Why I Preach the Second Coming
The epistles of Paul are filled with the pernicious influence of apocalyptic, Jewish fictions and the crass concept the Apostle had of the kingdom of Christ. Page after page is filled with proof that he expected the Lord to come in his day and was sorely mistaken, making that confession at the close of his writings and turning his attention to death and the grave, no longer having expectation of the Coming of the Lord as the daily hope of the Church.
It is these palpable errors of Paul, his honest, but undoubted mistakes that are wholly responsible for that strange thing (so the Post-millennialists think it) known as Pre-millennialism, a system of teaching which stands for a whole Bible, a Gospel of redeeming blood, a risen and actually coming Saviour, coming again in the flesh, and seeks with an insistent and constant “thus saith the Lord” to win the souls of men to a grace-given and grace-dealing Saviour. (And I may say in passing that Paul, under God, is undoubtedly responsible for this doctrine so persistent and aggressive, this doctrine of Premillennialism.)
To the advanced theological professor Revelation is a piece of crazy quilt patchwork, so full of symbols that have no intelligent meaning, symbols that can be interpreted by twenty different expositors in twenty different ways, is so full of monsters and nightmare doings that only an unbalanced mind could have written it and one equally unbalanced would alone attempt to decipher it.
To these teachers and leaders who count themselves as progressive followers of the Christ of God, who practically set aside the matter of miracles as no more worthy of credence than the stories of Alice in Wonderland, the final place of the deposit of authority is in the individual and subconscious mind.
These professors, teachers and leaders to a large degree are an expression of Protestantism.
Protestantism to-day stands for everything in general and nothing in particular, except its protest against being definite and particular.
It has thrown eschatology overboard.
It no longer has any interest in hereafter things.
There may be a holy city in heaven; it does not know, it will not affirm for nor against; but it does know there are unholy cities on earth.
The streets of the upper city may be paved with gold; it will not enter into controversy about it; but it is certain the streets down here are paved with poor asphalt and trodden by footsore and weary men.
Heaven may be more desirable than earth. The condition there may be a great advance on this. Advanced thinkers in Protestantism will neither affirm nor deny that; but they are convinced the conditions down here should be made much better and if possible even that of heaven on earth.
The truth is, both heaven and hell, like angelology, have fallen out of modern theology. Heaven is too high and hell too deep. No telescope has ever revealed the one and modern sweetness, gentleness and light repudiate the cruelty and sufferings of the other.
The Gospel for the individual soul, the soul the Son of God once outweighed against a whole world in all that the world might stand for of wealth and riches and power and attained ambitions, saying the profit in the gain of a whole world would not equal the loss of one soul, has been set aside.
Instead we have that modern and amazing evangel known as the “Social Gospel.”
Here for illustration are two old people living in a miserable cabin in a reeking, malarial swamp with a dozen children drinking in the poison of their environment. What folly to spend time and money on the father or mother. How inefficient any effort to save the children just one by one. Get to work at once and drain the swamp, drive out the poisonous and infectious insects with which the place is swarming, fill in the land with fine clean earth, plant flowers and sow seeds of fruitful harvests, let the salt sea blow in and breathe across the spot.
The old people may die, in all probability they will, but under right and sanitary conditions the children will grow up into vigorous elements of a strong and worthful society.
Why spend time, money, heart and enthusiasm in seeking to overcome or straighten out and make correct the bent lives that have come down to us through the unsanitary moral conditions of a previous generation? We have had wretched laws, desperate customs, children have grown up under them to become fathers and mothers of generations no better than themselves.
It is neither economy of mind nor matter, so the modernists teach, to build mission houses, gather the people, old and young, and frighten them with the thought that when they die they shall pass into an environment worse than the one in which they are endeavouring to eke out a handicapped existence. Let us do the wise thing – go not so much to the prayer meetings, but to the legislatures, get bills passed, laws made that will drive out the false and disastrous conditions now obtaining; legislate so that it will no longer be possible for people to drink themselves drunk, steep themselves in drugs, smoke themselves yellow with tobacco, yield to the fascination of gambling in any form. Let society be cleaned from these evils and the result will be certain. A generation that shall never see a saloon, a bottle of wine or whiskey; a generation that will never know the meaning of rum and tobacco and will never see a house of ill fame will be a generation that must grow up in righteousness and truth. There will be no more drunken brawls, no multiplied lawlessness, no diseased bodies, no moral leprosy. The world will be safe for each individual. Each individual will have a saved, moral life here, a life lived in obedience to the laws of nature, and as the laws of nature are the laws of God, in obedience to God. And what danger can the hereafter, if there be such a thing as the hereafter, hold for any one who is so obeying the laws of God?
