Why I Preach the Second Coming
“Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his peace and government there shall be no end.”
But when? Where?
Listen:
“Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it.”
And hear what Gabriel says to Mary when he comes to announce to her that she has been chosen of Almighty God to give birth to the Messiah of Israel.
The angel says:
“Thou shalt call his name Jesus.. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:
And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
He is to be the Prince of Peace when He sits upon the throne of united Israel in their own land and not before.
He was born in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah.
He was a Son given. The Son of God who was God the Son.
He was a Son given and became a child born.
He grew up to the station of manhood.
He entered upon His pre-arranged ministry.
At the appointed hour and to the very second foretold by Gabriel to Daniel and in the exact manner announced by the prophet Zechariah He rode into Jerusalem, went into the temple, claiming it as His Father’s house of prayer and by so much declaring Himself to be the Son of the Highest and the heir of David’s throne.
The shout of the multitude had announced Him officially.
They had said:
“Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.”
In crying this aloud they were fulfilling the prediction of Zechariah.
He had, under the vision of God, looked forward to this hour and with the Spirit of God upon him had exhorted the people who should be alive when Jesus should come to acclaim him.
He said:
“Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh unto thee; he is just, and having salvation (political as well as spiritual salvation); lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.”
The multitude were shouting as Zechariah said they should shout. They were confessing that He who came that day up the slopes of Zion was the Prince of Judah and King of Israel.
He came to His own, but His own received Him not.
Instead of the diadem of David He got a crown of thorns. Instead of the sceptre of Israel He got the vine stick of a Roman centurion thrust through His rope-tied hands. Instead of a throne He got a malefactor’s cross. Instead of a robe of royal purple He got the winding sheet of the dead. Instead of a palace He got a borrowed grave.
The Jews have paid the price of that blindness and betrayal. The man-slayer who unwittingly slew his neighbour or was even ignorant of it at the moment sooner or later found he had to flee from the avenger of blood instantly upon his track. He became an exile from his home, forced to dwell in a provided place called the city of refuge. He could not return to his home till the second coming of a priest.
The Jews were guilty, as a nation, of manslaughter.
They were deceived and involved by their leaders. They really did not know that He whom they hounded to death at the last was not only the covenant king of Israel, and the Holy One of their fathers, but the Prince of life.
Because of their blindness, blunder and sin they were cast out of the land. Because, even though in ignorance, they slew their King, they were exiled by the judgment of God from their home. They deprived the Lord of that land that was His through the covenant of Abraham, and the Lord in turn deprived them of the right of dwelling in the land. They should be exiles so long as He was an exile. Nor can they return till He comes the second time as a priest, not after the order of Aaron, but Melchisedec; for it is written that He shall be both a king and priest upon His throne.
Only can the Jews return and be owned nationally of the Lord when He shall come.
He will come and He will come as the Prince of Peace.
He will not come, I repeat, with the olive branch in His hand and the cooing dove nestling upon His shoulder.
Nay! not at all!
He will come as the Avenger of His elect, as the Son of man, as the judge of all flesh.
He will come to overthrow the combination of Devil and man.
His Coming will be the climax of old and outworn ages, the beginning of the new.
The glory of His Coming cannot be described.
Through years of meditation and continued effort at description I have exhausted my vocabulary and worn to tatters the oft-repeated phrases with which I have sought with heart full of adoring enthusiasm to announce the wonders of that hour.
If all the suns and systems were turned into speech till every flaming center of light were an adjective with increasing emphasis of qualification and expression the attempt to put into words the glory of that Coming would be a pitiful and overwhelming failure.
He will come surrounded by an innumerable host whose hallelujahs shall so vibrate that the very heavens will roll apart at their soundings.
The Lord will come in His threefold glory, the glory of the Father, the glory of the angels and His own glory: the glory of His eternal and unbegun sonship with the Father, as chief of the angels and as that man who is very God, as that God who is real and immortal man. Then will He set up the kingdom, the government for which the ages have dreamed and groaned and guessed and prayed.
That hour of hours!
Satan bound, iniquity overthrown, God and Christ and the Holy Spirit ruling in the lives of men. The very air surcharged with the righteousness of God; so surcharged that he who thinks a lie shall fall dead in the tracks where he meditated it. No longer need of judge, of jury, of prison bars, nor hangman’s rope, nor electric chair.
An hour when no longer the scarlet poppies of hate, of jealousies and mad ambition shall bud and blossom into war. War over forever, swords beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Every man the same right as any other man, the right to sunshine, to air, to water, the beauty of the landscape and all the usufruct of earth.
