THE KING IS COMING: It's Time to Prepare for the Return of Christ

Review

SECTION ONE John Bevere's *The King Is Coming* addresses a question most Christians quietly avoid: what does it mean to live now in light of the fact that history has a hard stop? Bevere, a prolific evangelical teacher known for books on the fear of God and spiritual authority, turns here to eschatology not as an academic exercise but as a pastoral provocation. His argument is straightforward — the return of Christ is not a distant abstraction but a near horizon that should reorganize every priority, every relationship, and every day. The book's audience is the ordinary believer who has heard about the Second Coming from the pulpit but has never felt its weight personally. Bevere wants that weight felt. Drawing on prophetic texts from Daniel and Revelation alongside the Olivet Discourse, he builds a picture of coming judgment that is meant to produce not fear but readiness — a reorientation of daily life toward accountability before the returning King. For readers who have drifted into a comfortable, culturally accommodated faith, this is a direct and intentional disruption. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Bevere's eschatological frame presupposes that the human person is a moral agent made for an eternal relationship with God — not a mechanism that winds down but an imago Dei who will stand before a personal King. This is not stated philosophically, but it is operative throughout: the book only makes sense if persons have genuine freedom and genuine dignity, since judgment without both would be incoherent. - **Fallen**: The book's diagnosis of the present moment is that believers have grown inattentive — absorbed in temporal comfort and cultural noise — rather than alert to the approaching end. This is concupiscence in one of its quieter forms: not dramatic sin but the disordered drift of attention away from what matters most. Bevere treats this inattentiveness as a spiritual emergency. - **Redeemed**: The corrective Bevere offers is not self-improvement but realignment — a turning of the whole person back toward the King through repentance, watchfulness, and obedience. This maps onto the CCMMP's Redeemed state insofar as it assumes the person can still respond to grace and form new patterns of attention and action before the door closes. - **Justice (adoration)**: The virtue most directly trained by this book is adoration — the proper worship owed to the one who is truly Lord. Bevere's repeated return to the majesty and finality of Christ's kingship asks the reader not merely to assent intellectually but to reorder affective loyalty, which is precisely what adoration as a moral virtue demands. - **Prudence (foresight)**: By making the Second Coming an operative pastoral reality rather than background theology, Bevere exercises readers in foresight — the integral virtue of anticipating future consequences and ordering present choices accordingly. A person trained by this book should carry a different temporal consciousness into ordinary decisions. SECTION THREE Ignatius of Loyola[^1] in the *Spiritual Exercises* builds the meditation on the Call of the King around the logic Bevere employs: a king of extraordinary liberality calls each subject to share in both his labor and his glory, and anyone who refuses deserves censure as mean-spirited.[^1] Bevere's evangelical invitation to readiness recapitulates this Ignatian structure, though without the ordered progression of the Exercises that moves the retreatant through discernment toward a stable election. Von Balthasar[^2], in his *Theology of History*, presses further: the action of the feast depends entirely on the appearance and character of the King himself, who impresses the mark of his own singularity on the ordinary men he calls.[^2] Where Bevere treats the King's return as a future event demanding present urgency, Balthasar insists the King's presence is already transformative for those who receive him — a pneumatological depth Bevere's framework does not fully develop. Benedict XVI[^3], in his catechesis on Zechariah's prophecy, names the King as the king of the *anawim* — those with interior freedom from the longing for domination — and this reframes Bevere's call to readiness: preparation for the King is not primarily strategic vigilance but the slow work of poverty of spirit.[^3] ## References [^1]: Ignatius of Loyola. (1548). *Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola* (L. J. Puhl, Trans.). Loyola Press. Second Week, Call of the King meditation, First and Second Points. [^2]: von Balthasar, H. U. (1964). *Teología de la Historia*. Guadarrama. p. 41. [^3]: Benedict XVI. (n.d.). *Wednesday audiences* [Vatican catechetical addresses]. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Catechesis on Zechariah 9:9–10.

✓ Strengths

• ✓Bevere centers the book on eschatological accountability — the coming judgment of Christ the King — which directly activates the virtue of adoration by reorienting the reader's deepest loyalties away from temporal comfort and toward the eternal sovereign.
• ✓The 'King is coming' frame is structurally Ignatian: it places the reader before a King who calls each person by name into labor and eventual glory, the same movement Ignatius builds into the Two Standards meditation of the Spiritual Exercises.
• ✓By treating the Second Coming not as background theology but as an imminent pastoral reality, Bevere trains foresight — the integral virtue of anticipating future consequences — in readers who might otherwise live as though this age will not end.
• ✓The book's call to personal readiness maps onto the CCMMP's Redeemed state: it assumes the person can respond to grace, form habits of vigilance, and cooperate with the work of sanctification rather than remaining passive before coming judgment.
• ✓Bevere's evangelical Protestant voice engages the same scriptural tradition as Catholic eschatology — Daniel, Revelation, the Olivet Discourse — making the book a useful ecumenical entry point for readers new to end-times formation.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Bevere writes from a charismatic evangelical framework that sometimes conflates personal prophetic certainty with doctrinal clarity; Catholic readers will need to distinguish his interpretive claims from the Church's defined eschatological teaching, particularly on the millennium and the timing of the rapture.
• ⚠The book's genre sits between self-help and prophecy commentary, and its anthropology is primarily voluntarist — it addresses the will and urgency without a robust account of the intellect, the passions, or the unity of body and soul that the CCMMP treats as foundational.
• ⚠No sustained engagement with the sacramental life or the Church as the means through which the person is made ready for the King's return; the preparation Bevere prescribes is heavily individualist, which creates a gap for Catholic readers who understand readiness as ecclesial and liturgical.