Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been talking about the time of the second coming of Christ.

And in our last lesson, we saw that we have on the one hand abundant evidence,

both in Paul as well as from Jesus, that the second coming of Christ was not something

that was going to happen soon. It looked as though a lot had to happen first. And yet we also have some very puzzling sayings of

Jesus that seemed to suggest that he was predicting his return within the lifetime of his hearers.

This problem is known as the delay of the Parasia. How shall we best deal with this problem?

Well, as you can imagine, there are quite a number of different suggestions that have been made.

For example, the preterist has no problem with these passages because the

preterist says that these predictions were all fulfilled in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem.

When Jerusalem was destroyed, all that Jesus had predicted actually happened,

including the Son of Man's coming into God's throne room and receiving the kingdom.

Now, that is certainly a strength of the preterist view. It just completely solves the

problem of the delay of the parocia by saying that Jesus' predictions were in fact

fulfilled within the lifetime of his hearers. But I've already expressed my reservations about the

preterist view and why I just don't find it to be a plausible interpretation

of the biblical text. And so for me at least it's not an option. I just don't

think that it solves the problem. Another alternative is the

revised prophecy view, which holds that Jesus' prophecy was simply provisional and that it was

susceptible to change. We have in the Old Testament certain examples of prophecies like this.

Think, for example, of Jonah's prophecy to Nineveh in the book of Jonah.

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