As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Don’t tell anyone about the vision until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”
So the disciples questioned Him, “Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”
“Elijah is coming and will restore everything,” He replied. “But I tell you: Elijah has already come, and they didn’t recognize him. On the contrary, they did whatever they pleased to him. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.”
Then the disciples understood that He spoke to them about John the Baptist. (Matthew 17:9-13)
For the disciples, the descent from Mount Tabor must have been one of the most profound of their lives. They had just seen with their own eyes mysteries greater than the fire and cloud of Moses; they had heard with their own ears words clearer than those spoken to Elijah. They had understood that Jesus was the glory of God incarnate and the Word of God to be supremely listened to.
All of this — and the context for the vision was Jesus’s coming death. The disciples might have wanted to forget that, but Jesus didn’t allow them to. Even as they struggled to process what they had just seen, Jesus commanded them to keep it quiet until he was raised from the dead.
At this point, all the expectations the disciples nurtured for the messianic kingdom were in deep disarray. D.A. Carson is helpful in understanding the disciples’ question about Elijah “coming first.” It wasn’t just a chronological question; after all, they had seen Elijah on the mountain, and they recognized the concurrence between Elijah’s work and John’s. But it still seemed to them that things were out of order, because their modern-day Elijah had not restored everything!
“Elijah was expected to restore all things—to bring about a state of justice and true worship. If that were so, how could it be that Messiah would be killed in such a restored environment—killed, Jesus had told them only a week before, by elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law?” (Carson, Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew).
The disciples could see that, as Jesus had told them, the arrival of the kingdom of God was underway. The kingdom was here; the Messiah was here; the eschaton was advancing.
But they had expected all this to happen within a context of national revival, of restoration brought about by Elijah—which would do away with any backdrop of persecution and violence leading to Jesus’s death (or the disciples’, for that matter).
How could the Messiah be here, instituting his kingdom, and still be subject to persecution by the religious leaders of Judea?
I Am Going to Send You Elijah the Prophet
The disciples’ expectation about Elijah came from a powerful passage in Malachi, one that takes us back to the “day of the Lord” concept.
Here it is in full:
“For indeed, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, when all the arrogant and everyone who commits wickedness will become stubble. The coming day will consume them,” says the LORD of Hosts, “not leaving them root or branches. But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go out and playfully jump like calves from the stall. You will trample the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day I am preparing,” says the LORD of Hosts.
“Remember the instruction of Moses My servant, the statutes and ordinances I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Look, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome Day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise, I will come and strike the land with a curse.” (Malachi 4:1-6)
Before the coming of the Messiah, the Jewish people expected Elijah the prophet to return and spark a national revival. Malachi explained this as “turning the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” When fathers and children turn against one another, the result is covenantal rupture, dissolution, and civil war. It is the breakdown of a people. The opposite of these things is restoration. Thus Malachi’s promise was understood as Elijah coming to “restore all things,” to bring national revival as the children return to the fathers (the law and the prophets) and the fathers to the children (the new work of God in the world through the messiah).
When Jesus connected John the Baptist to this work of resurrection, the disciples understood that this was exactly what John had come to do. We can see this too: in fact, laying the text of Matthew 3 over the text of Malachi 4 shows abundant resonance between the two. Both spoke of a consuming fire of judgment, of trees threatened with being cut down, and with stubble (aka chaff) subject to burning.
John called the people to repentance and renewed covenant commitment. He also proclaimed the coming of the Messiah and warned the religious leaders of the day that Malachi’s “coming day of consuming” was at hand:
When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to the place of his baptism, he said to them, “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore produce fruit consistent with repentance. And don’t presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that God is able to raise up children for Abraham from these stones! Even now the ax is ready to strike the root of the trees! Therefore, every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but the One who is coming after me is more powerful than I. I am not worthy to remove His sandals. He Himself will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing shovel is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor and gather His wheat into the barn. But the chaff He will burn up with fire that never goes out.” (Matthew 3:7-12)
The mention of Moses in Malachi 4 is also interesting, as Moses and Elijah appeared together on the mountain. Both Jesus and John came preaching faithfulness to Moses. But in this dawn of the messianic age, perhaps the most pertinent of Moses’s commands was this one: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him. (Deuteronomy 18:15, emphasis mine)
The End Has Already Begun
For the disciples, the meaning of all this was clear: the eschaton had already begun. Not only were the “end times” here, they were much further advanced than anyone had realized. Elijah had already come, the restoration had already taken place, and the Messiah was already riding toward Jerusalem — with them in his train.
At the same time, Jesus’s answer pointed not only to the past but also to the future. While clearly identifying John the Baptist as the Elijah of Malachi’s prophecy, he answered, “Elijah is coming and will restore everything.” These are future-tense statements, and they indicate something the disciples were just beginning to realize — that the “day of the Lord” would unfold in stages; that the Messiah’s coming would not be a one-time event but would happen over a long period of time.
This period would be punctuated at the beginning and end by the “appearing/presence” of the Lord, but the whole stage in between would be a ”coming” as well: the coming of the kingdom of God and the initial fulfilment of his promises.
Jesus affirmed that Elijah still has a work to do. He will come, and he will do his work, before the final end. But he also affirmed that Elijah has already come, and the work of Elijah is underway.
For us, this means what it meant for the disciples: The day is far spent. The time is already further than we think.
Living in the Coming Day
Throughout Christian history, many generations have been convinced that Christ would return in their time. The signs were all there! In our own day, the “end times” are a hot topic again. But I believe that far too much focus has been placed on the Antichrist, or on watching for natural disasters, political evils, or other signs of the end. The eschaton is ultimately about none of these: it is about Christ. That’s why the book of Revelation is called, not “The End of the World,” but “The Revelation of Jesus Christ.” And let me remind you again that the word “revelation” (Greek apocalypse) literally means “unveiling.”
In a very real sense, Jesus is not gone; he is here with us. We aren’t waiting for him to “come back” but to be revealed, unveiled, so that we see him clearly once again, just as the disciples saw him speaking with Moses and Elijah and shining with the light of the sun.
So let me ask us: How does it change our lives if we understand that we are not waiting for the coming of the kingdom but living in it? Not in the fully arrived kingdom, no, but in its coming, in a period of active arrival. We are part of its coming, in fact. When we pray “your kingdom come,” we are not asking for something that happens apart from us, but for the unobstructed progress of a project in which we are intimately involved. And how does it change our prayers, our actions, and our identity if we are not waiting for Jesus to return from some faraway place but to be revealed where he already is—in our midst?
From the time of Jesus on, the church has known itself to be living in the “already-not-yet” eschaton, the latter days of the world. We have known that Jesus is in heaven, at the right hand of the Father, and yet he is right here, with us, wherever two or three gather in his name. We have known that Jesus came to fulfill the promises of God, and that he is fulfilling them, and yet that we still need patient endurance and faith to see all this through to the end.
At times it can seem like everything in life is conspiring against this hope — much like Peter, James, and John, faced with Jesus’s crucifixion and death and the stone rolled up to close off his soldier-guarded tomb, must have wondered if the shining vision they saw on Mount Tabor was really real, really faithful, really true.
Yet what Jesus told his disciples when he revealed that John the Baptist was the Elijah “who is to come” is true for us too. The apostle Paul, who delved deeply into all these things, added his own voice to the call of the last days:
And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. (Romans 13:11-12a, NKJV)
It was true for Paul’s generation. It has only grown truer for us.
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This is Part 257 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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