BEWARE A DANGEROUS DOCTRINE; THE DOCTRINE THAT THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST HAS ALREADY OCCURRED!!
There are a group of believers around who believe that such prophesied events as the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead have already occurred; indeed, some of these people even believe (incredibly!) that we are now living in The New Heavens and New Earth! As long ago as the first century AD, the apostle Paul warned Timothy about a few who were claiming that '...The resurrection is past already' and how these people were '...Overthrow(ing) the faith of some' (See 2 Timothy 2:18). This dangerous doctrine seems to have reappeared during the last 25 years or so.
Many of us are aware of the
magnificent Mount Olivet Prophecy of Jesus which appears in
Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21. I am not going to go through the
prophecy in detail here, but the overwhelming majority of us who
are experienced Bible expositors realise that Jesus clearly
employed a form of prophetic dualism or typology here. Many of
His comments clearly referred to events which would occur in AD70
at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem (notice Matthew
24:15-21,34), while many other parts of this prophecy clearly
looked beyond AD70 to the time just prior to the Second Coming
(notice Matthew 24:14,22-33), other comments could have equally
applied to either period (notice Matthew 24:4-13,32-33 etc). The
disciples appeared to be confused about Jesus' comment about,
'...There shall not be left here one stone upon
another...' (Matthew 24:2) in reference to the temple, and
seemed to assume that Jesus was referring to 'the end of the age'
– Jesus did nothing to clear up the confusion and, as we
know, made many intriguing comments covering both
events.
Some however go to the extreme of
insisting that ALL of Jesus' comments concerned the events
of AD70, and that the destruction of Jerusalem and it's Judaic
temple system in that year show that the Second Coming of Christ
occurred in AD70! This is usually refered to as 'Realized
Eschatology' . Many of us would indeed say that far more
biblical prophecies that many people realize have already
been fulfilled, however, the notion that Christ has already
“returned” is quite plainly a nonsense and can
certainly be shown to be unbiblical. Moreover, the belief that a
spiritualized resurrection is , 'already past' and that we are
now living in the New Earth must be challenged by all who seek to
uphold biblical teachings.
I here give a link to an article
from another website which attacks this very odd teaching. I give
a link to that website's homepage at the end of that article out
of common courtesy, but I don't necessarily support other things
on that website; however the following article covers all the
main points which need to be refuted: