When Will Jesus Return? Can We Know the Year?
Someone always has a date. A book with a year in the title, a chart of sevens landing on next autumn, a video with a countdown clock in the corner. Every one of them has been wrong.
So: when will Jesus return? Scripture does not say. No year, no month, no date for the second coming appears anywhere in it — and Matthew 24:36 goes further than silence, saying the day and hour are unknown even to the angels of heaven. That is not a gap somebody forgot to fill. It is a withholding, and it is deliberate.
But the same books that withhold the date tell you to read the season. Two claims, not one — and most arguments you'll find online carry only half.
When will Jesus return — the date Scripture declines to give
Start with the sentence everyone quotes, and read all of it: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." — Matthew 24:36
Then read the one people quote less, because it is harder on the date-hunters. When the disciples asked the risen Christ about restoring the kingdom, the answer was flatter still: "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power." — Acts 1:7
That verse matters more than its reputation. The Greek is chronous ē kairous — not two categories but a stock pair, and doubling widens the refusal rather than narrowing it. Whatever door Matthew 24:36 leaves ajar at day and hour, Acts 1:7 pushes shut.
Notice what follows the withholding. Not a riddle, not a cipher: a command. "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come." — Matthew 24:42. Two verses on, the Son of man arrives in an hour you think not — strange counsel for people meant to calculate. A timing question goes in, a readiness answer comes back.
The three hardest words in the verse
Most English Bibles today have something in Matthew 24:36 that the King James does not: nor the Son.
That is not a translator's liberty but a genuine split in the manuscripts. The phrase stands in the earliest Alexandrian and Western witnesses and in every major critical edition, and is absent from the Byzantine tradition and the Textus Receptus the KJV used. In Mark 13:32 it stands in every major stream, effectively undisputed.
Which way did the change run? Text critics reason from difficulty. A scribe copying a line that says the Son of God does not know something has an obvious motive to drop it. Nobody has a motive to insert it, and the harder reading is usually older.
The Church has answered that difficulty in more than one way. Some read it through Philippians 2:7 — the Son, having emptied himself, not exercising divine omniscience on earth. Some read it through the two natures: not known to him as man, known to him as God. Others hear "to know" in its Semitic sense of to make known, making the saying about authority to disclose.
Day 4 does not arbitrate that. Honest believers have landed in different places for seventeen centuries. But whichever answer you take, the same conclusion falls out: the information was withheld from those best positioned to hold it. You are not the exception.
The half of the argument that isn't fantasy
This is where confident writing errs in the other direction, treating anyone who watches the horizon as a crank. The season texts are real, and not few.
Paul opens 1 Thessalonians 5 with "the times and the seasons" and says his readers need nothing written about it, since they already know the day comes like a thief in the night. Then verse 4: "But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief."
That verse is genuinely contested. One reading takes it as a promise of advance recognition — believers will see it coming as the world will not. The other reads it morally, pointing to the surrounding sentences about light and darkness, sleeping and waking, sober and drunk: the day doesn't ambush you because you were never asleep, not because you had the date. Most commentators go the second way, and neither requires a calendar.
Luke 21:28 tells you to look up when these things begin to come to pass, and Matthew 16:2–3 rebukes men who read the face of the sky but not the signs of the times — though those verses are missing from several of the oldest manuscripts. Together they sustain something modest and real: a posture of attention. Discerning that a season is heavy is not the same act as naming a year, and Scripture never treats the first as a step toward the second. What "signs" claims can bear belongs to are we living in the end times.
The Feast of Trumpets claim, chased to its source
You'll meet this one everywhere: "the day and hour no one knows" was a known Jewish nickname for the Feast of Trumpets, so Jesus was not concealing the timing — he was naming the feast.
The calendar fact underneath it is genuine. On the lunar reckoning the rabbinic calendar inherited, Trumpets is the one appointed time that opens on day one of its month — and day one could not be settled ahead, because the month turned only when the court in Jerusalem accepted testimony that the new crescent had been seen. Distant communities hedged by keeping both candidate days.
