CHARLO, New Brunswick, September 10, 2023 – A good percentage of professing Christians, particularly American evangelicals, have jumped on the “Jesus is coming back soon!” bandwagon. They declare themselves “rapture-ready” and eager to join Jesus in the clouds as soon as he makes his appearance.

The only problem is that Jesus is likely not coming back any time soon. And for good reason. Christianity still makes up the lion’s share of believers in America (close to 65% of the population). The percentage of believers is mostly lower in other parts of former Christendom, but still hovers just above or below the 50% mark. While these percentages are low compared to 100 years ago, when nearly 100% of people in Christian nations claimed to be Christian, they still represent nearly one-third of the world’s population.

That’s good right?

I think it’s good.

But the people longing for Jesus to come back soon might not agree with me. Because, you see, as long as nearly one-third of the people on Earth claim to be Christian, Jesus likely won’t come back.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus says: When the son of man returns, will he find faith on Earth? This is a rhetorical question that implies Jesus won’t find any faith (or not much faith) when he comes back in his glorified flesh. But surely among the more than 2 billion souls in the world today who count themselves Christian, there must be some who actually have what Jesus calls “faith”. I mean, even if only 1 per cent of the 2 billion has the kind of faith that gets Jesus’ seal of approval, that would still be 20 million souls. Ten per cent would be 200 million. Would Jesus dismiss 20-200 million souls as negligible? That’s a rhetorical question, too, and the answer is also clearly “no”.

So here’s the conundrum: People want Jesus to come back soon, but in order for him to come back, the scripture about the radical lack of faith needs to be fulfilled. Remember that Paul also talked about a “falling away” that would happen before believers would be “caught up in the cloud” with Jesus. If the generational trend of ~10% fewer believers with each successive generation continues, it will be at least another 100 years before the Christian percentage of even America’s population reaches what could reasonably be called critical or negligible numbers. Meanwhile, Christianity is actually expanding elsewhere in the world and is the Number One religion that people of other belief systems convert to, if and when they do convert.

Mind you, a lot of things can happen to reduce the number of believers faster than the current trend indicates. War, famine, disease, natural disasters, etc., could put an unanticipated dent in the Christian population. So could outlawing Christianity, which is not as farfetched as it sounds. Several countries in the world today forbid Christian evangelizing or church attendance, and murmurings about the Bible being “hate speech” are growing louder and louder in parts of former Christendom, perhaps leading to a point where the Bible is outlawed altogether in those areas. Not to mention that artificial intelligence has proposed rewriting the Bible to be more “inclusive” (I’m guessing the rewriting has already been done) and China has produced a version of scripture that’s been sanitized for communist sensibilities. None of this bodes well for the long-term outlook on faith as modeled by Jesus, even if in the short-term there is a slight bump in numbers before the long, inevitable, and prophesied decline.

But such a decline is still decades away if we go by the percentages and numbers and trends as they present themselves today. Again, there could be “rapid intensification” (to borrow a meteorological term) of the decline in Christianity or there could be a slowing down of the decline. Lots of factors in play here. What is known, however, is that scripture cannot be undone, and that Jesus prophesied a near total absence of faith and Paul a radical reduction in faith as an unmistakable sign that would occur prior to Jesus’ return. With our 2-billion-plus self-professed Christians, we are obviously nowhere near that state of being, and I say THANK GOD FOR THAT, as a world bereft of believers will be so spiritually toxic, it will literally unleash Hell on Earth. Things might seem bad now in comparison to what they were a few decades ago, but they’re nowhere near as bad as Noah’s day or Lot’s day. They’re not yet Hell on Earth. Not yet, anyway.

So the Good News is that there’s still time for people to hear God’s Word and convert, and still time for those who have strayed off the path to get back on it. The bad news, for some, is that Jesus is very likely not coming back any time soon. Certainly, we need to remember that we can’t know the exact time when he’ll come back and that he told us outright he’d come when we least expect him, so anything’s possible in that regard. However, he also told us to watch for certain signs, one of the chief ones being a catastrophic decline in faith to the point of seeming non-existence. We are not there yet. We will get there some day (although I promise you, none of us will want to be on Earth when that happens, things will be so bad for believers), but we’re not there yet.

Thank God, we’re not there yet.