Come, Lord Jesus: Meditations on the Second Coming of Christ

Prepare for the second coming of Christ, exhorts Piper (Let the Nations Be Glad!), chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary, in this dense exegesis. The purpose of the second coming, the author contends, is to achieve the full glorification of God through God’s unification with creation, and for Christians to partake in that glory they must strive “to be spiritually alive and awake and sober.” Piper interprets the Book of Revelation to suggest that moral transformation will be accompanied by physical transformation in the form of “perfected” bodies that won’t bear the “flaws of the futility and corruption of the fall.” He demonstrates a rigorous knowledge of the Bible, but some of his assertions suffer from ambiguity, as when he writes that the coming of the anti-Christ—the key harbinger of Jesus’s return—will be “discernible” without specifying how. Additionally, the dry, academic style might be imposing for lay readers, and the arguments can get theologically knotty, such as his explanation for why Jesus’s prophecy in Matthew 24 should be understood to apply to events after the fall of the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE. This requires close reading, but the reward might not be worth the effort. (Jan.)