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.
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.”
That this restriction was for the Church is the declaration of the Apostle. This is what he said to the Church at Thessalonica:
“Of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you.”
Why had he no need to write to them?
Because the day of the Lord, he said, should come as a thief, and as that day is introduced by the Coming of the Lord for His Church, then His coming for the Church was, as He Himself afterwards declared in his letter to Sardis, like the coming of a thief. This Coming Paul had described in the fourth chapter of his first letter to the Thessalonians.
It was not for the Church to know in Paul’s day when the Lord should come as the bridegroom for His bride.
No revelation has been given in any epistle to the Church since. What was true in Paul’s day as to the attitude of the Church is true in this day. Listen to the commended attitude of the Thessalonian Church:
“Ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven.”
There you have it.
The Church is to wait; that means to watch, to expect, to be ready.
This is what the Apostle said.
This is what the Son of God Himself said and still says to-day.
He affirms we do not know the hour.
He exhorts us to watch.
The affirmation and the exhortation hold for this hour.
If therefore the Son of God be not incarnate falsehood; if He seek not to play with my heart and make me a spectacle to the lost souls of the pit as well as to the mockers among men—He means what He said.
If He meant what He said, then He means that any day, and any hour of the day so far as I know I may meet Him at any turn of the road.
And what would that mean if He should come to-night or to-morrow?
I have told you what it would mean to me.
What would it mean to you, to some of you who have so much invested in Laurel Hill, in that white and beautiful city of the dead, by the banks of your winding river?
When I was a boy my father took me there and I watched as the winds rippled through the long grasses, and I could hear the wash of the river below, I was startled and sometimes shivered as I walked under the shadow of tall monuments, carved figures, and by stately tombs of marble. And once I started back and broke into tears at the sight of the sculptured form of “Old Mortality” bending above a slab with chisel and mallet in hand—and I suppose is there still, grown older in his stony face because more stained with the passing years.
What would it mean to you whose loved ones are lying in that cemetery or any other of the sleeping places of the dead?
Ah! it would mean the home-coming, the greeting, the rapturous kiss and hand-clasp of recognition, the joy of that heaven life that shall know no end and that immortality that shall compensate for all the weariness and the heartache of the mortal path here below.
Yes! it would mean to those of us who by faith in Christ Jesus are children of the living God, the gathering to our arms again of those who have left us and for whom our arms still ache to enfold them once more. And O my soul! it would mean the seeing of Him whom our soul loveth and who unfailingly has loved us; it would mean that boon of boons—seeing Him face to face.
Do you wonder the Holy Spirit who is the finger of God has written over against the word “hope,” that qualification, “blessed,” and affixed to it the demonstrative, “that,” so it doth read: “That blessed hope”?
And yet! and yet! there are men who call themselves the ministers of Christ who would blot out that hope and take away the vision of it from our souls.
With cold, acute, metallic voices in which you may hear the sound of the wheels of machinery and the buzz of business, they tell us that should the Lord suddenly come it would paralyze all industry, put an end to commerce and to trade, overthrow all progress, make worthless every high endeavour for the betterment of man, shut the doors of school, of college and university, render useless the architect’s and builder’s plans, throw down the mechanic’s tools, the artist’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel, the writer’s pen, still the orator’s tongue, make null and void the legislator’s high emprise and draw a line of atrophy across the unfolding processes of human life.
Oh, foolish, blind and slow to believe, do you not see that if the Lord should come it would lift our so-called civilization out of the slime and shame of its brazen folly and reeking, though perfumed sin into the glory of eternal righteousness and peace?
Do you not see that it would, at last, make men immortal and give them such beauty of form, such sanity and such culture and worth of being as all the gymnasia and all the eugenics of the hour have failed and will ever fail to achieve?
Do you not see that if the Lord should suddenly come it would at once open the gates of knowledge and bring us face to face with the secrets of the universe and make us masters under God of all natural laws such as all the curriculæ of all the institutions of learning, of applied science and philosophy have failed to impart?
Do you not see it would be the fulfillment of the highest ideals and aspirations and would make man what the creator of heaven and earth originally intended man should be—not an animal working with tools and breaking his heart in vain finally to achieve—but a very God who should speak and it should be done, command and it should stand fast; and who should be the incarnate revelation, the eternal enthronement of the invisible God, in power, in character and holiness?
Do you not see it would change this old earth from the swinging cemetery of the dead into the home of deathless men, the home of the eternal and worth-while life?
Oh, listen to me all who hear me!
The hope for this world of daily toil and tears, of graves and unceasing tragedy, of pitiful woe, is not that slow creeping thing called evolution, wallowing on its serpentine belly amid the dust of death and the crime and sin of unchanged and unchangeable human nature—but God Himself—God in Christ, the personal Coming of Him who is the maker of heaven and earth, coming to bring in the new dawn, the new day, the new earth and the new empire of God and man.
Oh, tell me those of you who have been redeemed by blood, regenerated by the Spirit, made partakers of the divine nature, turned heavenward by the power of God, who see cloudless daylight in the Bible, even in the darkness of a spiritual night, hear music in its promises and whose souls are filled with love to God and love to man, tell me would you like Him to come, would you like to see your Lord face to face?
Oh, you who have had the vision of His cross behold it, I beseech you, there!
The head crowned with thorns, the nailed hands, the nailed feet, the pierced side, the blood pouring out of those hands, gliding round His body, weaving itself in its sinuous course over the white flesh into a robe of crimson, and then streaming out into a fringe of intense scarlet as it drops, drop by drop to the thirsty ground, dripping, dripping there. Oh, I can see it and I seem to feel the warm touch of it, the strange, the wonderful cleansing touch of it, the only thing that can make a blackened sinner white; and as it drops each drop seems to say till it turns to very music in the soul:
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
Listen to the dropping of that blood out of the heart of God, every drop the price current of the merchant, the half shekel of the sanctuary, the purchase price of your redemption and mine and the seal of infinite love, of measureless grace.
Oh, tell me would you like Him to come, transfigure you into the beauty of His likeness and put the benediction of His peace upon this old sin-smitten, tear-stained earth?
Do you ever pray the last prayer recorded in Holy Scripture, the last prayer of the Holy Apostolic Church?
Listen to it! Listen to it well!
“Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
Is this prayer in your heart?
Does it ever come to your lips?
Do you ever genuinely and openly offer it, wishing with all your heart it might be so, might be answered in your time; or, have you forgotten it like the Church at large?
Do you feel ashamed or afraid to offer it in public?
When you try to offer it in private or public does unbelief smother it?
I once heard a boy say to his mother:
“O mother, don’t do so much for me; love me more.”
I tell you the truth whether you hear or forbear: as preachers and teachers many of you are doing too much for the Lord. You are busy, morning, noon and night in His name, running here and there, tinkering religiously and morally, putting things together and increasingly active; so busy doing for the Lord that like Martha you have no time to sit still at His feet as did Mary and hear His Word, hear what He has to say to you; so busy doing for Him that you are losing sight of Himself. This was the “somewhat” He had against the Ephesian Church.
That Church was full of works and labours. They had tested false doctrines and false teachers. They stood squarely for fundamentals and were theologically sound; but they had left their “first love,” love to Himself, love to His person, devotion to His person, a flaming, outbreaking, overflowing enthusiasm for a personal, a realistic Saviour and Lord. They were taken up with what they were doing for Him rather than with Himself. They had got away from the loving, impelling touch and contact with Himself.
The personal touch with Christ!
That is what He wants from us. Not so much what we are doing for Him, but what He is to us personally. He wants to be the first and the last, the chiefest among ten thousands and the one altogether lovely. This is the definition of true and efficient Christianity—personal devotion to a living and loving Saviour.
Looking down from heaven He is saying to us, no matter how much we may be doing for Him, He is saying this to us:
“Love me more.”
And until there is this flaming, burning, out-flowing enthusiasm for and devotion to a personal Lord, to Him for what He is as well as for what He has done for us, there can be no sweeping, wide, resultant revival and ingathering of the elect of God. You may plan and organize and get together, you will have only a flame that will flare for a time and then go out.
Nay! only when we are on fire for Him can we make the hearts of men to burn with the faith that shall turn them to Him and make them hate and forsake whatever does not honour and glorify Him.
Over all the noise and rush of things, and all the machinery well motived men sometimes set going in His name He is saying:
“Love me more! love me more!”
When some one you love with this intense personal love is absent you are not satisfied till that absent one returns, fills your vision and responds to the touch of your greeting and your love.
If you love the very person of the Son of God; if you have a quivering, all-pervading enthusiasm for Him so that He is, indeed, above all personalities in the universe to you, you will want Him to return where you may look upon Him—not as Thomas did for doubt’s sake and stumbling hope’s sake—but for the very joy of it until the print of the nails in His hand and the print of the nails in His feet shall be to you as the apocalypse of His glory and the illumination of your soul.
Do you really want Him to come—this long absent Redeemer and Lord?
He is listening to hear whether you want Him to come; whether above every plan and scheme you may have been building in His name; above any religious, even spiritual ambition you may have, you want Him to come for—Himself.
He is very still. He is listening to hear whether you will say that one little word that has in it such vibrant meaning, that one word:
“Come.”
The Church as a Church has long ago ceased to say—“Come.”
But the old prayer is still written here in the closing page of Holy Scripture:
“Amen. Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.”
Are you willing to-night to put your faith and your heart into that old prayer and bid Him come?
Have you the faith and sincerity to do it?
You say, “Yes.”
Then rise to your feet as one person and say that prayer as I line it out to you until it shall roll upward like a wave on the infinite shore and break on our Lord’s listening ears with the music of love’s unfailing appeal:
“Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
“Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
In response to Dr. Haldeman the great audience filling the building from pit to dome rose to its feet as in a flash and repeated the prayer as he gave it out. It was a moving sight and full of impression as the mighty volume of united voices rose and swelled upward to that throne where our Lord sits as Bridegroom as well as King and yearns in these days to hear His true Bride in all the wonder of her spiritual beauty and the strength of her essential unity say—“Come.”
In response to Dr. Haldeman the great audience filling the building from pit to dome rose to its feet as in a flash and repeated the prayer as he gave it out. It was a moving sight and full of impression as the mighty volume of united voices rose and swelled upward to that throne where our Lord sits as Bridegroom as well as King and yearns in these days to hear His true Bride in all the wonder of her spiritual beauty and the strength of her essential unity say—“Come.”
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