in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.”  And again, in the Upper Room, He said to His disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto Myself; that where I am ye may be also.”  The hope of that return shines on every page of the New Testament:  “This Jesus,” said the angels to the watching disciples, “which was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him going into heaven.”  The early Christians were wont to speak, without further definition, of “that day.”  St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians how that they had “turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven.” Maran atha—­“our Lord cometh”—­was the great watchword of the waiting Church.  When, at the table of the Lord, they ate the bread and drank the cup, they proclaimed His death “till He come.”  “Amen; come, Lord Jesus,” is the passionate cry with which our English Scriptures close.

For all those, then, to whom the New Testament speaks with authority, the fact of Christ’s return is established beyond all controversy.  But what will be the nature of His coming?  Will it be visible and personal, or spiritual and unseen?  Will it be once and never again, or repeated?  Will Christ come at the end of history, or is He continually coming in those great crises which mark the world’s progress towards its appointed end?  These questions have been answered with such admirable simplicity and scriptural truth by Dr. Denney that I cannot do better than quote his words:  “It may be frankly admitted,” he says, “that the return of Christ to His disciples is capable of different interpretations.  He came again, though it were but intermittently, when He appeared to them after His resurrection.  He came again, to abide with them permanently, when His Spirit was given to the Church at Pentecost.  He came, they would all feel who lived to see it, signally in the destruction of Jerusalem, when God executed judgment historically on the race which had rejected Him, and when the Christian Church was finally and decisively liberated from the very possibility of dependence on the Jewish.  He comes still, as His own words to the High Priest suggest—­From this time on ye shall see the Son of Man coming—­in the great crises of history, when the old order changes, yielding place to the new; when God brings a whole age, as it were, into judgment, and gives the world a fresh start.  But all these admissions, giving them the widest possible application, do not enable us to call in question what stands so plainly in the pages of the New Testament,—­what filled so exclusively the minds of the first Christians—­the idea of a personal return of Christ at the end of the world.  We need lay no stress on the scenery of New Testament prophecy, any more than on the similar element of Old Testament prophecy; the voice of the archangel and the trump of God are like the turning of the sun into darkness and the moon into blood; but if we are to retain any relation to the New Testament at all, we must assert the personal return of Christ as Judge of all."[53]