R.C. Sproul

And His departure was visible.

And He ascended on clouds of glory, on the Shekinah cloud.

And the expectation is that His return will be just as visible and just as glorious when He comes at the end of the age.

I don't think anything in the last several centuries has done more to provoke

heightened interest in the return of Jesus than the restoration of the Jewish state, unless it was the subsequent events that took place in 1967 when the Jews, after almost 2,000 years, recovered the city of Jerusalem.

We go back to New Testament days and the Olivet Discourse, and in Luke's version when Jesus predicts the coming destruction of the temple and of the city of Jerusalem, he makes the observation that Jerusalem will be trodden underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

Now, that's the only time in the Gospels that we encounter that phrase, the times of the Gentile.

But there's one more time when that phrase is used in the New Testament, and there it is used by the Apostle Paul in the 11th chapter of his epistle to the Romans.

Paul labors the question, what about Israel?

What about the Jewish people who had rejected the Messiah when he came?

Is God finished with them?

And in that text, he talks about how we as Gentiles

have been grafted in to the holy root that was Israel.

But God has not cast off His original people forever.

And Paul then speaks in Romans 11 again about the future work that God will do among the Jewish people when the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

Now, there's a lot of speculation, a lot of disagreement on exactly what Paul means in Romans 11, but all I intend to mean at this point is simply to say that we are at a time in church history where the expectation for the return of Jesus is at a fever pitch.

Now, two-thirds of the doctrinal material that we find in the New Testament relate to future aspects of the kingdom of God.

And there is no element of the New Testament future prophecy more important to the people of God and to the history of the Christian church than that body of prophecy that relates to the return of Jesus.

The promised return of Christ to this world has been understood by the church for 2,000 years as the blessed hope of the people of God.

and it is something that keeps people going in the time of distress and persecution and difficulty.