Ask · Suffering, Evil & Hard Questions
Why hasn't Jesus come back yet?
The short answer
Peter answered this exact question in the Bible's own words: scoffers would ask where the promise of his coming is, and the delay is God's patience, not his absence or inability. The Lord is not slow, Peter says, but patient, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance. What looks like lateness from inside a lifetime is, on the scale Scripture uses, mercy extending the day of salvation.
The fuller answer
It may help to know that your question is quoted in the Bible, worded almost as you worded it, and put in the mouths of scoffers. Peter warned that in the last days scoffers would come, pointing at the ordinary turning of the world and asking: where is this coming he promised? Everything goes on as it always has. Peter does not treat the question as a scandal to be hidden. He prints it, answers it, and in doing so admits what every honest believer feels: the wait is long, and its length is the point at issue.
The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9 (BSB)
His answer has two parts. The first is about scale: with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day, which is not a conversion table for prophecy charts but a reminder that God's experience of this delay is not ours. The second is about character. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. Every generation of the church since has contained people who exist, spiritually, because the return did not happen in the generation before.
For the vision awaits an appointed time; it testifies of the end and does not lie. Though it lingers, wait for it, since it will surely come and will not delay.
Habakkuk 2:3 (BSB)
Habakkuk was taught the same lesson in miniature. Told to write the vision and wait for it, because it awaited an appointed time and would not lie, he learned that delay in God's hands is not denial. Jesus set the same boundary for his own followers. Asked about times and dates, he said they are not for them to know, that the Father has set them by his own authority, and he redirected their energy entirely: not to calculating, but to witnessing, from their own city to the ends of the earth. The church's assignment during the delay is a mission, not a countdown.
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
Revelation 22:20 (BSB)
Nor should the delay be read as indifference to evil. Peter goes on to promise that the day of the Lord will come, that judgment is certain, and that new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells, stand at the end of the wait. The Bible's last page ends with Jesus saying, yes, I am coming soon, and the church answering, Amen, come, Lord Jesus. Christians are permitted, even taught, to find the wait hard. They are not permitted to conclude from it that the promise failed. Patience, Peter insists, is what the delay is made of.
Sources
- Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
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