Great Expectations

I enjoyed my class in literature while in high school. I am not sure it was a specific subject in grade school as we just had a class in “reading.” In my ninth and tenth year of high school, I had a “literature book” from which I would be required to read the writing and often memorize portions of it to recite in class which I often found distasteful as I stuttered terribly and it was never a pleasant experience for me. Certain writing from my high school classes have remained in my mental files, one of which was a condensed version of “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens. I can't tell you much about it except the title. Oh, I looked it up and found out about Pip and the fact that it was written entirely in the first person but that is about all I can tell you about it. What has kept my attention is the title of the work. The title grabs your attention and focuses on something great in the future. For the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, there are many “Great Expectations.” First Thessalonians 4:16 says, “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:”

       This is one of those “I don't know how it's going to happen, but it's really something great” type of things that will occur sometime in the future. Much has been written about the event especially in the last twenty years with the “Left Behind” series that kept coming out over about a ten year period. In the day of the Apostle Paul, people assumed that the Lord Jesus Christ would return in their lifetime, but when He didn't arrive, they got concerned because believers were dying and the concern for the living believers was that their family and friends that were dying, would miss the return of the Lord. The Apostle Paul writes about this to the church at Thessalonica and to assure them that both the living and the dead would be present when this “great expectation” would take place. It seems that every generation has looked forward to this event and the possibility of it taking place in their own lifetime. The “signs of the times” seems to be present with increasing severity in every generation. Believers have been persecuted to the point of death in every generation since the crucifixion of Christ Himself. Every Apostle died a martyrs death. So, we are here in the 21^st century after the first coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the signs are still increasing. The ultimate hope of the believer is in the doctrine of the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every chapter of the Thessalonian epistles contains a reference to the second coming. Paul taught on the doctrine many times in other books than the Thessalonian epistles. For us, there is the “Greatest of Expectations” and it is the second advent, or the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. I get excited about it just when I read about it in God's Word and I get the mental picture going to meet the Lord in the air. Do you look forward to this Great Event? Praise God for the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is coming again and it may be sooner than we all think.