That hour when no man shall call another his master; when no longer a man shall toil and bend his back and break his heart for a stipend of bread; for a hole in the ground and the worm of corruption as mistress of his bed.
That hour when life shall be worth while and when the centuries of peace and perfectness of actual being shall pass on till they are counted as eternity.
And because this government of peace and splendour and all the outflowing possibilities of a world in which righteousness shall reign and God shall be first can be brought about only by and at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; because until He does so come wars and sorrows and the darkness of sin will continue; because all the legislation of man and all the leagues of nations will utterly fail to establish permanent peace; because in spite of the best endeavours of all the merely moral forces in the earth there is nothing can keep this system called the world from going on the rocks; because only the hand of God’s Christ can break the bands of iniquity, quiet earth’s fever pulses and putting down all authority bring in the peace that never can be broken; because when He comes the government of right and truth and the life that is really worth while shall come; and because from my heart I want to see that longed-for hour of heaven on earth, I preach the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
VII
It is at the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ that the Earth Will be Delivered from the Bondage of Corruption and Transformed into the Paradise of God
WHEN man fell creation fell.
It fell because creation in respect to this earth was headed up in him.
God placed a ban upon it, a restraint of its fruitfulness.
Instead He gave liberty to thorns and briars and poisonous, creeping things.
You may plant your garden, you may plant your orchard, set your vines and sow your fields. You may go to sleep and rest and think your work is done, that nothing remains but to awake again and receive the looked-for fruit and harvest.
When you do awake you will find the poisonous, creeping things have climbed over your wall and fence, have glided in among the good seed, flung their tentacles of death about them and are slowly, surely strangling the life out of them.
If you would have your garden to grow, your orchard to yield its fruit, your vineyard to hang out its purple clusters, your harvests to ripen in the kiss of sun and developing touch of caressing winds, then you must rise early and toil late. For every acre of worthful land you must crown your brow with the sweat of unceasing and exacting toil.
The earth is in bondage. It is held in the close, the gripping and relentless bonds of corruption.
Everywhere and in all things is the corruption of the dead.
The very air you breathe is dust from the mingled bones of the dead. The earth is crammed with the dead of man and beast. The grain that is reaped and the flowers that bloom grow forth from the fatness of the grave and the impulse of corruption, watered by tears distilled from the heartache of the generations old who have sorrowed above that grave and wept and hoped in vain.
Put your ear to the bosom of old mother earth and you will hear a moaning and lament like unto women in travail who seek to bring to the birth.
I am told the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now; that it is on the tiptoe of expectation with neck and head stretched out waiting for the Coming of the Son of God and all the sons of glory.
O yes! creation in all her borders is crying out for the Son of God to come.
It is crying out from all its rivers, from the moan of the sea, in the shiver of earthquake and the rush of the lava tide from the red throat of the flaming volcano. It is crying out in the heat of burning deserts, in every pain that is felt, in every tear of anguish that stains the face and speaks the agony of the heart, in every clod that falls with its accent of woe upon the coffin lid, in all the bitterness, the shame and tragedy of a sin-smitten and Devil-hurt world; everything in nature from rock and worm to man is crying out: “Come, Lord Jesus, and build again this broken and ruined earth of thine.”
He will hear the cry.
When He comes He will take off the ban.
He will deliver from corruption.
The earth will no longer shiver as an aspen.
Fear will no longer walk forth like a tyrant and set the pulses beating or hold them strangling.
Briars and thorns and fiend-like weeds and smothering, choking things that have kept the earth in barrenness where Eden-like gardens should have bloomed, and, thank God, all graves, will disappear. The desert shall bloom as the rose, the earth shall be renewed, made beautiful, and all creation loosened from its prison bonds shall sing and echo with unending harmonies in every freely fruiting and growing thing throughout all its delivered and happy borders.
For a thousand golden years under a new heavens and beneath a pure sky where the air shall flow round it as a river of crystal from the throne of God the earth will roll onward to the music of its sister spheres keeping time in the great diapason of the universe that owns and celebrates the glory of God; then, at last, it will pass through gates of fire and come forth into that new orbit, as that new earth wherein is no more dividing sea, storm swept and full of the wrecks of ships, of greater wrecks of hopes, and tiled with the white bones of the dead; that new earth where there shall be no more night with its hidden evil and its long and darksome hours in which the sufferer yearns for morning light, no more tears, nor sorrow, nor pain, nor any more that black and ever multiplying horror they call death; that new earth that shall be no longer the footstool, but the exalted and special throne of God – the center of the universe.
