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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Why I Preach the Second Coming, by Isaac
+Massey Haldeman
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Why I Preach the Second Coming
+
+
+Author: Isaac Massey Haldeman
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 1, 2009  [eBook #30573]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHY I PREACH THE SECOND COMING***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Keith G. Richardson from page images generously made
+available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com/)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      the the Google Books Library Project. See
+      http://books.google.com/books?vid=etoOAAAAIAAJ&id
+
+
+
+
+
+WHY I PREACH THE SECOND COMING
+
+by
+
+I. M. HALDEMAN, D. D.
+
+Pastor First Baptist Church, New York City
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York Chicago
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+London and Edinburgh
+
+Copyright, 1919, by
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+
+New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
+Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
+London: 21 Paternoster Square
+Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
+
+
+
+Foreword
+
+
+THE subject of this volume is an address delivered by the Author
+before the World's Conference on Christian Fundamentals at
+Philadelphia, May 30, 1919.
+
+The reasons for preaching and teaching the Second Coming of our Lord
+Jesus Christ are manifold and each one worth while.
+
+The Author has contented himself with presenting a few as follows:
+
+The Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is the one event most
+often recorded in Holy Scripture.
+
+It is bound up with every fundamental doctrine, with every sublime
+promise and every exhortation to high, to holy and practical
+Christian living.
+
+Only at the Second Coming of our Lord will redemption be complete
+and the blood of the cross be justified.
+
+Not till our Lord Jesus Christ comes the Second time will the Church
+be exalted into her true function of rulership over the world.
+
+Only at the Second Coming will the solemn and covenant promises of
+God to Israel be fulfilled.
+
+Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of God will a government of
+everlasting righteousness and peace be established on the earth.
+
+It is at the Second Coming of Christ alone that the earth will be
+delivered from the bondage of corruption and transformed into the
+paradise of God.
+
+The Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ FOR His Church is the most
+imminent event on the horizon of time.
+
+
+I. M. H.
+
+
+_New York, 1919._
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+I. THE SECOND COMING OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST IS THE ONE EVENT MOST
+OFTEN RECORDED IN HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+II. THE SECOND COMING OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST IS BOUND UP WITH
+EVERY FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINE, EVERY SUBLIME PROMISE AND EVERY
+EXHORTATION TO HIGH, TO HOLY AND PRACTICAL CHRISTIAN LIVING
+
+III. ONLY AT THE COMING OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST WILL REDEMPTION BE
+COMPLETE AND THE BLOOD OF THE CROSS BE JUSTIFIED
+
+IV. NOT TILL OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST COMES THE SECOND TIME WILL THE
+CHURCH BE EXALTED INTO HER TRUE FUNCTION OF RULERSHIP OVER THE WORLD
+
+V. ONLY AT THE SECOND COMING WILL THE SOLEMN AND COVENANT PROMISES
+OF GOD TO ISRAEL BE FULFILLED
+
+VI. ONLY AT THE SECOND COMING OF THE CHRIST OF GOD WILL A GOVERNMENT
+OF EVERLASTING RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE BE ESTABLISHED UPON THE EARTH
+
+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
+
+VIII. THE COMING OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST FOR HIS CHURCH IS THE MOST
+IMMINENT EVENT ON THE HORIZON OF TIME
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the One Event Most
+Often Recorded in Holy Scripture
+
+
+IT is recorded in type, in figure, in symbol, in analogue, in
+parable, in hyperbole and metaphor, in exalted song, in noblest
+poetry and in rarest rhetoric. It is set before us in dramatic and
+dynamic statement, in high prophetic forecast, in simple narrative,
+close linked logic, expanded doctrine, divine exhortation and far
+-reaching appeal.
+
+The first promise of the Second Coming was made in Eden. It was made
+in the promise given to the woman that her seed should bruise the
+serpent's head. On the cross the serpent bruised the heel of the
+woman's seed, but her seed did not bruise the serpent's head. Never
+was his head more uplifted and unbruised than now. The promise of
+the bruising is of God and must be fulfilled. The record of that
+fulfillment is to be found in the twentieth chapter of the book of
+the Revelation where our Lord descends and in the plenitude of His
+power by the hand of an angel binds Satan for a thousand years
+beneath His feet and the feet of His saints. As the bruising of the
+serpent's head takes place at the Second Coming, and the promise of
+the bruising is made in Eden, then the first promise of the Coming
+is made in Eden; and as you see rising above the figure of the
+fallen first man the figure of the Second man, you hear for the
+first time the story of the Second Coming of the Second man; and
+thus the story and the doctrine of the Second Coming begin with the
+very beginning of the Book.
+
+For three hundred years Enoch walked amid the slime, the slush and
+the uprising tide of human iniquity in a God-hating and God-defying
+world. Then one day God took him out of all the riot and wrong of it
+without dying into the heaven of His glory; and the Apostle Paul
+writing to the Corinthians of the Second Coming affirms there will
+be a generation who will continue alive till the Lord comes; and
+thus Enoch is a type of that deathless generation and by so much a
+prophecy of the Second Coming.
+
+For one hundred and twenty years Noah preached righteousness to a
+world from which the death penalty had been removed, a world
+surrendered to conscience (and let it be well remembered conscience
+is not the gift of God nor evidence of grace but mark of fallen man,
+the shadow of God's throne before which the "accuse" and "excuse" of
+the soul witness to human guilt), a generation given over to
+unrestrained fallen nature; a generation of murder, assassination,
+violence, war, utter brutality, sickening sensualism, the invasion
+of fallen and lust-seeking angels, rank spiritism, diabolism and
+mocking laughter at God and the things of God.
+
+Suddenly, without warning, God called Noah into the ark (the
+building of which had awakened the derision of the revellers in sin
+and the would-be wise men of the hour) shut the door and bolted him
+in. At the end of seven ominous days in which the darksome clouds
+hung low and threatening, the windows of heaven were opened, the
+fountains of the deep broken up and the flood fell, sweeping away
+all save Noah and his family in the ark. When the judgment waters
+had subsided Noah and his family came forth to set up a new and
+distinct dispensation in the world.
+
+Seated yonder on the Mount of Olives in the shadow of the cross,
+looking forward to His Second Coming and backward for an
+illustration that should forecast the times and leave no excuse for
+exegetical and interpretative theological blundering our Lord said
+as it was in the days of Noah so should it be when the Son of man
+should come the Second time.
+
+Without warning, out of a world of increasing materialism, self
+-sufficiency, boasting, pride, violence, war and multiplied peril, a
+world that under the guise of general indifferentism and cultivated
+cynicism mocks at the things of God and denies we have a written,
+final and sure revelation from Him, the Lord will snatch away the
+genuine, regenerated Church (the dead raised, the living changed)
+and take them to Himself, into the place prepared. For at least
+seven years spiritual blackness, measureless woe and indescribable
+anguish will fall upon a Devil-deceived and Devil-ruled world. Then
+will the Lord come with His previously gathered Church, execute
+judgment on the ungodly, sweep away all iniquity and set up the new
+administration of righteousness and truth. Noah is therefore a
+figure, a prophecy of the closing hours of this age and its climax
+in the Second Coming of the Lord.
+
+One day Lot went into Sodom, took office, tried to reform the evil
+city, succeeded in vexing his righteous, but unspiritual soul with
+the filthy conversation of the wicked, got down to the level of the
+natural man, lost his testimony and seemed to his friends and
+intimates like a madman or the most excuselessly inconsistent
+trifler when he attempted to take up once more his damaged
+testimony.
+
+Then there was a night when God's angels came and snatched him out
+of the doomed city. The next morning the fire of God fell and Lot
+"saved so as by fire" looked on at the blaze and the burning of all
+his works of righteousness as wood hay and stubble, big in bulk but
+rejected of God.
+
+Looking forward to His Second Coming and backward for an
+illustration the Son of God declared as it was in the days of Lot so
+should it be when the Son of man should come again.
+
+There are good and righteous Christians--righteous enough but wholly
+unspiritual who are seeking to make spotless town of a world God has
+judged and doomed, failing to see the cross is not only the judgment
+of the individual, but equally the judgment of the world; that not
+only does the cross reveal the end of all flesh but the end in God's
+sight of that system of things which men call the world; that on the
+cross the world is crucified to the Christian and the Christian to
+the world; and failing to see this, failing to get the mind of God
+are daily descending to the plane of the natural man, are losing and
+in many cases deliberately setting aside the testimony once for all
+delivered to the saints.
+
+Without warning, they will be snatched away to meet a descending
+Lord (if they be real and regenerated Christians) and this alone
+because their faith be it never so small holds them securely in the
+bonds of the covenant. After that the Lord will be revealed in
+flaming fire to execute judgment on the world and all the works of
+misguided social reformers because these works are built, not upon
+the righteousness of God, but the righteousness of man.
+
+According to the Word of the Lord Himself therefore Lot is a picture
+and prophecy of the closing hours of the present age with its climax
+the Coming and Appearing of the Lord.
+
+After Abraham had typically offered up his son on Mount Moriah and
+typically received him from the dead on the third day the son for a
+number of chapters in the record disappears from view. Then Abraham
+the father sends his servant Eliezer into a far country to get a
+bride for this now invisible son. Eliezer meets the intended bride
+at a well from whence she is drawing water, goes with her into her
+brother's house, takes out a pack of precious things sent from the
+father in the name of the son, displays them to her and invites her
+to become the bride of the son. She consents. The servant leads her
+forth. On the way he talks to her of the promised bridegroom.
+Suddenly she beholds him coming to meet her. He receives her, takes
+her into his prepared tent and she becomes his wife.
+
+On the same mount nearly two thousand years later God the Father
+offered up His only begotten Son. On the third day He raised Him
+from the dead. For two thousand years He has disappeared from view.
+The Father has sent forth the Spirit to obtain a bride for His Son.
+He meets her at the Gospel well from whence we draw the waters of
+salvation. He is calling her through individual selection that she
+may become the corporate bride. He has brought spiritual gifts which
+He seeks to display in all her assemblies. He is endeavouring to
+lead her along the highway of time and to speak to her in the heaven
+speech of the Coming Bridegroom. Suddenly the Lord will come to meet
+her and take her into the place prepared and keep her for the
+marriage hour. In this simple story the analogue finds its prophetic
+climax in the Second Coming of our Lord.
