In Acts 1, the scene is the Mount of Olives in late spring. There will be a new moon that night. The resurrected Jesus Christ is ready to ascend to heaven. Acts 1:6 (New Living Translation): “So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking Him, ‘Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?’”

The New International Reader’s Version indicates that “the apostles gathered around Jesus.” The Amplified Bible says they “asked Him repeatedly.” This incident was not just another instance of Peter’s solitary impulsiveness but one that sprang from questions in the minds of all the disciples. What happens next, and when?

We cannot blame them, nor should we. After all, we ask the same question, though perhaps with a slightly different focus today: When will Christ return?

An Exciting Seventy-Five Days

It helps to put the question the disciples asked and the insistence they displayed in asking it in its historical perspective. Christ probably resurrected Lazarus—a significant miracle indeed—about three weeks before His last Passover.¹ Between the Passover and Pentecost that year, there were 54 days. So, the total period between Lazarus’ resurrection and Pentecost was 75 days, more or less. We cannot be precise since we do not know exactly when Christ resurrected Lazarus. Besides, that level of precision is unnecessary in this context.

What happened in that span of approximately 75 days?

1. The resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:38-44).

2. Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (John 12:12-19).

3. The Passover, with the betrayal, trial, death, and burial of Christ.

4. The ripping of the veil in the Temple, which gets only a brief mention. Matthew 27:51²: “And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” To discover an idea of how vital this incident would be to a Jew living then, think of watching the President speak. Behind him hangs the Constitution, protected, encased behind glass, and perhaps surrounded by armed guards. As he speaks, the document mysteriously rips in half without hands. That would be highly disconcerting—unsettling—to us.

Jews traveled to Jerusalem as often as possible, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, to worship at the Temple, the centerpiece of their culture. The mysterious top-to-bottom rending of the veil would have been the “talk of the town” for a long time among Jews no matter where they lived. News of it would have rapidly spread throughout the Roman Empire, to Babylonia, Alexandria, Persia, and beyond.

It is unlikely they understood the rending as a divine judgment, as God’s Presence, associated with the Shekinah, may have left the Temple at that time. (However, it may never have been present in the Herodian Temple.) The Jews certainly believed God lived among them in the Temple, and this perception defined their reality. The tearing of the veil may have been His way of emphasizing to them that He had removed Himself from them. From His perspective, the Temple was as good as gone and no longer necessary in a New Covenant context. This event was not insignificant.

Surely, Jerusalem Jews debated about what would happen on the next Day of Atonement if the veil remained ripped until then. The Atonement ritual, as outlined in Leviticus 16, demands the existence of a Temple, an altar, and a Holy of Holies. In fact, it requires a completely separate room for the Holy of Holies. Today, the Jews, having none of that, observe Atonement only in effigy, by their own admission. (As an aside, we, having access to the heavenly Temple, do not keep it in effigy.) Doing so would have alarmed thinking Jews of that era.

5. An earthquake and the resurrection of many saints:

And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:51-53)

These events would also have been the talk of Jerusalem and beyond. The shopkeeper tells his wife at the dinner table, “My dear, you’ll never guess: Saul ben Joshua dropped by the store today. You remember Saul, the guy who lived down the street, upstairs, the one who died about two months ago. You went to his funeral. Seemed chipper. Looks great. He said he got his old job back, working at the rope shop at the foot of the street.” That sort of conversation took place repeatedly in Jerusalem in those days. These were not normal times—not normal at all.

6. The resurrection of Christ and His appearances to various groups of His disciples for another forty days. As important from their perspective is the teaching He provided during that time, as He opened the Scriptures to them.³

7. The ascension of Christ, already mentioned, at the end of those forty days (Acts 1:6-11).

8. Finally, Pentecost with the coming of the Holy Spirit, Peter’s sermon, and the founding of the New Covenant Church with Christ as its Head (Acts 2:1-4).

Amazing! When God works, things get done—and fast. All these things happened in the span of about 75 days. When God accelerates events, they happen swiftly!

