Why Haven't They Gone Back POST ONE

“Why haven’t they gone back?” That’s the question given as a final proof in the minds of those who reject the moon landings; that it was indeed a hoax. And it explains the reason why today’s youth simply can’t embrace the concept. The net result of the space program was the effect it had on the children of the time. I was too young to see “Star Trek” and “The Jetsons” in their first runs but they were alive and well in syndication by the time I came onto the scene in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. People my age and slightly older who had watched these TV shows suddenly said within their hearts “hey this could really happen” when they saw the moon landings. Those same young adults then devoted themselves from that point on toward the goal of achieving that dream. It’s the state of mind these people cherished that is ultimately responsible for the incredible technological progress we have made in the last 40 years.

You may remember a TV commercial about 10 years ago with Avery Brooks of “Star Trek Deep Space Nine” asking “where are the flying cars?” (You can actually find the commercial on Youtube if you look for his name and that question.) Well “where are the flying cars?” is really “I don’t see that we’re any better as a world. I still feel empty inside even with all my gadgets.” Whether they’d be willing to admit it to themselves or not, the youth of today reject the moon landings for this one reason above all others. The rest of their arguments against the moon landings are really just excuses. The promise of heaven on earth science was supposed to create simply has not happened. People don’t feel any better inside no matter how many conveniences we have today. And of course, the only way to feel any better inside is to be changed within by surrendering your heart to the Lord. Romans 12:2 puts it this way “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Still the lingering question remains, why haven’t they gone back? A history buff will give you several different answers and opinions. The most popular of which is that the U. S. only did it to beat the Soviet Union in the first place and therefore another moon shot is not needed. The USSR actually had a robot spacecraft on its way to the moon at the same time as Apollo 11. It was supposed to land, retrieve a soil sample and return before Armstrong and Aldrin, but it crashed. Another reason is that no one can afford it today. The United States spent a full 25% of their GDP on the moon project and would have been bankrupt if they continued.

“I was there” proves that Jesus did rise from the dead as we have seen. For those who refuse to believe in Him, there is also a similar comeback. “Why hasn’t He returned yet like He said He would?

I want you to imagine you are a member of the early Christian Church living at the time of John receiving the book of Revelation. This was about 96 AD. Three generations of believers have now come onto the scene. The 1st generation, those who were there, has all gone into their graves. The 2nd is now very old and the third is coming into adulthood and filling the leadership roles their fathers once had. You have lived through years of persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire, but you have grown up in the church. After hearing all those wonderful stories over and over of Jesus, how good He was and the truth that He did indeed rise from the dead to offer life to all, you are 100% sure nothing will ever take your faith in Him away. Still there is one lingering, nagging thought that has crossed your mind lately, especially as the last living disciple, John, will soon go to his grave too. That thought is “why hasn’t Jesus come back yet?”

Anyone today who reads the New Testament can clearly see in the tone of its writing that the first generation of Christians did believe Jesus would return for them in their lifetime. In John 21:23 (written a few years after Revelation) John himself tells of and refutes a common error held by many that he would not die before Jesus came back. By 96 AD that question must have grown larger and larger in the minds of those who were still waiting for Him. So if Jesus really was who He said He was, why didn’t He come back?

The explanation comes from a concept I like to call “multi-level prophecy”. This is something that we see in many parts of the Bible. One of the best examples is from the Old Testament in Isaiah chapter 65:17-25. In this text God makes all kinds of promises that obviously will never happen in this world but are promises of Heaven. These include creating a new world (17), taking away all sorrow (19), complete physical security (21, 22), the promise of His presence (24) and that of a world where everyone is nice to each other all the time (25). Yet in the middle of all these wonderful promises is verse 20 “No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, Nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; For the child shall die one hundred years old, But the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed.”

How can this be? Doesn’t the Bible say that we’ll live forever in Heaven? The answer is this is a multi-level prophecy. At the time Isaiah wrote these words God knew that about a century afterward the Babylonians were going to invade and destroy Jerusalem. This prophecy then was given as a promise to the people of that time that their Jerusalem would be restored. The promises of Heavenly Jerusalem were partially fulfilled in earthly Jerusalem’s restoration and the experience was used as a model to illustrate the eventual complete fulfillment of these promises at the end of time, which will take place very soon.

The prophecies Jesus gave in Matthew 24 were exactly the same as those in Isaiah 65, multi-level. Compare Matthew 24:15-18 with Luke 21:20-22 (this time the references are from the King James Version):

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.

These are both taken from the same discourse yet they have one important difference. Luke quotes Jesus as speaking of an event that happened in the lifetime of the first generation, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD; while Matthew remembers Jesus speaking about something different, the “abomination of desolation”. This is taken from a time prophecy in Daniel 12:11 and did not come to pass for hundreds of years afterward. As Matthew warned, it’s one of the most complicated things in the Bible to understand; therefore I won’t spend any more time on it here. I’ll give you a clue as to what it means. It’s about the decline of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages when through a union of church and state, oppression and persecution took place in the name of God.

