Why I Preach the Second Coming

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.”