Get society right and the individual will become right.
That is the modern Gospel.
That is the message to a needy world:
“Get society right and the individual will become right.”
I do not interject here in full testimony the nevertheless fact that such a pagan city as Rome, or licentious Corinth or idolatrous Ephesus were lifted into cleanness and moral decency, not by legislative action, by reorganization of local conditions, but by the regeneration of one individual at a time until the divine sanity and personal spirituality enthroned in them built up societies, assemblies of such heaven-given health that the old social conditions were overthrown; so overthrown by the personal Gospel Paul preached that throughout Asia Minor the people had been turned away from the worship of their gods, in Ephesus the temple of Diana was largely deserted and the craftsmen who made the silver, souvenir images of the goddess complained their business was almost at an end.
Strangely enough the advocates of this social Gospel set up the individual life of the Son of God as the means by which society is to be made right; but they set up, not the life He is living now as the risen, glorified God-man; on the contrary the life He lived before He died, the character He exhibited as a social reformer and an exemplar in righteousness. Men, they say, are not to be saved by the death Christ died, but by the life He then lived. He is to be taken as the proof of the doctrine of evolution and the possibilities in the natural man. He is the most advanced son of God who ever lived. All other men are innately sons of God, but undeveloped.
The fact of Christ, it is said, is a sublime encouragement to any man. He has only to copy Him in His words and deeds to find the divine life unfolding. Get away from the sacrificial Christ, this modern Gospel teaches, to the social Christ, the Christ who was interested in the poor and needy and who arraigned wrong social conditions; take the attitude of Christ in relation to the evil of His times and with Him as the inspiration institute right legislation and right social conditions and the world will soon approach the condition of heaven on earth.
This is the infidellic drive of Protestantism today.
Protestantism has come down from the plane of the supernatural to the plane of the natural.
Every day Protestantism is becoming more and more a society for competitive morality.
In short, the Protestantism of the hour is a combination of religiousness, civilization, Christianity, socialism, pagan philosophy, unitarianism and the energy of the flesh.
Nor need we be startled at this as though some strange thing had taken place. Long ago the Apostle warned us that it would be necessary to preach the Word in season and out of season – just as a watchman is under bonds to flash light in the darkness – because the time would come when the Church should have a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof; when it would not endure sound doctrine, but in obedience to the itching of the flesh should heap to itself teachers who should endeavour to respond to these worldly demands; teachers who in the end should turn the people away from the truth and turn them to the fictions and fables of men; teachers of whom the Apostle Peter warned who should bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord who had bought them, teachers whom Jude foresaw would creep in unawares.
Men who consult the chart of a seacoast which marks the place of breakers and treacherous, hidden ledges, now and then thrust out through the white foam like the gleaming sharp teeth of waiting sharks, are not startled when they see the surf breaking at the indicated spot and hear the roar of the waters where it was announced they should lift up their thunder; they are not surprised, instead their confidence in the accuracy of the chart is emphasized.
Likewise when those who have read the forecast in Holy Scripture, while they may feel a certain grief at the facts as they are, rejoice when they see these things that even the failure of man as man and the betrayal of committed trust bear witness to the accuracy of Holy Writ.
With all its failure the professing Church still claims to be the kingdom of Christ on earth and asserts its determination to rule the world. Rome holds to the idea with unfailing faith and with consistent Jesuitical and political scheming is moving forward with united front to temporal sovereignty. Protestantism with its new watchword of a “reorganized world” is making all its plans to attain the place of power by social, moral and political means.
What would be said of a queen who entered into partnership with men whose hands were still red with the blood of her murdered husband and rejected king? What could be said but that she had wholly forgotten or proved totally false to the principles for which her husband had died?
What shall be said of a Church which seeks to enter into partnership with a world that slew her Lord; which under all the smile and smoothness of moral, social and philosophical phrases and all the hypocritical laudations of His human character rejects His deity and hears in His cry of agony on the cross the proof that He was only a man who failed as other men have failed at the last.
Such a Church as that has lost the vision of its true attitude during the absence of its rejected Lord and is well-nigh to forfeiting its commission.
Over the professing Church is sounding to-day with ominous significance the Apostolic words of warning:
“What, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God; and that whosoever will be the friend of the world, is the enemy of God?”
The Corinthian Church attempted to take the place of rulership in the world.
With keen and biting words the Apostle rebukes them.
Thus he writes to them:
“Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we might also reign with you.”
Then he adds by way of contrast:
“I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels and to men.”
It is this same apostle who under the inspiration of the Spirit in his second epistle writes to Timothy:
“If we suffer, we shall also reign with him.”
