for the bride, however long she takes. I’ve been to weddings where an hour goes by and she still hasn’t arrived. Just tell me to come at four instead of three! But you wait, because the bride is the important part.

As we wait for Jesus, he’s also waiting for us. We get ready, not because we’re scared that we won’t make it or that Jesus will be angry and judge us, but because we love him so much. We want to bring him our best, to mature in love and character, and to come to him as a pure bride.

At a wedding you vow to forsake all others and love one person. That’s what we do as the bride of Jesus. So I want to encourage you to be desperately in love with Jesus and give him everything. This wedding isn’t about “don’t miss out, make sure you’re doing the right things.” It’s all about love: coming to Jesus as his bride and saying, “Jesus, I love you so much, and I want to give my whole self to you.”

The wedding in Bali

Let me close with a wedding I really enjoyed: Luke and Rebecca’s, in Bali. It was my first destination wedding, and it ran over several days. It was like holidaying with people you love while having something to look forward to.

Before the wedding I had just finished a week of worship for high school students in Perth, and I was wrecked. So I went down to Uluwatu at the bottom of Bali, by the beach, and it was stunning. When I travel alone I tend to book on the day, so that morning I went on Airbnb, and this place popped up at 50% off. Perfect. I stayed three days, surfing and just chilling. I thought, “This is the good life.”

Now imagine if I’d said, “This is so nice, maybe I’ll just stay and skip the wedding.” First, that would be very disrespectful. Second, I was in Bali for one reason: the wedding. Surfing in Uluwatu was a bonus along the way.

That’s like this life. Enjoy it, yes. I’m not saying don’t do things that make you happy. But keep your eyes on the prize, the thing you were made for. Many of us have become too comfortable with the side quest. The wedding is just a few hours away, and we’re still sitting on the beach, still out surfing, and we’ve forgotten there’s a wedding around the corner.

Bali was awesome, but what I remember most is the wedding: Luke and Rebecca pledging their love and commitment, and us witnessing that celebration of love.

You’re invited to a greater wedding, something cosmic: the whole world restored to what it was meant to be. And you’re not invited as a guest. You’re invited as the bride. Jesus says, “Come to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Stop living for the little black bit that’s fading away. Live for eternity, where every desire you have is fulfilled in me, because I am the one who satisfies you completely.”

Maybe you haven’t accepted this invitation yet. You are invited, whatever you’ve done and wherever you’ve come from. Jesus loves you and sees you as his bride, and nothing can change how he sees you. All you have to do is accept the invitation, accept what he did on the cross, and accept the covenant he’s proposed. Will you drink from the cup he’s offered? Will you accept him as the groom?

Or maybe you’ve accepted the invitation before, but you’re living only for the little black bit. Let me ask you: what have you done in the last week that matters in the light of eternity? How have you prepared for this eternal wedding?

Let’s not get too comfortable where we are. Let’s accept Jesus’ invitation and live towards a future where every desire is fully satisfied in him, because that’s who he is. And let’s look forward to the groom coming back to take his bride home, so that we can live with him forever.

Prayer

Father in heaven, this world isn’t our home. We’re just passing through. In this waiting room, keep us from getting too content and comfortable. Help us know you’re coming again for your bride, and that you call us your bride because you love us unconditionally. Fix our eyes on the eternal life you have in store, and help us live now for the life ahead.

May we accept you, Jesus. May we accept your covenant and your proposal and choose to be your bride. We get ready not because we’re afraid, but because we’re passionately in love with you and want to come to you with all our hearts. Thank you for the marriage we look forward to. In Jesus’ name, amen.