There is no death where he is; death flees at his coming; dead bodies
sprang to life when he touched them or spoke to them. His coming is not
death; he is the resurrection and the life, when he sets up his kingdom
there is to be no death, but life forevermore.
There is another mistake, as you will find if you read your Bible
carefully. Some people think that at the coming of Christ everything is
to be done up in a few minutes; but I do not so understand it. The first
thing he is to do is to take his Church out of the world. He calls the
Church his bride, and he says he is going to prepare a place for her. We
may judge, says one, what a glorious place it will be from the length of
time he is in preparing it, and when the place is ready he will come and
take the church to himself.
In the closing verses of the fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians, Paul
says: "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so also them
which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.... We which are alive and
remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are
asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout,
with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead
in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,
and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore, comfort one another
with these words." That is the comfort of the church. There was a time
when I used to mourn that I should not be alive in the millennium; but
now I expect to be in the millennium. Dean Alford says--and almost
everybody bows to him in the matter of interpretation--that he must
insist that this coming of Christ to take his church to himself in the
clouds is not the same event us that to judge the world at the last day.
The deliverance of the church is one thing, judgment is another. Now, I
cannot find any place in the Bible where it tells me to wait for signs
of the coming of the millennium, as the return of the Jews, and such
like; but it tells me to look for the coming of the Lord; to watch for
it; to be ready at midnight to meet him, like those five wise virgins.
The trump of God may be sounded, for anything we know, before I finish
this sermon--at any rate we are told that he will come as a thief in the
night, and at an hour when many look not for him.
Some of you may shake your heads and say, "Oh, well, that is too deep
for the most of us; such things ought not to be said before these young
converts; only the very wisest characters, such as ministers and
professors in the theological seminaries, can understand them." But my
friends, you find that Paul wrote about these things to those young
converts among the Thessalonians, and he tells them to comfort one
another with these words. Here in the first chapter of 1 Thessalonians
Paul says, "Ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true
God, and to wait for his Son from heaven whom he raised from the dead,
even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come," To wait for his
Son; that is the true attitude of every child of God. If he is doing
that he is ready for the duties of life, ready for God's work; aye, that
makes him feel that he is just ready to begin to work for God.
Then in 1 Thessalonians, 2:19, he says: "For what is our hope, or joy,
or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye, in the presence of our Lord
Jesus Christ, at his coming?" And again, in the third chapter, at the
thirteenth verse, "To the end that he may establish your hearts
unblamable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints." Still again, in the fifth
chapter, "For ye yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so
cometh as a thief in the night. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness,
that that day should over take you as a thief." He has something to say
about this same thing in every chapter, indeed I have thought this
Epistle to the Thessalonians might be called the gospel of Christ's
coming again.
There are three great facts foretold in the word of God: First, that
Christ should come; that has been fulfilled. Second, that the Holy Ghost
should come; that was fulfilled at Pentecost, and the church is able to
testify to it by its experience of his saving grace. Third, the return
of our Lord again from heaven--for this we are told to watch and wait
"till he come." Look at that account of the last hours of Christ with
his disciples. What does Christ say to them? If I go away I will send
death after you to bring you to me? I will send an angel after you? Not
at all. He says: "I will come again and receive you unto myself." If my
wife were in a foreign country, and I had a beautiful mansion all ready
for her, she would a good deal rather I should come and bring her unto
it than to have me send some one else to bring her.