Are we desperate for him to come — as a bride longing for her beloved, with a passion that cannot be articulated (Song of Solomon) — or are we merely in a state of expecting him to come back one day? It’s worth asking honestly, because Scripture describes the coming of Christ, both times, as an event the enemy of our souls could see was certain but could never see coming.
“But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night” (2 Peter 3:10; 1 Thess 5:2). This is another dreadful day Satan knows is coming and cannot prevent. I believe the reason he cannot prevent it is the same reason he could not prevent the first coming of Christ — a reason hidden in what Paul calls “the hidden wisdom… which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:7–8).
The pattern is this: God pronounces judgment against the enemy, names the certainty of it, and conceals the timing and the means. “The seed of the woman shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15). Satan knew, from that moment, that his defeat was decreed. What he did not know — could not know — was when, where, or how. The same pattern may be present again. He knows the day of the Lord is coming, but Scripture gives us no indication that he knows when it will come, just as his efforts the first time could neither locate nor stop what he knew was coming for him.
How he tried to stop the first coming — and failed
When the enemy does not know which vessel carries the promise, his strategy is elimination: remove every possible candidate. This is why Pharaoh ordered the death of every male Hebrew child in Moses’s generation (Exodus 1:22), and why Herod, centuries later, murdered the infants of Bethlehem trying to catch the one child the prophets had spoken of (Matthew 2:16). Between the two, the killing never really stopped — Cain was moved to murder Abel almost as soon as the judgment in Eden was spoken (John 8:44), and I believe the corruption of the antediluvian world, the raising of Nimrod, and the strange unions producing giants and Nephilim, were all part of the same long campaign: either corrupt the holy line beyond recognition, or eliminate it outright.
This was not merely a mystery to the adversary — it was a mystery into which prophets searched and angels desired to look. Peter tells us the prophets “searched diligently” concerning the salvation that was coming, and that these are “things the angels desire to look into” (1 Peter 1:10–12). Paul can therefore speak of Christ as “seen of angels” (1 Tim 3:16). Heaven itself watched as the Word was made flesh, awed at what it beheld — while the powers opposed to God, for all their scheming, did not comprehend what was actually unfolding in front of them.
None of it worked. “The fulness of the time” came (Gal 4:4), and the day star, the hidden wisdom, arose in a manner the enemy was not watching for and would not have recognized if he had been. “Had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8) — the very act meant to destroy the Savior became the means of his own undoing.
The verdict on that strategy
Scripture doesn’t leave this as an open question — it states the outcome as accomplished fact. Christ, “blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us… nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Col 2:14–15). “Through death [he] destroyed him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb 2:14).
He bound the strong man and spoiled his house (Matt 12:29); he took the kingdom by force (Matt 11:12); he now holds the keys of death and hell (Rev 1:18). The sting of death was sin (1 Cor 15:56), and “in the flesh of his Son, God condemned sin” (Rom 8:3) — so that we can ask, with something like triumph in our voice, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Cor 15:55). A ransom was found (Job 33:24; 1 Tim 2:6; Mark 10:45). The strategy of elimination met total, decisive failure.
A different problem the second time
Here I want to be clear about where I’m moving from what Scripture explicitly states into an interpretive possibility of my own. The first time, there was a traceable line — a bloodline, a family, eventually a town and a manger — something narrow enough to attack directly.
This time there is no single thread to sever; the promise now rests on everyone who is in Christ, scattered across every nation. If the first coming exposed the futility of trying to destroy the promised Seed by force, perhaps the second presents the adversary with a different kind of problem — not preventing the event, since elimination is no longer an available strategy, but obscuring its meaning after the fact.
I think this is part of why Scripture describes Satan as the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2), and it is no accident that so many belief systems instinctively broadcast their prayers upward into that same atmosphere, sensing, perhaps, where their god resides. I suspect this is also why the modern imagination has been so thoroughly prepared with an “alien” explanation for unexplained disappearances. If the sudden removal of God’s people from the earth takes place “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15:52), it is not hard to imagine a world already conditioned by that narrative reaching for it as an explanation. What Scripture calls a gathering to Christ could be presented instead as an abduction.
The futility, restated
But notice: even this would not be a strategy that works — it would only manage appearances after the fact. It cannot prevent the event, only mislabel it. Paul tells us “the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel… and we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thess 4:16–17). Satan occupies the air, but occupying a space is not the same as controlling it. Scripture gives us no reason to suppose he will know the moment it happens. If total, violence-backed effort — the murder of countless children across two millennia — could not stop the first coming, a narrative built to explain away the second coming after the fact was never going to stop that one either.
So — are we desperate, or merely expecting?
This is where the question I opened with actually matters. If the enemy’s every effort, past and present, amounts to nothing more than damage control around a defeat he cannot avert, then our posture toward Christ’s return shouldn’t be anxious watchfulness over whether it will happen. That much was settled at the cross. The only live question left is ours: do we want him to come? “And every man that hath this hope in him purifies himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). “Little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming” (1 John 2:28). Scripture speaks of those who “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city” (Heb 11:16) — and of Christ himself, “not ashamed to call them brethren” (Heb 2:11).
The enemy lost the decisive battle at the cross. Another day is coming when that victory will be manifested openly before the eyes of the world. He cannot prevent it. He cannot know its hour. The only thing left undecided is how we wait for it.
Note: The interpretive connection drawn between Satan’s failed strategy at the incarnation and his posture toward the second coming — including the reading of Genesis 3:15, the “prince of the power of the air,” and the alien-explanation suggestion — is my own reading, offered for reflection rather than settled doctrine. I’d encourage you to weigh it against the citations given.