Into this new and perfect earth the Church shall descend – a company of redeemed, blood-washed, immortal sons of God.
The Son of God and God the Son Himself shall descend and dwell there. Then for the first time shall the children of God behold in Him the full lineament of their Father’s face; for, though He be the eternal Son He shall be seen and known as the “everlasting Father,” or “the Father of the everlasting age.”
The onlooking worlds as they swing in their chorus of adoration about this radiant and omnipotent center will learn and proclaim the immense truth that this earth was created, not merely as an expression of the wisdom, genius and might of God in His function as a creator, but as the arena of redemption, as the spot whence in all the wide empire of His power might be known and felt the pulse beat of His heart. As the innumerable hosts of heaven sweep around this center of grace and redemption, as they behold beings who once were lost in sin, wrecked and ruined beyond human hope or angelic aid, now immortal, holy, happy sons of God, they will break forth in ever increasing songs of adoration and shall say as they sing till the universe shall repeat it again and again:
“Behold, the glory of God is not alone in his majesty and might, in his holiness and omnipotence, but in his love.”
They shall take up that marvellous passage in John 3: 16 and cry it aloud so that it will ring with accumulating praise to Him who first uttered it:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
And all the host of heaven shall proclaim:
“God is love. God is love.”
All this consummation is to find its initial at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And because I want to see this earth freed from the stain of sin, the torture of pain, the accents of sorrow, the terror of tears, the hour of dying, the black and shameful grave, the trench of corruption and the Devil’s ministry of death; because I want to see a worth-while world where no longer the earth shall turn from night to morn and then from morn to disappointing night again, but shall glow forever in the light of an endless morn; because I want to see a world where the purposes of God in love, in benediction and unfailing grace are no longer seemingly contradicted by untoward events and conditions, by problems that with the best apologies for the divine character no human genius can solve or balance, but are written in high and lifted testimony brighter than the stars of any night and stronger shining than any sun of day; because I want to see a world where man shall be the enthronement of God and shall glorify Him as such, and where every atom of earth shall be full of His love and redolent with His praise, and where life shall be only another name for joy and the unending and the ever new unfoldment of it, the actual joy of unreserved, unlimited living; and because this desire in all its full accomplishment can come and the first notes of infinite triumph alone be struck and the song begin by the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ – I preach His Second Coming.
VIII
The Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ for His Church is the Most Imminent Event on the Horizon of Time
BETWEEN us and the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in glory to Mount Zion to set up and establish His kingdom there are many predicted and consecutively fixed events.
Between us and the moment when our Lord shall suddenly and secretly descend to take the Church to Himself into the place prepared, hold her in security above the woe hour coming on all them that dwell on the face of the earth and then bring her back to reign and rule with Him in glory, there is not a single, predicted event; and this – in the very nature of the case.
In the nature of the case because this age in which we live is a parenthesis between the kingdom postponed upon the one side and the kingdom to be brought in upon the other.
In this age God is not seeking to convert the world, but to take out of it a people for His Name.
It is an age of selection and therefore an age of election.
When you take some things out of the midst of other things there will be, not only a first one, but necessarily a last one.
As there was a first one elected, called out and taken into union with a risen Lord, so must there be a last one who shall be called through the Gospel, quickened by the Spirit and bound up in indissoluble union with a living Lord.
When that last one is called and responds to the life-giving power of the Spirit the Lord will descend into the upper air and take the completed and corporate Church to Himself – the dead raised, the living changed.
When that last elect one will be called you do not know, it is not known to a single soul on earth.
Since you do not know when the last elect of God shall be called, and it is sure the Lord will come when that last elect one is called, then you do not know when the Lord will come; and so far as you are concerned, and so far as any revelation otherwise is given, it may be any hour and, therefore, “any moment”; consequently the Coming of the Lord for His Church is – imminent.
Thus the imminency of the Lord’s Coming for His Church is grounded on election.
Imminency is so absolutely linked up with election that you cannot deny imminency without denying election; and to deny election is to deny God Himself, deny Him in the very essence of His own prerogative, the prerogative of foreordination, of decree.
The imminency of the Lord’s Coming for His Church is grounded on the Lord’s own declaration that He is coming for her as a thief comes.
This is His declaration and warning to the Church at Sardis, that Church which is the symbol of Protestantism in the closing hours of the age. The warning is given to the pastor, through the pastor to the Church and through the local assembly at Sardis to the whole Church.
This is what the risen Lord actually says:
“Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard; and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will arrive over thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will arrive over thee.”
The characteristics of thief coming are marked and clear.
