Luke 17:22-25

He said to the disciples, “The days will come, when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. They will tell you, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Don’t go away, nor follow after them, for as the lightning, when it flashes out of the one part under the sky, shines to the other part under the sky; so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first, he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

It is very important that everyone understand that when the true Messiah comes, it will be very obvious. I believe that this is telling us quite clearly, that you won’t have to turn on the television to find out that He has arrived. No one is to be deceived by a person who claims to be the Messiah who can’t make Himself known everywhere at once. That means that all of these other “messiahs” aren’t the one.

Notice that although Jesus said that the Kingdom of God was already with them in the passage we looked at yesterday, He told them that “His day” was yet to come. This tells us that the Kingdom has already arrived but that the Day of the Lord hasn’t. The way that Jesus answered the Pharisees makes it clear that He wanted this distinction to be very clear. Even today, this is a difficult thing for orthodox Jews to accept. So we can see that Jesus said that the coming of the kingdom would be separate from the Day of the Lord and that when the Day of the Lord comes, it will be very obvious.

I believe that an accurate way to understand this is to recognize that Jesus came to take the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth from Satan by dying on the cross. He is already the rightful King but has yet to clean things up. As for now, we are here to bringing people into the Kingdom by faith. Once again, this shows how valuable God thinks that faith is. He allowed the world to continue in sin while we have a chance to believe in Him without seeing the end result with our eyes. We, as Christians, have been commanded to bring as many people to Christ as possible by faith before He returns and has “His day.” We are also to act in faith as we do our duties in expectation of Jesus’ return. Our works will also be judged by what we ended up doing in faith.