+
+Jacob fled from his home, the brother he had outwitted and the
+father whom he had deceived. As night drew on footsore and weary he
+cast himself upon the plain with a stone for his pillow. Visions
+came to him in the night. A ladder of gold reached from earth to
+heaven. At the top of it was a host of angels and the Lord Himself
+in glory. The Lord spoke to him and assured him he and his posterity
+should have the land on which he was lying for an everlasting
+possession. It was a confirmation of the oath to and the covenant
+with Abraham and Isaac. As the covenant can find its fulfillment
+only at the actual Second Coming of our Lord as the God of Jacob,
+this vision is the prophetic anticipation of that hour and the
+heaven-proclaimed assurance the Lord is coming a Second time.
+
+Joseph was sent by his father to his brethren. They despised and
+rejected him. They cast him into the pit of death. He was taken out
+alive. He was carried away into a far country--even into Egypt.
+There he was exalted to become co-ruler with Pharaoh. In the hour of
+famine he became the bread giver, the saviour of a hungry world. At
+the same time he got a Gentile bride. In the hour when tribulation
+and sorrow came upon his brethren he revealed himself to them the
+second time and was owned and acknowledged by them. With his wife he
+came in his chariot of kingly glory and established his father and
+his brethren in the promised land of Goshen.
+
+The application is so simple it applies itself.
+
+God the Father sent His Son to His brethren in the flesh. They
+despised and rejected Him. They put Him in the place of death. He
+was raised up alive. He has gone into a far country--even into
+heaven itself. He is there now as one who has been exiled from
+earth. He has been exalted to the throne of His Father. For two
+thousand years of spiritual famine and hunger in the world He has
+been the giver of the bread of life, the saviour of men. During
+these years of His exile He has been obtaining a bride from among
+the Gentiles--that is the Church. When the hour of tribulation and
+anguish shall come upon His brethren in the flesh, even as He
+Himself has warned, He will appear in His glory, the scales will
+fall from their eyes as they did from Paul and they will own Him as
+their Messiah and Lord, the Holy One of Israel. With His Church in
+associate power and glory He will deliver them and place them
+forever in the promised land--the land of their fathers.
+
+No sooner has Moses with the host of Israel crossed dry shod through
+the divided waters of the Red Sea than he lifts up his voice and
+sings, not of the first, but the Second Coming of the Lord. He sings
+of Him as a man of war, as the head of celestial armies, coming to
+execute judgment, overthrow iniquity and establish His reign and
+rule of righteousness.
+
+When you open the historic pages of the Bible, along the seemingly
+driest and coldest paragraphs you may if you will behold the wheels
+of the King's chariot flashing by and catch a gleam of His radiant
+features, now as the man of war in David, and then as the Prince of
+peace in Solomon.
+
+Yonder, under the far-away stars, Job sat at his tent door and as he
+meditated on the brevity and vanity of human life, its hopes
+deferred that make the heart sick, the sound of the clods as they
+fall upon the coffin lid, he asked the question that has quivered
+down the ages--"If a man die, shall he live again?"
+
+He answers his own question. He says he knows he will die. He knows
+his soul will go into the underworld of the dead. His body will be
+laid away in the dust. It will become nothing more than a bundle of
+skin and bones. He knows, also, this bundle of skin and bones is the
+work of God's hand. The Lord will have respect to His work. He will
+remember He wrought it. At a given time He will call to Job and Job
+will answer; then in anticipation of the supreme moment he cries out
+exultantly he knows his redeemer liveth; that he shall stand in the
+latter day upon the earth and covered with his own flesh once more
+shall see his incarnate God.
+
+Thus in those wondrous days of the long ago Job caught the shining
+of the morning star, heard the trumpet of the first resurrection and
+caught the vision of the Second Coming of his Lord.
+
+David sweeps his fingers across the answering chords of his golden
+harp and sings of that hour when the Lord shall come in His glory;
+when the trees of the wood shall clap their hands; when the
+mountains shall flow down at His presence, the waves of the sea
+fling their hallelujahs on the resounding shore; and when the earth
+shall own the Lord is coming, coming not the first time to die, but
+the Second time as the risen one to live and reign and with none to
+dispute Him.
+
+In the Song of Songs we who believe are by nature before God as
+black and uncomely as the sun-burned tents of Kedar, but by grace in
+God's sight as beautiful as the Tyre-woven curtains of Solomon.
+
+The breath of the spring time is in the air. The voice of the turtle
+dove is to be heard in the land. It is the time of love and for
+hearts to find their mates. The leaves of the fig tree of Israel are
+beginning to put forth. The seeds of hope sown in the graves of the
+Christian dead and watered with tears from the anguish of the living
+are ready to bud and blossom forth in the full flower of their
+assured immortality. The voice of the Bridegroom may be heard saying
+to the Church: "Come away my beloved. Come thou rose of Sharon and
+thou lily of the valley," and presently we see the Bridegroom
+Himself descending and the Church going up out of the wilderness
+leaning on the arm of her Beloved.
+
+So we may learn and quickly if we will, that the Song of Songs which
+is Solomon's is the celebration of the nuptial hour when our Lord
+shall come the Second time to take His affianced Church to Himself
+and make her the heavenly bride of His unfolding and unfading glory.
+
+The prophet Isaiah hears the seraphs sing their "holy, holy, holy is
+the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" till the
+posts of the door are moved at the wonder of the song. He sees the
+glory of the Coming of the Lord. He tells us the Lord is coming with
+fire and with His chariots like a whirlwind, to render His anger
+with fury, and His rebuke with flames of fire.
+
+Jeremiah announces the Lord is coming the Second time. When He comes
+He will make Jerusalem the throne of His glory. Unto it shall be the
+gathering of the nations. They shall gather unto it in the name of
+the Lord, and neither shall they walk any more after the
+imaginations of their evil heart.
+
+Ezekiel beholds the Lord seated on a throne high and lifted up. He
+sees Him coming out of the purple dawning of the east. He restores
+Jerusalem. He builds the temple till the shining spendour of it
+shall fill the promised land; and in a voice as the sound of many
+waters He says this temple shall be the place for the soles of His
+feet and thus rebukes those who try to keep Him from dwelling bodily
+in the land as though forsooth He should lose His heavenliness by so
+doing, forgetting that earth is His rightful home and is to be His
+eternal dwelling place. Yea and Amen when He comes to His own again
+He shall dwell in the midst of His ransomed forever. And the nations
+of the earth as they ascend to the heights of Jerusalem to behold
+His glory and to worship Him in His holy temple as they catch the
+first glimpse of the city, its gardens like unto the garden of the
+Lord, the temple with its shekinah cloud by day and the flaming fire
+by night that shall make it to be no more night but day, shall cry
+out, not "Jerusalem," but "Yaveh Shamma--the Lord is there." And
+from henceforth this shall be the name of the city.
+
+Daniel has visions in the night. He beholds the Lord as the Son of
+man, as eternal judge and king of all the earth. He sees Him coming
+to the Father to receive His title deeds and then descending in
+clouds of glory to establish the kingdom that shall never pass away.
+
+From Hosea to Malachi the Minor Prophets echo with the declaration
+the Lord is coming and always this coming is the Second.
+
+Hosea foresees Israel will forsake the Lord and for many days be as
+a dead man out of sight and forgotten. But in the latter times when
+the Lord Himself shall return Israel will awaken and own Him as Lord
+and king.
+
+Joel tells us the armies of the world league shall be gathered
+against Jerusalem and under their godless, Devil-incarnate head
+shall defy the Lord of hosts; that the Lord will come, overthrow
+them with a great slaughter and deliver the holy city from the
+treading down of the Gentiles forever.
+
+In Amos the Lord is coming to restore the kingdom to Israel and set
+up and establish the throne of David.
+
+Obadiah warns us of the day of the Lord, the day that is introduced
+by the Second Coming of the Lord.
+
+Joel teaches us under the madness and folly of Gentile rule
+ploughshares are to be beaten into swords and pruning hooks into
+spears and the nations are to give themselves to war and all the
+horror and desolation of it. But this Scripture is never quoted by
+those who preach peace where there can be no peace. Always they
+quote Micah who tells us the swords will be beaten into
+ploughshares, the spears into pruning hooks and the nations shall
+learn war no more.
+
+The two prophets seem to stand in absolute opposition to each other.
+
+They do not.
+
+Joel tells us what will happen just before the Lord comes.
+
+Micah tells us what will take place after the Lord comes.
+
+In Joel the Lord will come, meet the armies of the League in the
+valley of decision, the valley of Jehoshaphat, and overthrow them;
+then will the implements of war be beaten into the implements of
+peace and war be at an end forever.
+
+Micah announces the end of war and the beginning of lasting peace
+will come as the consequence of the Lord's appearing in glory and
+not till He does so appear.
+
+Nahum proclaims the Second Coming. The Lord's way shall be in the
+whirlwind and the storm, the clouds shall be the dust of His feet,
+the mountains shall quake at Him, the hills shall melt and the very
+earth burn at His presence.
+
+In Habakkuk the Spirit carries human language to its loftiest height
+till it glows on peaks of thought sublime.
+
+The prophet sees the Lord coming the Second time. His brightness is
+as the shining light. In His hands once pierced for such as we is
+the hiding of His power. Pestilence and burning coals are His
+vanguard. He stands and measures the earth. He drives asunder the
+nations. The everlasting mountains are scattered. The perpetual
+hills bow before Him and the inhabitants of the onlooking worlds
+lift up their voices and sing: "His ways are everlasting."
+
+Zephaniah proclaims the Second Coming.
+
+The Lord will come and smite the world league in the pitifulness of
+its gathering and the pigminess of its might. He will pour forth His
+indignation and fierce anger upon all the exaltation and pride of
+man. He will devour the earth with the fire of His jealousy, deliver
+Jerusalem, turn to the people the pure speech of the old Hebraic
+tongue, bid Zion to sing, Israel to shout and calling Jerusalem her
+daughter, bid her to rejoice. He will overthrow the false Christ and
+as the true Messiah will Himself dwell in the midst of Jerusalem
+forevermore.
+
+Haggai declares the Lord will come and will shake all nations so
+that only the things which are of God may remain.
+
+Zechariah tells us in terms so plain, so clear no one need
+misunderstand nor be in darkness for a moment that the Lord is
+coming the Second time.
+
+He will come with all His saints. His feet shall stand in that day
+on the Mount of Olives; and that no false teacher nor wilful
+perverter of the truth about the reality of the Lord's bodily
+presence on the earth at that time may have even the shadow of a
+shadow to rest on, and as a proof that this coming is not spiritual
+but actual and the testimony of His very feet under the most
+pronounced topographical conditions, the prophet says the mount on
+which those blessed and real feet shall descend is not only on the
+Mount of Olives, but that "Mount of Olives, which is before
+Jerusalem on the east."
