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.