Book Review: When Christ Comes

Title: When Christ Comes

Author: Max Lucado

Date: 1999

Publisher: Word

ISBN: 0-8499-1298-9

Length: 207 pages

Quote: “No book can answer all the questions. And no reader will agree with all my suggestions. (Some of you were only a few lines into the opening description of the return before you stubbed an opinion ona sentence.) But perhaps God will use this book to encourage you to be at peace about his coming.”

Lower-case H for “his,” meaning God’s? That’s one point where readers may “stub an opinion.” God is a Spirit, bound to neither the gender nor the number of a body. The Bible uses “he” pronouns to go with a “she” name and a “they” name, I believe, to make that point. English-speaking humans started using “His,” with a capital, to show that they’re referring to a Being to Whom the genders and numbers of mortals are about as relevant as the pagination of books. Asking “Is God a he or a she?” is like asking “Are you, the reader, a bird or a fish?” So in my lexicon that which pertains to God is “His,” but not “his.” Christians don’t worship a Goddess; from time to time we need to remind ourselves that we don’t worship a he-god, either.

But this book is about the return of Christ as (Christians believe) an aspect of God that was incarnate as a man, so I find myself allowing the incorrect pronouns here and throughout. Prophecies discussed include the vision at the beginning of the book of Revelation, where the risen and transfigured Jesus appears, recognizably, as like a man (with a beard), but incandescent white, a being of light rather than flesh. But that light had the shape His human friends remembered, masculine and singular.

Max Lucado’s reading of these prophecies is standard U.S. Protestant. Skimming lightly over the question of what happens immediately before the End of Time as We Know It, he anticipates a literal resurrection of some sort of flesh—different from the flesh we know, as a tree is from a seed. He quotes Matthew 11:20-22 to support the belief (which I share) that non-Christians are judged by suitable standards. God knows the difference between the man who didn’t become a Christian because he didn’t want to give up lying and cheating, ad the one who didn’t become a Christian because he never knew that there was such a thing.

About several other questions of interpretation Lucado has to admit: We’re not wired to understand what the words given to us really mean. We’re told that we too, like Jesus, will eventually pass from mortal time into eternity. On one question he says, “I was once coun­seled to maintain a ‘reverent agnosticism’.”

Such humility is probably one part of Lucado’s popularity. Another part is that, as the publisher claims, he’s a “master storyteller” who illustrates each of his points with a story—a dramatic news report that needs to be preserved in history, or a family anecdote. Toward the end of the book Lucado describes a pet hamster getting lost in the piano: “I wondered, Do these thngs happen to other families? Or does God know that I need a conclusion for the book?” The hamster is saved from fatal misadventure in the piano in a way Lucado finds analogous to the way Christians believe we are saved in the Final Judgment.

There’s also a long study guide at the end. For novels, unless they’re old enough to need to be read in their historical context, a study guide is pretentious. For scholarly books, even Sunday School books, a study guide adds value. This one will have you searching the Scriptures, learning a few bits of Greek, and listening to classical church music.

Some Christians have a different vision of the Second Coming than the one this book illuminates (I do, but I like “reverent agnosticism”). They may still gain some understanding and will probably enjoy reading Lucado’s stories.