+
+At the touch of the Lord's feet this wondrous and sacred Mount of
+Olives will split in twain. One half of it will roll like a wave
+northward. The other half will roll to the south. A great valley
+will be formed. That valley is named in Scripture, but never has
+been found on any map and cannot be found in Palestine to-day. It is
+the valley of Jehoshaphat, the valley of decision, the valley of
+judgment of the nations. And into this valley pell-mell shall rush
+the Antichrist-led and Devil-deceived armies of the league of ten
+nations to find their overthrow at the hand of the Lord and the
+inauguration of that hour when the once despised and crucified
+Christ shall be the revealed and recognized God of the whole earth;
+when there shall be one Lord and His name one--even that name which
+is above every name whether in heaven or on earth--the name of
+Jesus.
+
+Malachi closes the book of the Old Testament. He beholds our Lord
+Jesus Christ coming the Second time. He sees Him coming as the
+rising sun filling the heavens and flooding the earth with the
+benediction of His majesty and might.
+
+From Malachi to the New Testament we pass over four hundred years of
+prophetic silence and then we are in the book of the Gospel
+according to Matthew.
+
+Here we are face to face with the night of nights.
+
+The stars like silver squadrons sail close to the waiting earth. The
+angels fling down their wreath of natal song and the virgin mother
+cradles upon her white and unsullied breast the Christ of God.
+
+We follow Him in the days of His unfolding ministry. Every time He
+touches the earth His footsteps leave a benediction. Each time He
+breathes the air He sweetens it. His low and modulated voice starts
+a note of music whose rhythmic accents have not done sounding and
+whose heavenly harmony outsings the discords of earth. He looks
+daylight into blind eyes. He cools the fever pulse to quiet beating.
+He makes the lame man to leap as a hart. He hushes the storm on
+Galilee till the ruffled, windswept waters are as calm and peaceful
+as a babe upon its mother's breast. With a word He raises the wept
+-for dead. Everywhere and at all times His miracles are wrought, not
+merely that He may do good and bring needed blessings as He passes
+by, but as the credentials and sign warrant of the truthfulness of
+His claim that He is Son of God, God the Son, the Anointed of the
+Lord and Israel's king.
+
+But in all His ministry of hand or word never does He speak save
+incidentally of His first coming. Always and in fullest degree He
+speaks of His Second Coming. Seated upon the Mount of Olives He
+affirms, after the cross shall have slain and stained Him and the
+grave shall have briefly held Him He will come again; but, just
+before He comes it will be as it was in the days of Noah--a time of
+materialism, sensualism, the culture of self-consciousness, an hour
+of boasting, pride, lawlessness and war; and when He is revealed it
+will be as with the driving judgment of the flood.
+
+In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew and the first part of the
+chapter He declares He is coming as the bridegroom comes--seeking
+the marriage hour of his bride.
+
+In the last part of the chapter and as the climax of His bridegroom
+coming He will appear as the king of glory and the judge of the
+living nations.
+
+When He stands before His guilty judges and their suborned witnesses
+and while they mock and deride Him He breaks His hitherto amazing
+silence not to demonstrate to them the truth of His incarnation nor
+the proof of His preexistence, but in calm and measured utterance to
+tell them that after they shall have put Him to death He will come
+the Second time; and they shall see Him descending from heaven
+seated upon the cloud of shekinal glory and with the power of God.
+
+In Mark He is the householder who goes into a far country, gives to
+each of His servants a work to do, puts the porter on guard to watch
+the door of the house and announces that no one in heaven nor on
+earth knows when He will return. He will return, He will come the
+Second time. It will be in one of the four watches of the spiritual
+night. It may be at even, it may be at midnight, it may be at
+cockcrowing and it may be in the morning. Because it is certain He
+will come, but uncertain when He will come, each one who claims to
+be His servant is under bond to watch. The whole household must be
+in the attitude of watching, of readiness and expectation; and His
+word of exhortation and warning to His Church is:
+
+"What I say unto you, I say unto all--watch."
+
+In Luke He is the nobleman who goes into a far country to get the
+title deeds of His kingdom and return. When He returns He comes
+first to His servants, gathers them to Himself and rewards them.
+After that with them He executes judgment on His enemies and then
+sets up His kingdom.
+
+In the Gospel of John He eats with His disciples the last and
+memorial supper. He goes out with them, bids them lift their glances
+to the wide, extended sky where the jewelry of the night as the
+scattered largess of a king burns in the fire of opal, the purple
+and violet of amethyst and the white splendour of uncounted
+diamonds. He assures them these gleaming things are no fiction fire
+-flies of gaseous worlds in the making, but illuminated dwelling
+places in His Father's house. He is going thither. He will ascend
+into that congeries of inhabited worlds and will prepare a place for
+them, a glorious palace home befitting their high estate; when all
+is ready He will come back and receive them in corporate unity to
+Himself.
+
+His words are simple, but the simplicity is the simplicity of light
+and every accent is as the touch of peace to troubled hearts; for
+this is what He said:
+
+"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would
+have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
+
+And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and
+receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."
+
+In the book of Acts, in the first chapter you have a scene no artist
+has really ever painted, no writer ever fairly portrayed and no
+mortal tongue can fittingly describe.
+
+Our Lord is going up from the Mount of Olives. He is going up from
+the midst of His disciples. He is going heavenward. The disciples
+watch Him as He ascends. He enters a cloud. Do not, I beseech you,
+imagine for a moment this cloud is a fog bank, a mass of watery mist
+and vapour; it is the shekinal cloud which once covered the
+tabernacle in the wilderness and was the vehicle of His presence
+when Israel in that far time marched on their way to the promised
+land. It is His chariot of state. In this chariot sent to meet Him
+He passes between the onlooking worlds ever higher and higher till
+at last He takes His seat upon the throne of the Highest at the
+right hand of the invisible majesty.
+
+Then, as through the dimness of their tears the disciples watch Him
+disappear, they hear a voice which says to them:
+
+"Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same
+Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like
+manner as ye have seen him go into heaven."
+
+"This same Jesus."
+
+Mark that well!
+
+The Jesus who on the Sunday night of His resurrection did meet these
+disciples in the upper room and said to them as they shrank back
+into a frozen silence of hope and fear:
+
+"Peace be unto you."
+
+"Why are ye troubled?"
+
+"And why do thoughts arise in your hearts?"
+
+"Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and
+see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have."
+
+Still these disciples were afraid, afraid it could not be true.
+
+Then He showed them His hands and His feet that they might see where
+the nails had gone in, torn through the flesh and left eternal
+wounds as the chevrons of glory.
+
+And still the silence of hope mingled with fear.
+
+Then he said:
+
+"Have ye here any meat?"
+
+And they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.
+
+And He took and did eat before them.
+
+He had said to them He was flesh and bones, not flesh and blood.
+
+He was not flesh and blood because in the sin-offering all the blood
+must be poured out at the bottom of the altar, and He was Himself
+the antitypical sin-offering. He had poured out His blood. It had
+run as a living stream from every vein and artery.
+
+Because He was the sin-offering in death, in resurrection He became
+for the first time a priest--high priest after the order, not of
+Aaron, but Melchisedec.
+
+That very morning as the high priest He had ascended to heaven,
+within the vail, and sprinkled His redeeming blood (how is not
+revealed) on the eternal throne, changing it from the throne of
+judgment to a throne of grace. That night He stood before them He
+was their high priest, not of earth, but heaven. He breathed upon
+them, imparted to them the Holy Spirit--the Comforter--linking them
+to His immortal body. He remained with them, going and coming,
+during forty days, operating with them officially by and through the
+Holy Spirit as His unseen executive; for we are told that, "until
+the day he was taken up he through the Holy Ghost had given
+commandments unto the apostles;" and then, finally, as this scene in
+the book of Acts shows us, ascended to His high-priestly function
+and unceasing service of intercession.
+
+He is seated in heaven now, seated there as the same Jesus who met
+His disciples that first Sunday night, the same Jesus who ascended
+out of their midst from Olivet. This same Jesus! The same not only
+in realistic, human body, but the same in character, full of the
+same measureless compassion and grace as when He sat on the well
+curb in Samaria and though thirsting as a real man for real water
+offered to give to the sinful woman who by divine and eternal
+ordination met him there, the water that should be in her as a well
+of water springing up into everlasting life.
+
+This same Jesus is coming again, not a phantom, not an impalpable
+spirit, not a ghost Christ, but a Christ who is a real man of real
+flesh and real bones.
+
+This is the key-note of the book of Acts.
+
+He who died for men, who has sanctioned the Holy Spirit to operate
+in His name, speak in His name, reveal to us the things that are His
+and show us things to come concerning Him, He is coming again,
+coming not only as very God, the Holy One of Israel, He who has been
+exalted to be both Lord and Christ, but as this loving, tender,
+compassionate Jesus, and in a body that may be seen and handled--a
+body of flesh and bones.
+
+In Romans we have the promise the Lord is coming to bruise Satan
+under His feet and the feet of His saints; and according to the
+calendar of heaven and the way in which they measure time there this
+great event must come to pass, as it is written, "shortly."
+
+In First Corinthians the Lord is coming to raise the dead who shall
+be His "at his coming."
+
+In Second Corinthians He is coming to transfigure the living who
+believe in Him and thus clothe them with their "house from heaven,"
+give them the body that shall be the handiwork of God and not man.
+
+In Philippians our citizenship is in a country which is in heaven
+from whence we are to look for a Saviour, even the Lord Jesus
+Christ, who shall change this body of our mortal humiliation that it
+may be fashioned like unto His immortal and glorious body, a change
+which He will effectuate by that mighty power according to which He
+is able to subdue all things unto Himself.
+
+In Colossians our life is hid with Christ in God, a double
+environment of security, and when Christ who is our life shall
+appear, we shall appear with Him also in glory.
+
+In the epistles to the Thessalonians each chapter closes with a
+testimony to the Second Coming.
+
+In the first epistle in the first chapter the Apostle commends the
+Thessalonian Church because they had turned to God from idols to
+serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven.
