The Two Advents

The most common objection to Jesus as Messiah is simple, and it deserves a straight answer: the Messiah was supposed to bring world peace, gather Israel, and reign — and that plainly has not happened. So how could Jesus, who was executed and left the world at war, be the one? The historic Christian answer is the two advents: the same prophets foretold a Messiah who suffers and dies and a Messiah who reigns in glory. Not two Messiahs — one Messiah, in two comings.

The tension is already in the prophets

Set the passages side by side and the puzzle is visible in the Hebrew Bible itself, long before any Christian claim:

The tension was felt within Judaism too

This is not only a Christian observation. Rabbinic tradition itself wrestled with the two portraits, at times speaking of “Messiah ben Joseph,” a Messiah who suffers and dies, alongside “Messiah ben David,” who reigns. The strain between a suffering and a triumphant Messiah was real inside the tradition — the two-advent reading is one honest way to hold both together.

One Messiah, two comings

The Christian reading resolves the objection without brushing it aside: the Messiah came first in humility — born, rejected, pierced, and raised — fulfilling the suffering prophecies; and he comes a second time in glory to reign, fulfilling the rest. The peace, the gathering, the kingdom — those belong to the return still awaited. The objection is answered not by denying it but by locating its fulfillment in the second advent.

The Apostolic (Oneness) reading

Apostolically, the wonder is that it is the one God Himself who comes — first veiled in flesh to save (“God was manifest in the flesh,” 1 Tim. 3:16), then unveiled in glory as King. “This same Jesus… shall so come in like manner” (Acts 1:11): the LORD of the prophets, the Savior of the cross, and the returning King are one.

Two advents — three comings, and the coming in the air

Look closely and the second advent itself arrives in two movements, which is why many describe the whole pattern as two advents but three comings. First the Lord comes for His people — the catching away, when “the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). Then He comes with His people to the earth in open glory, when “every eye shall see him” (Revelation 1:7) and “his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives” (Zechariah 14:4). One return, unfolding in two stages: first the gathering, then the reign.

This is the weight of the angels’ words at the ascension. As the disciples watched, Jesus was taken up bodily and “a cloud received him out of their sight” — and the two men in white promised, “This same Jesus… shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). In like manner: personally, bodily, and in the clouds. The catching away answers it in kind — His own caught up to meet Him in the air, as He was taken from them into the air.

And the heart behind it was spoken long before, in tears, over Jerusalem: “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not” (Matthew 23:37). The gathering He longed to do, He will yet do — He “shall send his angels… and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds” (Matthew 24:31). The whole of redemption bends toward a people gathered home to Himself at last.

And this catching away is not a denominational specialty — it is Paul’s own plain teaching, and he set it down twice, in two letters to two churches. “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout… and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17); “we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52). What Christians debate is not whether Christ gathers His own, but the timing and staging — whether the catching away is a distinct event from the final descent, and how it lines up with the tribulation (before, during, or after it). The Apostolic (Oneness) reading holds a real catching away of the Church to meet the Lord in the air, then His return to the earth to reign; but on the fact of the gathering itself, Paul could not be plainer. The same Jesus who left — in person, in a cloud — is the same Jesus who comes again.

And the promise began on the Lord’s own lips. In the upper room, the night before He died, Jesus told His troubled disciples: “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:18) — and “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:2-3). Notice the order He gives: first He goes — the ascension, to prepare the place; then He comes again, to receive His own to Himself. The departure and the return are the two ends of a single promise, and the receiving He describes — gathering them to be where He is — is the catching away, pledged by the very One who would do it.

So the coming in the air does not rest on a single voice. Jesus promised it Himself; the angels declared it once, at the ascension (“shall so come in like manner,” Acts 1:11); and Paul taught it twice, to the Thessalonians and to the Corinthians. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established” (2 Corinthians 13:1) — and here the witnesses are more than three, the first and greatest of them the Lord Himself.

The heralds — and how they reverse

Step back from the catching away to the whole sweep, and a pattern appears in who announces each coming. At the first advent the heralds run ahead of Him, in rising order: God Himself spoke the first promise in Eden (Genesis 3:15); the prophets carried it down the ages (“God… spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,” Hebrews 1:1); angels announced the hour — Gabriel to Mary, the host to the shepherds (Luke 1–2); John the Baptist, the last forerunner, cried “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” (John 1:23); and only then did Jesus come — quietly, into a manger. Afterward the apostles, carried by the Spirit, took the news to the world. Announced for ages; arrived almost unnoticed.

At the second advent the order reverses. No herald runs ahead this time, for the coming itself is the announcement: the Lord is “revealed from heaven with his mighty angels” (2 Thessalonians 1:7); the armies of heaven — the saints and the angels — come with Him (Revelation 19:14; Jude 14); the angels gather the elect (Matthew 24:31); and “every eye shall see him” (Revelation 1:7). The first time the heralds went before Him and He came hidden; the last time they come with Him and He comes in open, unmistakable glory. (The catching away, in between, has its own witnesses — the Lord Himself, the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God, unveiled to us through Paul, as above.)

Through every stage the center never moves. God speaks, prophets foretell, angels attend, apostles proclaim, saints accompany — but it is always Jesus who is the One coming. Everyone else is only a herald around the King.

The honest part

The two-advent framework is a Christian one; Jewish readers hold the Messiah’s work to be a single, still-future accomplishment, and that is a serious position honestly held. What is not merely a Christian invention is the tension itself: the suffering texts and the reigning texts sit together in the same Scriptures, and any Messianic hope has to reckon with both.