_A Sermon delivered by_ D. L. MOODY, _the Evangelist, at the Great Chicago
Tabernacle, Jan. 5, 1877. Repeated in the Boston Tabernacle, April
29th._
In 2 Timothy, 3:16, Paul declares: "All scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness;" but there are some people
who tell us when we take up prophecy that it is all very well to be
believed, but that there is no use in one trying to understand it; these
future events are things that the church does not agree about, and it is
better to let them alone, and deal only with those prophecies which have
already been fulfilled. But Paul does not talk that way; he says: "All
scripture is ... profitable for doctrine." If these people are right, he
ought to have said: "Some scripture is profitable; but you can not
understand the prophecies, so you had better let them alone." If God did
not mean to have us study the prophecies, he would not have put them in
the Bible. Some of them are fulfilled, and he is at work fulfilling the
rest, so that if we do not see them all completed in this life, we shall
in the world to come.
I do not want to teach anything to-day dogmatically, on my own
authority, but to my mind this precious doctrine--for such I must call
it--of the return of the Lord to this earth is taught in the New
Testament as clearly as any other doctrine is; yet I was in the church
fifteen or sixteen years before I ever heard a sermon on it. There is
hardly any church that does not make a great deal of baptism, but the
New Testament only speaks about baptism thirteen times, while it speaks
of the return of our Lord fifty times; and yet the church has had very
little to say about it. Now, I can see a reason for this: the devil does
not want us to see this truth, for nothing would wake up the church so
much. The moment a man takes hold of the truth that Jesus Christ is
coming back again to receive his friends to himself, this world loses
its hold upon him; gas-stocks and water-stocks, and stocks in banks and
horse-railroads, are of very much less consequence to him then. His
heart is free, and he looks for the blessed appearing of his Lord, who
at his coming will take him into his blessed kingdom.
In 2 Peter 1:20, we read: "No prophecy of the scripture is of any
private interpretation." Some people say: "O yes, the prophecies are all
well enough for the priests and doctors, but not for the rank and file
of the church." But Peter says: "The prophecy came not by the will of
man, but holy men spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," and those
men are the very ones who tell us of the return of our Lord. Look at
Daniel 2:45, where he tells the meaning of that stone which the king saw
in his dream that was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that
broke in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold.
"The dream is certain and the interpretation thereof sure," says Daniel.
Now we have seen the fulfillment of that prophecy all but the closing
part of it. The kingdoms of Babylon and Medo-Persia and Greece and Rome
have all been broken in pieces, and now it only remains for this stone
cut out of the mountain without hands to smite the image and break it in
pieces till it becomes like the dust of the summer threshing floor, and
for this stone to become a great mountain and fill the whole earth.