+From the beginning the Apostle Paul taught the new converts the next
+possible event might be the Coming of that Lord whom he had declared
+had been sacrificed for them, was now risen and in heaven. This was
+the one supreme thing for which they were to be in readiness every
+day--the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+In the second chapter he assures the Thessalonians he will meet them
+in the presence of the Lord at His Coming; when He comes and they
+are all gathered before Him, saved through the Gospel Paul has
+preached to them in the demonstration of the Spirit and power, they
+will be the guarantee and occasion of the crown he shall receive.
+
+In the third chapter he exhorts them to increase and abound in love
+to one another that their hearts may be established unblameable in
+holiness before the Lord when He shall come the Second time with all
+His saints.
+
+In the fourth chapter he announces as a special revelation from the
+Lord that the Lord Himself is coming to awaken those whom He has put
+to sleep in His name. He will descend from heaven with a shout, with
+the voice of the archangel and the trump of God. The dead in Him
+shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught
+up with them in clouds to meet the Lord in the air; so shall we ever
+be with the Lord and with one another.
+
+In the fifth chapter the Coming of the Lord for His saints as just
+noted in the fourth and preceding chapter will bring in the day of
+the Lord; and we further learn this coming for the saints not only
+precedes the day of the Lord, but as the introduction to it will be
+as secret, sudden and unknown to the world as is in general the
+coming of a thief.
+
+In the second epistle, in the first chapter the Lord is seen coming
+with all His saints to execute judgment on the ungodly and the
+unbelieving.
+
+In the second chapter we learn the word, "Rapture," so often given
+as the name and title for the translation of the Church to meet the
+Lord, while it may be a deducible truth and exegetically, or, rather
+philologically sustained, is not the Holy Ghost title. The true and
+Scriptural title is: "Our gathering together unto Him."
+
+In this chapter we learn also when the Church has been gathered to
+the Lord in heaven the man of sin, the Antichrist will be revealed;
+then will the Lord appear in glory, overthrow him and his league of
+nations and set up the heaven-ordained kingdom of righteousness and
+peace.
+
+In the third chapter the Apostle prays the Lord may direct their
+hearts into the love of God and into--patient waiting for Christ.
+
+In the First Epistle to the Thessalonians the Lord comes FOR His
+Church.
+
+In the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians He comes WITH His Church.
+
+In First Timothy He is coming that He may be shown forth as the
+blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords.
+
+In Second Timothy He is coming to judge the quick and the dead and
+to give reward to all those who love His appearing.
+
+Titus gives us the inspired and official title of the Coming of our
+Lord Jesus Christ as, "That Blessed Hope."
+
+In Hebrews we see this age is the antitypical Day of Atonement; just
+as at the close of the day in Israel the people were waiting for the
+man who led away the scapegoat into the wilderness to come back
+without it as evidence their typical redemption was complete and
+secure for another year; just so our Lord Jesus Christ having
+appeared in the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of
+Himself, reconcile the world to God and bring in the day of grace
+and salvation, to them that look for Him shall He come the "second
+time, without sin, unto salvation"; that is, He will come back not
+as the sin offering, but as the triumphant Redeemer and as witness
+that our redemption will then be completed by Him in the immortal
+bodies He shall give us.
+
+James testifies that in the closing hours of this age Capital and
+Labour will look at each other with wrinkled brows, clenched hands
+and nervous, impatient expectation.
+
+He exhorts the Christian labourer to be patient because, as he says,
+"the Coming of the Lord draweth nigh," is so near, so imminent He
+standeth as a judge--verily "at the door"--and ready to intervene.
+
+In the First Epistle of Peter the Lord is coming to justify the
+faith of His elect.
+
+In the Second Epistle He is coming to bring in the new heavens and
+the new earth.
+
+In the First Epistle of John we who believe are sons of God. It is
+not yet manifested to the world what we really are, nor what we
+shall be; but we know when He shall appear we shall be like Him for
+we shall see Him as He is. When He shines out we shall shine out
+with Him.
+
+We are told every one who has this hope in him, purifieth himself
+even as he is pure.
+
+And thus in this special fashion the Holy Spirit affirms the Second
+Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is not only the climacteric of our
+avouchment as sons of God, but, when held as a hope in the heart,
+will keep us pure and clean as the Holy Christ Himself.
+
+In the Second Epistle of John we are warned false teachers will
+abound; teachers who shall deny the eternal incarnation of the Son
+of God. They will deny He is coming the Second time; but, above all,
+they will deny He could possibly come in the flesh.
+
+The Apostle unhesitatingly affirms those who hold and teach this
+falsehood are nothing less than antichrists; and he warns us as
+faithful followers of the true Christ not to receive them into our
+houses, nor bid them Godspeed.
+
+Jude is the smallest, that is to say, the shortest, of all the
+epistles. It is a clasp between the Old and the New Testaments.
+
+Jude tells us Enoch the seventh man who lived on the earth
+testified, not of the first, but the Second Coming, saying:
+
+"Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints."
+
+Then we find ourselves in the Revelation.
+
+This is the book of the Consummation.
+
+The supreme subject is the Second Coming.
+
+There are twenty-two chapters.
+
+Each of the chapters portrays conditions and circumstances leading
+up to the great climax--the Second Coming and the immense and
+measureless consequences--the millennial reign and the eternal
+state.
+
+The book is like the roof of a great cathedral, like the interior of
+the roof, groined and panelled--each panel a chapter.
+
+It is like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in which, however, may
+be found figures and forms such as Michel Angelo never drew nor such
+even as his imperial and suggestive mind could conceive.
+
+You will find in these chapters the figures of wild beasts, the
+dragon, fallen angels, fiends from the pit, that old Serpent called
+the Devil and Satan. If you will read and listen you will hear the
+blast of trumpets, the breaking of vials, the sounds of woe, the
+tramp of marching feet, the clash of battle, fire falling out of the
+heavens, trees and grass in flame, the waves of the sea turned to
+blood, fountains and streams become as wormwood and gall, the sun as
+black as a starless midnight, the moon hanging in the lowering
+heavens like a clot of blood, earthquakes, the scarlet tongues of
+outpouring volcanoes, thunderings and lightnings, all manner of
+wickedness and pervading sin, a world quivering as a ship in the
+storm, the bending heavens as though unbolted and insecure, all
+foundations apparently shattered and the universe itself as though
+rushing forward to its funeral pyre.
+
+Heaven opens and the Lord comes forth riding a white horse, followed
+by armies on white horses, the horses the symbols of His power, each
+hoof beat as it smites the slant of heaven the sound of swift
+descending judgment.
+
+On the Lord's head are many crowns.
+
+He is wrapped in a garment dyed in blood.
+
+His eyes are as a flame of fire. His glances penetrate to the secret
+intents and purposes of the heart. They get behind every cloak of
+deception and every pretense. All the spotted nakedness of interior
+and intensive sin is revealed. Nothing remains in shadow, everything
+is illuminated to bareness, and the searching light of His looks
+goes through every fibre of being.
+
+He is coming to reign and rule.
+
+All the things the chapters record have been driving us to look
+forward to that; the woe, the anguish and the hell on earth have
+been pleading and crying out for a master to master and put an end
+to the cataclysms of catastrophic iniquity; the very nature of
+things has been testifying that He must come.
+
+He is responding to the demand that lies in the nature of things.
+
+He is coming to reign and rule as a king. He is not coming with an
+olive branch in one hand and a cooing dove on His shoulder.
+
+Nay!
+
+He is coming with a rod of iron. He is coming to trample all
+opposition beneath His feet, put down all rule and authority, break
+to pieces and shatter as a potter's vessel the pride of nations and
+the self-exaltation of man.
+
+He is coming to establish peace, but not by means of compromise, by
+gentle and persuasive ways, but by war and as a man of war, as the
+man who is very God and judge omnipotent.
+
+The book closes with the thrice repeated announcement from the Lord
+Himself:
+
+"Behold, I am coming quickly."
+
+This is the last utterance of the Lord from heaven.
+
+To this the Church replies with its last recorded prayer:
+
+"Amen, even so, come, Lord Jesus."
+
+When you close the book you feel the next thing is--the Coming of
+the Lord.
+
+If the value of a statement or doctrine is to be measured by the
+number of times repeated, then, since from Genesis to Revelation, in
+every form of human language the Second Coming is proclaimed, is
+stamped upon almost every page of the Bible, is inwrought with every
+fibre of truth it finally presents; since in the New Testament alone
+it is mentioned directly and indirectly more than three hundred
+times, as there is no other theme in the Bible that approaches it in
+frequency of repetition, it should seem that this event and doctrine
+of the Second Coming with all its promises and certified
+consequences should easily be of supreme and all-compelling
+importance; and because the Holy Spirit has made it of such
+importance I am under bonds to preach it.
+
+Those who persist in saying it is incidental, secondary and sporadic
+might well be said to be of that class of theological disputants who
+never study their Bible; for the fact is should you cut out every
+reference to the Second Coming, its cognate truths and all the
+events to which it gives emphasis, you would have but a fragment of
+the Bible; and the Book upon which faith is founded, from which hope
+casts its glances heavenward, sees light in the grave and
+immortality assured, would be but as a broken reed, a garment of
+beauty torn and shredded, or as a harp whose main chord had been
+snapped asunder.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ is Bound up With Every
+Fundamental Doctrine, Every Sublime Promise and Every Exhortation to
+High, to Holy and Practical Christian Living
+
+
+IT is bound up with every fundamental doctrine.
+
+The resurrection from the dead, the transfiguration of the living,
+the judgment seat of Christ, the judgment of the living nations, the
+consequent judgment of the white throne, the rewards of the
+righteous and the punishment of the wicked.
+
+It is bound up with every sublime promise.
+
+The recognition of the dead, the overthrow of Satan, the deliverance
+of creation, the triumph of God and Christ and the eternal felicity
+of the saints.
+
+It is bound up with every exhortation to high, to holy and practical
+Christian living.
+
+We are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together as the
+manner of some is. On the Lord's day we are to break bread and drink
+the fruit of the vine, show forth the Lord's death and make known to
+heaven and to earth that the only ground of approach to a holy God
+is the sacrificial offering and vicarious sufferings of the Son of
+God and God the Son, and that on the ground of His atoning blood as
+our sin offering and personal substitute we claim Him as redeemer,
+saviour and interceding priest.
+
+We are to love God and love one another.
+
+We are not to judge one another.
+
+We are not to cast stumbling blocks in each other's path.
+
+We are to walk worthy of our vocation.
+
+We are to let our moderation be known to all men.
+
+We are to be patient, long-suffering and forbearing.
+
+We are to engage continually in prayer and supplication.
