I guess we just can’t help ourselves.

So long as we have meteor showers and solar eclipses, there are those in the religious and secular communities who insist they know what day Jesus is coming back.

So far, they’ve all been wrong.

And they will continue to be wrong.

My advice is to pay them no heed, both preacher, and soothsayer.

Here is all you need to know: BE READY

Sure, predictions make great headlines, but it’s fake news.

Sure, it puts someone’s “brilliant analytical biblical scholarly thinking” on display, but to no avail.

Man will never be smarter than God.

Prognosticators are “of this world” and, I’m afraid, predestined to be foolish.

1 Cor. 3:19 reminds us:

 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness.”

Why bother predicting His return when Jesus Himself said that even HE doesn’t know…only God the Father knows that day.

Mark 13:32-33:

But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come.

Jesus wants us to be ready.

He could come today while you are reading this.

Or, He can come years from now.

Jesus will return when God tells Him to.

Jesus tells us in Rev. 22:20 that He will come soon.

“Soon” doesn’t mean “right this second.”

Soon can mean 1,000 years in God’s time.

And God’s timing is, well, perfect!

Rather than trying to predict the return of Jesus, the Bible counsels us to be ready for His return.

Matthew 24:44:

So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

1 Thessalonians 5:2:

For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

The message is clear.

Don’t predict.

Just be ready.

Are You Trying To Predict Christ’s Return?

Bible scholars, preachers, psychics, and the well-intentioned can’t help themselves.

The need to predict when Jesus will return may as well be in their DNA.

How has that been working out?

Not one prediction has ever panned out.

They shout: Here’s my brilliant theological road map! Here are the 14 signs announcing Christ’s return! Check out all the major prophecy’s being fulfilled! Solar eclipse = Jesus is Coming Now! Israel is now a state, and the end is near!!!

And yet, it’s all in God’s timing, is it not?

Predicting the return of Jesus is not a modern phenomenon.

It harkens back to ancient Rome when theologians said Jesus would return in the year 500.

Here is a link to many others whose predictions have fallen by the wayside.

Psychics like the late Jeane Dixon make headlines predicting the return of Jesus (her next date for his return is 2020).

Others, like fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell, fudged the timeline, saying Jesus would appear sometime between 1999 and 2009.

Still, others like to move those spiritual goalposts.

Radio preacher Harold Camping and televangelist Jack Van Impe kept moving the dates farther into the future when their latest prediction would fall flat.

This need to predict has cast a dark cloud over the works of some great and otherwise Kingdom-building men, including the late Pastor Chuck Smith, the founding father of Calvary Chapel.

I love Chuck Smith. I love his teachings. I love how much he loved God and genuinely cared for everyone.

In his 1978 book, End Times, Smith predicted the generation of 1948 would be the last generation, and that the world would end by 1981 … at the latest.

They even had a New Year’s Eve service awaiting Jesus’ return.

That had to be a disappointment!

Keep Jesus At The Center Of It All

There is a two-fold lesson to be learned from the mistakes of others.

• One, if God wanted us to know the day Jesus would return He would have told us.
• Two, no matter how smart or clever we think we are, we can never “one up” God.

It’s folly to make such a prediction.

• It hurts the church.
• It plays into the world’s hands and is ammunition to lob more spiteful anti-Christian rhetoric.
• It plays into a mass media that doesn’t care one whit about God and his principles.

The world wants to laugh at Christians.

That is why we are “not of this world.”

When you lay out a claim that Jesus is returning on a certain day, you are dealing in absolutes.

And when that absolute never happens, you are left with disappointment … and fewer church members if you are a pastor.

Stay focused on Jesus. He is our Lord and Savior…and our friend.

No matter how simplistic it sounds, “What a friend we have in Jesus” is a literal truth.

It’s more than just a Sunday school song.

And I know my Friend is coming for me, in Father God’s timing.

It carries a lot of heavenly weight, as Jesus tells us in John 15:15:

“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know His master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

What is slow to us, is purposeful to God.

He wants none to perish, as 2 Peter 3:9 lays out:

The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

So here’s a fact.

Jesus will return on the day God sends Him.

And when He returns, it will be quite a scene.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17:

For the Lord, himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

So, it’s not a question of when will Jesus return.

The question is … are you ready?