'... Now is our salvation nearer than
when we believed.'--ROMANS xiii. 11.
There is no doubt, I suppose, that the Apostle, in common with the
whole of the early Church, entertained more or less consistently the
expectation of living to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ.
There are in Paul's letters passages which look both in the direction
of that anticipation, and in the other one of expecting to taste
death. 'We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord,'
he says twice in one chapter. 'I am ready to be offered, and the hour
of my departure is at hand,' he says in his last letter.
Now this contrariety of anticipation is but the natural result of
what our Lord Himself said, 'It is not for you to know the times and
the seasons,' and no one, who is content to form his doctrine of the
knowledge resulting from inspiration from the words of Jesus Christ
Himself, need stumble in the least degree in recognising the plain
fact that Paul and his brother Apostles did not know when the Master
was to come. Christ Himself had told them that there was a chamber
locked against their entrance, and therefore we do not need to think
that it militates against the authoritative inspiration of these
early teachers of the Church, if they, too, searched 'what manner of
time the Spirit which was in them did signify when it testified
beforehand ... the glory that should follow.'
Now, my text is evidently the result of the former of these two
anticipations, viz. that Paul and his generation were probably to see
the coming of the Lord from heaven. And to him the thought that' the
night was far spent,' as the context says, 'and the day was at hand,'
underlay his most buoyant hope, and was the inspiration and
motive-spring of his most strenuous effort.
Now, our relation to the closing moments of our own earthly lives, to
the fact of death, is precisely the same as that of the Apostle and
his brethren to the coming of the Lord. We, too, stand in that
position of partial ignorance, and for us practically the words of my
text, and all their parallel words, point to how we should think of,
and how we should be affected by, the end to which we are coming. And
this is the grand characteristic of the Christian view of that last
solemn moment. 'Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.'
So I would note, first of all, what these words teach us should be
the Christian view of our own end; and, second, to what conduct that
view should lead us.