Second Coming of Christ

For Dan Lafferty, the Second Coming of Christ is not simply a future religious expectation but the end point of a history divided between God’s children and the devil’s, and the purpose he assigns to his own life. After concluding that neither organized religion nor fundamentalism held the answers, he recast his faith around a personal conviction: he is Elijah, the forerunner charged with preparing the way for Christ’s return. The book presents this as Dan’s interpretation of events, not as an established revelation or prophecy.

A Forerunner’s Calling

Dan identifies with Elijah as Forerunner, whom he understands as the one who must prepare the way for Jesus Christ. He compares his role to John the Baptist’s preparation for Christ’s first coming and says he is certain he will identify Christ when he returns. In this account, the Second Coming depends on a human announcement: Dan believes he has been assigned to tell the righteous who their Father is at the proper moment, setting in motion the coming kingdom.

This claim gives Dan’s identity a prophetic shape. He does not describe himself merely as a believer awaiting a future event; he sees himself as an essential participant in its arrival. His expectation thus ties an immense cosmic conclusion to a specific personal duty, one he believes was appointed by God.

Six Thousand Years and the Big Party

Dan’s chronology divides sacred history into a long period of earthly disorder followed by a millennium of divine rule. He imagines Jesus Christ gathering his children for a thousand-year reign on earth, but first allowing the devil’s children to populate and govern the world for roughly six thousand years. The suffering endured by God’s children during that interval becomes, in Dan’s account, a kind of credit toward the coming celebration, The Big Party.

The end of that period is also a harvest. Dan connects the Second Coming to the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord and the Parable of the Wheat and Tares: Christ’s angels will gather out and kill those who do not belong to him, leaving the earth for the thousand-year reign. The same division organizes Dan’s view of humanity throughout the account. He believes people are inherently children of either God or the devil, and that love belongs to the former while greed, hatred, envy, and jealousy characterize the latter. In this framework, the promised kingdom is inseparable from the removal of those Dan classifies as evil.

Murder Recast as Prophecy

Dan retrospectively interprets his killing of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty as a foreshadowing of the harvest he expects. He explains the biblical reapers not as winged beings descending from heaven but as men already on earth who act as avenging angels after learning who their Father is and receiving instruction. The book thereby shows how Dan folds a past act of violence into his end-times account: he treats it as anticipation of the future destruction he believes scripture predicts.

That interpretation also shapes his understanding of his brother Ron’s attempt to strangle him with a towel in 1984. Dan reasons that the devil had disclosed his Elijah assignment to Ron before God disclosed it to Dan, and that Ron tried to kill him to prevent him from announcing Christ’s return. Dan says he believes the devil was trying to prolong his rule by stopping the one person whose failure, in Dan’s reading of the Bible, would prevent Christ from returning. This explanation is Dan’s later theory about the attack; the account does not present it as a verified motive.

The Sign in the Sky

A year or two after he was incarcerated, Dan says, he was pacing in his cell in the middle of the day when he heard a voice tell him to write down that the moon would shine from noon until nine. He did not understand the message at the time. Only years later, he says, did he decide it referred to the sign of Christ’s return: the moon would be visible in the sky from noon until nine at night.

Dan admits he does not know how such a sign would occur, but insists it would be unmistakable. The episode gives his expectation a concrete, if unexplained, marker and links a private prison experience to a future public event. His interpretation turns the Second Coming into both a cosmic promise and a personal commission: he expects to recognize the sign, identify Christ, and prepare the way for the reign he believes will follow.