As I’ve recently noted, Advent Preface I speaks of Christ’s Second Coming — the first focus of Advent — as a time “when all at last is made manifest.” I’ll add another reason why the Second Coming involves full disclosure: because it is the end of faith. Faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). But neither faith nor hope will be necessary with the Second Coming “because, when Christ appears… we shall see Him as He is” (1 Jn 3:2). And if He is seen, there is no need for supportive “evidence.” The Second Coming is what is “hoped for,” the triumph of God and good.

Which means the threads of history have to be explained.

“Why does God let bad things happen to good people?” That’s been a perennial human question long before it became the motif of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s best seller. Joseph and his brothers wrestled with it. Job pondered it. Even the Apostles wondered about blind men and folks crushed by falling towers. It’s also been a bludgeon used against Judaism and Christianity. It’s the butt of all Voltaire’s Panglossian satires about “the best of all possible worlds.” Bad things happening to good people — the problem of theodicy — has long been a rock on which many people’s faith founders.

So, God’s “revelation of all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) is not something to be taken on faith. God’s revelation of “why” — his full disclosure at the Parousia — is not just an affirmation of God’s justice (for example, X was saved because of this and Y was damned because of that). No, full disclosure is removing faith from history. It is to know, not just to believe, that God wrote straight with crooked lines, that winding paths were made straight, valleys exalted and hills made low. It is to understand why, in the intersection between human freedom and God’s fidelity to His promise that He “works for the good of those who love Him” (Rm 8:28). It means showing clearly that in the end only good is creative; evil can only destroy, can only be an absence of. How God’s grace sought to renew and how human choice of evil ultimately sought to leave ripped open holes is the Second Coming’s display of Wisdom and Foolishness. It is the fulfillment of Wisdom’s word: “those who find me find life and receive favor from the Lord. But those who fail to find me harm themselves; all who hate me love death” (Prv 8:35-36), even eternal death. It is the affirmation that those who accept Folly’s invitation that “stolen water is sweet and food eaten in secret is delicious” find themselves as “guests… deep in the realm of the dead” (Prv 9:17-18). God’s making “all things manifest” is not just a vindication of His Justice or human foolishness. It is proof, not taken on faith, that not only was it just but it could not be otherwise. It is the indisputable confirmation that history did make sense no matter what human beings, in love with evil, tried to do with and to it.

Human beings are inherently oriented to the good; the will naturally homes in on the good. So powerful is that orientation that, even when humans freely choose evil, the consequence is that they are compelled to “switch the labels,” to call good evil and evil good. This is prominent in modern life: intrinsic evils are labelled as good, even “grace-filled” moments. So entrenched can such confusion become that people even pretend there can be no normative judgments in the area of morality, just “your good” and “my good,” not “the good.”

The Last Judgment clears away all that mental ballast and ethical gymnastics to call things by their rightful names: good as good, evil as evil. And not just to label them, but to show how, throughout history, God’s grace sought to save men by drawing them to the good, even when they resisted in the midst of their freedom. How that history came to be summed up in the end cannot be a matter of mere faith for eternity. It is a matter of seeing that “all at last is made manifest.”