Here’s a statement from the book “The Desire of Ages”, Page 628, which further illustrates this point and shows that this prophecy was for our time as well:
... when He was alone, Peter, John, James, and Andrew came to Him as He sat upon the Mount of Olives. "Tell us," they said, "when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world?" Jesus did not answer His disciples by taking up separately the destruction of Jerusalem and the great day of His coming. He mingled the description of these two events. Had He opened to His disciples future events as He beheld them, they would have been unable to endure the sight. In mercy to them He blended the description of the two great crises, leaving the disciples to study out the meaning for themselves. When He referred to the destruction of Jerusalem, His prophetic words reached beyond that event to the final conflagration in that day when the Lord shall rise out of His place to punish the world for their iniquity, when the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. This entire discourse was given, not for the disciples only, but for those who should live in the last scenes of this earth's history.

The best example to show that the early Christians did expect Jesus to return in their lifetimes probably comes from Acts 1:6, 7 “Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.’” The disciples are seeing Jesus for the last time here as He is literally minutes away from leaving for Heaven in a cloud and they want to know when it’s going to all be over. As we already saw from the quote above, they couldn’t have handled it if He’d told them that 2 more millennia would go by before that happened.

1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 gives us additional evidence of what the first generation’s expectations were. “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” These words were given as a promise to those believers still living that their loved ones who “fell asleep” (a metaphor for death) would see Jesus and them again. We see in these words an attempt by Paul to comfort those who may be upset that their loved ones died before Jesus came back. Yet Paul is speaking as if he also thinks Jesus will return shortly.

It stands to reason then that since the first generation wasn’t ready and the lingering expectation of the Second Coming continued at least until the end of the first century, that the timing of the book of Revelation was ideal for the early church. Just when people might have been ready to give up, God came through with a new set of visions given to the last living disciple who put them together into a message to tell the church what was still to come.
Matthew 24 and its parallel references in Mark 13 and Luke 21 speak of wars, famines and earthquakes. These things happened on one level in the first century. One famine from the days of Claudius Caesar is mentioned in Acts 11:28. They also were fulfilled on a gradual on-going basis through the entire Christian era. And who can doubt they have been happening on a greater level of fulfillment than ever before during the last 100 years. They are multi-level prophecies so that any one in any time could see something in them to make that person aware of the need to be ready for Jesus. As Billy Graham put it “Christ will come back at the end of the world. But when you die, that’s the end of the world for you.” The decision to accept Him is a decision we have to make here in this lifetime. The first generation of believers had to make it then and we have to make it now.

The statement made by Peter in 2 Peter 3:3, 4 has been fulfilled on an on-going basis in every generation since his time “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”

Do you see the answer to the question now of why Jesus has not come back? Those who ask that question as scoffers are often people who have looked into the prophecies of His coming, saw some part of them come true in their lifetimes; believed them, hoped for Him and waited; and waited and waited and finally got sick of waiting and abandoned them altogether. The prophecies of His coming are true and reliable. They’re just broader and wider in their scope than any one generation of people can understand. Just like those who scoff today at the moon landings and try to prove their position with the question of why haven’t they gone back, many today use the fact that they don’t understand why Jesus has not returned yet as an excuse to deny Him.

At some point though, Paul must have realized the expectations of the early church would have to wait. Though he was not alive when the book of Revelation was written, its companion book from the Old Testament, Daniel, was available to him. It’s likely that with a study of those prophecies, many of which had not come true in Paul’s day yet, that he wrote in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 “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”.

We know this person today as the antichrist. And one very important thing that must be said about him is that some of the prophecies concerning his arrival are also multi-level! Jesus warned in Matthew 7:15 to “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” What does this mean? Beware of those who claim to be followers of Christ, but aren’t really. And this trend was also in motion by the time the first generation had died as is shown by Acts 20:28-31 “Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.”

Years later John concurred with Paul. Having seen the beginning of this trend near the end of his life, he wrote in 1 John 2:18 “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.”

Most people today look at the various Bible prophecies and are expecting one person to come and be “the” antichrist. However, in every generation these prophecies have been fulfilled to some degree. Though they will be fulfilled again on one final, grand scale across the whole world just before Jesus returns, we can’t wait for that to happen. We have to be ready now and have our hearts right with God now. Revelation 13 makes two descriptions. There’s “the beast” and “the image of the beast”. There is only one “beast” yes. But the image of the beast can be anyone else who acts like the beast, who is like the beast in spirit.

This is one of the main points of this entire blog. The modern world claims to have triumphed over the church, the Bible and God because of all the great scientific discoveries we have made. The teachings of the church during the Dark Ages are thought of as the teachings of the Bible. However this is simply not true. The Dark Ages were just as much a spiritual as well as an intellectual darkness. The church Jesus started on earth fell away from the simplicity and beauty of the gospel.