It is not while her Lord is the crucified and rejected that the Church is to reign and rule over the world. Not while He is seated on His Father’s throne in heaven and His own throne on earth is cast down and trampled in the dust. Nay! if the Church is faithful she will walk in separation from the world. If the Church is faithful she will testify against the world, not testify merely against certain abuses, but against the world as a system, that it is built upon the principle of the enthronement of self and not God, the exaltation of the flesh and not spirit.
If the Church shall be faithful and like Noah in the building of his ark condemn the world; if the Church will take up earnestly the solemn truth of God and warn men that no matter how good a government may be established by human means, no matter what culture and morality may fill the earth, no matter to what extent advance may be made in art, in science, nor no matter how safe a place the world may be made to live in, no matter to what heights of natural morality and righteousness man as man may attain, the judgment of God against this system of man called the world is certain, and that He will arise in His majesty to shake terribly the earth, and that only the things that are built on God can remain, the Church will suffer and be rejected even as was her Lord.
The Church is to be faithful to the testimony of Christ and enter into the fellowship of His sufferings.
The day of her triumph will come.
She is yet to rule over the world.
The hour and the circumstances are fixed.
Listen, I pray you, to the words of the Spirit as He speaks through the Apostle Paul:
“When Christ who is our life shall appear – then (and not till then) shall ye also appear with Him in glory.”
Only when Christ shall come to take to Himself His long deferred rulership can the Church enter into her rulership over the world. In the fifth chapter of the Revelation you have the new song of the Church, the song of redemption and rule.
This is the triumphant song; it is a song of praise addressed to the Son of God Himself:
“Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation:
And hast made us unto our God kings and priests; and we shall reign on the earth.”
But mark the moment when that song is sung, the occasion of occasions!
It is at that supreme moment when as the Lion of the tribe of Judah yonder in His risen and glorified humanity in heaven He steps forward, Son of man, king of the Jews and king of Israel to take the title deeds of His kingdom from the hand of the Father; that moment when He is getting ready to cast His judgments on the earth and come forth as in the days of Noah to sweep away all iniquity and unrighteousness. It is at this moment when He is about to take to Himself His great power and descend in judgment glory that the Church bursts forth into her song of redemption and rule.
It is at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ alone that the Church will enter upon her function of rulership over the world. She cannot reign till He comes and puts her in the place of His queen and in associated power with Himself.
And because I want to see the Church lifted up out of social, political and fleshly partnership with the world; because I want to see the Church in the place of authority and power making and fulfilling the edicts of God; because I want to see the Church so exalted into the place of rulership that all the nations shall walk in the light of her excellency, her righteousness and holiness; and because this high and glorious state will be attained alone at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ I preach His Second Coming.
V
Only at the Second Coming Will the Solemn and Covenant Promises of God to Israel be Fulfilled
GOD sware to Abraham that he and his posterity should have the land of Palestine for an everlasting possession.
Abraham never got a foot of the land under covenant promise.
The only bit of ground he was able to call his was the burial plot he purchased with his own money.
The children of Israel never entered the promised land under the Abrahamic covenant.
The Lord redeemed them from Egypt, brought them through the divided waters of the Red Sea, led them by His presence, bore them up as on eagle’s wings and dealt with them in pure, unconditional grace till they came to Sinai.
There in all the pride and self-sufficiency of the flesh they took themselves off the ground of grace and unconditional covenant and put themselves under the covenant of the law.
This covenant was a covenant of good behaviour.
They were to possess the land as long as they fulfilled the terms of the covenant under the seal of its blessing and cursing.
After the first generation had perished in the wilderness because of their unbelief, the second generation crossed the Jordan dry shod as their fathers had crossed the Red Sea and entered the land under pledge and bond of good behaviour.
They were not able to keep the covenant of their own suggestion. Ten tribes went into an abomination of organized and politically inspired idolatry.
In judgment and according to His warning He caused them to be carried away captives and buried nationally among the people whither they were led and for twenty-five hundred years have been nationally lost to view.
For two thousand years because of similar and aggravated offenses and finally, because as a nation guilty of manslaughter in slaying the Lord their covenant king, the Jews have been the wanderers of the earth, the people of the restless foot, finding a home in every land but their own.
Has God failed to keep His promise?
Has He been unable or unwilling to keep His promise?
Neither postulate is possible.
God’s counsel is immutable.
He confirmed it by an oath. And since He could swear by nothing greater He sware by Himself.
In the nature of the case then scattered Israel and wandering Judah must be gathered. They must return to their own land.
God has so promised.
These promises are to be found upon the pages of Holy Writ like the leaves of autumn – so many, so thickly strewn, now in single phrase, in connected passages, in whole chapters that should I attempt to read them slowly and distinctly, giving the sense, it would take me till the morning light.
