Forty days after Jesus rose from the dead He was taken up into heaven. Angels foretold that He would return and asked the men watching on the hill why they gazed up into heaven.
Patriarch Abraham knew that God could raise the dead and looked forward to the day that Messiah would reign on this earth.
The Old Testament prophets told the Lord would come, raise the dead, punish the wicked and reward the faithful. His reward was with Him they foretold.
The psalmist sang that the dead would awake, arise from sleep, and the Lord would bring reward to the faithful.
Jesus told us to pray to our Father to bring His will and His Kingdom to this earth.
Luke relates how the apostles went about preaching the resurrection of the dead and the return of Christ.
The writer of Hebrews told that the apostles taught the doctrine of baptism, laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, eternal judgment and to those that look for Him would He appear a second time to give salvation.
Peter wrote that the Christian has a living hope by the resurrection to be revealed when Christ returns.
John foretold that when He returns we shall see Him as He is.
Paul, in his epistles to the Church, wrote that his joy, his hope, his reward would be with Christ when He returned. He said he "groaned" in his present body, longing to be clothed with a new body at the resurrection. He called this the Blessed Hope!
This then was the good news, the hope, the preaching of the Word in the first century church.
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But then an old lie crept in. An old lie, but it was new in Christianity. It obscured the Blessed Hope. To some it entirely replaced that hope. Some heard that lie and thought Christ had already returned. Others thought it was the task of Christians to work and bring forth the Kingdom. Sadly, some heard that lie and forgot that Christ would return. That lie was now their hope.
The fire of Paul's Blessed Hope and been cooled. The fervor and heat of the early church had turned tepid by the lie. That lie is a veil covering the Blessed Hope. Diluting it, obscuring it, turning the focus from Christ's return and the resurrection of the dead to, like those men on the hill, gazing up into heaven.