He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. The Advent season - the weeks before Christmas - is traditionally a time to meditate on Christ's promised return - the Second Coming.
The Old Testament prophets foretold a day, the Day of the Lord, when God and his Messiah would come to purify and judge the earth. It would be a time both of hope and distress. "Who can stand when he appears?" asked Malachi (3:2). "The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes," said Joel (2:31).
So much for the bad news. Now the good news. The good news (or rather the Good News) is that the prophecies were, partly at least, misunderstood. The cataclysmic event in the distant future has already taken place. It took place in Judea and in Galilee 2000 years ago. The prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus - even, in one sense, the final judgment: "Now is the judgment of the world." (John 12:31)
God never changes, and it often happens that things seen in the old order of things shine out in Jesus, and then are reflected in our own lives, as well as being something expected in the future. Jesus' words reflect this - "the time is coming, and now is" - God's kingdom and final victory over sin were realized in him, but the harvest lay too in the future. So our Nicene Creed speaks of two comings: he came down from heaven, and he will come again in glory.
Jesus said that in this second coming, the kingdom would come "like a thief in the night" (Mat 24:23 - the precise phrase comes from Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians (5:2)). This hasn't stopped Christians, from the church in Thessalonika onwards, trying to second-guess him. Second-century Gnostics, thirteenth-century Cathars, sixteenth-century Anabaptists and nineteenth-century Adventists (including the Plymouth Brethren, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons) all saw signs in the world around them that "the end was nigh". People have scanned the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to John, written as a comfort to Christians under persecution, as though it were a recipe book for predicting the future in minute detail.
The coming will be a time of glory, and a time of judgment. We sometimes think too much about the judgment and too little about the glory! And we are distracted by the mediæval paintings and sculptures (as above the west door of the Münster here in Berne) to imagine that our lives will only be weighed by God at the Second Coming, whereas we are always being tested, even during life, against God's eternal goodness. Jesus' words (to the penitent thief, for example, "today you will be with me in paradise", or in the story of the rich man and Lazarus) imply that the picture in the sculptures of a great court scene is a bit of an over-simplification.
The word "doom" has lost its original meaning of "judgment" (though we still use the verb, to deem, and in the Isle of Man, judges are called deemsters). But it still carries the pessimistic idea of "doom and gloom" - the future is not a bed of roses. This is totally contrary to the hope that underlies the Gospel. The Gospel is the Good News of God's forgiveness. If doom means we are to be judged for every bad thing that we have done, that is Bad News!
Nevertheless we do believe that we shall be judged. God's judgment is unlikely to be like any kind of human judgment that we know. Theologians talk about us becoming aware of our own condition in relation to God. Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats, and his references to hell-fire (not a fire to torment people, note, but just a fire for burning up rubbish!) imply that not all will pass the test. But we know that "God wants all of us to be saved" (1 Tim 2:4). The Bible refers to those who follow Jesus as "those who are being saved" - we are not there yet, but we are on the way - or the Way!
HD