Then, Nothing

We must put ourselves in the shoes of Christ’s disciples. In just 75 days, more or less, they had lived through everything from an earthquake to resurrections—plural—to God’s judgment on the Herodian Temple, and a whole lot more, witnessing fulfilled prophecy after prophecy. Many prophecies came to pass during that time—more than can be counted on two hands. Jerusalem was abuzz. It would never be the same. God had left His Temple, and by instituting His church, He had founded another one.

Those original followers of Christ stood right at the center of those dizzying events. They were assured; they did not have to assume or speculate. From what they had seen, experienced, and been a part of, they knew that God was working now and in high gear. History was in the making. No wonder they asked Christ, just before He ascended, if He would soon restore the Kingdom to Israel.

If we were then followers of Christ, what would we expect to occur on the next holy day, the Feast of Trumpets, just a few months away? What did the disciples expect to happen in the aftermath of that dramatic Pentecost? Whether or not the veil in the Temple were fixed, what would happen on the Day of Atonement just ten days after? After that, of course, would come the Feast of Tabernacles. Many of Christ’s followers probably anticipated some remarkable event then, too.

God had, as He said in a different context, worked a “work in their days that they would not believe if told” (paraphrased from Habakkuk 1:5). But nothing happened! It is as if God turned the fulfilled-prophecy machine off. On Tishri 1, 10, and 15, the people gathered at the Temple, rejoicing and praising God, especially the Christians, who had reason to do so. They may not have thoroughly internalized it then, but they were among the first signatories to the New Covenant, prophesied in the Scriptures. They waited to see what God would do next, but He did nothing dramatic, nothing spectacular.

In the months and years after that Pentecost, the church grew, exponentially at first. God chose Matthias to replace Judas (Acts 1:12-26); Peter healed the lame man (Acts 3:1-10); Ananias and Sapphira fell dead for lying (Acts 5:1-11); the church ordained deacons, and Stephen subsequently suffered martyrdom (Acts 6-7); God called the apostle Paul (Acts 9); He called Gentiles into His church (Acts 10); and the apostles convened the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). We read of those events quickly in the book of Acts, but years transpired between some of them, not days. The Jerusalem Council, for example, happened 15 to 20 years after that AD 31 Pentecost,⁴ virtually a generation later.

That first Trumpets came, and no assassinations or coups occurred. No earthquakes. No armies then gathered around Jerusalem. The Roman Empire did not collapse. No sign appeared in the heavens as Christ said there would be near the end.⁵ The Messiah did not return. Israel was not restored.

Over the ensuing years, there was speculation. People in God’s church do that now and again! They waited until the next Land Sabbath. Surely, He would return then. Or maybe He would come on the next Jubilee. Or what about after a time-cycle of nineteen years? Some probably figured He would return then, just as some have it all figured out today. He did not return. And He has not returned.

It is fine to ask, “When will Christ return? When will He restore the Kingdom to Israel?” It is okay as long as we understand that, no matter what answer we arrive at, we will almost certainly be wrong. We will join the expansive crowd of other faithful church members whose answers have been incorrect down through the centuries. Even Paul did not have it right! So, we are in good company.

Understanding that we will not be able to predict our Savior’s second coming, in Part Two, we will consider what is essential for us to get right by examining Paul’s comments on the matter to his protégé, Timothy.

End Notes

¹ Consider John 10:40: “He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there He remained.” The apostle John, writing in John 1:28, tells us that John the Baptist was baptizing at a place called “Bethany beyond the Jordon” or across the Jordan River. This was not the Bethany where Lazarus died a while later, which was about a mile and a half east of Jerusalem, and a long way from the river. Bethany “beyond the Jordan” was on the river itself, making it suitable for a baptism site. It is frequently associated with Bethabara.