The thief does not come with strident voice, with thunderous noise, nor in open daylight, but between the midnight and the morn, with shodden feet, silently, softly, and takes the treasure while all in the house are sunken in the depths of sleep.
When the sunbeams of the morning pelt the eyelids of the laggard sleepers they awake to find the thief has come and gone and in his going has taken the treasure with him.
If the symbol be of avail and not a mere exercise in logomachy then will the Lord, indeed, descend in the moral and spiritual night of the world while men are sleeping and in fancied security pleasantly dreaming.
He will descend unseen, unnoted. If men shall hear the sound of a trump it will have no greater significance to their spiritually deaf ears than any other passing sound. He will take, not the “great house” of religious profession, but those alone in that profession who have been regenerated and are indwelt by the Spirit, the dead who have fallen asleep in His name and the living who abide in Him.
Above all – imminency is grounded in the integrity of the Son of God and His apostles.
Unless all language is a deception; unless the promises of God are a baited lie; unless the apostles of Christ are the most shameless of all wanton tricksters; unless the Son of God Himself is the coolest traitor to truth who ever fooled the trusting hearts of needy men; unless He is the one being of all others who had the subtle and effective genius of making promises that fill the ear and are broken to the heart; unless He was the most skillful of all deceivers and rejoiced with malignant delight in deceiving the souls of men and thus proved Himself to be not the Son of God at all but the very son of falsehood, then seeing He is the reverse of all that, is in truth the very Son of God and truth itself, by His own unqualified statement, by its very character as exhortative warning His Coming must be and is – imminent. It is on the threshold of unfolding history and the gates of heaven are ajar ready for His Coming. So imminent is it that there is nothing between us and that event of events but the shout of command, the voice of the archangel and the shattering sound of the trump. So imminent that there is not the thickness of an eyelash between us and that moment when the door in heaven shall open wide and His voice with all compelling power shall say, “Come up hither.”
Listen to what He says:
“Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”
Watch! because He is coming.
Watch! because you do not know what hour He will come.
Watch! because as the householder He said He might come in any one of the four watches, at even, at midnight, in the cockcrowing or in the morning.
He did not come at even.
Surely the midnight has come. It is dark enough spiritually. There is not only enough of sorrow, sin, confusion and unbelief in a godless world, but rank treason to the truth and repudiation of the written Word in the professing Church to call it spiritual midnight.
It seems sometimes like the cockcrowing.
There are sounds of chanticleer, blasts of trumpets, changing of the guards and sentinels of old customs and ways, and echoes in the events now unrolling that prelude the great morning and the great day.
There is nothing certain about the hour but its – uncertainty.
Watch! because you may be alive at His Coming.
That is the word of Holy Scripture and not my suggestion.
Listen to the Apostle: “We which are alive, and remain unto the coming of the Lord.”
The Apostle said that for his generation.
He said it not under his own mistaken idea as the Chicago department of “sacred literature” would suggest, but under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of the Holy God.
Paul as a mere man might make mistakes just as the modern theological professor not infrequently does.
The Holy Spirit speaking through Paul could not make a mistake Himself, neither could it be possible for Paul under the direction of the Holy Spirit to make a mistake.
Paul was led by the Holy Spirit to believe it possible the Son of God might come in his day.
What Paul under inspiration said for his generation, he said for our generation.
He said it for you and for me.
Because no man knows the hour when the Lord will come it might be in your hour and my hour.
The Master Himself said:
“You know not what hour your Lord doth come.”
Who is he who will have the hardihood to fix the hour when the Master has said no man knows?
Who is he who will put a thousand years between the Church and her returning Lord?
Where is the difference between a thousand years’ delay and one moment that can be fixed by any man?
If the Lord says you do not know the hour and necessarily do not know the minute of the hour, if you fix a minute between us and the Coming you deny the words of the Son of God Himself that the minute and the hour are unknown.
Who is he who has it all fixed and polished and pumice stoned to the exact date?
The Lord has said no man on earth knows, not an angel in heaven knows. He Himself took the place of a servant and by the exercise of His omnipotent will residing in His eternal and unchanged personality as Son of God and God the Son, shut out the knowledge of it from His humanity, from Himself as man, and said He did not know when He should come.
Admit that a revelation has since been given to Him as a man or that He has taken the ban off His human side Himself and that He knows when He will come for the Church and the exact hour of His appearing in glory; admit this if you like and for the sake of argument (although there is not the slightest shade of a shadow of evidence for such an argument) it still remains that no such revelation has ever been given to the Church; neither has the restriction of the Son of God to His disciples been removed. You remember what He said just before He ascended!
This is what He said:
“It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.”
