We should pray for the quick coming of things agreeable to God’s will because we strongly desire them. At the same time, we should patiently submit to the wisdom of God’s timing in answering our prayers. We should sincerely pray for the Lord Jesus to come quickly even if we have reason to believe that His coming will not occur in our lifetime. We have many reasons to desire the second coming because our redemption will not be fully applied until that time.

I remember being in a class decades ago listening to Dr. Charles Ryrie explain the difference between the words imminent, immanent and eminent. The word eminent means having a superior position, the word immanent contrasts with the word transcendent, and the word imminent means happening soon. A particular view of imminency was an important part of the dispensationalism that Dr. Ryrie was teaching. He didn’t want us to embarrass ourselves by getting these similar sounding words confused.

The doctrine of imminency states that Jesus is returning soon. Classical dispensationalism and the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine were devised in the early nineteenth century to be consistent with a particular view of imminency. At that time, the prevailing Protestant eschatology had a historicist understanding of prophecy fulfillment in the church age. The key to this was the identification of the Anti-Christ with the Roman papacy. At the time of the Reformation, Protestants tended to consider the fall of the Anti-Christ as then imminent. The power and reach of the papacy, however, rebounded through the Counter-Reformation and the religious wars. Protestant hope for the fall of the Anti-Christ was revived in 1798 when French troops under Napoleon occupied Rome and exiled the pope to France, where he died the next year. A new pope was elected in about six months, and he returned to Rome. Napoleon again invaded Rome in 1809, and the new pope was exiled to France. This pope was able to return to Rome after the defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Paris in 1814.

After this roller coaster series of events regarding the papacy, some Protestants were ready for a view of prophecy that was not so closely tied to current events. The English Plymouth Brethren offered such a view in their newly devised pre-tribulation rapture doctrine based on a combination of innovations. One innovation was the separation of the rapture of the saints from the second coming. The rapture was no longer a part of the cluster of events that constitute the second coming. The rapture became an event preceding the second coming whose purpose was to remove all the Christians from earth so that the former Jewish age could resume. A second innovation was the assertion that the church age is an unforeseen parenthesis in a prophesied Jewish program. This parenthetical church age began at the Pentecost of Acts chapter two and will end with the rapture. The church age is placed between the sixty-ninth and seventieth of the seventy weeks prophesied in Daniel chapter nine. A third innovation was the claim that all unfulfilled prophecy must be fulfilled in a literal Jewish context after the rapture. No prophecy whatsoever is fulfilled during the parenthetical church age.

This new dispensational doctrine acknowledged that there are unfulfilled prophecies that need to be fulfilled before the second coming. Yet it placed the fulfillment of all these prophecies after the rapture. By associating imminency solely with the rapture as they had defined it, they were able to say with consistency that the rapture could happen at any moment. In their system, there is no event in the church age prophesied to occur before the rapture.

I discuss elsewhere the deficiencies of the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine. If that modern doctrine is in error, then one has to reconcile the doctrine of imminency with the existence of unfulfilled prophecies that will be fulfilled in the church age. As long as there are prophesied events in the church age that are yet to be fulfilled, the second coming must still be sometime in the future. Taking that into account, the second coming can still be defined as chronologically near because we are living in the last days.

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