Who Restores All Things: Elijah or Jesus?
Mar 1, 2006 · Posted in ElijahHas this statement of Jesus ever bothered you:
Matthew 17:11 — Jesus answered and said to them, “Indeed, Elijah is coming first and will restore all things.
Mark 9:12 — Then He answered and told them, “Indeed, Elijah is coming first and restores all things. And how is it written concerning the Son of Man, that He must suffer many things and be treated with contempt?
Compare that to this verse about the nature of the time of Jesus return:
Acts 3:21 — whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.
Who really restores all things, Elijah or Jesus? According to many prophecies about the Millennium, we know that Jesus will himself do this at his coming. If Elijah does the same thing first then there is nothing left for Jesus to restore of course. So this is a problem. To solve it, some doubt that Jesus really meant Elijah, but instead perhaps was referring to himself in some mystic way. Myself, I always hesitate to say the Bible should be spiritualized that far (i.e., “Elijah” is not Elijah but a reference to himself, Jesus). The solution in difficult cases like this usually turns up after carefully looking at multiple Bible version since the Greek NT we have is not perfect but a patchwork of many incomplete fragments subjectively pieced together by each translator.
In this case, I looked and found that the Aramaic for these passages says something different than “restore all things”:
Matthew 17:11 (Lamsa) — Jesus answered and said to them, Elijah will come first, so that everything might be fulfilled.
Mark 9:12 (Lamsa) — He said to them, Elijah does come first, to prepare everything; and as it is written concerning the Son of man, that he will suffer much and be rejected.
That’s makes more sense doen’t it? As I state in my About page, if you always accept that the Bible means what it (originally) says, a good answer will present itself without resorting to spiritualizing the text away from its face value meanings (plural because as we saw in this case, there are often more than one possible face readings because of the manuscript variants or word ambiguities). This, then is a good example of the benefit of resisting the temptation to deviate from reading the Bible naturally.
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Update: What I predicted would not happen in 2007, 2008 and 2009, also applies to 2010, so read on: An Ipsos poll in 2006 said that 25% of adults believe it is at least somewhat likely that Jesus Christ will return to Earth in 2007. Among white evangelical Christian adults, 66% believed this. Yet three years later Jesus still has not returned. Want to know why Jesus did not come in 2007 and still won't come in 2010? Read Featured Article
Well tim, im glad your still adding articles here!
Good clarification ty!
I find it strange that the Almighty all knowing, seeing hearing God that created everything, and whose hand this world fits in, could not, by His Holy Spirit, put in our hands, a perfect bible!
Of course he could have, but the evidence says for whatever reason he obviously choose not to. We can ignore the evidence for this unpleasant reality and continue instead to choose to believe our preferred reality that we have an perfectly preserved, easy to understand Bible (KJV or otherwise).
Or, we can face reality and go deeper and discover why delivering a perfect Bible actually would damage our free will and thus God’s plan 6000 year plan giving men a choice of what to believe, who to serve and who to love first in their life and find out the results themselves of each. See my second book for details
Perhaps the reason we have a biblein whichwe have to dig in sometimes to find the truth is that
“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.” Proverbs 25:2