ast Friday, in a cemetery north of Philadelphia, off Route 1, across from a Radisson, around the corner from a Texaco station and behind a Dunkin’ Donuts—we buried my best friend from the Miami Beach days. He was 43 years old. Breast cancer.

As I stood there looking at the quiet casket (traffic from Route 1 irreverently loud in the background), I thought about all that George Zifferblatt and I had done together as teenagers: the boating, the spearfishing, the lobsterpoaching, the wild boar hunting (I know, a wild boar hunter doesn’t quite fit my nerdy image). And now for all these things (and so much more) to climax, to converge, and to end at a single point, a hole in the ground behind a Dunkin’ Donuts? It makes no sense.

Yet because so much of the world does make sense, irrevocably so, in that it’s logical, rational, purposeful (the sun gives us light and heat, plants make air, gravity holds us to the earth, the heart pumps blood), it’s the height of absurdity for human life (the beneficiary of all these sensible, logical, and purposeful natural phenomena) to end in such meaninglessness. How can so many of the individual and finite things of nature—in and of themselves replete with points and opulent with purpose—so beautifully, precisely, and artfully climax into nothing more than a hole behind Dunkin’ Donuts?

They can’t; or at least they’re not supposed to. Which is why standing there I was struck again by just how fundamental the Second Coming is. Without it and the hope it contains (the resurrection of our bodies into an immortal sinless existence) all that we have believed, lived for, and promulgated as Seventh-day Adventists crumbles into the dust of lies.

The Second Coming isn’t the epilogue, the appendix, or the afterword of the sad story that we all find ourselves written into as tragic characters who always die off; the Second Coming is, instead, the raison d’être of all the pages, all the scenes, all the dialogues and transitions and chapters and sentences and commas and periods that precede it. Without it, the story never ends but just goes on and on, one miserable scene after another, like a long and trashy novel. Apart from the hope that Christ’s return offers, life is, as Shakespeare wrote, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I find it fascinating too that the Second Coming and the resurrection of the dead that attends it are not truths that one can learn from natural law. They are a priori to nothing. These are not promises that inductive reasoning can derive from axioms (and they certainly aren’t axioms themselves). The stars at night don’t herald in letters of fire the promise of eternal life. The waves don’t hint at promises of resurrection. The birds chirping outside our bedroom windows don’t express this truth (and, in fact, without it they would be singing our dirges). Nothing in nature, history, or logic portends or even hints at it. On the contrary, in and of themselves, nature and history tell us that when we die we turn into nothing but carbon and dust; the closest we’ll come to life again is when we fertilize a tree or feed the bacteria that dissolve our corpses.

Instead, I know about the Second Coming only because I’ve been told about it. I believe what I’ve been told about the Second Coming because I believe what I’ve been told about the first. “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Cor. 15:12). The surety of Jesus’ second advent rests with the surety of His first; His resurrection contains the promise of ours. Without the Second Coming, the first was an empty gesture, an exercise in futility. Only the Second Coming validates the cross; without His return, Christ hung there in vain.

Thus as sure as we are that Christ died for our sins at the First Advent is as sure as we can be that He will resurrect us to life at the second. Otherwise all that we believe in, teach about, and hope for will end in nothing, at least nothing more than a hole behind Dunkin’ Donuts.

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Clifford Goldstein is the editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.