And because this government of peace and splendour and all the outflowing possibilities of a world in which righteousness shall reign and G.o.d 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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d
WHEN man fell creation fell.
It fell because creation in respect to this earth was headed up in him.
G.o.d 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 cl.u.s.ters, 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 G.o.d and all the sons of glory.
O yes! creation in all her borders is crying out for the Son of G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; then, at last, it will pa.s.s 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 G.o.d--the center of the universe.
Into this new and perfect earth the Church shall descend--a company of redeemed, blood-washed, immortal sons of G.o.d.
The Son of G.o.d and G.o.d the Son Himself shall descend and dwell there. Then for the first time shall the children of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d is not alone in his majesty and might, in his holiness and omnipotence, but in his love."
They shall take up that marvellous pa.s.sage in John 3: 16 and cry it aloud so that it will ring with acc.u.mulating praise to Him who first uttered it:
"For G.o.d 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:
"G.o.d is love. G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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.