The greatest deception of the modern age is the illusion of a distant tomorrow. We have become a people comfortably trapped within the linear progression of minutes, hours, and years, pushing the solemn realities of eternity into some hazy, faraway epoch. Even within the church, the glorious doctrine of the Lord’s Return is frequently relegated to a mere chart on a wall—a prophetic timeline that belongs to a future generation rather than our own. The scoffers of our day seize upon this temporal delay, echoing the precise mockery foretold by the Apostle Peter, asking, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. They point to the generations of saints who lived, watched, and died with the burning expectation of Christ’s return on their lips, and they declare them to have been mistaken. They look at the passing of two millennia and conclude that the watchmen were fools. But the foolishness belongs entirely to the world, for they do not understand that the boundary between this terrestrial life and the immediate presence of God is narrower than a single breath.
To understand the true imminency of the Blessed Hope, one must view time through the lens of the Creator rather than the construct of the creature. When a believer closes his eyes for the last time on this earth, he does not enter a state of protracted waiting, nor does he sit in some celestial anteroom watching the centuries slowly grind along the human calendar. Scripture terms this transition a sleep, and it operates much like a profound medical coma. A man may lie in a coma for days, months, or years, completely detached from the ticking of the clock, and when he finally awakens, he knows absolutely nothing of the passage of time. To his consciousness, the moment he drifted off is instantly welded to the moment his eyes open. So it is with the dead in Christ; the dead have no awareness of the passage of time, for them, the flow of history ceases entirely the moment physical life departs. Therefore, the very next conscious second for the believer who fell asleep in Christ during the Roman persecutions is the exact same microsecond experienced by the believer who passes away today. There is no gap, no delay, and no intermediate duration in the perception of the soul. The moment of death is seamlessly, instantly joined to the global, simultaneous awakening of the entire redemptive body. In a literal, experiential reality, Christ comes for every generation in their lifetime. Every single watchman who died looking for the sky to split was entirely correct, for their very next waking moment is the fulfillment of that glorious promise. As it is written in the first epistle to the Corinthians, Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. The timeline of man may stretch across thousands of years, but the timeline of human consciousness leaps across those centuries in the fraction of a second.
This sublime comfort, however, carries an immense and terrifying weight for those who remain outside of the household of faith. If the close of a man’s life is instantly joined to his awakening before the judgment seat of God, then Christ effectively arrives for every individual the moment they die. The luxury of procrastination is a demonic lie. Men live as though they have decades to settle their account with the Almighty, planning to toy with sin today and seek repentance in their twilight years. They treat the Ark of Salvation as something they can board at their leisure, oblivious to the fact that they are balancing on a tightrope over eternity. Scripture leaves no room for such reckless gambling, declaring with absolute finality that as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. There is no second chance beyond the veil, no period of adjustment, and no time to reconsider your rebellion once the breath leaves your nostrils. Just like waking instantly from a deep coma, you will not have time to prepare or think; the dispensation of grace closes for you individualistically the moment your heart beats its last. The door to the Ark is shut by the hand of God Himself, and the very next second of your awareness will be the absolute reality of Christ’s presence—either as your Savior or your Judge. Knowing that the next closing of your eyes is the final sealing of your eternal destiny, behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.