Jesus must have understood what a human lifetime looks like but he said he’ll return “soon” and he said that about 2,000 years ago now. That’s a long time when you compare it to the maybe 80 years any of us actually get. So why frame it as “soon” when he knew how many generations would live and die waiting for that promise to play out?
I’m genuinely curious about the purpose of that kind of urgency if the timeline was always going to stretch this far (assuming he knew it would, which I think most of us here believe he did).
I don’t mean to question him, I’m sure there is a reason for it but I do wonder why he would use the word “soon”.
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In the Greek in Revelation: tachu (???) for “I am coming soon.” It means “quickly,” “swiftly,” “suddenly,” or “without delay,” not just a timeline. KJV says “I come quickly,” shifting it to how he returns, sudden, catching folks off guard. Same word in Matthew 28:8 for the women hurrying from the tomb.
Peter tackled this exact gripe early on (2 Peter 3). Scoffers asking “where’s this coming?” He says God’s patient, wanting all to repent (3:9), and with Him, a day is like a thousand years. So “soon” keeps every generation urgent and ready.
Some “soon” language was partially fulfilled in the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24 Mark 13).
He says that “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place,” and many see “these things” as the wars and persecution right up to the temple destruction in verses 5-23. That all happened about 40 years later in AD 70 when Rome sacked Jerusalem. So it was soon for those listening.
NT writers called their era the “last days” (Hebrews 1:2: God “in these last days has spoken to us by his Son”). We’ve been in them 2,000 years. The urgency doesn’t depend on our 80-year lifespans. Every generation is close, since none of us is promised tomorrow.
Jesus himself said he didn’t know the exact time (Matthew 24:36: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”). In his human nature, that info wasn’t given to him. So his “soon” wasn’t a precise countdown.
Why say it then? Peter ties the delay to God’s patience. It’s time for the gospel to reach everyone (Matthew 24:14: “This gospel… will be preached in the whole world… and then the end will come”).
“Soon” also creates urgency. If God said “in 2,000 years,” generations would slack off.
By the 60s AD, scoffers were already mocking the wait (2 Peter 3:3-4). Peter called it God’s patience for repentance, a mercy that leads to salvation.
Maybe the return isn’t one single event. Like light slowly filling a room before the sun actually clears the horizon. You don’t notice it happening until you realize you can see.
Theologians call it the ‘already but not yet,’ and that framing helped me a lot. The kingdom broke in when he came the first time. It’s been expanding ever since. So in a way he has been coming, gradually, through all of it (that’s weird).
And the final visible return is just the last step of something already long in motion…
This almost broke my faith. Seriously. I kept thinking if he said soon and it’s been this long, what else might not mean what I thought it meant, and that’s a terrifying thread to pull on when your whole worldview is built on trusting scripture.
Every year he ‘delays’ is another year someone gets a chance to turn to him. My own grandmother didn’t come to faith until she was 74. If Jesus had returned in 1950, she would have missed it. Just gone.
Once I thought about that, I started seeing the delay as patience, patience I personally benefited from. I still wrestle with the tension sometimes though.
I think Jesus’ ‘soon’ is apocalyptic-style urgency, not a calendar countdown. In Jewish prophecy, events get described as near specifically to press repentance and readiness, even when the exact timing stays hidden.
I came across this Greek word ‘tachu’ for ‘soon’. It shows up in the gospels describing instant healings, like the blind man seeing right away with no delay. It connects to how his return hits sudden and at full power.
It puts the focus on being awake now. Eyes open every day. Staying present in prayer, alert for the knock today. Been chewing on that alongside the Matthew 24 thief in the night bit lately.
The repeated point is really just: don’t set dates, stay faithful.
When Jesus says He’s coming ‘soon’ in places like Revelation, that’s written to churches under persecution. It’s pastoral language, meant to encourage people in a hard moment.
And some of the ‘this generation’ sayings are more debated than people realize. You’re reading it as ‘people alive then,’ which is fair, but many scholars interpret ‘generation’ as something closer to ‘this kind of unbelieving generation,’ or they see the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 as the near-term fulfillment that was actually in view. That reading honestly makes more sense to me than strapping a 2,000-year stopwatch to it… though I get why people see it differently there.
Either way the urgency stands. The next big event could be sudden. Be ready.
‘Soon’ might be covenant language. Like once the next act kicks off, everything from that point forward counts as ‘soon’, which makes more sense when you remember ‘the last days’ technically began at Pentecost.
The “soon” question comes down to God’s timeline, not ours. “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day” (2 Peter 3:8). That puts it in perspective.
It’s about sustaining faith through the worst times, not dates.
I mean, the counterargument kind of makes itself here. Jesus was talking to fishermen, tax collectors, everyday people who measured time the way we do. If he meant ‘soon’ on some small scale, that’s honestly a little misleading to the people standing right in front of him. They would have heard ‘soon’ and thought about their own lives, their own frame of reference, not geological epochs or whatever timescale we’re retrofitting onto the word.
The better explanation might have nothing to do with relative timescales at all. Prophetic language works differently (or at least it can), and there’s this idea that his return is always imminent in the sense that it could happen at any moment. That preserves the urgency without requiring us to completely redefine what ‘soon’ means to actual humans living actual human lives.
But he exists outside of time entirely. Why would 2000 AD be more significant than 1000 AD, or even 777 AD? Every generation has been convinced they’re living in the era of his return.
And he literally said he would come like a thief in the night, so nobody knows, nobody gets to map it out on a whiteboard.
Maybe we should spend less energy obsessing over the timeline and more energy just living for the kingdom.
If you take Peter’s words seriously (a thousand years being like a day to the Lord), then barely two days have passed from God’s perspective since that terrible weekend. Two days.
His patience exists because He wants everyone to have the chance to repent. So I figured there’s no point getting antsy until at least 7000 CE.
A day to God is a thousand years to us, pretty sure that’s Isaiah (though Peter might reference it too).
From God’s perspective, it’s only been like two days since Jesus made that promise. Two days. So ‘soon’ means something completely different when you’re not the one counting centuries.
The Lord not being slack concerning his promise, I keep coming back to it. His patience might be the whole point. It’s more than a footnote to the timing question. We get caught up in our human understanding of ‘soon’ and miss something deeper. Maybe that’s exactly what Peter was getting at…