The week, I’m adding a one-minute video which asks the question that led to the story: Why, in spite of the clear indications that He should have appeared at some point during the last two centuries, have we failed to find Him?
For your convenience, here’s the text from each scene, with some comments:
1) He said He would return at the end of the age…
2 & 3) He told us that the end of the age would come once…His gospel had been preached to all nations. All three references are found in Matt 24:3-14.
4) 200 years ago, this goal was achieved… Most historians acknowledge that Christian missionaries had reached all nations somewhere between the 1810s and the 1840s, depending how you define “nations”.
5 & 6) and His followers turned their eyes to the skies, in expectation. In the early 1800s, hundreds of thousands saw various signs in the skies and became followers of William Miller and other evangelists, who predicted the immanent appearance of Christ’s return, based on various biblical prophecies.
7-10) Since then we have witnessed the signs of the close of the age, and the opening of a new one. Scenes of advanced weapons of war, including nuclear weapons. Also a scene of the Jewish people returned to the Holy Land, as Jesus anticipated in Luke 21:24.
11 & 12) But for 200 years, our expectations of His appearance have remained unfulfilled… This has been the central puzzlement of prophetic Christianity since the 1840s, when the modern evangelical movement and the Second Great Awakening (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening ) suffered their “Great Disappointment” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment ) in 1844.
13) Were all the prophecies wrong?
14) Or did we simply misunderstand them?
15) Based on the true story of the Wise Men of the East –This modern story is an echo of the biblical story of how the Magi found the Promised One of their religion through their own religious prophecies.
16) The Wise Men of the West–which shows what we in the West might have found, if only we had been looking!
How did we manage to miss such an important event? The answer can be summed up in three words: As with the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ time, we were “blinded by literalism”.
To get your copy, either in paperback and via Kindle:
The Wise Men of the West 