+
+We are to live blamelessly before men and holily before God.
+
+As pastors we are to shepherd the sheep over whom God has made us to
+be overseers.
+
+We are to feed the flock, not with the philosophies and fictions of
+men, but with the truth of God.
+
+We are to restore the wandering, sustain the weak and comfort the
+sorrowing.
+
+We are to go to the house of mourning and give consolation to those
+who are Christians and who weep above their Christian dead.
+
+As preachers we are to preach the Word. We are to preach in season
+and out of season, and to exhort with all long-suffering and
+doctrine.
+
+We are exhorted to this high, this holy, this exalted and practical
+Christian living, this reincarnation of Christ in daily experience,
+this translation of His character, this manifestation of His guiding
+and ruling presence, not by the fact that we must die and appear
+before God, but by the fact the Lord Himself is coming, may come at
+any time, that any moment we may meet Him at His judgment seat.
+
+In all the universe of God there is nothing so impressive as the
+thought that you, that I, that we must give a personal account to
+God for the manner in which we have used our time, our talent, our
+opportunity and substance; and when we are told--as we are told in
+Holy Scripture--that any moment we may be summoned to give an
+account of our stewardship, and that without dying, just suddenly,
+without a moment's warning, translated bodily and with all the sense
+of the daily life we have been living upon us into the presence of
+Him whose name we have been professing--impressiveness has reached
+its ultimate and exhortation the fullest leverage of appeal.
+
+And he who says the Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a
+truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to
+Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly
+ignorant of the Word of God or brutally and perversely guilty of
+denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the
+Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative passage in the
+Word of God.
+
+When thus you are face to face with the indisputable fact that every
+basic doctrine of the Christian faith, every outshining promise of
+hope, of comfort, of consolation, of abiding peace, every appeal to
+the noblest and purest life as a Christian, every demand that the
+Christian shall unceasingly be the light of heaven in the spiritual
+darkness of earth is bound up inextricably with the fact of the
+Second Coming, it carries with it the inevitable corollary that the
+Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as a certified and imminent
+event is the very sum and substance of all available motives that
+can lead to a life of practical service to God and man.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Only at the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ Will Redemption be
+Complete and the Blood of the Cross be Justified
+
+
+OUR Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world that He might go
+through the unspeakable horror of the cross; He did not hang on that
+brutal and torturing instrument of death as the criminal of the
+universe; He did not receive the down sweep of the essential
+antagonism of a holy God against the sin He represented; He did not
+cry the cry of the lost, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken
+me?"; He was not flung out like a derelict thing into the black,
+starless night of God's inexorable law, measureless wrath and
+indignation where His humanity unanchored and alone was forsaken
+both by God and man; He did not hang there in the torment of His
+body, suffering all the agony the most exquisitely wrought, nerve
+-centered body of the universe could suffer of physical pain and
+anguish; God did not make Him to be sin and treat Him as the
+blackest and most repulsive thing in existence; He did not lay upon
+Him the weight and demerit of a world's guilt that He might suffer
+in His innocence, His purity and innate sinlessness on behalf of the
+vilest outcast this side of Gehenna, the lake of fire, just that He
+might keep us from lying, cheating, swearing, getting drunk, giving
+ourselves up to immorality, licentiousness and sensualism; He did
+not send Jesus Christ His only begotten and well-beloved Son to die
+a spectacle to heaven, to earth and hell that He might make us
+merely decent and right and morally correct in our relations to one
+another. All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as
+fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is
+expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of
+verse and song.
+
+Cleanness and morality are involved quantities in a Christian. The
+moment the new life of the risen Christ is wrought in a believer and
+he is linked up by the Holy Ghost to the glorified body of the Son
+of God he has in him all the impulse and power of the highest
+morality, the most exalted purity, the rarest spirituality and the
+discernment of spiritual things. All that is self-evident--but the
+Son of God came into this world and went through the amazing tragedy
+and sacrifice of the cross to do something more than to make us
+merely moral and good. He came into the world, He died the
+foreordained death of the cross that He might deliver us from death
+and the grave.
+
+Death is the blackest and most shameful blot on the face of the
+earth, the grave the most repulsive of scandals, drawing the trench
+of its corruption and stain round the girdle of the globe.
+
+To bring a human being into the world, give him no choice of father
+or mother, of place, of time and circumstance, endow him with a
+brain to think, a heart to feel and love and then set him face to
+face with death, hide from him the hour of his going like a criminal
+who knows not the hour of his execution; to allow the old to live
+till they are withered, shrivelled and helpless, a burden to others
+and a still greater burden to themselves, cursing the fact they must
+live and yet afraid to die; to take a young man in the splendour of
+his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away
+without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves
+him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the
+decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the
+tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the
+sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of
+tears, or the choking sob; to allow the living whose hearts are torn
+and twisted and smashed by the robbery that death brings upon them
+to stand there and strangle themselves with the unanswered and
+unanswerable questions: "Whence," "What," and "Whither," and then
+say all this is the work of a good, a compassionate, a tender and
+loving God, and that death is as natural as birth?
+
+Nay!
+
+Those who say and teach that death is as natural as birth are guilty
+of pure unintellectualism and are unwarranted deniers of the facts.
+
+The birth of a child is like the coming of the dawn. It is like the
+note of a new and joyous song. It is the revelation of a new world,
+a world of life, of hope, of promised and larger activities. No one
+who is sane and true and wise will deliberately seek to hinder
+birth; but death! ah! everything is against death and by right
+against it.
+
+Every fibre in the body repudiates death. Pain is the protest of
+life against it and the scout that brings in news of its approach.
+The brain, the mind, the heart shiver at it, not merely because of
+the native fear at the unknown, but at the mockery it makes of life,
+the uselessness of living a time, at the longest, so brief, so full
+of disappointment and bitterness, a life where plans are never
+accomplished nor hopes fulfilled, where tears and sorrow outweigh
+laughter and song.
+
+Every remedy taken from materia medica, every operation of the
+surgeon's knife that adds even a day to the sufferer's existence,
+every hospital, every precaution and invention to prevent accident,
+all the genius exercised by man to conserve health and strength are
+a protest against death and a proclamation that it is unnatural, a
+discord and a wrong.
+
+Every human being who has the slightest pulse of sentiment, who is
+not sunken in the soddenness of moral unconsciousness feels that
+death is the shadow shutting out the sun of day and hiding the stars
+of night, the false note that breaks the lilt in any song, the thief
+who takes the treasure no money can replace, the mocker who bids us
+readjust our days and live as though those whom we have loved and
+lost had never been a part of us, so that their going has put more
+of death in those of us who remain to live than life--even the brute
+beast feels and knows death is--an enemy.
+
+Nor does God Himself leave us in any doubt about it.
+
+He says death is an enemy; even as it is written:
+
+"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
+
+And since in itself it is an enemy, it is, necessarily, the work of
+an enemy.
+
+It is the work of an enemy who has the power of death.
+
+He who has the power of death is--the Devil; even as it is written:
+
+"Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil."
+
+The Son of God came into the world that He might destroy the Devil
+and his work of death.
+
+He came to abolish death and bring life and immortality to light.
+
+He came to make us something more than--just moral.
+
+He came to make us--immortal.
+
+There is only one man in the universe who has immortality; and that
+man is He who is our Lord Jesus Christ, very God and yet true and
+actual man.
+
+There is not an immortal human being on earth to-day.
+
+There is no such thing as an immortal soul.
+
+But here I bid you halt!
+
+Let no one take up this statement and go hence and say I teach the
+final annihilation of the soul.
+
+He who should go forth and say that would be, after what I shall
+further tell you, a robber of truth and character.
+
+On this round earth at this hour there is no man who has spoken
+more, written more and, under God, done more to rebuke and smite
+this slavering, slobbering, unintellectual and Devil-inspired
+deception known as Russellism, Christadelphianism and Seventh Day
+Adventism than the man who now speaks to you.
+
+I affirm here that by the will of God the soul must exist forever
+whether it be in heaven or in hell; but, I say to you the preacher
+who seeks to deny and overthrow the doctrine of annihilation by
+defending the immortality of the soul is beaten before he begins. He
+has his pains for his labour. He can find no such expression as
+"immortal soul" in the Bible nor any such doctrine taught there.
+Above all, he is guilty of excuseless philological blundering. The
+soul is immaterial. Immortal is applied to that which is material.
+The words, "immortal," and "immortality" are never applied in the
+New Testament to the soul--never! but always and exclusively to the
+body.
+
+To be immortal means to have a deathless, incorruptible body like
+unto that of the Son of God.
+
+This, and this alone--as related to man--is Scriptural immortality.
+The Son of God came into the world to give this boon of immortality
+to men.
+
+This is the supreme objective of redemption.
+
+Till that objective is obtained redemption is not complete and the
+blood of the cross is not justified.
+
+Do you call the redemption of Paul complete so long as his body lies
+mingled with the dust of the highway by the banks of that yellow
+Tiber where he was slain?
+
+Do you call complete the redemption of those you love and I love so
+long as the Devil like the strong man armed with the law holds the
+mortgage on their bodies and keeps them in his dark and worm-filled
+house--the grave?
+
+It is true, blessedly true, thank God, the moment a believer dies he
+is absent from his home in the body and immediately present at his
+home with the Lord in the third heaven, in the beautiful country of
+Paradise, in the Holy City, the place prepared.
+
+It is true the dear departed ones are clothed with the white robe of
+immaculate light woven on the unjarring looms of heaven, a temporary
+clothing which preserves their form and makes them visible and
+recognizable to one another; but with it all they are disembodied,
+and in spite of the comfort and the consolation of it, in spite of
+the fact that their state is "far better" than this at its best,
+still they are souls whose vehicle is no longer body, but spirit
+(wherefore after death they are sometimes spoken of as spirits);
+nevertheless, the Son of God did not come to make us eternal, even
+if happy--ghosts.
+
+If Christians should continue to die and should remain as white
+clothed ghosts in heaven forever they would be an incongruous
+environment and abiding scandal to the immortality of the Son of God
+Himself. A living, immortal man shining in a glorified human body
+surrounded by bodiless souls forever! What a contradiction that
+would be, what a scandal, indeed. It would be the declaration that
+the Son of God had power to rise from the dead, make His own body
+immortal, impervious to death, but in respect to those for whom He
+died and who died trusting in His promise He either did not have the
+power or did not care to keep His promise.
+
+Such a conclusion in either member of the proposition is impossible.
