In preparation for a breakout session at our 2025 annual conference, I read a book called Dispensationalism Before Darby. The author, Watson, showed that the components of dispensationalism had been taught by British theologians for at least two hundred years before Darby.

Something that jumped out at me in Watson’s book was a chart listing people who predicted the date of Christ’s return to establish His kingdom. I’ve always thought that date–setting shows that the writer does not understand the prophetic teaching concerning Christ’s returning as a thief in the night. And that is true. Watson has a two-page chart listing over fifty people in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries who predicted dates. Above that chart he wrote, “As a reminder of the folly of date setting for any who might be tempted to do so, below is a partial list of those who set dates in their prophetic studies for the Apocalypse” (p. 343).

However, Watson helped me see that there is at least something positive in those who predict dates of Christ’s return. They believed in and taught Christ’s imminent return! That is a good thing, even though date–setting is a bad thing.

• Around the year 1177, Joachim of Fiore predicted a return of Christ in 1260.
• In the 1520s, Melchior Hoffman set the date of 1533.
• New England Puritan Cotton Mather suggested in 1691 that the kingdom would begin in 1716.
• Famed New England minister of the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, predicted in the 1740s that Christ would return in 1866.
• In 1768, Thomas Broughton suggested either 1987 or 2015.
• Alexander Fraser, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, said in 1795 that the Millennium would begin in 2073.

Of course, except for Joachim of Fiore, Watson was only considering British or American pastors from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

We could add many more from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

William Miller, whose teachings spawned Seventh Day Adventism, said Christ would return on October 22, 1844. Later Adventists said that while Jesus did not return physically then, He did return spiritually.

In 1980, I read an article on the DTS library bulletin board saying that Hal Lindsay had predicted that the Rapture would occur sometime before the end of 1988. He arrived at this by taking the year of Israel’s becoming a nation––1948––then adding forty years to that, based on the words, “this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place” (Matt 24:34). While Lindsay did not set a specific year, he set a narrow range.

Harold Camping, in 2010, said that Christ would return on May 21, 2011. Later he changed that to October 21, 2011.

I would suggest that signs of the Second Coming will occur during the Tribulation. But there are no signs of the Rapture. We in the church age know His return is imminent. But we do not know if it will be today or hundreds or even thousands of years from today. (Those who believe that the Millennium will be the seventh millennium of the world’s history believe that His return must be very soon since we are already several hundred years into the seventh millennium, assuming a young earth and a date of creation circa 4200 BC.) The authors of the NT clearly believed that Christ might return during their lifetimes:

• Little children, it is the last hour… (1 John 2:18, emphasis added).
• Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door! (Jas 5:9, emphasis added).
• For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord (1 Thess 4:15-17, emphasis added).
• For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:2, emphasis added).
• But know this, that if the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect (Matt 24:43-44, emphasis added).

I love the song “Jesus Is Coming Again.” It has a line that says, “May be morning may be noon, may be evening and may be soon.” In a church we attended together, Dan Mosher would loudly change may be soon to shall be soon. The rest of us joined him. Even though Jesus’ coming may be hundreds of years off, it shall be soon. If it was soon in the first century, it is certainly soon two thousand years later.

Keep your eyes on the Lord’s soon return and you will keep grace in focus.