From this we may conclude that our Lord’s hope for the future was not concerned with the Last Day as an isolated event, but was concerned also with all those events which are essentially and actually connected with it and which lead up to the great separation of spirits: in particular, with His death and resurrection, with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, with the founding of the universal Church, and—as necessarily belonging to this- -with the abolition of the Old Covenant and the downfall of Jerusalem. Precisely because Jesus knew that the Kingdom of God was already established in His own Person, because it was a central fact of His consciousness that the great separation of spirits, the judgment of the world, had already begun in His Person, He necessarily regarded all the events that depended upon His Person as particular moments of the General Judgment which was fundamentally and practically inaugurated with His Person. And so, proclaiming things in a prophetic manner, He made no distinction between today and tomorrow. He did not concern Himself primarily with the position of events in time and history; but in a single, powerful intuition comprehended their essential character, their real inner unity and their connection with His Person. The whole future, the destruction of Jerusalem as well as the establishment and expansion of His Church, was to Him the present, the present of His judgment. So His expectation of the Last Day embraced future generations along with His own, and He could threaten His own generation with the Coming of the Son of Man.

When is the exact day, the precise hour of His coming? If we formulate the question thus, we feel at once that it is an idle question, and we realize how impossible it is to believe that the Lord Jesus depicted in the Gospels, whose mind was so concentrated on the essential and real, not on the “when” but on the “what,” ever expounded a chronology.