The goings-on that are being proposed on this thread for the period between the ascension and AD 70 (and the so far unspecified date of a fall of Rome) are becoming an esoteric farrago eclipsing anything in The Da Vinci Code - and it’s all unseen! Just like the Mormons in their assertions that Christ went into the heavenly sanctuary on a genealogical field trip - if it can’t be seen, and has no bearing whatsoever on our lives as lived now, anyone can bring their own theories about the NT data, the capacity of which to be manipulated to fit the text is just about limitless. Well, not limitless - because a much simpler interpretation of the data is at hand, making better sense of all the key events, and having a far greater and more practical bearing on our lives as lived now - and on lives as they were lived by 1st century believers.

The ‘reign’ of Jesus, in the sense that it means anything at all, began at his ascension. As danutz has rightly been saying of different ways of describing God in different contexts, ‘at God’s right hand’ is a metaphor - not a literal statement. (It’s one of the few things I can agree with him about). The metaphor means the rule of Jesus.The phrase ‘at God’s right hand’ signifies authority and power - it’s not a distinction between God’s reign and Jesus’s reign. Jesus received that authority well in advance of AD 70, and delegated it to his disciples well before the fall of Jerusalem, when he said: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" and commanded them to go and make disciples of all nations. The substance of the metaphor, and the content of the command were illustrated and brought powerfully into effect at Pentecost and in the ensuing narrative. 

Again, I proffer a simple alternative to an increasingly esoteric eschatology: the reign of Jesus began at his ascension. It was in the first place not a worldly reign, but signified his victory over sin and death - and new life through the outpoured Spirit. This was not a metaphor, pace danutz. It was the renewing life of God made available to all who believe. It was a real enough reign to bring the early church into conflict with Rome - and gloriously to survive the fiercest of persecutions over a period of 300 years.

The outpoured Spirit was the guarantee not just of the church’s survival, but its amazing growth throughout the known world (and beyond - Thomas being reputed to have taken the gospel to India, and other apostles to equally far-flung places). There didn’t need to be a separate eschatological event focusing on the fall of Jerusalem. That was simply the fulfilment of Jesus’s prophetic warnings about armed resistance to Rome, and the rather muted response to its occurrence in history by the church suggests that was the case. The outpoured Spirit was the guarantee and evidence of Jesus’s victory - achieved primarily through the cross - and availing for the whole world, in fulfilment of the whole thrust of the OT narrative as well as specific prophetic predictions, and as understood, with a few false starts, and help from the Holy Spirit with a few supernatural events, by the early disciples in Acts.

If there must be an eschatological significance attached to the fall of Jerusalem to make sense of the few otherwise contradictory statements in the gospels, and the primary significance (but not the exclusive significance) of Matthew 24 and its parallels, so be it. But that event is the tail-end charlie of the immediate NT story (albeit ‘the end of the world’ to the Jews: metaphor again!) - not the inauguration of a brave new world. That had taken place some 40 years before.

The ascension and outpoured Spirit, as part of a nexus including the death and resurrection of Jesus, to which they attested, introduced a kingdom which is with us today - making the kingdom parables as relevant to us as they were to the 1st century believers. The Spirit expresses the reality of this kingdom by being a ‘deposit’ of a payment-in-full which is yet to come - and will remain yet to come until Jesus’s return - in whatever way that is to be expressed.

There needs to be a distinction between the ‘reign’ of worldly empires which had been seen in the pagan nations which oppressed Israel, and which were aped in the misguided imitation kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the ‘reign’ of Jesus expressed through the powerful and diverse workings of the Holy Spirit - which is how it works to this day. In this sense the expressions of the Spirit in and through us, described as the ‘new creation’ and ‘the kingdom’, are one and the same. This is how it has been throughout church history - despite the distracting power struggles which have hi-jacked and dominated the history books to the exclusion of the real story, which was quietly taking place in the background all the time.

For sure, the time will come when ‘the reign’ of Jesus is fully expressed across the earth - when the kingdom is handed over to the Father (metaphor again), and God will be all in all, an occurrence not taking place before the return of Jesus. But that kingdom will look quite different from any of the worldly variants - whose character Jesus decisively rejected in the wilderness temptations, and when he began to model in his earthly ministry.

So is Hebrews 9:28 a second coming of Jesus to earth? The logic of Andrew’s, and apparently Lloyd’s interpretation (and some of the rather more extreme preterists) says no. Based on a simpler and rather traditional interpretation of all the key events of Jesus’s history, with a sprinkling of preterism thrown in for good measure, it is.