+It is impossible, for no such postulate as inability or
+faithlessness can be laid against the Son of God.
+
+By His own immortality as the first-fruits of them that slept, as
+the ordained forerunner and sample of all those whom He has redeemed
+He is, and in the nature of things, under bonds to give immortality
+to each, to raise the dead and transfigure the living in His
+likeness.
+
+As the dead can be raised and the living changed only when He is
+personally present then He must come to this world again to give
+that immortality of which seated on yonder throne in heaven He is
+the promise and the pledge.
+
+He made this promise by the grave of Lazarus.
+
+Standing there with His cheeks wet with tears of sorrow over the one
+He loved and in profound sympathy with the grief-stricken sisters,
+groaning in Himself, not merely as one who was under the spell of
+sorrow and heartache, but full of "indignant protest" (this is the
+meaning of the word "to groan") against the havoc of death as the
+work of that being whom we so familiarly call "Devil," without
+stopping to measure his dignity, malignity and power, He said:
+
+"I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though
+he were dead, yet shall he live:
+
+And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
+
+Wondrous, gracious, far reaching and full of measureless comfort is
+the promise, but nine out of ten who repeat it seem never to have
+comprehended the full import of it.
+
+For this is what He meant.
+
+Listen to it as I quote it in its fullness of intent:
+
+"I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though
+he were dead, yet--when I come again--shall he live:
+
+And whosoever liveth and believeth in me--when I come again--shall
+never die."
+
+Nor is this a fictional fancy of mine, but the direct declaration of
+the Holy Spirit to the Church speaking through the Apostle Paul; for
+he says:
+
+"Behold, I shew you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall
+all be changed,
+
+In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the
+trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and
+we shall be changed.
+
+For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must
+put on immortality.
+
+So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption and this
+mortal shall have put on immortality, then (and not till then--not
+when we die and go to heaven, but when the dead are raised and the
+living are changed--then--and not till then) shall be brought to
+pass the saying that is written (written by the Prophet Isaiah in
+the twenty-fifth chapter of his prophecy), death is swallowed up in
+victory.
+
+O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
+
+And mark it well, the context of this Holy Ghost promise is the
+declaration that the resurrection of the dead, the transfiguration
+of the living, this changing from mortality to immortality will be
+the resurrection and the transfiguration of those who are "Christ's
+at His coming."
+
+Yes! He will come.
+
+He will descend from heaven with a shout of command. He will pass it
+on to the archangel. The archangel will pass it to the angel who is
+called the "trump of God." He will cause a sound, a blast, an
+utterance of power at which the doors of graves of every sort shall
+open outward, every secret hiding place of the purchased dead will
+be revealed and the sacred dust will bloom with life; for, in the
+body of every regenerated soul there is planted the germ of the new
+body; and just as the buried seed is linked by the unseen air to the
+fructifying sun in heaven and as at a given moment we call the
+germination is quickened and at last comes forth in new form yet the
+same essential embodiment as when planted; so, the regeneration
+nucleus of the new body is held by the Holy Spirit (of which the air
+is the symbol) to the risen, glorified body of the Son of God in
+heaven; and no matter what may befall the body in which it was
+buried it will abide to that hour we call the resurrection and
+transfiguration and at the shout, the voice and action of the trump
+of God will come forth in the glow of unfolded and eternal beauty as
+the sheath, the house, the home, the perfect dwelling place, the
+royal robe of the souls the Lord shall bring with Him; while the
+living shall flash forth in the same immortality and glory.
+
+Yes! the dust of death shall bloom and mortality shall put on
+immortality at the Coming of the Lord.
+
+And I for one want Him to come.
+
+I have loved ones waiting within the gates of the upper city for
+that morning hour.
+
+I have one there my heart in these days yearns to see.
+
+But a short time ago death with rude and sudden hand snatched from
+me my only child, the son of my heart; a son grown to splendid young
+manhood; a son who loved me, reverenced me, believed as I believe, a
+member of my own Church, baptized by my own hand in early days: a
+son on whom I hoped to lean in peace if the shadows should deepen
+round me ere my Lord might come. And in the going of that beloved
+son of mine the light of day has seemed at times to fail, the stars
+of heaven have grown so dim and far away I think of them often as
+tears of distant eyes that pity me. There are moments when I crave
+him as a hungry man does food and as a thirsty man in desert ways
+yearns for a draught of limpid waters. I have a hurt here in the
+heart of me no medicine of earth can cure; but because I know when
+the Lord comes this son of mine shall rise and I shall meet him and
+the old glad life renew in larger, richer, fuller measure; and
+because I know there is only the sound of the trump between me and
+that longed-for hour; that the door of heaven is always ajar and my
+Lord may come at any moment and bring us to the hand clasp and the
+love embrace again, I bear my hurt, I rest in the Lord and preach
+this blessed hope to other hearts that ache--the Coming of Him who
+is the resurrection and the life and whose last earthward utterance
+to His Church is:
+
+"Behold, I come quickly."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Not Till Our Lord Jesus Christ Comes the Second Time Will the Church
+be Exalted into Her True Function of Rulership Over the World
+
+THE Church was not sent into the world to convert or Christianize
+it.
+
+It was sent into the world to preach the Gospel to every creature.
+
+It was not to condone the world but to condemn it.
+
+With its twin doctrines of Incarnation and Regeneration it was to
+ring the knell of evolution and deny the hope of any saving energy
+in the flesh.
+
+It was not to flatter, to paint, to gild nor endeavour in any wise
+to reform or organize the world.
+
+It was to deal with the world, with the system called the world, as
+a ship pounding to pieces, and pounding helplessly, upon the rocks
+of fallen human nature, the dethronement of God in the soul and the
+enthronement and exaltation of self-interest in the soul.
+
+The Church in its ministry and widely commissioned effort was to
+plunge, as a well-equipped and perfectly manned life-boat may do,
+into the sea and surf of natural and Satanic things and get men out
+of an old system under the doom and judgment of God into Christ as
+the head of a new system under grace and the coming glory of God.
+
+The Church was not to build up a kingdom during the absence of the
+Lord.
+
+On the contrary, she was to recognize herself as the affianced bride
+of a rejected king and coming bridegroom.
+
+She was to walk in separation from the world, refusing the seductive
+enticements of her would-be lovers and with an upward and heavenly
+look serve while she waited for a returning Lord.
+
+The Lord did not come.
+
+The Church grew weary of her vigil.
+
+She exchanged the heavenly for the earthly look.
+
+She met the Devil and felt the magic of his bewitching glances.
+
+He had led her Lord to the mount of temptation. He had shown Him all
+the kingdoms of the world and their glory. He offered them to Him on
+condition that He would turn His feet out of the pathway that led to
+the sacrificial cross. He offered them on condition that He should
+refuse to go to the cross and there in the agony of His soul and
+body and on the loom of His vicarious sufferings weave the seamless
+robe of divine righteousness for sinful men.
+
+The Lord refused.
+
+The Devil turned and slew Him.
+
+He now led the willing Church to the same mountain height of
+temptation.
+
+He tempted her with the same temptation he had offered her Lord: The
+rulership of the world.
+
+If she would turn aside from a heaven-ordained bridegroom and a king
+whose face she could not see, she might win the world as her kingdom
+and rule it in spite of the cross.
+
+The offer of world rulership sounded pleasant in her ears.
+
+She yielded.
+
+She fell into the arms of the world.
+
+The world became her paramour.
+
+She became the world's mistress.
+
+Out of that ungodly and sensual alliance was born the illegitimate
+child, that woful ecclesiastical offspring, we call the Roman
+Catholic Church.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church became the Holy Roman Empire.
+
+The Empire was the Church.
+
+For long and dismal ages the Roman Church exhibited to perfection
+the evil, the folly and fatality of that false and deceptive
+proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth.
+
+Then came the Reformation. It so smote the Catholic Church that men
+imagined the tiara to be broken, crushed and scattered to the winds
+forever.
+
+They were mistaken.
+
+It came from underneath that blow almost as if it had risen from the
+dead.
+
+To-day it is more populous than ever, having a membership of at
+least two hundred millions. It has a more intensely emphasized
+solidarity. It is filled with enthusiasm, with ever-increasing
+arrogance and persistent aggression.
+
+It is the religious incubus of the hour, the spiritual paralysis of
+nations and their most dangerous political menace.
+
+With brazen effrontery and calculating boldness it has its clutch
+upon the throat of this Republic, controls its government from the
+Presidential office down through army and navy, has open mass in the
+shipyards of the latter, in camp and barracks its priests are
+masters and its wily knights of Columbus have obtained governmental
+favours and consideration the Young Men's Christian Association
+would not dare to claim.
+
+It rules your cities, holds the balance of political power and can,
+when it will, elect a President, and will promptly do so when the
+candidate for that high office shall be willing, as already it has
+been done by the present occupant of that office, to visit the
+Vatican or officially recognize the civil as well as religious
+authority of the Pope or receive the Apostolic delegate of the Papal
+See.
+
+The clutch of Romanism with its strangle hold is on the throat of
+what remains of Protestantism.
+
+Protestantism is the after birth of the Reformation.
+
+Protestantism repudiated all the temporalities of Rome but held on
+to the proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on
+earth.
+
+Protestantism is to-day broken up into multiplying fragments. If
+there be any unity remaining in it it is the unity that comes from
+the compromising denial of the convictions that led to the original
+break into fragments; a unity that hopes to maintain itself by
+classifying many of its former convictions as "non-essentials" and
+thus constitutes a combination that must become more and more
+colourless and inefficient in respect to doctrine.
+
+Some of its theological institutions are nothing better than
+clearing houses of infidelity and the curricula made up of Jericho
+theology. It has universities in which many of the professors have
+been graduated in Germany, having passed through the poison gas
+factory of the Berlin university, and under the camouflage
+department of "sacred literature" are sending out the mentally and
+spiritually asphyxiating poison of German rationalism, inoculating
+every fresh lot of newly made ministers and would-be missionaries
+with rank unbelief and Bible repudiation, distributing the poison
+into the back counties as well as municipal centers until there are
+scores of men who once stood for a whole Gospel and a certified Word
+of God who now stand first on one foot then on the other debating
+with themselves whether this Scripture that was once considered holy
+and sufficient is after all a revelation from God or an invention of
+man.
+
+A large number of men who are at the front in the teaching, the
+management, the organization and control of the churches of the
+different denominations repudiate practically every fundamental
+doctrine of the Christian faith.
+
+They deny the Virgin birth.