The Lord declares He has written their names upon the palms of His hand.
They are as near and sensitively dear to Him, He says, as the apple of His eye. He is so interested, so determined concerning their restoration that He uses the most intensive language to express it, language that almost thunders aloud from the page as you read it.
He uses language no less intense than this:
“Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land (the land of Palestine) assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul.”
Try and think of that! Let it penetrate your mind. The Lord who made heaven and earth, whose very name is omnipotence, says He will put the whole of His omnipotent heart and the whole of His omnipotent soul into the execution and the accomplishment of His determination and purpose to plant the children of Israel once more and forever in their own land.
In the face of that registered will and purpose what power is there of man or Devil; what force is there in all the sweep of the universe that can hinder the chosen and covenant people of God from going back to Palestine and possessing that land as theirs and theirs alone, forever?
But what evidence have we, what demonstration and proof that God will fulfill this postscript promise and plan?
What evidence have we from the bare statement of God that He will keep this promise?
The evidence is manifold and overwhelming.
Before even the children of Israel crossed the Jordan the Lord warned them in language which burns and blisters that if they did not keep the law covenant and walk in the ways of righteousness and truth He would cause them to fall before their enemies. They should go out one way before them and flee seven ways. Their cities should be taken and their wives ravished. They should be led captives into every land. They should become a proverb, a byword, a hissing and a scorn. Every hand should be against them to do them ill. They should find no ease whither they went, nor should the soles of their feet have rest. Amidst those nations the Lord should give them a trembling heart, failing eyes and sorrow of mind. Their life should hang in doubt. They should fear night and day, and have no assurance of life. In the morning they should say, Would God it were even, and at even they should say, Would God it were morning.
Their land should be made desolate and be an astonishment to the passer-by. In its desolation it should keep the sabbaths they should fail to give it. If they would not allow the land to rest in its sabbatic years, the Lord would cause it to have its ordained and natural rest by driving them out of it and allowing wind and rain and sun to take care of it and keep it fruitful.
Later on all this warning of woe and terror of judgments was emphasized by the prophets against the Jews.
They should become a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
But while the Lord should use the nations to correct them He would not make a full end of His own people.
He would use the nations as the rods of His anger, as the instruments of discipline. He would use them by taking advantage of their own aggressive desires and ambitions, then after using them He would turn upon them, punish them for their pride and godless enmity to His people and make a full end of them.
Then as the hour should draw nigh for the restoration to the land He would cause the Jews as the national representatives of all Israel to bud, to blossom and fill the face of the whole world with fruit.
They should be the first to be restored to the land.
They would go back in unbelief.
And mark how the prophecies have been fulfilled!
The illustration of this fulfillment finds its most tragic emphasis in the history of the Jews since that day when their king, the Son of God and the Holy One of Israel was hung as a malefactor on a Roman cross.
They have not only been wanderers in every land, but they have suffered an agony no tongue can fittingly tell.
The men have been robbed. They have been broken on the wheel. They have been stretched on the rack. They have been flayed alive. They have been burned alive. They have been sent to sea by thousands as herded cattle; and they have been sent thither in rotting and sinking ships. Their wives and daughters have suffered worse than torture or death. Their children have been mutilated; and when they failed to bring a full and satisfactory price in the public market, men, women and children have been given away as worthless slaves, not worth even the price of a kennel dog.
They have been hunted like wild beasts of the mountain. Like frightened beasts they have trembled at the sound of approaching footsteps and the sound of a shaken leaf has caused them to flee.
If their Lord was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, truly may it be said of them that they have been through the centuries a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief; but the sorrows were unlike those of their Lord. He carried the sorrows, the griefs and woes of others that He might relieve them; they carried their own sorrows put upon them by the wickedness and cruelty of others until tears were their meat and drink night and day.
Behold how the prophecies have been fulfilled in respect to their land.
For centuries it has kept a sabbath of rest.
It has rested from the toil of man; harvests have neither been sown nor reaped, nor the vintage gathered save here and there as with the sword in one hand and the sickle in the other.
The land is there as a land just as it was in the days when the man of Nazareth walked by the shores of blue Galilee or trod the hills of Judah. The mountains of Moab draw their lines of beauty against the measureless deeps of an orient sky. The valleys lie between like fruitful bosoms where wheat and barley may grow. The olive trees stand dusky in the deepening shade. Pomegranate and apricot stretch forth their weighted boughs and the grapes in Eschol clusters hang purple in the slant of westering suns. It is even yet a land of brooks and fountains of waters and men may still dig iron and brass from out of its rugged hills.
