The Second Coming Necessary to the Atonement
The doctrine of Christ’s Second Coming is not a teaching apart from the atonement, but is necessary to the atonement. That is, God’s plan of redemption for us cannot be completed apart from the coming of Christ and the events connected with that coming. His coming therefore is essential to salvation. Not that the understanding of the doctrine is essential to individual salvation. A sinner needs to know very little Scripture in order to be saved; when the Spirit has convicted him of sin a single sentence of Glad Tidings will suffice. But it requires the whole redemptive purposes of God to make that salvation possible. And those redemptive purposes include the appearing a second time of the God-man, our Lord Jesus Christ. The importance of our Lord’s Second Coming, then, is exactly parallel with the importance of his first coming and of his present ministry for the believer.
The Word of God presents salvation in a threefold aspect. There is the past, the present, and the future of salvation. “We were saved; we are being saved; we shall be saved.”