6 “Coming In The Clouds of Heaven” …and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory (Matthew 24:30b).
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oes God come down to planet earth? Yes, He does, if we are to believe what the writers of the Bible tell us. It might be well here to consider that all through the Bible God is depicted as coming down, descending, coming in the clouds, and coming in various ways both at times of salvation and at times of judgment. Various figures of speech are used to depict God’s making His judgments known to man. It is not unlikely that the writers of the New Testament used the same kind of language in depicting the same things. In the passage under consideration at the moment, Jesus is pictured as “coming in the clouds of heaven.” We have seen in the previous section of this book that the coming of Christ in Matthew 24:30 was His coming in revelation of His power and majesty and kingdom at the time Jerusalem was destroyed in A.D. 70. He is depicted here as “coming in the clouds of heaven.” The Jewish mind understood this kind of language in the sense it was written. We need to do so also. The language. does not mean those things happened in a literal and naturalistic way. We want to discuss this terminology in order to better understand how language like this was used in the Bible, and what it means here. Genesis 37:5–11 (especially verse 9) explains the language concerning the sun, the moon, the stars, etc., as we discussed previously. In this case in Matthew 24 the reference is to Israel. We find help in interpreting such New Testament passages by going back to the Old Testament where these things are first mentioned.
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