+
+The denial of the Virgin birth puts a stain upon the mother of Jesus
+as of a woman who has broken wedlock and sends her son forth as a
+bastard, an illegitimate who had no legal right to come into the
+world; and then illogically, if not hypocritically, those who deny
+it bid us take this son and make Him the exemplar of righteousness,
+forgetting or ignoring the self-evident fact that if, indeed, He had
+but a human and natural father then was He bred in sin and unfit to
+be set up as the supreme standard of righteousness and holiness
+among men.
+
+There are those who deny the sacrificial character of the death of
+the cross.
+
+They repudiate atonement by the shedding of blood.
+
+When we tell them it is written without shedding of blood there is
+no remission and it is the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, that
+alone cleanseth from all sin they fling up their hands in protest,
+tell us we are to be numbered among the figures of the past and that
+the theology we seek to maintain is the theology of the butcher
+shop, the barbarous doctrine of the shambles and the shadow of old
+-time tribal gods whose vengefulness and wrath could be appeased only
+by the murder of a victim.
+
+They repudiate the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the Lord.
+
+His body has long ago mingled with the dust of Palestine and been
+blown afar by careless winds. If He rose at all it was as the
+principle of righteousness and truth, whatever such a resurrection
+may mean. They will no longer tolerate the insistent need of
+regeneration. It has been said that "if a man is well born the first
+time he does not need to be born the second time."
+
+In the nature of the case such teaching rejects our Lord's bodily
+ascension to heaven and His session as a glorified man who is very
+God at the right hand of the Father.
+
+Above all, and as a further consequent of such an attitude, teachers
+of this class repudiate with an almost hysterical outcry, not only
+the thought that the Lord will come a second time to this world, but
+that those who love Him and yearn to see Him will ever behold Him
+coming in visible glory so that they may stand face to face with Him
+and get the very touch of His hands upon them in the vital
+benediction for which they are longing.
+
+These advanced teachers repudiate the Bible as the inspired,
+infallible, inerrant Word of God,
+
+The Pentateuch, the writings of Moses, is a bundle of folk lore,
+Moses himself a fiction no more substantial than Abraham, Isaac and
+Jacob. The historic books of the Old Testament are unreliable and
+therefore not history at all. The book of the prophet Isaiah instead
+of one author has many, each in turn contradicting the other. The
+book of Ezekiel from its incomprehensible wheels as they flash by
+the banks of the river Chebar to the impossible temple and its
+animal offerings with the ever-deepening river flowing out of it, is
+as mystic as the amazing cherubim which the prophet seeks, but
+apparently fails, to describe. The prophecies of Daniel were written
+long after the events they pretend to foretell. From Genesis to
+Malachi the Old Testament is in reality the mixed history of a
+tribal people with a national god whose attributes and demands are
+no more authentic and authoritative than those of the gods of Greece
+and Rome.
+
+The New Testament while a degree of advance on the Old by reason of
+the progress of the times and the more cultivated environment of its
+origin is not a whit more divinely inspired. The three Synoptic
+Gospels are witnesses summoned to court where their success is the
+contradiction and confusion of the story they attempt to tell. The
+book of Acts is a combination pamphlet put together by the followers
+of Peter and Paul as an attempt to compromise between the one who
+was the Apostle to the Circumcision and the other who was the
+Apostle to the Gentiles.
+
+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.
+
+Yonder in Bashan within the range of your eyes you may count sixty
+cities of stone, walls and roofs and windows of stone, great
+swinging doors of stone. The centuries have beaten the wind, the
+rain, the storms and flying sand upon them. They remain. They have
+outworn the centuries. They are silent. No footfall is heard upon
+the threshold. The houses are empty save for a fox, a swiftly
+gliding viper, or a belated Bedaween who may stable his horse in a
+deserted room where once a happy family dwelt in the long ago.
+
+The stone cities are waiting and every stone in door and window
+seems to be crying out:
+
+"We are waiting till they return whose right alone it is to live and
+dwell here."
+
+But what of the nations that scattered them and made them to suffer?
+
+Where is Babylon the proud empire that took them captive; where is
+Babylon the golden city that saw them hang their harps upon the
+willows, sit down upon the banks of the strange river and give way
+to weeping as they yearned for their own land again?
+
+Where is Greece whose phalanxes swept through their fields and
+spoiled their vineyards?
+
+Where is Rome whose iron legions took their city, put thousand on
+thousands to the sword, destroyed the beautiful temple once hallowed
+by a Saviour's feet and then drew a ploughshare over Zion that it
+might become a ploughed field as foretold? The Rome that sculptured
+on its triumphal arches the figures of the captive Jews it had led
+in boastful mockery at the chariot wheels of returning conquerors?
+
+These nations in their ancient glory have disappeared, the Lord as
+He promised has made a full end of them.
+
+But what of Israel?
+
+The Jews have answered for them.
+
+There are fifteen millions of Jews to-day.
+
+They are the most vital and vigorous race on the earth. They are
+five times the number of all Israel who left Egypt; and they are but
+a sixth part of them--two tribes, Judah and Benjamin.
+
+They are the money makers and money loaners of the world. They are
+the merchants, the bankers, the musicians, the professors in school,
+in college and university. They are the philosophers, the
+scientists, the electricians and chemists. They have furnished prime
+ministers, statesmen, judges and generals. Such a statesman as
+Disraeli who glorified England, such a general as Massena whom
+Napoleon characterized as the "child of victory."
+
+If to-day you should seek a representative in every department of
+human genius and endeavour you would find that representative to be
+either a Jew or a Jewess.
+
+Fifteen millions of Jews!
+
+What are these fifteen millions of Jews but fifteen millions of
+proofs that the book we call the Bible is true, is inerrant,
+infallible?
+
+Fifteen millions of demonstrations and fifteen millions of
+indubitable proofs.
+
+By so much as they prove that God keeps faith with His warnings of
+woe and judgment, by so much will He keep faith with the promise of
+good He has made; by so much is it sure He will yet plant them as He
+has said in their own land and will do so with His whole heart and
+His whole soul.
+
+Already the sound of their footsteps may be heard on the homeward
+march.
+
+Zionism is now an immense fact.
+
+The spirit of nationalism has come back to Judah.
+
+The blue and white flag of David has been unfurled.
+
+Diplomats in the nations' counsels agree there can be no settled
+peace between Europe and the East till the Jew is back in his own
+land and Judah once more a recognized political state; that the Jews
+are the only people all the nations will agree should have
+Palestine, and the words, "Jewish State" are words repeated in
+common speech round the globe.
+
+England has driven the Turk out of Jerusalem.
+
+The corner-stone of a five million dollar university has been laid
+upon that Mount of Olives where once the Son of God amid its lonely
+shades prayed and agonized, a begun fulfillment of the prophecy of
+Zephaniah that in the latter days the Lord would execute judgment on
+the Gentile nations that should be gathered there and to His
+restored and delivered people turn again a pure speech, no longer
+the stuttering and smattering phrase of Yiddish, but the old Hebraic
+tongue of their fathers.
+
+Already there are papers in Jerusalem published in Hebrew, schools
+are taught and many speak in the ancient language.
+
+Many Jews are going back to Palestine.
+
+Many more are there now than returned from Babylon.
+
+They are going back as the Word of God foretold, in utter and
+absolute unbelief and bitter repudiation of the idea that Jesus of
+Nazareth was their foretold and foreordained Messiah.
+
+They are going back with the vail upon their eyes and as blind as in
+the day when their fathers caused Him to be crucified by Roman
+hands.
+
+They are going back to a time of anguish of which Jeremiah solemnly
+warns as "the day of Jacob's trouble," and our Lord describes as the
+tribulation, "the great one," the like of which the world has never
+seen and will never see again.
+
+They are going back to be set up by a league of ten nations and to
+enter into an alliance and covenant with its godless head as their
+political and false Messiah.
+
+They will suffer until there shall come upon that generation all the
+righteous blood shed upon the earth from the blood of righteous Abel
+to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Bacharias who was slain
+between the temple and the altar, and the blood of the Son of God
+which they invoked in judgment on themselves and their children in
+that fatal hour when Pilate convinced of the innocence of Jesus and
+wishing to let Him go had washed His hands in water, putting the
+responsibility of the crucifixion upon them as a people. Then it was
+they cried that terrible cry:
+
+"His blood be on us, and on our children."
+
+But then as now, and always since the days of Elijah, there was and
+is an elect remnant in Israel.
+
+For their sakes the Lord will come.
+
+He will descend with His host to Mount Sinai, the place of the law;
+the spot where Israel rejected grace and sought that covenant which
+neither they nor their children have ever been able to keep.
+
+He will sweep with His mighty army to Jerusalem.
+
+He will overthrow the Gentile nations gathered there under the
+Devil-incarnate Antichrist.
+
+He will stand upon the Mount of Olives.
+
+The elect remnant will behold Him come.
+
+They will look upon Him whom their fathers pierced.
+
+They will fall down in anguish before Him.
+
+They will mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son.
+
+They will take up the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah and make it
+their confession of faith and bitter, self-accusing lamentation.
+
+They will say:
+
+"We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
+
+But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our
+iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his
+stripes we are healed.
+
+All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his
+own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."
+
+And in that hour, in that day of days shall there be a fountain
+opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem,
+for sin and uncleanness.
+
+The Lord will cause Jerusalem to be rebuilded "upon her own heap."
+He will ordain the erection of that temple in which He shall
+establish the throne of His holiness.
+
+Like David He will reign first over Judah. After that He will send
+Gentile messengers like "fishers" to seek out and find the
+descendants of the ten lost tribes. They will respond to the
+proclamation that will be made and to the search that will be
+instituted in that eastern land and among those peoples whither they
+were first carried away. There will be many impostors among them;
+but the Lord will make them to "pass under the rod" as when the true
+sheep are struck with the owner's mark and as they take up their
+journey Zionward all who are not of Israel will be purged from their
+midst.
+
+Those who are really of the covenant people will be quickened,
+regenerated, and when they enter the land will be welcomed by Judah
+and Benjamin.
+
+They shall become one nation in the land upon the mountains of
+Israel. One king shall be king to them all. They shall not be two
+nations any more, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms at
+all. The Lord will make a covenant of peace with them and multiply
+them and set His sanctuary in the midst of them forever. His
+tabernacle shall be with them. He will be their very God as He shall
+be the God of the whole earth. They shall be His peculiar people.
+All the Gentiles shall know that He has set them apart for Himself
+when they behold His temple erected in their midst, the most
+wonderful building in all the earth.