What is not attested is the nickname. The traditional names are Yom Teruah and Yom HaZikaron. No ancient source — not the Mishnah, not the Talmud, not Qumran, not Josephus — calls this feast "the day and hour no one knows." The supporting appeal to Psalm 81:3, reading keseh as concealed, meets an awkward fact: most modern translations render it full moon, the least hidden the moon ever gets. And the arithmetic settles less than either camp hopes. That witness uncertainty was forty-eight hours wide, once a year, while the question you came here with is centuries wide.
The trumpet imagery is a separate argument and a fairer one. The last trump of 1 Corinthians 15:52 and the trump of God in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 make the association feel apt, and there is no call to sneer at it — just don't buy resonance while being told you are buying an ancient idiom. Feast of Trumpets vs Rosh Hashanah takes up the naming question.
This is the exact line Day 4 sits on. The app marks the Day of Trumpets on its Feasts screen beside your everyday date — but by the 364-day reckoning counted from the March equinox, not the rabbinic first of Tishrei, and the two rarely coincide. Whether that reckoning was ever the Temple's is a question scholars still weigh, and Day 4 does not claim to settle it. What it will never do is name a year. A calendar keeps appointed times, not forecasts.
The wait is built into the stories
Read the parables of the return back to back and one shape repeats. The delay is never the problem the story is trying to solve. It is the setting.
The bridegroom is late and the ten waiting fall asleep — "While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept." — Matthew 25:5. The master of the house leaves no arrival time, which is why the porter is set to watch (Mark 13:34–35). Even the bad servant acts on an interval: "My lord delayeth his coming." — Matthew 24:48. Take the delay out and nothing is left standing.
Then the letter that meets the objection head on. By the time 2 Peter was circulating, people were asking where the promise had gone, and the reply offers no revised timetable. It describes God's patience instead — "not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." — 2 Peter 3:9. The delay has a purpose, and the purpose is other people.
That reframes what the missing date is for. Had a year been printed, waiting would be a countdown, and a countdown is mostly endurance. What you are handed instead is a wait with no visible edge, asking something harder and more ordinary. The long history of attempts to close that gap with sums is in why end-times date predictions keep failing, and the passage most of them lean on in the seventy weeks of Daniel.
Common questions
Does the Bible give a date for the second coming?
No. Not a year, not a month, not a day. Matthew 24:36 states the day and hour are unknown to the angels and to the Son. Acts 1:7 puts the times and seasons in the Father's own authority. Prophetic passages give sequences, conditions and durations — but never an anchor date to count from, which is what a calculation needs.
Does "no one knows the day or the hour" rule out knowing the season?
Not by itself. The phrase is narrow — day and hour — and Paul writes to the Thessalonians about times and seasons without rebuke. Acts 1:7 reaches further, refusing the whole category rather than one unit of it. The honest summary: discerning a season is permitted and expected, but converting that discernment into a year has no scriptural warrant.
Is the "day no man knows" really a nickname for the Feast of Trumpets?
The uncertainty behind it is real. The month began on witness testimony to the new crescent, so Trumpets could open on either of two days. The nickname is not attested — no ancient source calls the feast "the day and hour no one knows," and the names on record are Yom Teruah and Yom HaZikaron. Even granted, it names a day of the year, never a year.
Is it wrong to try to calculate the year?
Scripture never treats the wanting as the problem. The question was put to Jesus directly more than once, and each time he answered — just not with a number. What came back described conduct: watch, be ready, you shall be witnesses. That is consistent enough to read as instruction rather than evasion. A fair test on your own reckoning is whether it leaves you steadier and more attentive to the people in front of you, or whether it needs the year to be right to hold.
Sitting with the answer
The likeliest reason you searched this is not curiosity about eschatology. Something is wrong and you would like to know how long. Fair thing to want, and the withholding can feel like a door shut in your face.
But read it once more with the emphasis moved. No one knows — not the angels, not, in some real sense, the Son. You are in good company in your not-knowing. And the command that follows isn't calculate. It's watch — what you do when you expect someone you love and cannot say what hour the road will show them.
Nobody waiting like that keeps a spreadsheet. They keep the house ready and they keep listening for the gate. You can begin this afternoon, in a week with nothing prophetic about it, which is precisely where the stories put it.