Notice the time and place markers in John 10. Verse 22 says that Christ was in Jerusalem at the Feast of the Dedication, in December, when He plainly told the Jews, “I and the Father are one” (verse 30). They sought to stone Him. As frequently happened, things were getting too hot for Him too soon. He did not want to be arrested until the Passover, yet a season away, so He withdrew Himself, this time, up north to Bethany beyond the Jordan River. “And there He remained,” verse 40 reads.

We lose track of the time markers for a while at this point. We do not know how long He remained beyond the Jordan River. He may have gone there to collect His thoughts, knowing that the time of His suffering was drawing close, going back to His roots, as it were, to where His ministry had begun in the days of John the Baptist. A number of John’s followers may have been there, and He may have wanted to work among them before He died. Verse 42 relates, “And many believed in Him there.”

John 12:1-2 contains the next obvious time marker, within a week of that fateful Passover: “Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So they gave a dinner for Him there.” “They” are presumably Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, and “there” is obviously Bethany, near Jerusalem.

Notice, Jesus came to the Bethany of these folk; He had been away from it. So, we must work backward to find out where He came from. We know where He was in December and where He was six days before the Passover, but not where He was in between. For that, note John 11:1-3:

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”

John describes Bethany as “the village of Mary and . . . Martha.” They sent word to Christ while He was up north, in Bethany beyond the Jordon (the other Bethany), asking Him to come to their Bethany because their brother was ill.

So, somewhere after December, when Christ left Jerusalem and went up to Bethany beyond the Jordan, but before six days before the Passover, Christ raised Lazarus. When? We cannot know for sure. We know from John 11:54 that, after He raised Lazarus, Christ left Bethany and stayed for an unspecified time in Ephraim, probably near Jericho. Again, He went there because of the plots to arrest Him: “Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there to the region near the wilderness, to a town called Ephraim, and there He stayed with the disciples.”

When He was invited to Mary and Martha’s dinner six days before the Passover, He came back to Bethany. We do not know how long He stayed in Ephraim. It may be that Mary and Martha, in gratitude for His work among them, prepared a dinner, perhaps around two weeks after He had resurrected Lazarus. (Commentator Adam Clarke cites traditional but probably errant sources that argue Jesus resurrected Lazarus much earlier, in mid-January. “Calmet says, following Toynard, that he stayed there [in Ephraim] two months, from the 24th of January till the 24th of March.”)

In any case, He was not in Ephraim long. That two-week delay would have allowed family members the opportunity to travel to Bethany to attend the dinner. This scenario suggests that Lazarus’ resurrection occurred about three weeks before the Passover.

In the context of this supper, John 12:11 reports that the Jews were then plotting to murder Lazarus because “many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.” So, his resurrection was still prime-time news at the time of the dinner—fairly recent, not something that happened, as some surmise, in mid-January. It seems to have occurred in late February, about two weeks before the Bethany supper, about three weeks before the Passover.

² Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural quotations are from the English Standard Version.

³ See Luke 24:32.

⁴ Another event was the separation of the Jerusalem congregation from the Temple, serving to disconnect the congregants there from Jerusalem at large, making it easier for them to flee Jerusalem when the Roman armies neared it.

What happened? The Pharisees evicted the church from the Temple in the mid-60s. Until about that time, the Sadducees controlled the Temple, but the Pharisees had become politically ascendant to the point that they turned Jerusalem politics into a “one-party system.” They forced Sadducees from the Sanhedrin and took control of the Temple. A spinoff was the church’s loss of the right to meet for Sabbath and holy day services in the Temple. The Romans destroyed the Temple about five years later.

To the Jews, the Temple was the center of worship. They could not offer sacrifices without the altar, according to Leviticus 17 (see also Deuteronomy 12). With the Temple gone, the Jews lost their sense of place. It is important to realize, however, that Christians did not need this sense of place, as they had access to God’s heavenly Temple, His heavenly altar (see John 4:21-24). While the loss of Jerusalem was certainly traumatic to church members, it lacked the impact the Jews felt.

⁵ See Matthew 24:30.