+
+And thus will be fulfilled the prophecy concerning Israel quoted and
+emphasized by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul that the
+Deliverer should come to Zion and turn away ungodliness from Jacob
+and that all Israel--that is--Israel united and as twelve tribes,
+should be saved.
+
+It is at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, then and not till then
+that the solemn and covenant promises of God made to Abraham, to
+Isaac and to Jacob will be fulfilled and united, redeemed,
+regenerated and saved Israel set in their own land as the center and
+channel of blessing to the earth.
+
+And because there can be no permanent peace in the world till Israel
+has been restored; and because I wish to see, not only peace among
+the nations and Israel reaping the blessings of the unconditional
+covenant of God's grace and unchanged faithfulness, but because I
+yearn to see the hour when the Lord shall enter upon His own
+inheritance and justify Himself before heaven and earth as Judah's
+Lord, as Israel's God and turn the accusation of His cross: "This is
+Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews" into the pean of His
+coronation as such, I preach the Second Coming.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of God Will a Government of
+Everlasting Righteousness and Peace be Established Upon the Earth
+
+
+IT was the original purpose of God to make the people of Israel the
+head of nations, place them in Palestine as the geographical center
+of the earth, make them its political center, send His own Son to be
+their incarnate king, use them as a channel of earthly and spiritual
+blessing and make this world the most perfect and happiest spot in
+all the wide universe.
+
+They failed to meet their opportunity.
+
+Then the Lord transferred the possibility of world rulership from
+the Jews to the Gentiles.
+
+He did this by handing political power and authority to
+Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.
+
+This rulership and sway of the world descended in its ordained and
+foretold succession down through Medo-Persia with its incorporation
+of Babylon, through the temporary but immensely extended empire of
+Greece which under Alexander included both Babylon and Medo-Persia,
+and after that the colossal and magic empire of Rome, swallowing up
+as it did the three empires or kingdoms which preceded it.
+
+Since the division of Rome into Western and Eastern empires the
+rulership of the world has been maintained by the various nations
+composed of those people dwelling in the territory once occupied by
+Rome.
+
+The world has been ruled by Turks, Spaniards, Germans, by the French
+and by the English.
+
+The Gentile nations in this special and prophetic territory have
+been the world rulers.
+
+It has been peculiarly Gentile rulership and in Scripture is called,
+"The times of the Gentiles."
+
+Gentile times, Gentile rulership has lasted for twenty-five hundred
+years.
+
+It has been an amazing rule.
+
+It has been a rulership that has revealed the genius, the brilliance
+and the God-given powers of man.
+
+It has been a rulership that has revealed the iniquity, the sin, the
+mad ambition and devil-inspired policies of man.
+
+In all the twenty-five hundred years of this Gentile rule there have
+not been one hundred consecutive years of universal peace.
+
+It has been twenty-five hundred years of war, of rapine, murder and
+measureless lust.
+
+Cities have been destroyed, fields have been laid waste, women have
+endured the last outrage. Children have been orphaned, right has
+been upon the scaffold and wrong upon the throne, prison chains have
+been for virtue, silk and velvet for vice, civilization after
+civilization has been destroyed, the earth has been filled with
+anguish beyond the power of tongue or pen to describe, and blood
+enough has been shed through man's inhumanity to man to float all
+the navies of the world, and money and treasure enough wasted to
+have provided a palace for every man and woman on earth.
+
+A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of
+peace and safety.
+
+Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.
+
+Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted
+all the claimed benefits of civilization.
+
+Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science
+were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the
+churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were
+turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or
+consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great
+insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day
+and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of
+millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the
+lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the
+fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming
+together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each
+other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming
+more and more a profession that was free from restraint.
+
+Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the
+counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the
+days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an
+end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to
+the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected
+in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where
+Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of
+arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and
+calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them
+menacingly apart.
+
+War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense
+of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the
+nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as
+trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea
+pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to
+stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that
+a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no
+longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music
+hall or even a church.
+
+Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for
+the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the
+men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended
+human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the
+individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and
+ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the
+strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the
+guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours
+and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the
+presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the
+comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation
+governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to
+resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity,
+were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of
+benighted and barbaric days.
+
+"Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a
+pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied
+rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.
+
+Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in
+raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous,
+ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in
+all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and
+from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of
+Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its
+sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among
+those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God
+had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by
+Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of
+world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles."
+
+To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting
+in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been
+starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children
+mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of
+strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.
+
+All the genius, the science and invention of man with poured out,
+unlimited wealth, have been drafted to produce the most terrifically
+destructive means of war. All the boasted progress and culture of
+the preceding centuries were called upon to wage the contest until
+it should affright even the participants themselves. Clouds of
+poison gas filled the once sweet and vital air of spring time and
+summer mornings. Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like
+other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They
+burrowed in holes and trenches like wild beasts concealed in their
+lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged
+things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way
+over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them
+the dead, the dying and the tortured. Hunger with its sunken cheeks,
+and pestilence with its green eyes, its slavering lips have trod the
+earth till horror with wordless anguish has kept vigil by the
+blackened hearthstones of ruined homes and deserted firesides.
+
+To-night, the fields of Flanders where the poppies grow and where
+the dead who died too soon and lie almost too thick to count, are as
+though a mighty juggernaut had rolled its fearful wheels over them,
+crushing both man and earth together into one monstrous pulp of
+hopeless ruin.
+
+To-night France, where the lilies were wont to bloom, is torn and
+ripped in all the one-time beauty and fascination of her white and
+winding roads, poplar fringed, in the culture of her fruited
+gardens, her orchards and her royal forests, as though some
+monstrous creation of pre-Adamite days had survived and broken
+through all restraint of all the ages to riot and gorge himself with
+unlimited delight of destruction.
+
+All this after two thousand years of professed Christianity and the
+constant iteration that the Church was slowly winning its way to the
+ruler-ship of the world; that each hour the world was growing better
+and more and more the principles of the Christ of God dominating the
+universal heart of man.
+
+The world awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive
+animalism still the underlying and primal force in man.
+
+To-night in face of all this, in face of the solemn declaration of
+the Son of God that during the whole time of His absence there would
+be war and rumours of war, and specially within the territory once
+occupied by Rome; that there would be distress of nations with
+perplexity, men's hearts failing them for fear for looking after the
+things that should be coming on the earth; that the people like the
+waves of the sea should be roaring, uttering their discordant voices
+in the thunder of protest and bitter discontent, breaking the bonds
+of old customs and lashing the times with lawlessness and
+unprecedented crime; in face of the warning of the Apostle Paul that
+in the last days, that is to say in the closing hours of this age,
+there should be, not peaceful but perilous times; that evil men
+should wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived; in the
+face of the inspired assurance of the Apostle James that as this
+dispensation should draw to its close Capital and Labour should
+stand in bitter attitude to each other; that the accumulated wealth
+of a special class called "rich men" should be "heaped together"
+that they might be spoiled and that miseries should come upon them;
+that on the one side should be the aggression of the profiteers and
+on the other the violence of those who would refuse to be exploited;
+in face of this assurance of industrial and class war; in face of
+the fact that the softest toned apostle whose pen is always
+transcribing the word "love," and who has reached the highest and
+most sublime definition of God as love; in face of the fact that
+this apostle affirms the hour will come when the whole world under
+religious, political and devilish inspiration will rush to conflict,
+that everywhere will be heard the tramp of armed men and the
+gathering of the nations for a war such as the world has not yet
+seen; in face of the picture which this apostle of love paints where
+the armies of the world are seen gathered in battle array against
+the Lord Christ and His right to reign; in the face of this divine
+warning the statesmen of the world are assembled in counsel at
+Paris, the world's capital of pleasure, in a palace once dedicated
+to lust and wanton self-gratification, whose panelled ceiling and
+mirrored walls are filled with and reflect the scenes and
+glorification of war, that by the stroke of a pen, by a series of
+resolutions, they may constitute a league of nations bulking so big
+that every threatened wave of future war may be flung back as when
+the dykes of Holland reject the sea.
+
+The astonishing and suggestive thing is that in the making and
+remaking of the map of Europe and Asia undertaken by the framers of
+the league, they are, all unconsciously, restoring the outlines of
+the old Roman Empire and preparing the way for the final and
+desperate revival of Rome under the form of ten confederate nations,
+with its last kaiser, that dark and woful figure, the man of sin,
+the son of perdition, the Antichrist.
+
+And there are Christian teachers who see in this league another
+herald of the millennium before Christ comes which they so
+sedulously preached previously to the war. They see in this league
+an evidence that the Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace is in
+reality reigning over the earth and bending the nations to His will
+for the reign of peace.
+
+In the whole history of theological exegesis and interpretation I
+know of nothing so utterly faulty, illogical and wholly unscriptural
+as that exegesis which teaches the angel song at Bethlehem to be the
+announcement of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of
+Peace and that as such He should establish it among the nations
+after His ascension to heaven and during His absence from the world.
+
+The angels sang glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to
+"men of good will."
+
+The angel who spoke to the shepherds keeping the temple sheep for
+the morning and the evening sacrifice was testifying to them that
+there was no longer need to keep the sheep for such a purpose. The
+day of animal sacrifices had passed, the living God had provided the
+true sacrifice, He who was born beneath the chaplet of heaven's
+music, the Lamb of God ordained before the foundation of the world.
+He had been born into the world that He might make peace by the
+blood of His cross, not between man and man, not between nation and
+nation, but between man and God. He had been born to die and by His
+death reconcile a rebel world to God; on the basis of this sacrifice
+yet to be and when He should have risen from the dead as witness of
+the efficacy of His death He would bring peace to every soul that
+should be of good will--every soul that should surrender to the will
+of God by believing on Him, offering Him by faith as a sacrifice and
+claiming Him as a substitute. Every such soul should be at peace
+with, and have the peace of, God.
+
+This was the meaning of that natal hour at Bethlehem.
+
+The angels were not singing over Him as the Prince of Peace who had
+come to abolish war among the nations, but as the ordained sacrifice
+who should bring peace between the individual man and his God. And
+yet--He is to be the Prince of Peace and reign and rule as such over
+the earth, putting an end to war and establishing perfect peace
+among the nations.
+
+The promise of His reign and rule as the Prince of Peace is clearly
+set forth in Scripture; as it is written in the book of the prophet
+Isaiah:
+
+"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."
+
+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 curriculae 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."
+
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
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